First - you are born into your family. Regardless of their quirks or flaws you love them, learn from them and adapt certain aspects of your personality to be acceptable by them. (Don't deny it - even you rebels out there do SOMETHING to be either accepted or noticed by SOME part of your family if not the whole.) This provides you with your character base, the pieces of you that are, for the most part, stationary. They may shift or sink, but inevitably lift the rest of your pieces out of the mud.
Secondly - you go to school or out in the world and make friends. And even if you don't make friends, you interact with people in some way. They tease you or praise you. These things pile ontop of your basework. Now we all have something resembling a really messed up game of Jenga.
Thirdly - you find yourself emotionally attached to someone. Requited or not, you will strive to impress this peron, make them like you, see them smile or laugh. You will do anything to gain their approval and devotion in return - and often enough it is silly things. But of course - we do them anyway, don't we? This is the pretty stuff. The gingerbreading under every lopsided eave of our Jenga house. The welcome mat out front, and the chiming doorbell. You will convince yourself that you are settled.
For some of you thats how it ends. Despite the lesser rejections, you may feel that this jenga home is complete and live out your days. For those of you who are past this homey happy feeling, feel free to continue.
Fourthly - That someone rolls up the welcome mat and leaves. Things fall into a bit of disaray. As if to forcably shake things up and hide the lacing and the window boxes, you send an earthquake through the Jenga tower, and pieces shatter, break and fall to pieces at your touch. Pieces you thought were stationary now only have hollow cored and crumble to pieces. Even those with the iron centers shift and sink, puncturing your foundation and making it difficult to rebuild.
Fifthly - you have a revelation. Not the quick kind - more of an ever-building kind that blossoms slowly in your head until you realize, with sleepy, blinking eyes, that you HAVE build upwards. You have discovered the strengths of your foundation and enforced them, replacing the weaker hollow pillars for other ones. The jenga house looks more like a house.
And of course for those that can't do this - they join cupid.com.
...
Oru
I've been through this, or something nearly so. Recent (but not too recently) slow and long rumblings have tourtured and shaken my tower, but I find it gladly standing. Having no other choice, I began to rebuild, filling the cracks in my walls and supporting my sagging ceilings. As I near the finish of my labors I have begun to eye the gingerbread and icing, wondering and hoping that soon I would be able to dress up and make pretty my home.
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