Reddit, Where Can I Buy a Tourniquet?
I wrote this in late 2024. It’s personal (not bad! maybe a little bit weird, though), so turn back now or risk sinking.
Well. It took nearly twenty-six years, but I finally understood this year that expectation is futile. How could I have expected this year to be anything in particular, at all? How could I have expected myself to be anyone in particular, at all? I don't mean to criticize my ignorance; at least now, I understand that to expect is to ascertain disappointment.
Of course I couldn't have seen any of it coming. Hospitals and elections; ends, fear. Above it all: the constancy of uncertainty, which walked back into my everyday with more weight and presence than ever before. Weight, presence, and pain.
Yet I am grateful for the pain of what happened to me this year, as it shaped me into the self that I can appreciate now. I walk into this next year looking forward to what I might know, experience, feel, and be next.
I'm very good at being vague. Enough of vague.
Good Grief
Oh, the wound! A breakup that struck spontaneously, from someone who I looked forward to shaping a life with. In September, I maniacally scrambled for answers to the question: how do I stop hurting?
As I searched, I realized that I had spent much of my year floundering. Contorting myself to be someone I wasn't for someone I loved, losing grasp on who I was for the sake of a tenderness and care I didn't want to lose. I had conflated his values, which I thought were respectable, with my own. What I had gathered throughout my life to shape myself, I no longer knew. (You read about this kind of thing all the time and laugh it off as a possibility, and then... oh!)
If I was unable to understand myself, how was I to expect someone to understand me? But how could I understand myself if I was busy drowning in feeling? Reddit, where can I buy a tourniquet?
Yes, I spent a brutal amount of time wading through the wheat fields of r/breakups and the like. Saved dozens of comments, discovered ask dot metafiilter dot com, scrolled by hundreds of nebulous (and perhaps AI-generated) happymaxxing images while laying haphazard in my bed. Some of those internet strangers' words were gold, and I reread them for hours, days, weeks, and even babbled them nearly unconsciously in the graciousness of my loving friends. (I will never take them for granted again.)
But, three weeks after the breakup, in the midst of a one-day mistake with Lexapro that had me feeling like my scalp was going to stand up and walk away from me, it was this essay that walked out of my laptop screen and slugged me in the face.
Now, my blog is not supposed to be about Buddhism, and you should only read that essay if you have hours to stew in, so I will paraphrase briefly and poorly (which happens to be the antithesis of the blog post): the Western interpretation of the Buddhist concept that "desire leads to suffering" is an incorrect translation that can lead to poor self-maintenance. Rather, we should understand the nuance behind each untranslated term and then phrase it as so. Since I don't want to recount those translations here, let's para-paraphrase it as "expectation leads to bad."
Expectation leads to bad. Yet we tend to believe, to hope, that things can be "maintained to our satisfaction". If this hope inevitably leads to bad, our only way out of the cycle of suck is to understand that we cannot control anything. Since we cannot control anything, we must let things happen to us. We monitor our reactions to these things and we watch the reaction pass in order to not prolong suffering. Feel, recognize, and let go.
Yeah, your therapist probably brought up "letting go" in some CBT session before. But I didn't know! This amount of self-examination was new to me as it is to everyone at some point in their lives. I’m taking this one.
So, with the support of my friends, and with the wise guidance of my newfound Buddhist teacher, RomeoStevens76, I've been trying to feel, recognize, and let go. I can't lie - realizing that I don't have to ruminate and wallow in miserable emotions forever really did feel like uttering a magic word. Such simple actions, yet I'm no longer overwhelmed by my emotions. The effects are greater than just emotional relief, even, but I'll leave that there for now.
Now: how do I understand myself?
Understanding Is More Important Than Love?
Special thanks to Julian Casablancas for that title. Human Sadness is one of the greatest songs of all time.
How do I understand myself? Well, how would I try to understand anyone else? How can anyone try to understand me? I had never asked myself these questions, and again: the answers were so simple. I had a light grasp on the things I liked and believed in, but I hadn't given myself thought past that. I didn't know myself.
Acknowledging such a thing about myself seems like it should be embarrassing given how I am always unconsciously trying to feel and look put-together, but I now know that to even have a concept of who I appear as can be damaging. I do not want to blame myself for not knowing, and it does not matter that I did not. I was not, am not, better or worse a person for being anything at this level.
This self-imposed regulatory kindness was easy to swallow and hard to practice. After not knowing that you don't really know yourself for your whole life, but knowing that something is missing from your fundamental self, you gain a great amount of subconscious self-disapproval for not being able to bridge that gap.
Anyways, I decided to sit down and think about myself more in these last few months of 2024. What I discovered was a newfound appreciation for the things I hold and do. I do have values. I do love things. With no malice: it is great to realize these things away from the influence of someone whose opinions I mistakenly valued more than my own.
It is tempting to wrap these thoughts off with a happy conclusion a la hero's journey, but I am still a work in progress, and I’m sick of writing candid-and-resonant-yet-ultimately-hopeful-and-prospective slop. No! Maybe we’re not looking forward all the time.
The truth is, in some places, I feel frustration drizzled over leftover, festering confusion. But how can I ever expect to fully understand myself? I am malleable and I am nothing in particular, and to believe that I can be definable is a mistake that can lead to pain if not satisfaction. Should I fear the pain? Should I embrace and try to understand in spite of it? That's life, I guess.
