Angsty crap
Just using this to vent, not looking for feedback (he says as he puts his thoughts on the internet, rather than on a scrap of paper on his desk, fully understanding his desires even while pretending to rationalise them out of existence)...
It's hard to draw the line as a critic or cynic or skeptic, or even merely as someone is occasionally in the grasp of a bitter mood. Tearing down argumentation is what I do, and I find myself as susceptible to the technique as anyone else's arguments.
The only things that stir my emotions beyond my control are the relationships that I (want to) have. The tension between the relationship I have and the one that I want to have is frustrating.
To be a poet and not know the trade
To be a lover and yet repel all women
Twin ironies by which great saints are made
The agonizing pincer jaws of heaven
~Sanctity, Patrick Kavanagh
A poem I memorised probably more than a decade and a half ago, still resonates with me at these moments, the moments of self reflection/indulgence.
There are things I want to write, to speak about, yet the fear of social stignatisation holds me back. The fear of people judging my thoughts as being inappropriate to... what? publicly state? "my station"? my age? my gender? This... definite fear of an unspecified source, while not overpowering, is frustrating. If a source is identified, the fear can be evaluated as rational or not, prudent or not, justified or not. Without a source, the consequences of acting cannot be calculated, and the Utilitarian nature of my mind is at a loss.
Thus two fingers to it, and damn the consequences. Oh, the melodrama... Pomposity and self-aggrandizement is one escape from the fear. Generate 'rage at the injustice', and one's self-importance surges to the fore.
How to determine if a relationship (and I use this in the loosest and most general sense possible) is of positive affect to your life, or negative? Given that the relationship is now a part of your life, how to determine if the termination of that relationship will be an improvement? While, perhaps, one could judge the overall effect of the relationship to be negative, perhaps the loss of that relationship would be worse... Never having the relationship is an option no longer on the table, yet it may have been the optimal choice given the current information base, yet the choice at the time given the then-current information base was optimal.
I dislike being right and wrong. I dislike right and wrong having a temporal aspect.
I dislike having one person having the significant effect on my emotional state that they do.
I dislike that they never opted-in to this situation, that the situation is entirely of my construction, and that the situations of the past that mirror this were also of my construction.
I dislike that I feel that I must "explain" to them how I feel, knowing that they know (enough about) how I feel to know that they don't wish to know anymore. I dislike this need to emotionally blackmail people. To tell them "I feel sad as a result of you saying x, y, z" knowing that telling them will make me feel better at the cost of making them feel sad.
This is me. Is it us? Is this a certain calibration of the human condition, or is it the calibration of the human condition? Is this just the calibration of me? The only thoughts in response to that can be inductive, not deductive, or statements of fact. When I was losing my belief in god a long time ago (15 years or so), I believed that knowledge both freed and imprisoned, in different ways.
I've moved a long way away from that belief, towards one where I understand (believe?) that we are always imprisoned by the nonsense of our genetics and social programming, and the gibberish that emerges from the combination of both just leads to sadness.
Knowledge doesn't create the bars on the cage, it merely turns on the light so we can see some of them, to recognise that "yup, this stuff right here, is bullshit. Bullshit of my own making".
And that, along with all the rest, recognising along with Satre that the situation is of my own making, and yet rejecting that psychologically uninformed view to recognise that the situation is *not* of my own making. Dialectic? Or contradiction?
To recognise that if the object of my affection (raise red flag here) does nothing to act in a way that one could reasonably consider 'mean' or 'cruel', that said object (and again) merely expresses their feelings in response to an unwelcome act of my own (knowing/suspecting that such an act would be unwelcome), then if their is poison in the relationship, then that poison is of my of design, making, and introduction.
Recognising that means realising that ending a relationship with a perfectly decent/fantastic person because of something they did not do is A) unfair, B) sub-optimal, and C) veils the problem by scapegoating it on the relationship rather than it's actual source: me.
Solution: think more, talk less, grow up, stop doing things that I know to be unwelcome.
(for those who are concerned at the vague "unwelcome acts", I'm open to discussing the matter in private. I am certainly not above criticism)