I feel at a crossroads, and I don’t know how to proceed. But that’s not true. I do, but I know that both paths are right. I’m unable to make the decision, because both options are — I know with unbearable certainty — the right choice.
I wondered yesterday if the dark/light spectrum that we live on has a kind of magnetisation: if you are moving towards the darkness, it pulls you down; if you are moving towards the lightness, it lifts you up. Both forces propel you further, as you engage with them more regularly until said engagement represents you:
Thought becomes action, action becomes habit, habit becomes trait, and trait becomes identity. To change yourself you must start at the beginning (since, for example, changing ones habits does not change the underlying though that motivates said habit).
My decision: To keep writing, or to let it go.
I have tried writing in relatively smaller amounts, so I now have a rough idea of the amount of dedication it would require. It’s a lot. I cannot do things by halves. It’s all or nothing. Either this takes all of me, or it takes none.
In contrast, letting go requires nothing. It takes nothing from me; in fact, it gives.
—
I want to do this: Write about the darkness, about abuse, ultimately about how to protect yourself. I have a few motivations:
* I know it will help me to understand my own trauma even more. That would help me heal parts of myself that I don’t know are broken, deep parts that hurt often.
* I know it can have an effect. I have seen, in a hippy haze, the absolute best case scenario, I’ve even lived in that universe for a little while. It was incredible. I had visions — I inhabited visions — of schoolchildren reading about abusive practices from a textbook, and how they understood it in such a banal way, routine information as common as the names of Henry VIII’s wives, partly forgotten into adulthood but mostly recoverable whenever needed. Learning the tricks as if from a fable, free from pain, just an insight that now protects them.
+ I felt how that world feels, the freedom from mental terror.
+ I understood the effect on culture. I mentally grasped the full extent of how manipulation permeates the all the major and most influential parts of our lives, from the obvious knowledge that manipulative ads are a necessary component of capitalism within populations as dense as we have — all the way through history, people screwing over other people and doing it to their face, becoming better liars, better marketing managers, better politicians, better abusive husbands
* Because describing it is, actually, laughably easy. (it’s the other stuff that takes its toll, the stuff snapshots of empathy spreading out into infinity, all brutal and ugly)
* Because it feels important.
* I like the idea of having a purpose in life
So why not?
* It affects who I am, how I think, how I perceive my own universe. It takes but gives nothing, it’s ultimately exhausting.
+ (To explain the above further:) To understand the pain that I am protecting someone from, I have to feel that pain. That’s the only way I can talk about it. And I cannot seem to help it. In honesty though, this apparent motivator feels more like it’s pushing me away from it. Can I talk about the darkness if I’m not living in it, to a small degree? Is my memory actually good enough to handle that for me? Whatever words you speak now, right in this very moment, sure they are words, but more crucially they are your attempts to describe the universe that you currently find yourself in. If the feeling changes, your perceived reality itself changes, and hence, so too does your attempt to explain it — And yes, I’m only stating the obvious fact that the way you talk and think depends on your mood, but the implications of that mean I have to stay familiar with the darkness to be able to describe it.
* I don’t know if it could help anyone, this might all be for nothing
But.. again, why though?
* If it helps just 1 person, if it saves them from the fractured life I’ve lived, and which I’ve seen others live, does that make it worth it? Should I martyr myself to save this hypothetical person, or people?
Does it have to be this way?
Perhaps not. I recently listened to one of my favourite lectures, it’s by Alan Watts and on YouTube it’s titled “trust the universe”. I had totally forgotten the practices of the Tao (aka Dao), and the insights and understandings that I got from reading the Tao Te Ching (aka Dao De Jing, generally known to be “zen”).
To summarise an entire life-changing philosophy in one sentence: A leaf will fall when it needs to.
I can feel the stories I need to tell still swirling around inside of me. I know that, when they are ready, they will be told, in exactly the way they need to be.
Perhaps I need to stop shaking the tree, and remember to be.