There are a few incidents in my life that confuse me because I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about them. I know that “supposed to feel” isn’t the best phrasing, and I should ask how I actually feel, but I don’t know the answer to that either. It’s just a blank space. This is why I say knowing the “correct” emotional response matters, because sometimes, we won’t allow ourselves to respond unless our reaction is supported by the script of what’s “proper” and “appropriate.”
Many times, I didn’t know how I should respond emotionally. And so I decided it was best not to at all. 3/10 would not recommend this approach to a friend.
One event keeps resurfacing in my mind. I had tried to put my feelings aside. I couldn’t, and I responded to the whole situation by crying. I didn’t say or do anything except cry. Much later, when I revisited the memory, I asked myself how the person in front of me could see so much evidence that I was upset and not react.
It’s a normal question, a healthy question, and it should be asked. But then I realized something else. It wasn’t one person alone in a room. I was there too. Two people saw me crying, and I was the one who cared the least.
I knew better than anyone the pain I was feeling, and I did not think it deserved any recognition. I did not speak about it, I did not act on it, I did not want to have any type of conversation about it. I later denied my tears came from anything except stress.
When I think of the whole situation now, I don’t have any feelings. It’s like I wasn’t there—but I was there. I didn’t want to be. But I was. So I separated from it mentally to such an extent that I don’t know where the part of me who was present and felt everything is. I don’t know where feelings go when we tell them to die. I just know that they don’t die.
Why do we believe we can devalue ourselves and someone will witness it and refuse to let it happen? We have picked the people who are present in our lives. If I do not love myself, I have not picked people based on whether they treat me with love. What we really want is to be agreed with. This is our comfort zone: people who see us as we see ourselves. This is what we surround ourselves with.
I do not become more compassionate when I refuse to be compassionate towards the person I see most often. And I would not call myself compassionate towards others if I saw their pain and “felt bad” for them but didn’t take any measures to help. When you practice detaching from yourself, you practice detaching from everyone. You are a person as well. How you treat yourself is included in the definition of how you treat people, and it is more than a technicality. What we think of as two separate attitudes are connected; they are a reflection of each other.
One of my favorite quotes is from Maya Angelou: “I don’t trust people who don’t love themselves and tell me, ‘I love you.’ There is an African saying, which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.”
Culturally, we glorify self-sacrifice. But this type of “love” is like stealing from the poor to give to the rich. The poor are so used to being poor they’d rather stay that way than change (but they’ll tell you it’s really about you), and the rich don’t really want money, they just think it’s sweet that you’re suffering for them. And none of it is real money, it’s all chocolate coins and suddenly everyone is diabetic.
I don’t know if that makes any sense and I think I should stop now because I’m not ready to examine the metaphorical significance of my eating habits. All I’m saying is maybe, most of the time, we really do have what we want most. We just don’t have what we say we want.
Half-Blood Kuwaiti 