All it takes is knowing yourself to find yourself knowing others. And to know them well enough to create discomfort and unease as to how that knowledge came to be. A gradient that will see them leaning forward with intrigue and curiosity as they attempt to restore the balance in this acquaintance.

They desire to leave you equally exposed, equally vulnerable, yet the more they seek in you, the more they find themselves. They find themselves as a result of your ability to relate, to seek and solve similarities as a reference point from which to thread your understanding and base relation.

The effortlessness of your ability to relate can only come from knowing yourself intricately, and that intricate knowing from putting yourself in situations that you have never known yourself to be in, testing yourself against your differences, your odds thereby training yourself to find yourself everywhere, and in everything even where you are not.

The art herein lies in not being so obviously defined and rigid in self but instead in being defining, to be as much as you are as what you are not and to be as comfortable in similarity as you are in difference. To be entirely analogue. Entirely relatable. And from this state; the thread of understanding and the depth of knowing another no longer provokes vulnerability but instead gratification and addiction to the expression and freedom it is to be around you without the expectation of having to fit into what they have been before, and to whom. The cessation of role and title and the birth of something new. Something of vigour and valiance.

So then, the question you ask yourself is. When you walk away from a conversation, an introduction or perhaps a relationship of kind. If “they” followed the footprints you left behind, would they lead them back to you, or would they lead them back to themselves? Did they learn to love who you are as your egos self perception, or did they learn to love who you showed them they could be?