Repost: A self-reflective blog (thoughts of a 22-year-old me)

Originally posted: November 27, 2007.
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I've learned lately that human beings tend to confront their emotions in a rather passive manner - in a way that disallows pain, hurt, anger, regret - basically any normal human emotion. I've watched my friends enter and exit "relationship" after "relationship" never fully allowing themselves the capacity of feeling that they deserve to have with another person.

I tend to think that this is in part due to our own pathological need for some semblance of reciprocal "neediness" from the other person. Yet, they are human, too - and probably looking for the same vulnerability in us. Perhaps we don't allow ourselves to fully delve into something until it is too late and we are already wrapped up and consumed with it. Perhaps this is the only true way to feel.

I tend to do this with family and sometimes friends. I block them out - cut them off at the surface - with the knowledge that if I don't get close to them, they can't hurt me. The most cutting words come from the people that you love and care about, right? So - isn't it sometimes easier to just let that relationship maintain it's buoyancy? Or is that just a passive way of not allowing real relationships?

Whatever the case may be - it's a cycle that we all fall into. It's a cycle that makes you fake, surface, unable to be hurt - to hurt - to be broken apart by someone else. That unbreakable spirit can rob you of true love and connection to another human being. It can rob you of true emotion as well. Emotion - even pain - can be a healthy and healing experience. I can say that from experience.

In fact, I can say that the depths of despair, blackness, darkness, and pain can cause one of two things. Firstly, it can make you bitter, cold, uncaring. I think that we tend to let this happen at first. If that doesn't happen, it can make us weak and unable to cope in the future. I think the trick is finding the happy medium.

In the end, we will inevitably hurt. The question is whether that pain is self-defeating and self-fulfilling. In putting up our shield, are we cutting out the oxygen?