NOBODY'S PERFECT

Sometimes the people that we like the most are also the ones who annoy us the most.

Not the most original of observations, I’ll grant you, but nonetheless it is a thought which has been tripping across my mind time and time again of late, although you may be surprised to hear that I’m not really thinking about this in a “family” context, especially given that my own peculiar version of what you might call “family” is particularly tiny, and I’d have to go a very long way to find a soul as kind and as simpatico with my own as the one held by my Beloved.

But people - other people – can be sooooo disappointing, and I think that it is because we happen to like some people more than we like others, that our expectations of them might be higher than that we might expect from other random strangers, the ones in whom we have not invested so many of our hopes.

After all, if I personally like someone then there must be a VERY good reason for me to do so, given my AMAZING sense of taste, so it’s hard when they fail to live up to that trust, and we can all take it very personally when they then manage to  “let us down” or somehow fail to live up to the standards which we have arbitrarily set them, and about which they probably know nothing.

And in this world with its need for instant gratification and constant affirmation, its sense of entitlement, and the general need to share everything, those ivory towers can very quickly come crashing down when someone expresses an opinion which we find disappointingly unworthy of them, or if they choose to “like” something that we find quite ghastly, or “share” something that we find utterly, utterly pointless, or when they fail to respond to something in the way in which we might hope that they would, or fail to respond at all, which can be the most crushing to our most delicate of sensibilities.

The bizarre lack of red flags on our home page… The empty inbox… The lack of “retweets” and “favourites” of our pithiest bon mots… (Sometimes I wonder why I flippin’ well bother, I really do…)

Every single one of them a dagger to the heart.

Every passing day another nail in the coffin.

Every single one a reminder that, in the great scheme of things, we don’t really matter after all.

Which is, of course, what most of us rather suspected all along.

After all, given that we all seem to believe that each of us is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD these days, the fact that other people, people we thought we were quite close to, might not actually think so, and may, just may, have other priorities like jobs and families and problems of their own, well… that can be a pretty bitter pill to have to swallow.

It’s all right, by the way, I do understand… and, given time, I may even learn to forgive you...

And I’m not just talking about personal relationships either, despite the fact that my lack of actual input into several of those over recent decades rather explains much of what I’m describing here, reminding me over and over again that you reap what you sow and that most of those alleged “two-way streets” are actually “one-way” after all, and this is something that I am slowly coming to accept.

Time and again over the past couple of years, some of the famous names that many of us invested our energy into supporting have turned out to be great disappointments to us, too, and have been found to have feet of clay.

Perhaps I’ve reached that point in my life when you start to realise that nobody’s perfect, and by “nobody” I actually mean “nobody” and not just “everybody except for certain souls who I might once have nominated for my own particular version of sainthood...”

Meanwhile, this, rather naturally, does leave me with one final but utterly stunning revelation to have to come to terms with…

Not only are you not perfect, but - and this is where it gets a little bit shocking – neither am I…(!!!)

So I need to take this moment to apologise once again for being such a huge disappointment to all of you.

That is, well, just as long as you’re prepared to apologise back, you disappointingly useless bunch of time-wasters.