Today, as I was driving, a song came on. I knew it the moment I heard its opening notes, and it instantly reminded me of someone who hurt me and is no longer in my life. Reflexively, I moved my hand to skip it, but then I stopped myself. I scolded myself, saying, “Let yourself feel this pain.” So I did. I listened to the song, and I felt a melancholic sadness about the memories it brought up, but also some degree of peace about listening to the song for myself, creating a new memory rather than connecting it to older memories I no longer want to live in.
Maybe it’s silly. Maybe it’s not that deep. But it’s part of a broader goal of mine, to not run from the things that scare me or make me uncomfortable. It’s why, around a year ago, I started lurking on the r/spiders subreddit a lot. I wanted to desensitize myself to spiders (and snakes, although I didn’t need a subreddit for that) so that I would stop being irrationally afraid of them. It worked well for the snake thing, but not too well for the spiders… but you get the idea. It’s why I keep every single note I’ve ever written in my notes app, even if some of them are ridiculous or embarrassing. It’s why I glancingly touch hot pans and keep my hands under hot water until I can’t bear the pain. I’m not fearless by any means, but I’m trying.
The weird thing about me wanting to feel all these things, painful or strange as they might be, is that often, I end up feeling very empty, feelings-wise. I have this little quirk that I might have alluded to before, which is that I can very rarely cry. I can only cry if it’s something about my family, and even that has been tenuous recently, and I can nearly count the amount of times in the past 6 or so years that I’ve cried. Excluding the times I have, with much difficulty, forced myself to cry a few scant tears, I can only remember crying three times for matters unrelated to my family. Once was about a girl, my first heartbreak, years ago. The other two times were about myself, on the nights where I couldn’t even imagine a future for my life. Every other time, there has been that sob in my throat, but nothing past that. It may not sound awful, especially because I hate how I look when I cry, but it can be very painful. It’s like Tantalus, constantly tortured by something so close, but always impossible to touch. A desire that will always be left unquenched, and ends up leaving me empty. Hollow, like I have nothing to give or feel anymore, just the dissatisfaction of having emotions with nowhere to go.
I didn’t even cry when I broke up with my girlfriend. I felt so heartless, and I wanted to so badly, but I couldn’t. The same thing happened around 4 years ago when my grandfather passed away. So instead I spend nights holding my head, covering my eyes as though there are tears to wipe away, and I cut onions without wiping my tears, so I can feel them sliding down my face, the way they would if my body worked the way it should.
You can guess how I got here. I don’t wish to speculate or write about it.
Anyways, I don’t just feel negative things. I know it might seem like it, and I know that people call me a pessimist all the time, but it’s not true. I resent it, actually. I feel a lot of things, but they are both positive and negative. Any true coin has two sides, no?
I thought about this quite a bit today. I wasn’t in the best state, but I got to do a little grocery shopping (my favorite!) and I noticed a lot of little things that put a big smile on my face, though somehow, I still felt a little numb. A middle-aged woman wearing a head-to-toe, preposterously bright floral-patterned outfit. A store associate, helping an old lady pick out a drink from the top shelf. The day-old bakery rack’s very existence. A man who seemed completely overjoyed when I let him cross the road. It wasn’t just today, either. It was the stranger helping a mother with her unruly children on the plane last week, and a man asking how I was doing yesterday when I took his order at the drive-through. I just find other people beautiful when they’re helping each other and being kind. Maybe it’s the bare minimum, and perhaps I’d like to believe that it is, but it’s meaningful to me, somehow. If it is the bare minimum, that is, the basic way everyone works, it would make it a lot easier to ignore all the awful and terrible things people do. It would be easier to imagine a world where everyone is simply pleasant and kind, where no one hurts anyone else.
Alas, that is not reality. So when people call me a pessimist, I do understand where they’re coming from. I do see a lot of negative things in the world, and call attention to them. But I choose to believe that it’s because I love the world so much that I hate it when awful things are invited into it and threaten or hurt those things I love, not because I’m simply a negative person.
The moral of the story is that life is all about living and feeling and loving and hating. Don’t hold back. Let your tears fall, I beg of you. It is a different type of suffering to be unable to fully experience your suffering.
