#scurf173: The Creepy Comfort of Being Abandoned
On 'Chor' and other such existentialist expressions of losing (versions of) oneself
We find it tough to let go of the good things, the good people, the good memories. But have you ever wondered how tightly we hold on to the bad stuff even more? I for one found my inner self in holding on to the wrong from my past so close. Family, friends, lovers, besties, bosses had all wronged me. And almost like an adult I held on to the grudges, the spite, the venom inside me in a sort of negative space that didn’t allow me to even breathe free.
As time passed, the negatives kept heaving atop each other, making me feel burdened with their corrosion. Each time I uttered the weight of that “something bad” that had happened to me, I weighed down and was bogged down. Even though I brimmed with anger and courage in those moments of calling my perpetrators out, and in feeling like I was gaining some control over myself, I kept slipping away from my true self.
That’s when I also realised that I along with some loved ones who depended on me to be strong, or just to be, continued to feel negatively preoccupied. In being so obsessed with my pain I allowed the pain to thieve into my present and steal a bit more of me from there.
I saw the damage it did to me, the shivers it left in its wake. I lived in its terror, woke up mid-nightmares with sweaty palms. I allowed the past to lord over me. More than anything else, I could feel both viscerally and physically how that hurt left me seething, raging, sulking, at times even sobbing, about the same thing over a long passage of time.
It was time. I had to warp out of this cycle of self inflicted bigger pain long after the incident of pain had passed.
I decided to shake things up and turn the affect of these emotions on their head quite literally by taking away from them the power they (thought they) had on me. As soon I’d start thinking about something that hurt or a bad memory from the past, I’d conjure up a questionnaire of sorts about the origin of the pain, how it impacted me in that present moment, what my relation with those people was now, etc.
Each time I did this it turned out to be an “out of course” question to which my muscle memory had no response. Each time I questioned my own misery, instead of wallowing into it, instead of delving into the already well-known depths of my prolonged sadness, my mind, the emotions drew a blank. They had no response to give to the questioning. This, in turn, unlocked a part of my brain that then set free a different way of looking at the situation. The person, that circumstance, the pain was in the pain. And in dwelling just on it, I was carrying the memory along. I was carrying along something that was not helpful, was not letting me grow or even be.
This dawned on me while listening to this segment of Genesia Alves’ Swaddle podcast episode with Arpita Chatterjee, writer of Three of Us. Chatterjee recalls an instance when her mother told her, “How you remember your life, is what you are choosing to remember.” This rang with me immediately because this is the exact kind of curation I started long back in my life, at a subconscious level and almost subliminally. Without paying much heed to it, I found myself thinking about how over the last decade I set my self free from my past hurt and chose to concentrate more on the beauty. “Memory,” Chatterjee continues, “is a way to curate your life.”
This made me realise how in that way I had let a former version of myself go, abandoning that person into the recesses of the past, only carrying with me the good bits forward. I’m not sure how any of this will click with anyone, but this awakening has been the base on which I have tried to fix myself and some people’s hurt in my life. Now when I look back, those who hurt are as alien to me as the one who got hurt.
In a way it can be said that the existentialism of despair could really not lock itself into me for long, but I also worked to not let it stick. I allowed the thief to enter in late one night and take away all it could, allowing him to think that they were thieving when in reality they were only unlocking my mental knots, relieving me of my burdens, curing me one little theft at a time.
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