Many of us are stuck in unhappy jobs trading integrity for a pittance. Many of us are stuck in dead-end relationships that brought into our lives an unbecoming. Many of us have an unfortunate habit of attaching to visions of life as it should be, ourselves as we wish to be, and people as they may one day become, and spending longer still to mourn the passing of such unreality.
There is great pain and toil in a reciprocal, if not mutual, separation between friends, lovers, and colleagues, but the greatest sorrow springs from the Sisyphean effort to alter the course of hearts, as if chance is a matter of bending a little more ourselves and our circumstances. There is an arrogance here that is at once tragic and naive. This is the childish fantasy that takes an entire adulthood to unravel – ““it’s not up to us”.
And if we so earned a change of mind in another, we’re often disappointed to find that such herculean effort is seldom commensurate with its rewards. And so we moan or carp or detach or lash out. Such is in the matter of love and work. All your efforts poured into earning the affections and loyalties another would not fill feel the void left in the absence of your own self-esteem.
I suspect that our first love is always with a mirage, made up of fragments of our parents here, romantic doodles of teenage hormones there, glued together by a generous concoction of rom-com plot beats, melodrama, and porn. And our first job, too, is a fantasy that we project onto our employer, until we sober up to the realization that no one gives two shits about us.
And our second is a recoil from that, textured by dreams curdled, paved over with things we think we want. It is narcissistic and retaliatory and fuming of weltschmerz. Perhaps in love we had diffused into our partner and opted to stay quiet about our wants, perhaps at work we had blurred our values or passed over our own well-being for the benefit of the group. In any case, we had given up too much of ourselves, and now we’ve become selfish in a wounded way.
But soon we learn to view life as it is, a flawed, frustrating, wretchedly wonderful thing. And soon we learn to view the people in our lives as they are, flawed, frustrating, wonderfully wretched things. Hopefully we can develop a healthy dosage of realism here. When you are bereft of soul to give to hope or despair, realism is all that remains, and it is both terrifying and liberating. Perhaps then we can stop measuring ourselves to whom we want to be and others as we wish them to be and start to live as it is, naked and afraid.
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