Psychology, Pride, Suffering

I sat on the floor of his dorm room, struggling to breathe and fighting the urge to cry.

Also fighting the urge to run.

Even now, as I type these words, I can feel my hands going numb. Anxiety makes my heart flutter and sends a tingling sensation into my stomach and down my arms. I'm anxious. I'm scared. Scared to write these words and share them.

Why? Two questions eat at you when you have a secret. The first: do you have the right to share your secret? The second: assuming you do have that right, will people still love you if they do know?

So, you fake nonchalance. You shrug off the serious and assume an attitude of detachment.

But inside, deep down, your stomach is somersaulting.

I sat on that floor. I was alternating between coughing the blood out of my lungs and swallowing it down out of my throat. I didn't have enough air to cry. I didn't have the right to burden this other person with what was inside of me.

I almost told him. Probably three times. I debated whether or not to tell him.

In the end, I decided against it. I poked fun at PTSD and psychology, reinforcing the wall between me and him. If he had any inclination to care about me, I wasn't going to give him a chance to act on it. I was too scared of the rejection that might come. Since I come with a burden, if someone knows about that burden and doesn't want to deal with it, they can't deal with me.

Besides, he was dealing with my physical problems. He had already taken on that burden. When you have a lot of problems, it's hard to see where those problems stop and you begin. They are inexorably intertwined. Rejecting the problem becomes rejecting the person. How could I ask him to deal with a psychological mess in addition to the physical mess he had already shouldered? If I was honest and he didn't handle it well, I'd have to run. I might even run before he had a chance to show me whether or not he was handling it. Could I take that chance?

I couldn't.

So the pretending continued. I laughed and moved on to more intellectual things.

...

But what's at the root of that pretending?

Pride.

Yes, there's fear. Lots of it, too. But fear gets a lot of attention.

The sneaky one is pride.

It's prideful to think you're too messed up for someone else to love you. It's prideful to make yourself untouchable, in both positive or negative things. We commonly view pride as the vice which causes us to be excessively pleased with a particular talent we might possess. Pride can just as easily be identifying excessively with our pain. Nietzsche talks about the pride of the man who suffers - he feels himself somehow elevated above his fellow men because of the suffering he has undergone. He has suffered more than them, so he is set apart from them.

There are two fears that accompany suffering: the first is that your suffering won't be understood and you will, therefore, be rejected. The second is that your suffering will be understood and, thereby, trivialized somehow. If someone is able to understand your suffering, it somehow makes your suffering less acute.

Suffering makes you alone; being alone makes you suffer. If someone were able to intrude on that solitude, it would alter your reality.

So the hand-numbing anxiety kicks in. You shut the door on complete honesty and hide behind abstract academics.

And you blog about it.

And you live another day.