I wrote this time last year that I felt like I was coping better than the year before. This year I don’t feel like I have made much progress, and perhaps I feel like I have regressed – possibly a trend detected in the darker tone of my recent posts. But unless we can truly zoom out and have a top-down view of our lives, who can truly say what is progression and what is regression?
I think in general human beings are good at playing roles. We take on roles of a child, parent, educator, student, friend, lover, etc, and plenty of times we act according to what we think is expected of us including expectations we have of ourselves. We all want to be certain types of people, and so much influence comes from environmental conditioning that I no longer really know who do I really want to be, versus who I think I should be. It is no longer very clear to me when I am playing a role and when I am just being my self. Does my self even exist? According to buddhism, it doesn’t – because our selves are never truly independent of conditions.
The roles I consciously or unconsciously play affect how I perceive my life. Sometimes I get too caught up in a role, and playing it well makes me believe I am making progress in terms of how well I am coping with life. Other times I snap out of it and break down, realising whatever progress I perceived was just an illusion I have created for myself. I don’t really want to be unhappy all the time, so I try to pretend. Is the breakdown a regression if it allows me to get closer to myself? I don’t really know because this world functions precisely because we’re all very good at upkeeping these illusions. Is functioning more important than truth?
As usual I don’t have an answer. As I age I feel like I have less and less answers because I am now seeing the complexity and nuances that age have gifted to me. When I was younger I thought truth is everything. Now I am not so sure. If truth makes me want to stop living, then is it worth the pursuit?
I guess I just want to be more at ease with myself. Or more at ease with the unease I would perhaps always feel for the rest of my life. If I live till 80ish I’m at my mid-life now, and it seems unlikely I’ll develop a positive relationship with life at this point. And if I do develop one later, then was it worth it having the navigate more than half my life in this existential pain, aloneness and confusion?
Sometimes I think that I am contemplating the wrong question and answer. That perhaps it is meaningless to wonder about the worthiness of existence. It is just something that has to unfold, even if it is meaningless, empty and worthless. Us human beings like to derive value in everything we do: we seem to only want to do something if we consider it to be valuable. That attitude has poisoned every part of my life and unconscious thinking, even if by now I am a lot more comfortable with meaninglessness and purposelessness than the average person.
There doesn’t need to be a reason for everything. Ageing one year doesn’t automatically confer more wisdom. The passage of time doesn’t equate to progress. Why are we so obsessed with progress anyway? The environment is always dynamically changing, it is just neither practical or sustainable to always expect things to get better.
Part of my internal suffering comes from so many “shoulds”. I want to be a certain way, and it gives me a lot of anguish that I can’t be that way. I once made an observation with my therapist: I said all my life I was expecting a fine-dining experience from a world that is actually a MacDonald’s.
Similarly I have been wanting myself to be able-bodied when I am actually disabled. Wanting reality to be different from what it is can cause a lot of suffering. Just like wanting myself to be someone I cannot be.
There are complex reasons why I am the way I am now. Why I go around living life as though I have not much life-force left in me. Everything takes so much effort. I have lived so much of my life against the mainstream, and sadly even being covid-cautious (which is just basically being concerned about my health) also invites existential loneliness. This is triggering for me because it reminds me of the painful loneliness I had felt as a child. The feelings of being abandoned.
I wish I can be like some others who are clearly a lot more comfortable being different. Again, wishing to be someone I am not. It seems I will never be part of the mainstream because we just have different living philosophies, and yet these differences trigger so much existential pain because I fear being abandoned. It doesn’t matter what I intellectually think, my body simply reacts (apparently rejection sensitive dysphoria is an adhd thing, and they think it is related to the brain structure).
If I can have a birthday wish, I wish for more emotional strength. To just be the way I am. To truly be able to accept my self, not just an intellectual acceptance, but with the whole of my body. I don’t want to keep on feeling immense sadness in my body every single time I get triggered. It really sucks especially when I intellectually know the trigger is truly innocuous, yet my body cannot help reacting. There is unending sadness in me, and I can feel it bubbling up even as I am writing this.
If this is something that has to be with me for the entirety of my life, then I wish I can co-exist better with it. To just be able to tolerate the sensations, or to compassionately hold it. Maybe I can’t abandon my self too, no matter how uncomfortable and painful she makes me feel.
Growing old is perhaps becoming more accepting of all the painful realities that exist, whether they are external or inside of us. I thought I’ll be less unhappy as I get older, because it seemed that was the trajectory. But I think I am becoming more intimate with my sadness.
I write one of these every year.