A while ago I wrote a piece called Drinking Shit. It talked about how I’ll dive deep into an ocean of darkness, explore it, and come back up to describe what I saw, and how it felt. And it talked about how, because I’m doing it, it means that you don’t have to. And I mean that in two ways:
First, that just because I seem to be suffering, it doesn’t mean you need to as well. This was the motivation behind the piece. I saw my Granny struggle with some things, and I felt that she may have been taking on burdens that she didn’t need to bear. It can be good to fall into sadness somewhat if it means you can extend your empathy, but letting yourself fall completely, in aid of someone else, isn’t needed. Not on my behalf at least. I don’t know if she really felt that, or if the things she seemed to be struggling with were just a normal processing of some of the dark and complex we were discussing at the time. But I said in another piece, Granny’s Gifts, that she has “occasionally drained her own emotional reserves to help refill someone else’s”, and I wanted to say that she didn’t need to do that here.
However, that approach is pretty similar to what I do: dive into a darkness, level up my empathy, and come back with new insights.
And that’s the second thing I meant, when I said that because I’m doing something, it means you don’t have to: That I’ll push myself slightly further than other people, so we can both benefit from what I find. And I’m happy to do that. I like exploring things, and my capacity for darkness is much vaster than other people’s: my threshold for what’s scary and traumatic and negatively impactful takes much longer to reach, and I am comfortably familiar with the things that might frighten most people. So I can already go further.
I’m also more practised in bringing myself back, because I’ve been doing it for so long. In fact, I do it so much that we could call it a habit, or even a hobby, because I do enjoy my time exploring. It’s almost like method acting, I guess. You might be performing as someone else with terrible insides, and you feel all of those things, but there’s still a certain level of enjoyment and fulfilment in those actions. Or maybe it’s like listening to a sad song, letting the music take you to a place of small blackness before coming back to a less melancholic reality. Maybe I’m just very happy to listen to the most depressing songs.
That comfort in the darkness, that’s certainly a topic I plan to explore: How discomfort itself can begin to feel comfortable. But we’ll have to come back to that later.
The event that triggered these thoughts was, today, I was chatting with my brother in law. I suspect that there’s a darkness present in him that he can’t quite comprehend. Most people’s darkness always feels incomprehensible, unapproachable, indescribable. I myself have felt a mounting bleakness in my mind over the past year or so, I’ve stopped taking my anti depressants as I found them to be ineffective, but I’ve also started to feel the black wall pressing up against me once again, gently now but if left untreated I know it will crush me. For the most part, I am OK, aside from a lack of motivation, and it’s something I’m aware of and working on. But I wanted to give him words for what he might be feeling. So I allowed myself to recap what unhappiness I’ve felt so far, and I let myself slip slightly further into suffering. And then I explained what I felt.
My words were not untrue, and my feelings were accurate and honest. But I was essentially describing the sensation of the exact moment a pin pricks the skin, explaining the pain in that instance, ignoring the surrounding time before and after. With such dramatic feeling comes dramatic words, so what I shared was undoubtedly an exaggerated version of what he might have felt. But it doesn’t all need to hit home. If even a single phrase can illuminate something that was previously hidden — that is, if something I say can help make sense of your suffering — then that makes it all worthwhile.
What’s funny is, I don’t think I could do that before, not completely, because it would mean that their impression of me could be altered. I would have been hyper-aware that the version of myself that I was portraying was, in reality, a small snapshot of a moment that I was exploring far more intensely than I would normally feel; and my ego was so stiff that I couldn’t allow someone else to think of me in a way that I didn’t feel was true. I would have to follow it up with statements about how it’s conditional and circumstantial, how it doesn’t define me, and other such defenses. But I don’t really care about that anymore.
This in itself is massive, that my ego has so small of a hold on me now. But I like the results. Now, I don’t mind so much if someone thinks something about me that isn’t what I view as “optimal” or “objectively valid”. I’ve let go of my need to control my reality in that way, which means, I’m not trying to control other people in that way either. I feel like I know, now, that if the truth of me is different to their interpretation, and if they have the capacity to see it, then that truth will be known in time. And if not, well, I’m no longer so desperate to be good in the eyes of everyone that, now, I’m actually OK with different people thinking different things about me. Hell, I might even learn something new about myself through their interpretation of how I manifest myself.
Putting it that way, it actually sounds pretty silly, doesn’t it? That different people might think different things about you, and how much that’s OK. How strange it is that I spent so much time fighting against that, trying to bend the realities of others to match my own. Perhaps now, instead of forcing them to see my reality, I’ll spend that time letting myself see theirs instead.