On emotion
A friend of mine just started a blog.
In many years I never bothered to find out her real name, so for the time being I shall call her Lily, just like the nickname she chose. Quite a crazy lady, or rather said a daring one, unafraid to mess with thoughts and words most people never question.
Her third post caught my attention. Aside from the small grammar and spelling errors, she’s looking at a quite interesting feature of humans: their ability to play roles unconsciously. Or, in her words,
For instance, if a boy comes with his father because he broke his arm , what strikes me is the way the father acts. It’s exactly like the roles had changed and the boy has to be a grown up while the father is living again the fears of his childhood. So when you examine them for the first time, the father can’t make himself undertood and he is speaking nonsense and when he comes back with the X-ray you can easily understand that he had been drinking to be able to face the new situation.
I’ve seen this situation countless times. People go through life and desperately dig holes in which to hide; they find this and that cozy place where to sit and linger, thinking life can be frozen forever in a nice portrait of smiling faces.
And then life happens, and all your buried fears surface. My mother never quite learned to talk and be social, and to this day making her call someone on the phone is something to avoid. I’ve seen school colleagues avoiding classes, teachers avoiding topics, friends avoiding their own stories.
And it always amazes me, this cozy image of self that we grow accustomed to. Even our flaws we regard as tolerable, and we carefully construct our social circles to avoid any interaction that doesn’t validate our image.
The query that arises from all these facts is whether there is a proper way of dealing with stressful situations?
There isn’t, in my humble opinion. No one-size-fits-all template, at least. It’s our flaws, not our successed that make us unique. Each one of us is going through life limping along, dragging some buried fear and bad memories. Some fear failure, some fear losing control; some are scared of deception, and the list goes on forever.
And in the end what makes me smile is that all the fuss is in vain. What one gains in a way loses in another. He who spends his time honing his skills and developing a carreer forgets about personal life, finds himself a wreck at 40. She who thinks that it’s fine having a baby at 25 then envies other women at 40. People afraid to lose control never learn to fly – or swim, for that matter. People afraid to be judged soon find their own company boring. People afraid to lose loved ones smother them until their love is driven away. People afraid of decisions soon find themselves on a short leash, driven by someone else. Do they all react to this similarly? Doesn’t look so.
Then again, I’m not a psychologist. So I think I’ll just wait for the next article …
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side-notes:
1. I wish she wrote in Romanian.
2. I well know this post is sketchy and probably looks half-baked. It’s precisely like that because initially it was meant simply as a comment. Of course, like a true internet virgin Lily turned off comments, so .. I end up writing articles. Way to go, lady.