On being interesting

Used to when I was young, I had dreams of being someone interesting, of doing amazing, daring things and living to tell about them.

Turns out I did those things, and did in fact live through them.

This isn’t why I did them, but I thought it’d make people like me more. Turns out I was right about that but it also turned out that it didn’t matter.

Because those sort of experiences also separate you from people. Not to glorify myself, but when you’ve seen things and done intense and dangerous things that most people really haven’t experienced, it builds a wall over which most people just can’t climb.

I’ve never been in combat thankfully, though I have been in some pretty hairy non-combat situations, and when in Homeland Brody finds that he can only talk to Carrie about himself and his life, I understood where he was coming from. Where they both were.

Luckily my current partner had no problem climbing over that wall, or we probably couldn’t have stayed together for as long as we have.

But for most people, there is no path, and no stairs, no catapult, no hovercraft, no jetpack or anti-gravity device that gets them over. We are just from different worlds and I have nothing to say to them that they’d understand.