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C:\Human\Brain\DecisionMaker.exe has returned an error. Diagnosing...
6 years ago · 0 · Depression, +2
1008
Hi. I'm still here. Something happened last night, it hurt. I want to talk about it. This will tie into my first post so I'd say to read that first otherwise a lot of this won't make sense.
I met a woman at a bar, we went back to her house, and I slept with her. I'm not above admitting that I objectified her for the sake of pleasure - the feeling was mutual, it's part of the reason we ended up talking to begin with. It doesn't mean I'm not respectful, some people prefer strangers.
That's who this woman was, a stranger. Though, just from the short time I'd been around her, I knew that she was similar to me for the better part.
Then something unexpected happened. She broke.
Right there, half-naked on her bed, she had a complete crisis. Then it hit me why I thought she was only similar to me and nothing closer.
Because if I was to put my mental state on a scale in terms of how far along I am in this spiral, she would've been just behind me. Just starting lose purpose and the motivation to live, but was struggling with what that really meant.
She confided in me, exposed herself so nothing was hidden. A lot of what she said will stay with me, but some I can share. She told me that she tried shutting out emotion for the sake of cold logic, and that her life had improved...at first. But then the pain kept coming back two-fold, she couldn't deal with it, couldn't handle the constant backlash of repressing the things that she only saw as ways she could be hurt.
To quote her directly: "I shattered so many times back when I was in school that I can't remember it properly, only pain. Everything after that was stumbling over the shards."
She asked me a lot of questions, and only wanted real answers. No compassion, no heart or "feel", only mind and "logic". I knew what she was doing. She was desperate. She'd concluded that she couldn't rebuild herself in a way that wouldn't break again, so she was going to model herself after something that seemed more durable. Me.
I paused. I knew I could do it, she was in a fragile state and wanting to be molded. Anything I said then would stick, she'd make sure of it. I could've made her like me. She was alive, but not certain if she wanted to keep living. I was alive, but that was about it.
Was that really going to help her though? Making her like me? It would've made her more stable, plus I would've had a companion - an eternally grateful one at that.
But I wasn't okay. I'm at the edge of the cliff, waiting for a gust of wind of a sudden impulse to push me over. I couldn't make her like me, even if that's what she wanted.
I couldn't leave her like that though, so I compromised. I fed her a philosophy that advocated accepting emotion as the payment for doing what you want with them. Forget about impossibilities, know what you can change, what you can handle, and what you cannot. Think about what you enjoy - do that, but understand emotions aren't states of being but rather variations, they are temporary.
I left her leaning towards narcissism and hedonism, that way she could focus on herself. She thanked me. I chose to point her down a path that might not solve everything, but it wasn't the dead-end I'm heading for. For the first time in a long time, I had an opportunity to have someone around me who understood it all - or at least someone who could learn, and I turned it down.
And it hurt so much to do that
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