People don’t want to be believed in. They want to be pitied. Your pity for them reaffirms their victim state because they need to believe that they’re downtrodden because no one else would’ve dealt any better with what they’re contending with. When you believe in them, you expect them to rise up and become a master of their state rather than a victim.
So instead, they’ll scowl at you for not understanding, for undermining their heartache or anguish, and for thinking you’re better than them or that you just don’t get it at all. All this because they need to hide behind the facade of being able to survive in spite of this massively overwhelming burden of life being placed on them. That way, they feel like they’re strong because they’re still alive and have pathetic remnants of hope for the future, when in fact they’re weak and are only existing and surrounding themselves with like-minded people that will stroke their egos and affirm their resilience because they haven’t thrown in the towel yet.
But despite knowing this, you’ll be bold enough (read dumb enough!) to believe in them because you see through their defenses simply because you employed those very same defenses at some point, and their true strength is visible to you like the light of day but hidden from them because of the daunting decay of society. So you believe, and you invest emotionally and sometimes physically into that belief in them, and instead they rebel…they deny and despise your efforts because you’re not giving them what they want…you’re not telling them what they want to hear.
And that sends you into a state of despair and suddenly you’re the victim of the weakness that you tried to help them to overcome. And suddenly you’re questioning your self-worth, your significance, your ability to influence…and you recede…not realising that receding is giving up and not necessarily accepting. But at some point we all give up. Sometimes on life, sometimes on living…and sometimes on existing. And then someone comes along and believes in us, and we strike back thinking what the hell do they know? Do they have any idea what I’ve just been through? How I’ve just been rejected in the harshest way? Do they know anything at all, or do they need to believe in me so that they can feel significant in their quest to touch someone else’s life in the hope that it would bring meaning to their own? How pathetic they are for thinking that they have what it takes to convince me that I am wrong about my conscious choice to recede. Do they not know how much I know about why I shouldn’t believe anymore?