We are all strangers to ourselves and can be unaware how other people see us. I can be especially dense on this front. Last week I wrote about how as a young woman I felt bad after casual sexual encounters and only now I realise this was not due to some intrinsic needy flaw in my character but rather that I was looking for connection and intimacy, and this was not the way to find it.
For the record, it is my observation that men are often more sensitive and easily bruised by painful relationships than women because it is not socially acceptable for men to talk openly about their hurt and vulnerability. We all struggle with this. It has taken me years to realise there was nothing shameful in what I craved -- closeness and connection. I was just going the wrong way about getting it.
Human beings have a natural and innate need to bond. As Johann Hari (a disgraced journalist and thus, I guess, a discredited expert, but frankly I'm fine with that) says in a TED talk on addiction, that if you can't bond with another human being because you have been isolated or traumatised or beaten down by life, you will bond with something else which can give you some relief: alcohol, heroin, luxury handbags.
When I couldn't manage to stay connected to myself and my life, I couldn't bear to feel my own feelings. I would try to escape in myriad ways: drinking too much, eating too much, being a bully by writing a mean story about someone, raging at various injustices, having random sex or buying overpriced deconstructed Belgian designer clothes.
Most of the time I wasn't even aware why I felt obliged to do these things. Hari says a core part of addiction is not to be able to bear being present in your life. I would add you may not even be aware you can't bear it.
Personally, some days I find it easier to be present than others. First example that comes to mind: yesterday I saw a very unfortunate-looking young man with no chin buying a Red Bull and a raspberry licorice strap at the dairy and felt almost wiped out and tearful at his predicament.
See? It's just unbearable to go through life being conscious of other people's pain every minute of the day. (I tried to tell myself he might have been quite oblivious and thought he was a total spunk. I hope so. )
As Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessell Zapfe says, the human self-conscious is "actively engaged in the repression of its damaging surplus of consciousness".
To that end we combat our feelings of isolation by anchoring our consciousness to fixed values or ideals -- so some people choose rigid world views rather than, say, having meaningless sex or drinking a lake of chardonnay.
Maybe this is why we freak out with terror when our fixed values or ideals prove not to be half as fixed as we thought, and why we revere "experts" who will tell us our fixed values or ideals are correct.
Anyway, I am writing this on Sunday morning in a hurry because I am racing to get to a class at the gym to get rid of my damaging surplus of consciousness. (Strangely, I love that sweaty smell of the Les Mills weights room.) The oblivion of working out is a better escape than some of the methods I have used in the past. But honestly, please don't listen to me. I'm no expert.
