"The feeling is mutual"

Yesterday I posted the following quote on my facebook:


"Never allow someone to become your priority while allowing yourself to be their option."


     Throughout the course of the day, I had numerous people tell me that the following quote reflected their lives. Teens and adults alike shared their feelings and poured out their hearts to me. Someone had become the center of their focus, while to the other, they were simply lingering in the shadows. As the day continued, I went back and forth with this idea that at some point or another, each of us has let an individual become way too important. How we would feel during a given day had became a direct correlation of how much (or how little) that other person had responded and/or reacted to us.
   Each of us can agree that usually we end up brokenhearted, discouraged and unhappy. So why is it that we build these emotional bonds to people? Even those people who only break us down?  Eleanor Roosevelt once said "Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent." Whether or not we want to admit it, we allow people to pain us. We let them sink into our brain and heart and suddenly everything is blurry.
     I'm not saying that we should not allow people into our lives, because we most definitely should. We as humans were made for friendship and relationship and feelings. But I am saying that if we were all completely honest with ourselves we would step back and see that at various points in our lives, we had put too much effort into someone that did not deserve it. Anne Frank, in her diary, made the bold statement of "Despite everything, I still believe people are good at heart." I would have to dispute that statement. I consider myself optimistic but also realistic. The truth of the matter is that people were, are and will be corrupt and unfortunately we will all spend the rest of our lives, weeding through the good and the bad. We will all get hurt at one time or another but we will also heal, learn and move on.
     Sometimes an attachment to someone is inevitable, it happens and you have no idea why. I challenge those in this situation to not let someone else get the best of you. I am a firm believer in that 10% is what happens to you and 90% is what you do about it. It all starts in the mind and it can end if we set our minds on other things. Its hard to forget about people and its harder to let go. Yet, no one deserves to live in a foggy, disconnected world. We need to live in this world with a clear mind, making our own independent choices knowing that the people who deserve our focus will never demand it.