To discard emotion from my life would be an interesting task. I’ve realized that with time, you have to disconnect from certain things or else you’ll explode. My mom feels so much for other people, I wonder where all that space in her heart comes from. Not to say that I don’t feel or sympathize, but I have a hard time connecting with pain. It’s exhausting. I often disconnected with my own pain and feel very little on the side of sadness.
I think a lot of that is inspired by the people in my life. Most of them are either highly in tune with suffering, and the other half are completely separated from it. But me, I can feel so self absorbed that it’s hard to even talk to sad people. I avoid them almost, like their sadness will rub off on me. And then I get mad at them for being that way, treading in dark murky water that has no right to interrupt my sunshine.
It’s the same anger I feel for people who take their own lives versus good people whose lives get taken from them. I guess it would be trite to say, but it’s completely unfair. The only reasoning I’ve ever heard anyone say is they had to die so I could learn XYZ. We try so hard to rationalize everything sad in our lives because we would go insane if we didn’t have a reason for everything. And thus a perpetual cycle of sadness continues. There’s no reason for it, which is enormously depressing, and those that can no longer rationalize became sadness zombies.
So there’s me. I can’t deal with sadness, so I don’t. But I’d be lying to you if I said that I don’t feel skepticism and pessimism, cynical, untrusting, dark thoughts all the time. I don’t have sunshine shooting out of my ass. In fact, I’ve been told that I’m a dark human that people would be scared to see what the inside of me looked like. On the outside, if you ever met me, I don’t come off this way. I think my outer appearance is actually starting to win because the darkness is turning to grey – into dismissive disconnection with sadness.
Also, sadness is boring. Have you ever noticed that? If you sit and listen to someone cry, do you not feel completely restless? Like when is this going to be over and how can I make this person laugh again? I can’t take it! I mean seriously, don’t lie to me. If you are completely honest with yourself, you know you feel that way. Being a shoulder to cry on is exhausting, it’s boring, it doesn’t have to do with you, and you can hardly wait for your turn to talk.
We are all assholes. Okay, there are some people who aren’t assholes. I don’t think my sister is an asshole. I think she genuinely cares when people are sad and crying and I don’t think that she feels like leaving when they do so. I think that she actually feeds off of it. A sadness eater. She loves it because it makes her feel useful. But to my point, it’s all a selfish pursuit.
I just think about time. All we really share together is time. Everything functions around it and lack of it, everyone’s fears all stem from the same place, a perpetual lapse in something completely out of our control. You cannot control the passing of the days and their continual movement towards the end of something, the day, week, month, sun. We are all moving forward, but at the same time, we are all expiring. So this is a large burden to bear for a race that feels things like guilt, need, hopes, and rationale. It’s huge, because you cannot break the cycle, you cannot stop it, you have no choice but to move with it.
In religion, devising a barrier between reality and the continuation of time can only get you so far. It can perhaps make you fear it less or accept its absence by belief in the after-time. But mostly it gives you comfort that we are all running out of the same thing.
I always wonder how anyone can be so frivolous with his or her time. There is no amount of rationalizing that can slow it down or make it stop. And because of that life provides the same conundrum. And that’s what sadness is – what it is, and tragedy and death, and fear and regret. It’s all there for you to make with it what you will. So I have a hard time understanding what people decide to make of it.
Is cynicism my sadness shield? Hating time wasters? I don’t know how else to feel about them. Bad people are time wasters, people who know there is something better and choose not to achieve it. People who understand how to get from A to B and choose F instead. You’re brain is strong and smart and able. It has the ability to rationalize and to believe, it also has the ability to choose. To choose how you spend your valuable, limited time.