People Are My Drug

I’m a people person.

A communicator, a people-gatherer.

 

Every personality test I take affirms these qualities about me, and I see it play out in my life in a myriad of ways.

On the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, my Extrovert number is usually towards the very top of the scale.

I like being a people person. I like connecting with people and helping connect them with others. I like to get to know people and like for them to get to know me.

 

There’s a dark side to this way I’m wired though, one I’m discovering more and more of: People are my drug.

I need people. On some level, we all do.

 

But when the people are not there, because they can’t be or don’t want to be, I can find myself clamoring and gasping and clawing for people in dangerous, unhealthy ways.

It’s an ugly little truth I’m uncovering.

When I don’t feel like my life is as “people-ful” as I would like to be, it’s easy for me to become needy. To see people as a tool to use to meet my own needs for connection and communication and companionship.

To miss the fact that they are people too.

 

I will always defend the idea and importance of community and relationships. But I can’t let my desire, my inner-wired need for these things, to drown out the fact that the people I am in community and relationship with have their own needs too. And sometimes what they need is not me, may not be people at all.

 

If I were a better Christian, this would be the part when I start waxing philosophical about how God is all I really need. But I’m not, so I won’t. As much as yes, I do need God, God has made me to need people too. Not in the way that I sometimes think I need them, as though they are a drug and I need my fix, but in that I need them because God often works through people to help me see him.

We’re all made to need people a little bit, just not in the way I sometimes do.

Til next time…

~Brianna!~

p.s. Have you ever found yourself needing people?

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