It is the chase—the reward of feeling like you can achieve something. Doing everything possible to get it, and when you finally do, the rush is gone. Dopamine is the reward chemical.
It applies to adventures,jobs, relationships, work, and almost everything else in life. The reason most people don’t commit to things is because they never wanted them to begin with. They were chasing the high. Isn’t that amusing?
Men have perfected this art in the dating scene, especially with women who are vulnerable. They will wake up one day and love bomb you so much you can’t think straight.They know what makes you tick, so they will capitalize on that. Once you show interest, they will go quiet, and now you aren’t sure if they are okay or not. Naturally, we are caregivers, so your first instinct will be to check if he is okay. The other will be to try and understand. So you do, and you spend the next few weeks reaching out. Here is where it gets interesting: once you stop checking on him several times, the conversation ends for a while.
If there is someone who draws energy from the high, they come back to you. They show a bit of interest and then continue the circle. That’s not even what amuses me the most. It is a fact that they will get very mad when you don’t feed their energy. Guilt-tripping you for not reaching out. You will find them asking you, “Mbona umenitupa?” You will strain your brain trying to remember when you ignored his call or text. Then, if you are bold, you will ask, and then it will go something like “Naeza kuona lini or usianze maneno mingi aki mrembo.”
The chase,the high, and the energy it takes to drain you from all of the emotional work you have done to be better. Oh, and they will not stop if you ignore it; they will keep at it. It might explain why the question of what we are is being asked a lot lately. Because emotional vampires will suck the energy out of you so much that you don’t even know where you stand. Then, because it’s too high for them, they keep escalating, and you wake up one day a shell of yourself. Before you say it happens to men too, please know that I know it does and that it’s worse for them because they resort to avoiding the subject or addiction. It is wild out here, and it just seems to be getting worse by the day.
Here is what interests me, though: what do these people gain? Emotional wounds are hard to heal, yet we inflict them on others anyway. No one is truly an expert in emotions, so I hope we learn to be kind to others even by chasing our own joy.