Aiden Deis: My Subset of Reality

Tik Tik Boom [Dec 24th, 2016]

Well, mom's emotions got the best of her. More likely they operated completely normally and when they were met by the black hole that is dad's capacity of forming emotional attachments to people, It started tearing her in half.

I wonder now how I should respond to this. It's difficult for me because I am both of their child. By which I mean, that I think that if to some degree I didn't like feeling the pain of loving and losing, I could choose not to. But I somehow enjoy the pain of it. It makes me feel human, it makes me feel weak and hopeless and worthy only of giving up. It reduces me to a puppy begging for scraps at the end of the table. It reassures me that I am capable of feeling affection and might not be my father. Or I can feel nothing, I can calculate the objective advantages that a relationship holds and make the other person beg for scraps or kick them out of my way if that seems necessary, and reassure myself that I am not my mother. Notice how I made this all about me? Either way, I wonder if there are people who just live, who aren't in constant fluctuation between too little or too much. Of course I think there are, but I have no way of knowing at what level of awareness they are operating. Do they have an idea of what 'ideal' is and just emulate it as best they can, are they dead inside and just playing the part, or do they wake up happy and go to bed happy without sparing any thought on the nature and cost of happiness?

Either way. I am increasingly feeling a responsibility, to be honest. Forthcoming. I think we all know everything that I know, at least on some level, but none of us knows, or is willing to admit we know that the others know it.

Communication. Other people do it, I know they do, I've seen it. We don't. We each exist in our own tiny construct of reality and anything that threatens to disrupt it, we expel, deny and rationalise away.

I'm terrified for not knowing any other way of being. I don't think half measures would be effective in remedying the damage that has been done by my very limited vision of reality. I am not saying that the fact that my vision of reality was extremely limited is the determining factor, but rather the fact that the focus of my limited vision has always been in this destructive relationship of these two people. These two people who I assumed in my ignorant youth to absorb into my most inner being, these two extremes of emotional dependence and emotional detachment. And I don't know if I can myself become a moderate between the two. Again I think the only chance I have is to remove the focus from those extremes and direct it somewhere else entirely.

I know my mother is in pain. I know it is the worst possible pain. I know that it is exponentially worse than any pain that I have ever felt. I know she feels alone and I know that I am incapable of providing her with emotional support or affection. I know that for decades she has fixated on this one image of happiness and therefore ignored any real attainable opportunities to feel joy, to feel loved and appreciated. I know that I resent both of my parents for my having to live with this perspective of reality. Even though I would not trade my, what I believe to be a very clear view of reality- for any other, I still resent it. I resent it because it feels like a burden, it doesn't make anything easier. It makes beautiful things look ugly and ugly things look beautiful. I don't know how to make either of them happy. I don't feel like it is my responsibility to make them happy, but I know that I cannot myself be happy unless they find their own happiness or I extricate myself from them completely. Lara tried it with mom, she couldn't do it with dad because she is dependant on him. And she stopped with mom over the break, probably taking the path of least resistance. I think she might do it to both when she is not longer dependant on either... but even so, it's not like any of us know how to find our own happiness either.

We're all just a bunch of happiness leeches, we muster enough of it to trick someone into allowing us close enough to latch on and then we start draining them. //This was irrational self-directed anger at my treatment of Cameron.//

Maybe that is the cause of all of this, we are projecting happiness onto the wrong targets. Maybe purpose is what we need. Of course purpose is what we need. Drive and passion are good sources of happiness. I think it also costs happiness as fuel though. The problem with happiness leeches though is that even though I know that me being happy would make them more happy, every time I am reminded of how much happier than them I am, I drown in guilt. It feels better to be just as unhappy as the people surrounding you. It feels better to be just as happy as the people surrounding you. Maybe if a group of people find themselves unhappy they should disband and find another group before they feel like unhappy is their natural state. I think I must have been raised in an unhappy group, because it feels pretty natural to me.