You say that you don’t care… which means that you do.

There’s a quote which keeps popping up in my blog’s search results:

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“My life, my rules, love me or reject me, I don’t care.”

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I hadn’t heard or seen this particular quote before, phrased in this manner… phrased in other ways it is familiar… the attitude it expresses is familiar in a literal sense.

My father had a similar quote he used to express a similar attitude – Those who love me will follow me.

Conditions applied – Don’t expect a follow-back. You only get followed so that you will follow-back, once your follow is acquired they unfollow you because they rate themselves (and think others rate them too – not without justification) on how many are following rather than being followed. The difference is important to them and they follow the difference and manipulate it accordingly… to cater to their rules, their life, which they want you to care about over your own concerns, over your own life and rules… yet they pretend not to care, but they do, oh how they do care!

He used this so often that eventually I stopped caring about proving my love to him by following him (off of a cliff if need be… me first, of course, as he had to witness what others, his loving followers, were willing to do to win his love enough to follow him and… hmmmm), his rules of life (mostly for others which he didn’t apply to himself), and started caring more about the flip side of it – Did he love me enough to follow me?

The answer to the latter question was a very obvious ‘No!’ once I was willing to face such a question and its answer (to follow myself rather than him, to love myself – a crime, a sin, of origin (but nothing to do with him), perhaps – rather than him)… and reality as opposed to those other realities which are created to deal with and cope with a painful reality (created by whom?) which we hope is not a reality but a momentary delusion (it’s me not you, it’s you not me).

It took me a while to do so, to face the truth, because, like most children, I was taught that my life and my rules were not relevant and what was relevant were the life and rules of my parents (adults first or you end up in The Lord of the Flies… or do you?). When I didn’t care for or about their rules and life, I was made to care. Tough love, indoctrination, preparing me for life on a very human version of Earth, for hierarchy which always has me on a step below those who came before me, or… something else?

This happened repeatedly until I eventually learned to lie to others about what I cared and didn’t care about. They needed my lies more than my truth. They needed me to care about what they cared about and to not care about… what I cared about which was not something they cared about and my caring about those things made them feel that I didn’t care for them in some way, that I was rejecting their life and rules in favour of my life and rules which meant that I didn’t love them enough to reject myself, and my love for myself, for them… which was something they saw as a rejection of them, which they cared about and couldn’t reject. Or something like that.

I tried to lie to myself about it too, that I didn’t care when I did and that I cared when I didn’t, because it hurt to betray my life and my rules for the life and rules of others. I wasn’t allowed to care about that, about betraying myself to be loyal to others, about not loving myself – loving yourself is known as being selfish which is apparently bad because it rejects others, your love for them is significantly decreased when you love yourself, they want it all, unconditionally, even though their love for you is conditional (though they claim otherwise to appear good and godly). I was supposed to care about their love, and making sure I got it by giving them what they wanted and needed, which was often about caring about when they rejected me – their rejection was telling me that I wasn’t loving them the way that they wanted and expected me to… and so on.

Being human is infinitely complicated… because others humans exist and we can’t not care that they do. We may try to not care, but there are consequences to that whether or not we want there to be consequences and to car about them or not. We will be made to care one way or another… we just wish we didn’t have to care because it hurts. Truly, madly and deeply.

“My life, my rules, love me or reject me, I don’t care.” – what a wonderfully beautiful and ugly ideal. A teenage rebel slogan for the teenager in us who has never grown up. Who can’t grow up until someone cares about what we don’t care about. We want to be indifferent but we don’t want others to be indifferent to us and to what we are indifferent to. An impossible ideal which lures us to chase it (pretend we’ve caught it and embody it – middle finger sign language satisfaction, showing we don’t care… and how much we care about what we don’t care about) with the false hope that somehow it is a panacea for our pain.

The pain of being loved and of being rejected. Cured by the pain caused when we love and reject… what we love because we don’t care… but we do, if we didn’t care we would be indifferent, truly indifferent not pretend indifference which isn’t indifferent at all, and wouldn’t even consider caring or not caring. Loving, not loving. Rejecting or not rejecting.

When we genuinely don’t care, are indifferent, we don’t even know that we don’t care or are indifferent. We don’t notice it, whatever it is. If we’ve noticed it…

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What we say we don’t care about… reveals what we care about.

When you think about it… there are too many thoughts to process which may lead to that bugaboo known as overthinking. But what about overfeeling?

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A quote such as – “My life, my rules, love me or reject me, I don’t care.” – I can relate to it, to what inspired it, the rebel yell, to the desire to say it and mean it, I can empathise with those who say it, what inspired them to say it, use it as a rebel yell and slogan for their life, rules of their life. etc, because I can relate…

but…

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My question for those who embrace the ethos of that quote is – What happens when we’re all saying this?

Yes, you’re unique and that’s what this is all about (according to a reverse search of the quote)… but isn’t everyone unique just like you?

Who exactly are you saying this to and do you care about how they react to it, to such a statement from you?

Do you care if they say this to you too? How it affects you when they say it to you instead of you saying it to them? How do you react to it?

Can you relate to the flip side, can you empathise or do you not care for empathy either… for others who may say this same thing to you? For those who may not care (or at least say that they don’t care) if you love or reject them? Or are you the only one allowed to use this statement? You don’t care, but they have to care about what you say that you don’t care about?

Are you ‘bovvered’? Are you ‘bovvered’ whether they are ‘bovvered’ or  that they ‘ain’t bovvered’?

And does it ‘bovver’ you that they ‘ain’t bovvered’ if you ‘ain’t bovvered’?

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Can you take what you dish out and like the taste of that dish the way you expect others to like it? Or is something else going on behind this statement, this quote. this rebel yell?

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And now that we’ve established what you don’t care about… what do you care about?