There are a number of ways that I hurt inside, ways that I’m not entirely whole. Does everyone feel lacking?
I want to be useful, competent, likable. I don’t forgive myself for my faults. I want other people to prove that they like me, and when they’re inevitably indifferent to my suffering, I assume I am not worth their love. I want to be recognized, so I raise my voice or try to do something witty and inventive. People remember me, then, but some people don’t like what they remember. I feel responsible for their dislike. Perhaps I should have been less brash?
I used to wonder how anyone could evaluate himself or herself. I still dislike myself, to some extent, or entirely. But I don’t think that having an accurate self-perception would be the end of it. Now I see it’s more complex than that.
If you had an accurate inventory of your strengths and weaknesses, your abilities and liabilities, the things that other people like about you or dislike about you, what would that inventory do for you? If you found out that you were an awful and evil person, you’d still have to go on living. Are you ugly? Fat? Stupid? Sorry, you’re still stuck. There’s simply no escape, save killing yourself— which, as I’ve written before is messy, burdensome to others, and emotionally painful during, and not something that everyone has success at anyway.
So you’re stuck being human with all the awkwardness that entails. There’s those who will tell you to just accept it the way it is and be happy. Of course, they are right in some sort of abstract sense. But for me, whether I’m good or bad or likable or unlikable or any number of permutations and in-betweens, I still hurt, and that’s the part that’s hard.
Where’s the hole in my soul where the oil is dripping out and causing the engine of my being to seize? If I found the hole, how would I plug it?
Who said that the lives of most men are filled with quiet desperation [2015 note– it was Thoreau] ? That’s what I’m trying to say here. No matter how you look at it, life is full of sorrow, pain, suffering, and disappointment. But that’s not at all what I’m saying at all, either, because it sounds overdramatic, like a bitter complaint someone might have if s/he were expecting a cocktail party at Christmas time but was forced to clean all of San Francisco’s public toilets with his/her tongue instead. No, no, no. I don’t mean to be bitter.
Just this: life is hard, and sometimes unbearable. Accept this as a bittersweet usual rule and go look for the exceptions. But don’t look for the experience to be fair– as that only comes to town once a year, at best. Accept things as they are and accept that even if you could imagine them some other way, that’s not how they actually are.
It’s a harsh and evil world we live in, and as soon as we can discard both the idea that the world should be more to our personal liking and the labels we use to describe such disappointment (“harsh,” “evil,” “disappointing”), maybe the faster we’ll get over it. I’ll tell you when I’ve gotten over it, but I don’t know it’ll happen soon. Maybe it won’t ever.
This is a review of my personal journal from my time as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Dominican Republic in 2001-2003. Even if I feel differently now or found out later that I what I wrote was factually incorrect, I haven’t changed what I wrote then. Part of the joy of reading old journals is seeing a story arc where I’ve learned new things.
Names have been shortened to initials to provide some privacy. Even though those who were there may be able to use these initials to figure out who it is I wrote about, please remember that my journaling is not about other people or their experience.
- The next entry in this series is The beach empty, expansive, and gorgeous
- The previous entry in this series is A statute of limitations for suffering
- You can see the journal entries as I post them here.
- If you’re just starting, here’s the first entry.
