Don’t change yourself for your crush
They play your game, you don’t play theirs
It was the moment when my other friend (because we’re both competing for the same guy) mentioned all of her moments with him that got me riled. I wasn’t jealous, no that wasn’t it. It was the fact that I could hear myself in her story. I could hear the air in her voice. The elation in it. I felt nodes of coyness and her expressions utterly whimsical.
I was seeing me and I no longer wanted that to be me.
I know what I said a few days ago and I still stand by that. I’m not saying that I don’t want what she’s feeling, but if I have those same emotions, I want the actions that took it there to be played by my own rules.
You see, when it comes to work crushes I feel like I fall in three categories:
1. We start as friends and have this cool banter relationship and then I start developing feelings and then I suddenly don’t know how to work with you in the same shift and if I do I’m constantly just fucking up.
2. We have an enemies-to-lovers trope or a classic “she/he is mean to you because they like you.” We have this very playful, fighting war going on where we can’t say anything nice and just constantly are at arms with each other. Its a mutual feeling but at the end of the day know that it is not serious. We’ve established that the other person can handle it you know? But this war turns into something in my mind and becomes a battle for the heart.
3. I just let them know straight up how much I adore them. Just endless compliments that they probably don’t even think that I like them at all. It's almost so over the top that they probably just think I’m really nice.
I don’t necessarily plan these things out. It all depends on the personality of someone and how our relationship naturally starts out.
Then there is *Jamie.
Jamie started off as more as the first one and then I kinda slipped into the third one but then not so much. Suddenly, it turned into an older version of me: super shy, super coy, fumbling all over the place, and refuse to bring attention to myself at all.
It was terrible. It was terrible because it was one of those where I was literally writing in my diary, “he looked at me.”
And that is not my game. Not anymore.
So I spun the wheel and decided that #2 would be the way to go. This one, as much as I love it, is not for everyone. And to be honest, I wasn’t sure if he could take it. I put some feelers out there and I was getting a C+ maybe a B-. But then something clicked and I thought, okay we got this.
As much as I would want Jamie to be the one to create memories for me to hold on to, you also just have to grab life by the loins and do it yourself. While every moment might not be picture-perfect, you put yourself in control. You have an idea of how you want it to play out and it is a possibility that it can work in your favor.
So why not just try it? Initiate the conversation first. Say a compliment, make a gesture. You never know where it will lead.
I have realigned myself and the mission at hand.
I still have a wave of elation in my voice, nodes of coyness, whimsical in my expressions.
So that must be so far, so good.
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