Saturday 23 May 2015

The forgiveness experiment

So you’re broken. And then what?

I have said this previously: some people are malfunctioning, malicious and broken beyond repair. This is because, I think, they’ve been broken one too many times.

I also think that I am one of these people. I don’t know how to un-break myself. Like when I am confronted with a person who has caused me immense pain and an opportunity to be forgiving, I almost always choose the unfavourable end of the spectrum. Forgiving is like a foreign language to me. [Clarification: key word is immense. If there is no immense pain, I can forgive relatively easily.] This is made more difficult when that person is not exactly repentant, or at least, acknowledge the extent of pain that was caused, although I admit this is difficult to ascertain from the outset.

I often wish that I am more Mother Teresa:

“People are often unreasonable and self-centered.  Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives.  Be kind anyway.
If you are honest, people may cheat you.  Be honest anyway.
If you find happiness, people may be jealous.  Be happy anyway.
The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow.  Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway.  For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.”
― Mother Teresa

A lot of people probably know what forgiveness feels like, but may not necessarily be able to define it. We can say that it is about letting go of anger and disappointment and eventually moving towards the territories of something more positive – and hopefully reach a point of conciliation. For some, it goes even further: forgetting the offence, or even, pardoning the said offence, and eliminating resentment. Or that forgiveness can only be extended when the harm done on the part of the wrongdoer has been recognised. Notwithstanding all of these 'criteria', almost in every case, forgiveness is an option, we may take it, or we may leave it. There is actually no right or wrong because the nature of this act is so personal, but we live in a society that expects certain things to be forgiven simply by virtue of love, and conversely, certain things are deemed unforgivable because forgiving in this situation is perceived as a sign of weakness, submission, lack of boundaries or something along those lines. If you subscribe to a particular religion, of course, you would be exposed to an emphasis to forgive just like [insert any prominent religious character] forgives.

There are two parts of forgiveness, seeking forgiveness (otherwise known as apologising) and forgiving. I don’t need to point out that they do not always come hand in hand, but just bear that in mind. Other than this, I don’t know much about the science of forgiveness. I strongly suspect, though, that it is more about us than the other person. This is true whether we are the party seeking forgiveness or the party forgiving. This is because we can almost all agree that forgiveness feels better. This is especially true when it comes to forgiveness in the context of close, ongoing relationships. Someone who is around us can be confronted, but this does not guarantee any form of conciliation because there is always a probability that this person would reject the said confrontation, resulting in a compounded anger, disappointment and basically, well, further (unnecessary) pain.

It is worth noting that what matters is the reason that we forgive or apologise. Let’s draw from a personal experience. I sought forgiveness from someone recently because I’ve caused this person immense pain. And this is the only fact that mattered, how I did so was not relevant, at least in the eyes of the person experiencing the pain. Despite the fact that it wasn’t my fault (a fact that was subsequently commonly agreed), I chose to apologise because this person was and still is one of the most important persons in my life, whom I’d like to be a part of my life for years to come. This person is worth fighting for. I got lucky and was forgiven (or at least, it felt that way). It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about a friend, or a lover, or any else, if we are not willing to fight for them, to go out of our way and make an effort to hold on to them, then we don’t deserve them because hey, obviously, we don’t want them badly enough. I hate to put it this way, but our willingness to fight for it, suffer for it and give up for it ends up telling us how important it really is. This is the kind of forgiveness worth asking for – because anything short of that just doesn’t cut it.

That said, it would be nice if someone who cares enough about you would say sorry, seek forgiveness because he/she is concerned about your welfare more than relieving his/her guilt. This possibility does exist, no matter how remote. In fact, I think most people would structure their apology so that they can be perceived this way. Very few people have the guts to say their true intentions out loud because society.

***

I think a relationship (in the general sense, including the romantic ones) that is dynamic and growing almost always requires a lot of energy, simply because it often involves more than two people, one of which is you. It requires you to learn to stand up for yourself, to fight for yourself, and to pick your battles, so that you’re not completely flat out before you get to accomplish your goals. Of course we all want a relationship that’s relatively low maintenance, but remember that a relationship that’s not being maintained is essentially dead.

The best relationships are often labelled ‘easy’ – but trust me when I say that they are still a lot of work. And even the best of relationships would have its broken moments. This is not just an example of ‘nothing is perfect’ (but it can get bloody damn close to it though), rather the persons who are able to break us are the ones that we love the most. Yes, it sort of sucks, really, because loving someone opens up the possibility of being broken by this other person. We do it anyway because love is worth fighting for; because anything short of that is quite possibly not love.

If you really think about it, the whole reason that we chose to engage with people in our lives, in addition to companionship, is to have someone who is willing to fight for you, or when they can’t, remind you to fight for yourself when it matters the most. These people may not necessarily fight for us with their fists (or kukri) in a blood-bath battle, but fight for us with the choices and decisions they make, especially in the way they plan and live their lives, how they forgive, and how committed they are in doing everything they can to grow the relationship.

For a lot of us, if we were completely honest with ourselves, because we hardly ever have to fight for anything, we never understand what is worth fighting for. This is certainly true for me. When things get too hard, I chose to walk away, jump ship, whatever you want to call it.  Walking away is a valid option, and more often than not, an easier option. Staying put, and forgiving, well, that’s a completely different ball game altogether.

This is often why being broken tends to be so devastating for us: being broken makes us momentarily forget what we were fighting for in the first place, and more importantly, it questions why we were fighting for it. We also forget how to fight for those things that are important to us. Or at the very least, we have to invent new ways to get up and get back to fighting for what we want, again. And again. And again. It is definitely a hard battle, most of the time, it is unglamorous, at times unnecessarily dramatic, and is fought over a lifetime. Now that’s a very long time.

Yet I feel that this battle is the only valid option, and it is not about saving the other person, it is about saving yourself. Forgiveness is when we love someone wholly, weaknesses and all – and this someone includes you. I believe this is the first step in how to unbreak: change your mindset and fight for yourself, because you need to trust that you are enough: good enough to fight for, and equally important, strong enough to fight for what you want.

However, some battles are not meant to be fought; some battles we need to walk away from. There are instances whereby our forgiveness happens in the form of us letting go. This usually happens in situations whereby we are mature enough to have perspective on someone else's life, but this same person isn't mature enough to have the same perspective on ours, whether this is due to insane jealousy, unrealistic demands, excessive selfishness or any other form of unreasonable behaviour. This is immaturity; this is not love.

I have said this previously: I have been lucky to have a loving stepmother. Anyone who's been in a similar situation would come to the same conclusion. A marriage with children that ended in divorce, that's subsequently followed by another marriage, would involve the presence of stepparents in the children's lives. When this happens, the best possible outcome is when the new stepparent becomes a positive influence in the children's lives. Anyone who's in their right mind would be thankful for this.

There are circumstances whereby one parent would strike at his/her children with emotional threats and blackmails in an ugly and completely unwarranted way, along the lines of "if you love me, you would not be nice to your stepparent". This emotional reaction is understandable, but its inherent childishness is not, and cannot be, excusable. As a child who are stuck in between, I would say from personal experience that this sucks, and it makes having a good relationship, or any form of relationship, with the parent playing these emotional games impossible. I do not wish to regress into an emotional black hole over and over and over again; I just want to be able to move forward without being bullied constantly. Seriously, the world is a harsh enough place, and it is made significantly more painful when disapprovals and frustrations come from someone who are supposed to set an example, but turns out to be the party who needs to quite literally grow up.

I guess sometimes we forget to grow up. Sometimes walking away is the only thing to do. The sad thing is that the person we walk away from often don't recognise that their unrealistic demands and bad behaviour are the very things that turn us away. Forgive them, anyway. And forgive yourself for preserving your mental health.

Friday 15 May 2015

On how far I've come (and why I write)

Seven years ago (at the time of writing) I finished a meeting and walked into the Queen Victoria Building on George Street to meet a bald man. I had no idea what I was doing, no idea that it was a moment that would change everything. I certainly wasn’t imagining any kind of future for myself. I would not use the label desperate, but perhaps that would have been a somewhat accurate description.

At this point in my life I was tired, jaded, spent. Up until a few months prior, I was spending far too much time with someone who was literally sucking life out of me. This man was charming in public, but not so much in private. Just like me, he was emotionally volatile. Towards the end of our separation, he had called me every available name under the sun, created a website to tarnish my reputation and did everything else he could have possibly done to make sure that I would commit suicide.

I obviously did not die, but this was only part of the reasons why I decided to leave. I am not going to explain them right now. But this is what I will say: leaving was the only viable option to me. It certainly wasn’t easy; it was navigating the realm of the unknown on both personal and professional fronts. I had no idea what I was doing, where I was going and how I managed to survive all that.

Miraculously along the way I learned to let go of some of the old sorrows and started thinking about the person that I wanted to become. I got reacquainted with myself all over again. I found my way through the jungle of emotional mess, processing what I was feeling and got through in one piece. I admitted to myself that a lot of things were not in line with my desires, needs and values that I upheld dearly – and more importantly, I wanted to change this. What I eventually realised was that I was largely uncommitted to myself; I was, for whatever reason, unavailable to myself. Consequently, I needed to address this issue so that I could actually be available to myself and stand by own side when things get tough. Or in other words, I had to learn to love myself all over again; I learned to be happy with me and accepted myself the way I was, and started appreciating my life like I was meant to. 

I stopped writing about relationships for the longest time because I couldn’t make sense of most of mine. I didn’t want to write out of anger; I really didn’t want another story that served to testify the ugliness of certain human beings out there. I stopped writing about being broken until recently, and the irony was that as soon as I made the choice to start writing about it, I ended being completely broken, so broken that I was incapable of writing anything.

I have said this previously, the things that I write are my understanding of them at that particular point in time. I notice the concurrent themes that are overlapping. The situations may be different, but the feelings are similar, if not the same. There is a reason why people with broken hearts have difficulties breathing. It is very possible and undisputed (by me) that others would have their own version of ‘the truth’, edited to their own understanding and preconceptions. But this does not negate the value of your own take on things, because self-reflection can help you understand why your life turned out the way it did, and perhaps, geared you into taking action and strengthen your resolve. Far too long, I write because I felt powerless, angry and misunderstood. I will not write that way again.

This is why I write: to make sense of my own story, while drawing from others’ stories, examining my own stories and to encourage others to examine theirs. They say that experience is like mirrors; they serve to teach us more about ourselves. We have this tendency to attract and be drawn to people that reflect things that we believe about ourselves, such that being involved with these people often end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy. I want to get comfortable questioning my life and to get comfortable talking about this openly, while thinking about the possibility of living in ways that are actually rewarding rather than merely tolerable, and be surrounded by good people in the process. 

Over time, we all change, some of us evolve at a different rate and end up in a completely different state than we originally were. Part of this journey is simply accepting that what we want over the years change. Once upon a time, the idea with this one person was so intoxicating, until we realised that the reality of being chased by someone who you’re not sure when you might hear from next was in truth not all that exciting. You kept on second guessing where you were in relation to his life, any kind of connection felt forced because it was impossible to forge a real connection when it felt like you were perpetually grasping for air. The drama of bad boys and its novelty just wore off eventually. You came to a point whereby you had enough of regressing. And this got tedious the older that you get.

Life is dynamic; if anything, it is a constantly changing destination. It does not owe us anything, but has everything to give. The question is how do we receive these gifts? Growing up, I was deprived from stability and spent a good chuck of my early twenties yearning for stability. I abandoned this fruitless search eventually. Stability is something that parents give to their children, and that’s about it. Once you’re grown up, you eventually come to embrace that life is a series of risks: the higher the risks that you take, the higher the returns that follows. And none of it is easy; it takes a lot of consistent effort, conducted in a persistent manner, overcoming exhaustion and the pain associated with these risks. Sometimes, we go through all of these only to realise that the rewards are not even worth it in the end. Then we conclude that change really stinks. Yet it is not the end of the story. What this really is this: a chance to rewrite your story. An opportunity to take your life in a different direction – you get to direct the course of your life rather than to live as reactively and passively as you once did.

It all sounds so simple and so clear cut laid out neatly in a blog post. You may not see it today or tomorrow, but you will look back in a few years and be absolutely perplexed and awed by how every little thing added up and brought you somewhere wonderful – or where you always wanted to be. You will be grateful that things didn’t work out the way you once wanted them to.  

Seven years ago, I did not imagine the life that I am living now.  Right now, I can’t imagine what my life would look like if I stayed.

Sunday 3 May 2015

On letting go

It takes a certain skill and commitment to have a certain kind of people in our lives. After about three decades of people coming and going, I must say that age certainly does not make certain things easier. When I say certain things, I really mean life in general. It is not that life gets harder as you get older (some things get easier), it's just that certain things do not get easier. To be fair, they don't necessarily get harder either.

I have had my heart broken in the past by various ex-lovers and ex-friends, and each and every single one of these was no easier than the last. (The only one that I ever wrote about is this one here.) It never gets easier, but hey, at least you can get used to it. And this is where I am now: spent. I am spent on all fronts. I do not know what it is that I could have done differently that would have resulted in a different outcome. Fate can be cruel like that.

I realise that there is a lot of things in this life that I legitimately do not have options in, no matter how badly I want a different outcome. This painful fact is exacerbated by my brain, which likes analysing things to no end, for it keeps on replaying conversations and events and trying to put a various combination of things, while at the same time trying to extract meaning, or I should say, anything meaningful, anything to hang on to. Ah, the futile search for meaning.  The endless merry-go-around of nothingness. The emptiness in the end that makes you wonder, why did I waste so much time on it.

I made the decision a long time ago that I shall cease to be around people who do not make me feel good about life. Life is about growing, changing, rising to new challenges, trying new things and hopefully becoming better persons in the process. I have learned to appreciate those whom I have known for a long, long time, not because of our history, but because of how these people have kept on continuing to somehow make me a better version of my previous self.

Yet lately, this belief I have had for a long time has been challenged because of this:



There is a certain truth in that statement. It is very possible that the person you are yet to meet will have a better intention than anyone you've known all your life. This possibility exists, no matter how remote. And if we are lucky, well, we get to meet this person, and our lives will change for ever for the better, like this. I called it serendipity. But for all I know, it might have been a part of some elaborate plan that I could not comprehend. And that doesn't matter, really. Because what matters is that it happened, and it changed me in a way that I think makes me a better version of myself.

It has taken me a very long time to understand this, but perhaps most people we met are not meant to stay in our lives forever. No matter how intense a love we felt for some of these people (and this love is not restricted to that of the romantic kind), no matter how strong we felt our bonds were, they can be easily snapped by something that we thought we could withstand. Or in other words, what felt so strong and enduring is actually very brittle. Or in other words, I was wrong.

When it comes to human relationships, or human beings in general, I am forever at the mercy of my own limited understanding, so much so that I have given up trying to understand it altogether, and instead just accept that people are like that, and that would be my explanation for the otherwise unfathomable (to me). Someone else might have a different explanation, which I do not have to necessarily agree with - and that is fine, insofar as they do not insist on me sharing this same understanding. And no, let's not talk about what happens when they insist.

There are some stories that I thought I would never write, for the one that I had drafted was a much, much better version. The version that I wanted to eventuate to reality for no other reason than, well, it was a meant-to-be. In this version, if it so happened that we had to say good bye, then it would be because of something that neither of us can control, like a terminal illness or something equally terrible. In this version, there was nothing voluntary about letting each other go.

I have come to eventually accept that the version that I might eventually end up writing, the real life version, is one that could not be more painful. I have come to accept that if we were to continue our story from this day forward, that story would be very different than the one we used to have. But you remain one of the very few people that I liked at first sight. It was easy to feel this way because you were (and still are) very attractive physically. It was a bonus, of course, that you are smarter than me. So in short, my superficial side won and I fell hard, and you were worth falling for. In a lot of ways I used to feel that my prayers had been answered: oh dear God, please let the people around me be good looking. Because wefies.

And for what is now seemingly a brief moment in time, there was warmth. This warmth that once nourished my soul would eventually be reduced to a memory, and overtime, be reduced to nothing. They said that we never truly lost the things that matter. Whether there is truth or not in this statement is something that I would rather not explore. But I can't help wondering if, for reasons I am yet to fathom, we had lost each other long before you said good bye.