what we hate, we make

Lately I've been thinking about the way that we create people in our minds. To us, as human beings, everyone is just a character in our story. So often I forget that this isn't just my story but hundreds and thousands of other peoples stories.

It's so strange. When you meet a person you dislike, whether you mean to or not, you place them in some category in your mind. Suddenly everything they do is an abomonation. You meet someone who is on the slightly messy side and suddenly every time they leave a pot or a pan on the stove with some food in it you are so grossed out that you can't even believe it.

And yet, the pedalstools that we place so many people in our lives on are the exact opposite. Whether it's a parent, a sibiling, a significant other or someone you just met who happened to blow all your expectations out of the water: these people set precedents for us. One grand gesture, one amazing contributation to your life and you place them so high up that only one of two things can happen: you ignore every terrible thing they do and chalk it up to a bad mood or a bad day, always giving them the benefit of the doubt because of the unreasonable expectations you place on them. Or they fall. So hard and so fast you can't even believe your eyes. Sometimes it takes years of the former before the latter occurs but when you place someone above all the others one of the two is bound to happen.

I love meeting new people because I love when they counteract the character I've drawn up in my head for them but I just find that, eventually, they stop being the person you thought they were and start being themselves. That's where we all go wrong.

Why do we do it? Why do we set these outlandish expectations for people? We either instantly mark them as something horrible and suddenly every move they make makes us hate them more or we set them up to fail by the sheer pressure we place on their shoulders. We ruin everyone for ourselves. If we just let people live and never expected anything, good or bad, from anyone we'd all be completely content with what we're given but instead we meet people, we categorize people and we are baffled when nothing they do can ever live up to the characters in our minds. We create everyone we like or dislike by giving them no choice but to fulfill an empty expectation or not. It's so frustrating. Why can't we just stop?