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The Republic
, he tells an (oft-cited) allegory of men
chained together in a cave, with their backs to a flame, believing that
the masterfully crafted shadows that those behind them were holding
up were reality. Seeing that light, metaphorically or not, is the truest
education, mostly because we need not lay eyes on it to understand
it. We need only piece together the illusions we perceive to make
sense of what is behind us.
And really, at the end of the day, it is not our own illusions that are
dangerous, it’s other people’s—especially when we accept them not
only as integral, unmoving parts of our (ultimately dissatisfying) lives,
but when we believe them to be good. Unquestioningly. Unfailingly.
Nobody ever gave someone permission to be enlightened. No new
line of thinking or creative genius was born of what was already
acceptable. We associate “acceptable” with “good,” when really,
“acceptable” is, mostly, “staying within the lines someone else uses
to control you by” (for better and for worse).
Our lives are not measured by other people’s gods, not their dollars
or illusions or business plans. Not their beauty standards or
declarations of what’s right and wrong and good and bad and whom
we should be on any given day.
It seems the task of the generation (century, maybe) will be
radically accepting ourselves in a society that feeds on the opposite.
Seeing illusions for what they are, even, and maybe especially, when
they are other people’s. Making kindness cool and humility humor.
Forgiving the way things are, knowing the only way to reinvent
anything is not to destroy what’s present but to create a new, more
efficient model, one that renders the other obsolete.
51
HOW YOU FALL
OUT OF LOVE
with the idea
OF SOMEONE
There are two ways things turn out:
You lose a thing, you replace it with something else, it’s better than
what you lost, you’re happy.
You lose a thing, it doesn’t disappear when it’s replaced, not having
it becomes as much of a presence as having it was.
You’re told the things you can’t forget about are meant to be in your
mind—the simple aftermath of having loved somebody so deeply:
You hold onto a someone and someday that was supposed to be
yours.
We are told to believe that not being able to let go of the things we
lose does nothing but prove how much we loved them in the first
place, and I don’t think this is true.
Living with a ghost, crafting an idea that you need to hold onto—to
fill a space or insecurity with—is using the idea of someone to fix
something about yourself.
We love heartbreak, and we love putting it on ourselves. We’re
more nostalgic for things that never happened than we are grateful
and present in the things that are. We start missing things we never
had, that we just created in our minds, in this false, alter-reality.
The things that are easily replaced are usually the ones that you
haven’t attached existential meaning to. That is to say: They’re the
things you don’t rely on to give you a sense of self.
The things that don’t leave your head are not the ones that show
you what’s “meant to be”; they’re the things that show you what
you’re still not okay with on your own.
You know what unconditional love is? Unconditional love is loving
someone even if they don’t unconditionally love you in return—that’s
affection without pretense. That’s what we claim we’re after, and yet
we can barely grasp the idea.
Most people we enjoy because they’re contact highs. The idea of
types and standards are proof that we’re just looking for somebody
to play a role. Heartbreak is the aftermath of when somebody steps
out of the very specific notion you had of them. Suddenly, they’re not
doing what you think they should be doing and so they are wrong.
The inability to detach is holding onto the fact that the package
looked so perfect, the pieces seemed to fit, and yet. But still.
Being in love with somebody that you only used to know is like
falling in love with a book (which sounds like a dumb example but
people really do fall in love with them). The point is: You can love it
all you want, but it’s a story that runs parallel to yours. At the end of
the day it’s static. It’s memory. It’s a sentence and you can’t change
it. It ends how it ends. It says what it says.
A friend once told me that the secret to finding love was not to
actually look for it, but to heal the things that were preventing you
from seeing and receiving it. I think the biggest one of all is, “What
will having this love fix?”
What will having this person next to me make me feel better about?
What do I need them to tell me? What do I need them to prove? Who
do I need them to look great in front of? What purpose do they serve
for my ego?
This is true of many things, not just of love: We confuse genuine
affection and real love with the light, happy, free feeling we
experience for a few seconds/days/months when we have fed our
egos.
That’s why it doesn’t last. That’s why we hold onto ideas of things
that were and things we need to be: The idea of someone saves
something about ourselves. And the more we hold onto those
fragments of a person, those soundbite dreams that distract us from
the moment, we end up with a few distilled memories that we’ve
turned into life-sustaining hopes, and we piece it all together and
place it on the shoulders of the person who we thought loved us
enough to make us love ourselves.
And if you’re not careful, that person will become a part of you.
They will become the good part, the whole part, the love of your life.
52
WHY WE
SUBCONSCIOUSLY
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