Care vs Curiosity
You know the moment when someone has gone through a break-up or made a big life decision or changed their instagram name or quit their job or whatever it is and you get this wave of “I need to know why!!!”? That is curiosity. It is one of the most natural feelings in the world, it’s helped us develop and allows us to get close to people through what we’re willing to ask them, it allows us to discover new things about the world and our existence and generally is a really expansive feeling/compulsion/notion that we have.
Curiosity is so natural that it get integrated into many things. How we communicate, what we wear and eat, the places we travel, the sex we have, and also the way we care.
What do I mean about that exactly? Well, curiosity is like an itch. We feel it and we watch to scratch it. It’s second nature for us to fulfill our curiosity, it generally indicates something we are interested in and the things we are interested in are often things we are connected to, and when we are connected to something we have an inclination to care for it. Something interesting about this dynamic falls in the “what we are connected to” part of this equation. With the online world, it is so easy to feel connected to people, places, and things we’ve never truly interacted with in real life. It doesn’t mean our feeling of connection to them aren’t real but that there is a falsified sense of closeness - sometimes, oftentimes, this feeling can be a oneway street. I can’t count the number of times someone who’s name I don’t know has referred to me as their “friend” because we have DM’d on instagram or I’ve read cards for them or they just generally feel a sense of closeness to me through some means.
When I think about care and connection in their deepest and truest ways though, it feels like something that needs to go two ways. It is a channel of giving and receiving - in our modern world I feel we have collectively become accustomed to giving, where receiving is more sporadic or less trusted or just kind of forgotten about. We take in information and posts and thoughts from those we choose to follow or engage with, and often what we “give” back is a like, or a share, and sometimes not even that. We take in so much it becomes an onslaught of information and energy that the channels get clogged. We are receiving so much that we have to open that part of the loop and widen it so much that the giving part gets sort of lost, the lines get blurred around what this means.
This notion of Care vs Curiosity first came to me last year after I had closed my business. I had given so much to the community - and they had given so much to me - but when it was time to rehabilitate myself for myself, there was this strange thing that happened. People wanted me to keep giving, but they didn’t realize it. I got an innumerable amount of messages, most of them from people that truly didn’t know me (and that I didn’t know back) performing care. What I mean by this, is that these nearly strangers would reach out and ask if I was okay, soon to be followed up by “what happened?”. While I know the intentions were good, and it’s natural to be curious, I had never felt so lonely or misunderstood in my life. I was grieving deeply even though it was my choice to close the shop, I was reconciling with so many things behind the scenes; lost friendships, broken trust, learning the ways me and my business has subtly been abused, depression and isolation, and things I still don’t feel are appropriate to share in even a semi-public setting. It was a time of fatalities in my life and I had people I didn’t know, who didn’t know me, and who really didn’t care for how I was doing but truly thought they did basically just sliding into my DM’s to ask me what had happened.
I stopped trusting a lot of people. I became very wary of why people wanted to connect with me, who I could truly trust, and kept deep traumas close to my chest because I couldn’t tell the difference between the people who really wanted and were capable of showing up for me, and the people who just wanted to have the scoop.
The thing is, I don’t blame those people at all. I completely understand. We’re all naturally curious, we all want to know what’s going on. I’m not outside of gossip or wanting to know whats happening in a random celebrities life or having a desire to know the juicy deets of what is happening with a mutual friend. But the thing is, that our curiosity cannot be more important that caring for people. What I mean by this is that if we really, truly care for someone we don’t need to know what happened in order to hold space for them. If we really care for them, our care won’t come in the question of “what happened?” when there has been something life changing - especially if it’s “negative” or challenging. Instead our care will be “I see you, I’m here for you.” “this is what I can offer you right now.” “I just want you to know I love you” “I’m coming over with your favourite snack” “let me clean up for you while you rest.” True care is an offering, it is a giving.
This lesson has completely changed the way I show up for people and the language that I use. Instead of saying “what happened?!” I say “If you need anything, I’m here for you. Even if that’s just some snacks and binge watching your favourite show, or if you need a soft and private ear to listen to your feelings. And if you need nothing but space, I will protect those boundaries for you while you heal.” In a world where we are so used to everything being on display - our heartbreaks, our wins, our losses, our achievements and failures and special moments and intimate thoughts, it can be kind of an anomaly for people to want to keep things private. At large, I think we have a lot of entitlement over knowing what’s happening in the lives of the people we love to follow. And that’s just it - in so many instances we are following people, picking up the breadcrumbs of their life they leave for us, always a few if not many steps behind the truth of what they are really living. And when we don’t get the morsel we have become accustomed to not only does that make the yearning to know stronger but we have also developed an expectation around it. We feel entitled to know.
It’s not a new idea to remind ourselves that not everything is shared online - regardless of where it falls on the scale. I have so much beauty and wellness and love in my life that is deeply private and intimate, that I don’t want anyone else to see or be a part of. And there is so much that I share, too. That I feel inspired by, that I am happy to give a glimpse into or connect over. Everyone gets to choose for themselves what they feel comfortable sharing in a public space - what feels safe for them. It is a privilege when someone allows you to see even 1% of what their life holds, whether it is mundane or fabulous or heart-wrenching.
I wonder when what we do receive stopped becoming enough. I wonder why we got to the point we are so invested and curious about the lives of others that we forgot what it is to care for them authentically. How care is not necessarily needing something from them, but actually what our willingness is to give to them… to surrender our egoistic wants to the humility of what it means to truly show up for a person.
In my world, you don’t need to tell me about your breakup in order for me to curl up with you and hold you. In my world, you don’t need to rehash your trauma or challenge or pain in order for me to understand what it means to care for you. And if you do need an ear, or a heart or a shoulder, it is not because I have an unquenchable thirst to know the details but because I am a safe person to hold your secrets and stories without judgement. To care for you, isn’t to satiate my curiosity. To care for you is to be there in the centre of the Venn Diagram of what you need, and what I can offer.