The Unbearable Lightness of Being…

just about anyone, really. Getting back into life, one day at a time, degree by degree. I’ve been having a bad time lately, but I’m no solipsist, and the sorrows of loneliness certainly aren’t mine alone to bear. Relationship trouble abounds in just about every neck of the woods. A little slice of the twentysomethings demographic, a cross-section of people and situations that could have come from just about anyone’s life.

One friend has been having a hard time letting go of a less-than-perfect relationship, with a less-than perfect person – desirable, even admirable, in most every way save that of maturity. But boy, what a stickler. It’s not a small thing. I told her the story of the genie and the amnesiac over an IM conversation this morning. Good for a laugh, good for a pause… good for understanding, but not solving. They are, after all, two different things much of the time. There are times we wish life had more to do with fate and less to do with luck… or maybe not. The problem with denying fate and luck and believing in free will in cases like this is the understanding that, to the extent your free will matters, so does everyone else’s. Hence your own initiative or bravery will not provide all the happy endings you hope for.

Another has been returning like a moth to the flame to a relationship that could be called abusive. It’s been two years and she keeps going back to the same guy, pining away at every parting, always hoping that the next time will be like the most miraculous of Christmas mornings, a gift worth waiting for sitting happily under the tree just waiting to be unwrapped and enjoyed forever, only to be greeted every time with disappointment and pain. “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid.” It would be easy for anyone to tell her she’s being self-destructive and pathetically drawn to an undeserving cad, but there’s no courage in unsympathetic advice… not when we all know, if we’d admit it, that we ourselves might be no stronger.

And another enjoys a wonderful relationship full of understanding and insight and joy. Happiness that would be complete, perhaps, if not for the price imposed from without – in this case, paternal disapproval. She won’t be spending Christmas at home… but it will be a happy holiday season, still, surrounded by love and friends and approval, from every corner save one. She’s strong enough – or at least willful enough – to get by in circumstances that would have broken plenty of other people. She may not have quite everything, perhaps, but she has what she needs. Or so it seems to me, but I only know what she tells me.

A fourth was going to get married earlier this year, but in what seems to have been an inexplicable turn of events, the groom called off the wedding less than two weeks to the date. To say that she was heartbroken would be an appalling understatement, but she’s recovering. I know that, from time to time, she probably still cries about it, outward strength and assertions of independence notwithstanding. I’ve known her too long for the signs to escape me. She’s mostly back to her old self, though a little wiser and a little more bitter for the experience… and I must say, if even only to be tongue-in-cheek, that it’s the next guy who’ll be paying the price for it.

A fifth is getting married. I’ve been invited to the wedding, and I’ll probably go – she was nice enough to me, back in the day, for me to feel obligated to attend despite my three-year policy of boycotting weddings. Weddings do me no good. I rent a tux (which I hate wearing), I feel stiff and uncomfortable, and I have dinner with a bunch of people I barely know. The bitterness cranks up the resentment on every little tribulation that comes with the day, and the worst part about the whole experience is that I’ll be spending the whole day thinking miserably about myself on a day that’s emphatically not supposed to be about me at all (As though any day is), and the sheer self-absorption of the entire experience not only can’t be blocked out, but makes me feel weak and disappointed in myself for succumbing to it. The whole point behind the boycott is to avoid situations like that, to keep myself in a state where I can at least maintain my composure, smile at my friends, and reinforce the bursting seams of old wounds with frail strands of principle. I’ve had a problem, lately, where around good friends, I can smile and laugh, try to be witty, and stay collected, but around others, who don’t know me well enough to care about me, I can’t even bring myself to try anymore. Reflexively, I meet the rhetorical greeting of “how’s it going?” with a glum stare and a pause, unable even to summon the incredibly simple, if insincere, response of “fine.”

We all talk, sometimes… to peel away the thin layer of false civility that keeps us sane around polite company (or at least keeps polite company from wondering what unhinged sociopath now walks amongst them). To get at what’s really bothering us, to explore those weaknesses of the self that bind us to things that make us unhappy. If trust is allowing someone close enough to hurt you, then that’s what we have… we talk about the things that hurt us, we talk about our helplessness… we ask why we lack the will to do what’s best for ourselves in the long run, why the allure of romance and the spectre of solitude defy the instinct of self-preservation. We allow the other to speak those blunt truths about our strengths and weaknesses, our vulnerabilities, all the mixed blessings in our personal makeups that make us too caring to be honest, too infatuated to be selfless, too feeling to be rational, or too analytical to be wise. Speaking these things inflicts pain. We listen despite the discomfort because we know it is in our best interest to understand ourselves, sometimes in the way that only a third person can. Introspection’s a tricky process, full of traps and pitfalls laid by the subconscious. It can be so hard to face yourself, especially when you want to blame the world for being unfair and when you want to believe that if there is fault to be had anywhere, it’s not to be found within yourself. Self-doubt leads us down dark corridors into the dead end of denial. Cowardice drives us into bottomless pits of despair. Uncertainty makes us detour from the silvered pathways of virtue, thinking it a mirage, that something this pure and noble could never exist in a heart so tortured… and self-pity stops us in our tracks, leaving us to rot in desolate places despite the obvious fact that going almost anywhere would be better than staying here. We never really know whether we’re seeing ourselves for what we are, or whether we’re just deluding ourselves. But with more voices searching for the harmony, we have a better chance of picking out the melody of the song that emanates from our spirits, too faint and distant to be heard against the background hiss.

“I hate platitudes. You know it’s said that ‘tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, but whoever said that forgot about unrequited love. If all you’ve ever had is unrequited love, then you have loved for but a moment before the loss sets in forever. Now that’s a raw deal.”

“The hardest part about being heartbroken is not showing it, because when let yourself look sad, you look pathetic. And I can’t think of anyone I know who was ever attracted to someone else for being pathetic. Tragic, how the worst thing you can do for your love life, when you’re at your loneliest, is to let it show on the outside.”

“You need to take him off your buddy list. Every time he logs on, his name appears and you think about him. You’re watching the screen, just waiting for him… no wonder you can’t forget him, you’re never giving yourself the chance! Every time he comes online, you sit and watch, hoping for him to talk to you, to say what it is you’re hoping to hear. You’re wondering if he’s thinking about you, whether he’s working up the courage to talk, whether you’re still in his daydreams. But you said it yourself – if he cared about you, he wouldn’t treat you this way. No, when he’s online, he’s just online. You don’t hold the space in his life you wish you did. You’re not in his dreams, you’re not in his thoughts. You sit and stare at the screen for hours with these false hopes. I can’t tell you what to do… I can’t make you do it, but please, at least consider it… if you take him off your buddy list, you at least give yourself the chance to forget, to stop reopening the wounds. He’s blown up his half of the bridge already, the only way you can keep yourself from going off the deep end now is to scuttle your half, because you’re hanging off the edge now, and he doesn’t care.”

“You’re a million wonderful things, you know. You’re brilliant and humble and just… you’re talented and accomplished and wise… you’re compassionate and selfless and strong… and it’s not fair that you’re alone. I wish I could tell you it’ll be all right some day, but after all this time, I’m sure there are no words that ring more hollow in the echoes of your soul, so I won’t feed you that tired lie. I just hope that someday, life will be as fair to you as you are to it. I know that when life is at its lows, the last thing you want to hear is some chipper idiot telling you that someday things will be good, that you’ll find your soulmate, or that someone out there will see and appreciate you for what you are… what you really want is someone understanding enough to acknowledge your perspective – to admit that life simply sucks, that things have been unfair… because only then can you begin to believe that that someone has any handle on the truth.”

“You get over it when you get over it. Who knows when that happens… one day you wake up, and the heartache’s gone. It heals in the night when you’re not expecting it, but there’s no telling when that’s going to be. You can try all sorts of things to distract yourself from the sadness – tea, therapy, long walks in the darkness, clubbing like crazy, getting sympathy from friends, dating, travel, working like a maniac, getting drunk off your ass… maybe they’ll help, and maybe they won’t. There are no guarantees. Until then, it’s going to be hard… and I’ll help in every way that I can, but you know that, as much as I want it to be true, I can’t make it go away any more than you can just by willing it. But I’ve known you for a long time. I know how strong you are, even if you don’t know it yourself. I can tell you with certainty that you’re going to be all right. I just can’t tell you exactly when it’ll happen. But I love you… you’re my friend, and I love you because I know you’re far too strong to collapse under the strain. I have been disappointed by so many people, but never you.”

I’m not saying who said what. These are all paraphrases anyway, of things more than one of us have said to another at different times, and sometimes back and forth between the same people separated by forgotten intervals of time and emotion. Lessons relearned by human beings throughout time, wheels spun and turned and reinvented over and over again. To the world, it’s nothing new. Cliches and platitudes, bits of folk wisdom, parables and novels and poems and songs have all been written about these little observations arising out of the life journey from naivete to maturity. It’s all been done before – but perhaps not yet by you. But that’s the important part, isn’t it? When it comes down to it, help or no help, love or no love, you have to learn it for yourself.