Existence 101

I had a blog once: http://www.dustlesschalk.multiply.com. Nobody knew about it. It was just a place for me to vent with no holds barred. I placed all my reflections and frustrations in the few entries that I posted there. I didn’t want anyone to know about it because I reflect from experiences that I share with people. I didn’t know how they’d react if they read my thoughts, though none of them are meant to offend or criticize.

Anyway, I’ve deleted that blog. Another guy found out about it, so I copied everything into a Word document and deleted my account.

This is one of the entries, just a little bit edited. Why did I come out with it? Well…sayang eh.

Here goes.

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Pain is real.

The best kind of pain is the physical one. No matter how long the wounds bleed or how deeply the injuries penetrate, flesh and skin forgive involuntarily. Injuries to the soul are a different story. The soul embraces pain, coddles it, and then struggles to let it go but the sorrow has penetrated too deeply and too intensely into the whole system, it's hard to just shut it out. You know that there's something broken inside you but you just can't figure out where. Thus, for the meantime, you get to deal with it.

There are many ways to do so.

1. Find a passion that would help you regain strength of will. Draw. Speak. Shout. Play. Rock out. Do anything that may be detrimental to nonliving instruments but will at least give you a little satisfaction (a luxury that usually feels like it's in short supply).

2. Hurt yourself, physically. The pain of the flesh can numb the pain of the soul for a time. Get drunk. Cut yourself. Drown in the misery and love the depression. When you've had enough and can't get up on your own anymore, call someone's attention. Terrified of you and terrified for you, people will help. Then at least you will know that you do have people to count on.

3. Hurt others. If someone managed to hurt you, you can restore a little pride by illustrating that you can do your own share of the soul-ravaging. Shout. Offend. Push people away. Make them understand your pain by letting them go through the same thing. Hey, it could work like a screening exam too: you’ll know who your real friends are and who your fair-weather friends are at the end of it all.

Those are three of the most common ways of reacting to pain. All three come with consequences
too.

1. Finding a passion means doing the healing the hard way: leave it to time. Internal pain makes us bleed in a place where it's hardest to heal. Time can move so slowly while you're trying to let it do the bandaging. This takes a lot of guts--something that, I'm happy to say, is always free for acquisition.

2. Hurting yourself physically isn't nice. It hurts. It leaves visible scars. Your weakness becomes evident and you become subjected to opinions of people who may or may not understand what could drive you to inflict pain on yourself. Others will snort at your weakness of heart. Others will pity you. Others will sympathize. In any case, at the end of the day, you get your scabs, and, more often than not, the same old wounds inside.

3. Hurting others won't work if you're the kind of person who has a conscience. Be wary that the conscience is not something people are always conscious of, so even if you think you don't have one, this method of dealing with pain can show you just where your conscience has been hiding. A tainted conscience is no fun. On top of the old pains, you get to feel it tormenting you, telling you that you're not making your life any better. That's just how it works.

So, make your choice. Choice is the only thing you could really claim as yours, and it's the only thing you need to get out of shit. Find yourself. Find your reason. Find your balance. Tighten your hold on the things that keep you strong. Choose your plan of action, because, in life, time never stops even if you do. No one finds favor with it and it doesn’t care who it passes by.

Everyone fends for themselves in the world. We all have to find our own way. So, let’s just get to work learning.

--- first written 07 October 06