Some Things Don’t Leave Us When We Leave Them

Sometimes, it's not even our own experience that follows us. Sometimes, it's somebody else's. I think I carry a lot of people's experiences in my head. 😂 Not because I want to, but because I listen. I hear what happened to someone. I hear how someone was treated. I hear the things they wish they had noticed earlier. I hear the warnings. And somehow, my brain keeps all of it. So when something similar happens in my own life, I'm no longer looking at that situation for what it is. I'm looking at it through everything I've heard before. And that's where the problem starts. I am that friend who somehow has relationship advice for everybody despite being single. 😂 I've heard stories. I've heard about people who were in relationships and suddenly got ghosted. No explanation. No warning. Nothing. They just disappeared. Then, after some time, they came back like nothing happened and expected everything to continue normally. And I'm there listening and thinking, Wait o, so people actually do this? Then I hear another story. Someone is in a relationship but is also talking to other people, collecting money from them, while still maintaining the image of having a main babe. And I'm thinking, Omo, people are really complicated. 😭 I remember telling my friend that what she was doing was unfair. Because imagine her partner doing the exact same thing to her. But then again, these are the kinds of conversations that stay in your head. You listen to enough stories and suddenly, when a relationship opportunity comes your way, you are no longer just meeting a person. You are meeting every story you've ever heard. What if this person does the same thing? What if they suddenly change? What if they ghost me? What if I trust them and regret it? And before anything has even happened, you've already started preparing yourself for the worst. I think I do this sometimes. Even when I'm supposed to be in a relationship, I can find myself being one leg in and one leg out. 😂 I'm not someone who gets attracted to people easily, and even when I do, I don't attach myself so quickly. Part of me has always thought, If you leave, I'll be fine. And maybe that's not entirely a bad thing. But sometimes I wonder if I'm protecting myself or if I've simply trained myself not to get too attached because I've heard too many stories about what happens when people do. I don't want the heartbreak. I don't want the emotional rollercoaster. I don't want the unnecessary crying. I don't want to be sitting somewhere asking myself, What did I do wrong?😭 So sometimes, instead of allowing things to happen naturally, I start thinking ahead. I start assuming. I start testing people. I start creating explanations for their behaviour before they've even had the chance to explain themselves. And there was a point where I caught myself doing it and thought, “Wait. Why am I doing this?” Why am I reacting to things based on what I've heard other people experience? Why am I allowing someone else's story to shape the way I see my own? And honestly, it doesn't only happen with relationships. It happens with business too. You hear about a customer who did something terrible to someone and you're like, No customer will ever try that nonsense with me. 😂 Then one day, a customer does something remotely similar and you're already prepared. I've heard this one before. I know where this is going. But do I? Maybe I'm right. Or maybe I'm just expecting a familiar ending because I've heard the story before. And then something happened that made me think about how powerful this really is. I once heard someone talking about how she believed that whenever there was something she was not supposed to do, certain things would start happening around her. I don't even remember exactly what she called it. 😂 But I remembered it. And guess what? The next morning, I'm holding three eggs. One egg falls. 😭 That same morning, a bucket falls too. At that point, I'm like, God. So my brain has started working overtime? 😂😭 Because immediately, I remembered what I had heard the night before. And I had to consciously tell myself: No. This is me. I am me. One egg falling doesn't suddenly mean I'm experiencing somebody else's life. A bucket falling doesn't mean anything has to follow a pattern just because I heard someone else's story. Maybe it was just an egg. Maybe the bucket just fell. 😂 And that's when I realized how easily our minds can connect things. Sometimes we hear something, store it somewhere in our heads, and when something remotely similar happens, our brain brings the story back. And before we know it, we're living inside an expectation that wasn't even ours to begin with. I don't think we should stop listening to people. Other people's experiences can teach us. They can warn us. They can help us notice things we might have otherwise ignored. But there's a difference between learning from someone's experience and carrying their experience as your own. Someone was cheated on. That doesn't mean you will be cheated on. Someone was ghosted. That doesn't mean everyone you meet will ghost you. Someone had a terrible customer. That doesn't mean every customer is coming to take advantage of you. Someone's life followed a particular pattern. That doesn't mean yours has to. You don't have to experience life according to how other people experienced it. I think that's something I'm still learning. Listen. Learn. Take the lesson. But leave the fear where it belongs. Because sometimes, we carry things that never happened to us. We carry warnings. We carry assumptions. We carry fears. We carry other people's disappointments. And sometimes, we carry them so long that we forget they were never ours in the first place. Maybe I don't need to carry everybody's experiences with me. I can listen to people. I can learn from them. I can take their advice. But I don't have to make their experience my expectation. I don't have to walk into a relationship already preparing for heartbreak. I don't have to meet a customer expecting them to behave badly because someone else's customer did. I don't have to see every little thing that happens and immediately connect it to something I heard. This is my life. I am me. And maybe I should allow my own experiences to introduce themselves to me before deciding what they're going to be. ❤️

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