Do not look for that thing we believe will be found in love before you have learned something about who you are, and don’t believe that sense of knowing can be had before you start to approach your mid-20s. Learning and experience must be accumulated just as language or artistic skills must grow over time. We are not born with fully developed skills for using words or paint brushes; we cultivate them gradually and take influence from the many interactions that must occur before we are able to share competency. The same holds true as we begin the journey of exploring our emergent adult selves. We cannot commit to a person early if we are to reach our complex potential that must grow and evolve. Who are we, what are we capable of, and what do we want to know that we don’t know yet? Those answers must be found as we traverse the space within us; they are only rarely delivered by someone else. Just because you watch a story about a fairy princess, you do not magically become one, and just because you want love, there’s no guarantee that what someone tells you is love will be, in fact, love.
There are people who desire to please others, hoping for love in return, and there are those who only take from others as they themselves never learned to give. It is only through giving that we begin to flirt with love. Do not fool yourself by giving your all that the recipient will be enlightened by your efforts if you’ve known them to be takers. People who only take do not love themselves or anyone else; they are exploring self-hate that cynically has them telling and showing others exactly what they want to hear or see so the taker can get what they think they want. The problem is that the taker has no real idea what they want as they are lost, blinded by an inability to feel for others.
Our investment in discovering ourselves requires traveling a path that only rarely do we have the opportunity to share with a kindred spirit. Often alone, the journey into discovery demands we peel the onion of life and suffer the tears of anguish, which brings forth the cliched maxim of “What does not kill me makes me stronger.”
Do not look for affirmation from others; you will not find validation from them that only comes from within.
As we transition to our teenage years there are those of us who experience for the first time ideas of loneliness; we are no longer nestled tightly within our family. We start to identify who we wish to be. Narcissists never grow up and accept this loneliness or isolation, and so they clamor to keep people around and dependent upon them so that they never need to feel alone or by themselves.