Just So You Know…

There's a call some people make that has a particular shape to it, and once you've taken a few of them you can hear it coming from the first hello. It isn't the call where someone's worried about you, and it isn't the call where someone has news you'd actually want, it's the one where the entire point is to make sure you know that they know. Something has gone wrong in your life, or they've decided it has, and they have called to set it gently on the table between you, just so you know, just so you're aware that they're aware.

There's no help attached to any of it. Nobody offers to do a thing, nobody asks what you need, the information travels one direction and lands and that's the whole visit. You get off the phone having received nothing except the confirmation that your business is being discussed somewhere you aren't, by people who found it interesting for reasons that have nothing to do with loving you.

Now look at what this same person has actually done with all that interest. She found out you had a book for sale, she went through the website, she found the channel and watched enough of your life to report on it in detail to other people, and she has not bought the book, not left a review, not subscribed, not shared a single thing, not once told you she was proud of you. She has all the attention in the world for you and none of the support, and the distance between those two is the whole measure of what she is.

Because attention isn't interest. Knowing every detail of your life is not the same as being on your side, and a person can follow everything you do while wanting none of it to go well for you. The watching was never about you, it was about having something in hand, some fresh piece to bring to the next conversation, and you were never the friend she was collecting it for, you were the material.

Seeing that stings, and then it frees you, because the same person who calls to tell you what's gone wrong for a cousin you haven't spoken to in years is, on another call, telling that cousin what's gone wrong for you. You are not the confidante in this arrangement, you are the next item on the list, and the warmth you keep waiting for was never coming, because appetite doesn't warm up, it just gets hungry again.

So you stop feeding it. You don't explain yourself, you don't correct the story, you don't hand over the update she's fishing for, because every detail you give her has a second destination and you already know what it is. You go boring. You keep the real news for the people who clap for you, you give her the weather, and you watch what happens to her interest the moment there's nothing left to collect. It drops off a cliff, every time, and that drop is the answer to the question you probably stopped letting yourself ask, which is whether she was ever interested in you at all, or only in what she could do with you.