Masochism

Yearning

"If you can see unrequited love or disappointment in love as a window onto the varieties of human experience, and to that extent as something to be welcomed, you will certainly learn something valuable about yourself and about life."- Christopher Hamilton, How to Deal with Adversity, p72.

When I was teens, 14 to around 19, I had intense passions and agonies as normal adolescents do. I felt infatuation to a girl or two who had a naive optimism, sunny disposition, and dealt with social situations with a graceful wholesomeness.

That to me was happiness, and looking at myself, I saw I was all misery and woe. I loved her beauty. I wanted to capture it, immortalize it, enshrine it, and hold it delicately in the palm of my hand. But I felt tainted, soiled with negative thoughts, depression, and resentment.

"Man no longer sees anything as it really is. He underrates his own qualities, and overrates the least favours granted by his beloved. Hopes and fears at once become romantic and wayward."  Stendhal - De l'amour:55. 
- How to Deal with Adversity, p70.

I felt I could not touch their beauty, or I would destroy it; I had to keep away, both because they did not return my affections, and because I feared to corrupt their innocence. Of course, that was a complex in my head, not an objective description, that I followed.

It pained me greatly to feel I could never have the object of my desires, by the very nature of our differences. Like Olaf the snowman in Disney's Frozen wants warm hugs in Summer... that combination is impossible, or at least, would destroy either him or the beauty he desires. I was like Olaf, except I was far less optimistic than he was!

But then in my early twenties, I became cold and indifferent. It hurt too much to love, to care, to want so I turned to hate, then to indifference. I shut my sensitive, suffering-for-beauty self in a steel riveted box, covered it with a camouflage tent, stuck it in an empty room in my head, shut the door, and turned off the lights.

I went to live on the other side of the world to sort out my hopeless feelings. I imagined, if I were locked in an empty room for the rest of my life, with just pencil and paper... what could I accomplish? I taught myself calculus out of a book and determined to learn each theorem and concept well enough that if I were placed in that solitary room, I could replicate all the knowledge from my mind alone and prove each result.

While spending time in the solitary chambers of my mind, the strongest impulse I felt was for a girl who I idealized. My heart raced at times in a panic, that I would never ever have any future with her happiness in my life. I thought of her as my Jenny, me as Forrest Gump.

Forrest Gump (1994)

I thought of her as everything that meant happiness to me, and being without her was living a world devoid of all joy. And no matter how far into the corners of the world I adventure, and amazing experiences I heroically surmount, she will never stay by my side. She will never be as peas in a pod, as we were for a brief time in childhood.

The adult world, reality, and all its trappings for what we have to do, what we search for, would mean that Jenny would always be running away to the next abusive man, to get away from her abusive home. Away from Forrest too. A paradoxical circle that leads back unto itself, like the snake eating its own tail.

Jenny returning to her abusive home
"Sometimes, I guess there just aren't enough rocks."

In the end, I concluded it would be too sad to depart from this life without at least seeing how her story turns out. To know where that vision of happiness leads, whether qualities of virtue and wonder in youth are imaginary, or promises of a healthy, vibrant life.

When I returned to the United States to resume my formal education in University, I found that I had lost something I used to have. The pain that drove me to frenzies of yearning, and insufferable tumult. And I wanted it back!

The environment of University felt like a perverse, immoral bubble - one before it pops and leaks its filmy rainbow onto cold, cracked cement. I was amazed that the world I left behind still existed. All the while I had been flipping my world upside down, they were sitting on a dime.

Soap bubble. (Richard Heeks photo)

I felt sterile, incapable of joy. I could not empathize with my peers. Their concerns and meant nothing to me. They were frivolous, myopic, insular and coddled into a warped lifestyle not representative of the exterior world. I felt I could dispose of any one of them without much reflection.

I was scared. I thought that I might become a monster. I yearned to feel the pain that I used to shun. That pain meant I was not a monster, that I was a compassionate little boy who wanted to be a better person and share my 'secret garden' vision of beauty to people around me. I wanted my heart to be soft again, to bleed! For the things I held dear!

Secret Garden source

So now, when I do have those adolescent agonies I feel nostalgia and admiration for the gentle little boy I was, and strive to remain. I hope to make him grow, but never lose that pang of humanity that separates humanity from a soulless monster.