Late night baking.  Cookies are in batches, taking their turns in the oven.  I'm listening to my (horribly) self-made playlist appropriately titled "Fuck It," because that's the mood I'm most often in lately.  I'm thinking about a boy.  My phone - as it often is these days - is on airplane mode to keep people and interruptions at bay.  And I'm drinking a bottle of Magners while my latest batch of photos are importing into my photo editing program.

I keep coming back to the question 'Why do people like me?'

Though, perhaps, I shouldn't pose it as a question.  Because that's not really what it is.  It's more of a conundrum in my mind.  Having a lot of time (read: too much time) to think these days, I have found myself pondering a lot lately, why it is so fucking difficult for me to accept that other people may actually enjoy my company.  That they like having me as a friend.  That they actually appreciate me for being...well...me.

And I think I have solved the puzzle which has perplexed me for so long.

People who love themselves, expect everyone else to love them, right?  And on the flip side, people who hate themselves, expect everyone else to hate them, yeah?  Following this logic, if someone doesn't like herself, she therefore can find it quizzical that people may actually like her.

What a turn around.

Things were so different - opposite - a few years ago.  I was confident.  I knew who I was.  I had a five-year plan.  I knew who I was.  Even more so, I liked myself.  I enjoyed my company when I was alone.  I enjoyed silence, and pondering the deeper and more complex issues of life.  I knew who I was.

And then we enter present day: 28 February 2017.

I don't know who I am anymore.  I don't know what direction my life is heading.  I break the silence with any kind of noise possible because if I'm left alone too long with my thoughts I start to suffocate.  And I most definitely do not enjoy my company; which goes hand-in-hand with not liking myself.

Which makes me constantly question "HOW can people like me??"

I questioned this back in my teen-years too.  But back then, that question was fueled by different things.  One was a non-existent self-esteem.  The other fuel was an almost-obsessive need of validation for my ego.  'Tell me why you like me.  Why you want to be friends with me.  Why you think I'm so amazing.'

But peoples' thought-processes rarely go in such a direct and conscious linear way when choosing friends, right?

It's usually more like this:  You meet.  Your personalities mesh well.  You decide that investing more time and effort into this person you happen to get along swell with is worth it.  You eventually become friends and become a part of each other's lives to some degree.  Rinse and repeat.

So asking people "Why are you friends with me?" hardly seems like a fair question, right?

I learned years ago that asking that question didn't really get me results.  As most people are apt to do when confronted directly with a question so blatantly blunt, they flounder and stumble and stutter and don't know quite how to answer something they've probably never thought about.  That's fair, I suppose.  As already aforementioned, people don't pick friends in the same manner they might pick out a, say, house.  They don't make a pro and con list and then decide accordingly.  It just...happens.

Maybe this is where the younger, inflexible, everything-that-can-be-controlled-must-be-controlled Aimee comes into play.

Clearly people are like me, right?  Sure, I have my subconscious like everyone else.  But I am so aware of my thoughts and their progression in everything throughout the day, others must be as self-aware as I am right?  Wrong.  (So very wrong.)

Don't worry, this is yet one more thing I learned a long time ago: almost no one I've encountered in my life is as aware of their thought and the progression of their thoughts as I am.

Suffice to say, in all the thinking I've done, I have concluded the source of my confusion as to why people like me.  I don't like me.  I don't enjoy my company.  So the ability to comprehend that there are people out there who may actually enjoy my existence is an unknown to me.  And that's okay.  Since I have realised this, I can accept it.

After all: I don't have to understand why people like me in order to accept that it's a fact, right?

(Right.)