Today I want to purge the thoughts of being surrounded by a particularly prevalent form of rotten human attachment: frenemies and competition.
The people at work are no different from people in my personal life. The frenemies and competition dynamic runs through colleagues and clients alike–there’s something about targeting a caregiver that they find accessible.
But underneath the violence is something more specific: they don’t want me to succeed at what I do. They want what my success represents. The attention. The meaning. The care. So they simultaneously try to be uplifted by me, put me down and live vicariously through me.
This is the deeper problem with competition society refuses to address. Uniqueness gets praised. But there are no checks on people who attempt to acquire a unique life simply by targeting and copying those who they feel possess one.
It’s not competition. It’s parasitic acquisition dressed as ambition.
The whole dynamic allows unsettled and troubled individuals to target others while stabilizing their own aggression – positioning backstabbing and competitive behavior as socially normative. Shared, even.
In truth, they are neither friendly nor truly competitive. They are petty, conniving and ruthless. A ruthlessness not born from strong character but from a severely underdeveloped one. These types haven’t aged past the developmental stage where the human mind comes to fully understand it is perceptible to others through both thoughts and actions.
That lack of self-perceptibility is almost palpable – visible in the bizarre grimacing smiles they flaunt as they challenge those whose attention they don’t naturally possess to impromptu or calculated duels.
The feigned friendship and the competition are the same gesture. Both are attempts to force attention from someone they perceive as having what they cannot generate internally. What they cannot generate is love. Not the receiving of it – the capacity for it. Friendship is performance. Competition is pursuit. Underneath both is the same hollow fact:
They represent what it is to be unloved and unlovable.
Several individuals come to mind: Arin and Christain add an additional attempt at higher group or “type” status. Pato, Jatina, Asha, Kat, Responszia, etc. add the element of “play”. It’s like they are quite literally playing at being me like one might when playing with an actual baby doll. When One is a terrible two year old.
When I attempt to process this dynamic more personally, however, Natasha’s behavior probably has had the largest impact on my mentality in this area as she had no shame in flaunting this idea of ‘… friendly competition’ while in reality the bitch was an outright bully.
She was so possessed by jealousy she couldn’t enter my space without trying to “taint” it. I did get some relief watching her “sing” in front of her “friend group” though during the ‘little kick-back’. Performing sanity for people she’d carefully confused. What a surprise for them too, huh?
Overall, what I am having the most trouble with is being the object of senseless aggression at all. And this is valid but I feel it may be far more productive to have trouble with the fact that there are people everywhere navigating the same aggression without language for it.
And hell, this appears to be a general nervous tic of the masses.
I don’t believe they possess an idea of the general public. They exist within odd collective groups and masses with carefully crafted “mental” scripts. Everyone else is instrumentally disregarded. This could be turned to advantage by giving them exactly what they expect.
They don’t actually have loyalty or ties to their groups the way a conscious human being might. All movements are extrinsic. Means without meaning. It’s not like they genuinely feel morale or camaraderie when challenging. They ARE simply idiots.
Beyond all of the irrational behavior, this very minor detail is what bothers me most – they aren’t targeting me because of who I am. Not fully. They are targeting primarily because they target.
That kind of pisses me off more than the realization that they are simply idiots.
Oh, well. I guess it should also be quite freeing.
The Quellwell 
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