Care and be cared for
I’ve already made a point for caring, to extend our own lowly existence wider into circles around us. But what about the other direction. It’s an old idea that everything in this world is realised in a split between object and subject.
We are all subjects, thinking, feeling, breathing, crying and laughing our way through our existence. But to everyone around us, we’re another object in a world that’s just getting fuller and fuller.
Care for another and make him a subject of your affection. But what happens when you’re being cared for and made a true subject of someone’s affection, love and friendship?
It’s possibly one of the hardest things to achieve: let yourself be cared for.
In times where we’re being tought to stand on our own two feet from a tender age, where being independent and self-sufficient, we’ve completely lost the notion of accepting anybody’s help. The idea that we need others in order to get better, be better, get more complete, be more complete has something revolting. Completely out of touch with the modern world and the idea that yes, man is an island and that every man can fight for themselves.
Accepting the care of others isn’t so much a dependency or a disguised profiteurism that only lets you consider others in their worth or what they can do for you. That’s just another way of being self sufficient and using anything and everything that you can for your own gain.
No, what I’m driving at here is the fundamental truth of ’seeing me through your eyes makes me fuller’.
As someone who had to very early on understand the terrible distance between me and the world and my own incapacity to ‘connect’ or blend in, it’s been the biggest change in myself and my not-so-funny automatisms of auto-derogation to accept that there are people caring for me and that them doing something for me, caring for me helps me be better, fight less to be oh-so-awesome and by admitting to liking it, actually learn to care for others more.
Letting yourself be cared for by others, on their own terms instead of your own, can offer new perspectives. Accepting help, accepting their view of you, of your needs and their ways of meeting them, is not just about you, but about them as well and about what links you to the rest of the world.
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