Category Archives: Writing

Day 12. Sweet Madness.

By Posted in Depression, Falling Apart, Love Lost, Road To Recovery, Writing Tagged , , , , , , 1 Comment

“Standing on my head at edge of the ledge,”
– Holmes Brothers, “Edge Of The Ledge”, Feed My Soul (2010)

Love. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. It is madness that we welcome often enough with open arms and end up cursing with abandon, oozing pain from our shattered hearts.

The Wikipedia article on love has a great note that “diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, compared to other emotional states.” It also quotes a 2004 article by Helen Fisher “Why We Love: .” “Love may be understood as part of the survival instinct, a function to keep human beings together against menaces and to facilitate the continuation of the species.” But what happens when that becomes the opposite? What happens when things fall apart, when that love is unanswered? I’m not trying to question the necessity of love or rail against it. That would be an exercise in futility and there’s not enough strength for that. Rather my goal is to attempt to unravel the tangled emotional mess that I find myself in.

What do we do when love is unrequited? Do we keep the feelings hidden inside? I suspect there is no one right answer. As I am only going through this currently, I won’t know whether my actions thus far have been correct. One would have to be rather removed from the traumatic event in question in order to gain some sort of objectivity. The one thing that has been going through my mind though is that in general we tend to hide that which we are ashamed of the most. Humans in general tend to avoid unpleasant things. In psychology this is know as the pleasure principle. When it comes to yours truly, due to various psychological issues mentioned in the previous posts, this drive (especially the part about avoiding unpleasant things) is present in spades. So what to do?

I admit, I was possibly being selfish when I sent the message to Her professing my feelings. Most of the things I had said can be found in my previous posts: A Cut Too Deep and … And Darkness Falls. I suppose I was overcome by a sense of defiance against an unfair universe and desire to be open about my feelings. I have held things inside for so long that now it has become problematic to keep them out of sight. It is true though that I have not really considered what Her emotions would be upon the receipt of my tear-filled missive. I assumed from our conversations, from when we were together, that She simply would not care and forget it soon thereafter. I have not expected Her to be angry and especially not angry enough to send me the type of message that She did. I have not expected Her to think so much less of me as a person.

Am I deluding myself? Am I really “small, petty and jealous”? Well, jealous is a “yes.” That often goes hand-in-hand with heartbroken. But I truly do want Her to be happy and I truly am tremendously sad that it can’t be with me. And I still love Her so much that her absence is painful beyond anything I have experienced. Not having her in my life is the greatest sense of loss that I have ever experienced. I have poured out so many feelings on this blog to try to come to terms with them. I have made WordPress my daily routine. Yet, it was not enough. Was it self-indulgence, jealousy, pride, self-importance, or some other negative trait that has pushed me to tell Her how I felt? Perhaps. Perhaps it was all of them. Perhaps I am simply trying to rationalise my actions. I hope though that was not the case and that it was motivated by only love and desire to not be ashamed of my own feelings. That letter was written as a stream of consciousness in a fit of deepest sorrow, and passion, and love, such that while writing it I had to occasionally stop to wipe snot and tears of my face for I had trouble breathing and seeing the screen. I hope that She will understand it one day and find it in her heart to forgive me and my emotional foibles.

And I still love Her.

Day 6. Trust.

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I’m having trouble today coming up with things to say. However, keeping with the “one post per day” challenge I shall say this. Trust is important in any relationship. Even enemies trust each other to behave in a foe-like manner. But I digress. In climbing, trust is paramount. We trust each other with our lives and continued well-being so that we can feel the freedom to explore. If that trust is shaken, it is hard to get things back to the way they were. There cannot be any hidden agendas and all things must be clear and transparent, which in its turn creates an implicit feeling of a close bond. Those feelings of bonding are multiplied exponentially when the climbing relationship goes beyond catching and belaying.

One day, I will find a way to finish this post. And I still love her.

Day 5. Fear.

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I have been thinking about fear and the nature of that emotion. It has occurred to me that when it comes to human relationships and life in general, fear is not so much us hiding from things but rather hiding things from ourselves. This gives us an illusion of having control over our lives because we make the choices and call the shots. The sad reality however is that we are sometimes ruled by the things we are afraid to face so we pretend they aren’t there or that they are something else.

Unwittingly, I have become a master at that technique during the last 15-20 years of my life. That realisation has sent me into yet another panic attack. How could I have been so blind??? And then anger sets in: why didn’t anybody else see this and help me??? But the answer, of course, is because I have been putting on a façade for most of my life. Dealing with having a learning disability in a society that praised and deified uniformity and conformity required it. So no one then could see what was going on. I have walled myself off from everyone and thus made myself alone. I used to joke that I had developed my ability of being alone in a roomful of people into an art form. Only now I realise how detrimental that was. So even though I had eventually learned to overcome the loner mode, I have not simultaneously developed a way of dealing with the world. So something had to give and I began putting scary things into their own walls so that I wouldn’t have to deal or look at them.

There’s a terrifying aspect to this whole thing: when it comes to relationships, we see what we want to see because often enough we are unable to cope with the idea that the other person might not be that into us. And then, you get to break down and hopefully ask for help.

Maybe even start a blog…

It had not occurred to me to do this before. A place that is so anonymous if it needs to be where I can scream the most inner things to the universe and still maintain my privacy? A comedian friend of mine, while pulling me out of what was fixing up to be a marathon drinking session in a dive bar, has told me to write what I’m feeling and write it out all the time. There’s no shame in this and no one, except a few people will ever read this. There’s a tremendous freedom in this. Eventually though, I will have to re move a cloak of anonymity either off of this blog and my true inner state. It will be me vanquishing another stage of fear by removing walls from myself and opening up myself to the world.

In the meantime, the minutia of writing this blog and being part of the WordPress community is helping but GODDAMN I am in so much pain every moment of every day! And I still dream of her.