I’m catching up on True Blood now, the HBO show Brian was nuts over last year. I watched a few episodes but didn’t love it. I just find the whole concept of vampires today a little too fetishized and infantile. On the show they call the ability to look deep inside someone and exert persuasion “glamouring” someone. You can imagine how I feel about that label. On the show, the good vampire meets this 25 year-old hometown girl who’s righteous and virginal. She’s special because she can hear people’s thoughts, which makes her an outsider as well, since most people in town fear her ability. In this world, both inside their small town in Louisiana and the world at large, vampires are real but discriminated. Think race affairs in the 60’s as a minority group fights for equal rights. So she meets this vampire and even though he’s the first vampire she’s ever met, she’s not afraid of him. She’s actually a little intrigued because he’s the only one whose thoughts she can’t hear. He tells her about how vampires can glamour humans into wanting to let them feed on them, and she asks if he’s tried glamouring her before. He says he has not and will not, because he wouldn’t feel right doing it to her. The truth is, it’s because he finds her to be special and therefore, she lays within the lines of his moral rules. He’s trying to allow what happens to happen by way of open destiny and free will, because he wants her, but only if it’s right.
I was recently asked how someone can tell if the me they have encountered is the me that’s just working with them or the real me. I’ve talked before that sometimes I have strong connections to people, but those connections are work connections, where I’m being helpful to them because I can and I want to see them reach their potential. Personal connections are exactly personal connections. Something for me, the human being trying to make her way like everyone else, trying to find people whose company I enjoy, who bring fulfillment into my life.
The nature of connections is sometimes not clear until you look at them in hindsight, whether they are of a personal nature or a working towards the overall benefit of humanity and my fellow man nature. But the biggest difference is the means in which I’m drawing things towards me. What Brian calls mindfucking, what Rie (adopting True Blood) calls glamouring, I got a hard lesson in maturity the last two years about willing something into my life because I could, rather than considering if I should or if it was even mine. I took that lesson to heart and I don’t want to have to learn it again if I can help it. The stronger your ability, the higher your awareness of your responsibility must be, both towards yourself, and others, and the things that become concrete in the future. I use my ability for good, to be helpful to other people, to promote healing, and the worst of it is just me being naughty…I use it to flirt, incite happiness to delirium, or to mess with boys behaving badly. But sometimes, there are some people I meet who are just instantly off limits. I remember a specific incident last July when I was clearly up to no good, when I got close to an intended target of my interest and suddenly felt like I got slammed by a wall and zapped of my powers. I wasn’t allowed to use them. I was embarrassed I had even tried. And because of that, what developed involved the real me, out of complete respect for another human being. It was a big lesson in maturity.
When a person makes me show the real me, I’m very careful about what I’m putting out towards them, even though I wonder if the truth is my moral guidelines are actually incapacitating my ability to exert my will. I still want to be a positive and helpful influence in their lives as I don’t tend to put my needs and desires first when it comes to others regardless. But there is an almost overconscientiousness of their boundaries. They must be the ones who want to connect with me, who want to spend time with me or talk to me. I don’t look too deeply inside them outside of what they offer to show, and I don’t open closed doors inside them to see what’s hidden, unless they invite me through those doors explicitly, offering the information themselves. I am exceedingly polite because I care about them and most importantly, I respect them. These people lay within my moral lines and I don’t even try what I’m capable of because it’s important that what they choose and what comes of these choices happen with an open destiny and through their own free will. In some ways, I’ll be experienced as being even more passive than they would expect because I am so conscious of not overpowering the balance. But the thing is, beyond what I can do, this is who I am. I’ve learned I have to respect other people and it is only when they want me, and if it is right, that I will want them. When I respect someone, they’ll know it’s real because I’ll be showing them the real me. But often, people don’t realize this or don’t trust this, and they poke at me until I leave.
It used to bother me, when people questioned what was real in me. Sometimes it would hurt. But now I just feel like, if they can’t see it or believe it, it means they aren’t the ones meant to get too close to me anyway. Mine is a lock and key system, the way things come together and fit. There’s an optimal place and distance for every relationship, like planets in orbit. But the ones closest to me, they will fall in place as though that was where they were meant to be all along. No need to think or analyze. When the time comes, it will just be obvious and natural. That has been another lesson in maturity. Learning that the best way to respect things outside myself is to allow things to come the way they were meant to come, and be the way they were meant to be.
