(2/2) Self-Pity: The Last Source of Love
Living, feeling, and thinking vicariously through false, conjured-up scenarios
This is the second part of two posts. To read part one, the narrative, click here.
TLDR
We all conjure up false scenerios to some extent. Whether that's to give ourselves the rights we were looking for, attention, victimhood, or even love. when we dwell within that inner world, however, it becomes harder to live in tandem with objective reality via engaging with the outer world. It becoems easier to live inside ourselves, where we have full creative control, rather than to experience life outside of ourselves with others.
Maybe this is because it's unbearable to constantly receive the pain of our expectations not being indefinitely met. As a result we may give the excuse of "I just don't want to deal with anyone." what necessarily entails from this choice is that we push ourselves away from the world and the world away from ourselves. Here, we find ourselves creating a fake world within ourselves.
Despite how much control we have over that two-dimensional realm, it still feels both insuffecient, and "off". The only cure that fully dispells false worlds, is engagement. Then and only then can we experience life fully and live in accordance with reality holistically. All of reality; The good, the bad, the unexpected, the surprising, the chalenges, and so much more.
Two seemingly opposite people with two seemingly opposite diagnoses. Whether one’s disposition outwardly appears neurotically abhorrent or coldly melancholic, inwardly, a wondrous human need remains consistent.
The need of love.
Belonging.
To feel like someone cares.
And to feel like someone is there.
Whatever state we may be in, or pretend to be in, may very well influence the way in which we seek to arrive at said need(s). Regardless of how unhealthy that way may be, we seem to have a natural affinity towards reaching the fulfillment of our ontological necessities.
In the case that we do not receive love externally, from those around us (as we naturally should) we find a way to give it to ourselves. To some degree, this may result in not only pushing others away, but pushing the world away in order to remain in that perpetual state of experiencing the self-fulfillment of our needs.
That may be one valid perspective.
On the other hand, what we may also be doing is pushing ourselves away from others and from the world to elicit a deprivation of needs, so that we and only we can fulfill them independently and pseudo-satisfactorily. A complex and sabotaging cycle that creates a void and then provides an artificial and inauthentic remedy.
We become, in a sense, an embodying microcosm of the macrocosmic failures of our age. Or perhaps, the macrocosmic failures are a manifestation of our microcosmic blunders.
We become like food industries that bar massive amounts of people from having fresh and natural produce, causing their bodies to deteriorate from a lack of sufficient vitamin intake, to then introduce the alternative of pills to balance nutritional deficiencies.
That is, we unnecessarily and inorganically solve the problems that we ourselves created in the first place; from the soil of neglect and the seeds of heedlessness.
Today it’s easier to pop pills than it is to stay consistent with a healthy diet that would likely remove any reason to take said pills, whether because of a lack of resources, access, wealth, time, or willingness.
Likewise, it may very well be easier to excommunicate ourselves from the world — to elicit the feeling of a rupture — so we can superficially fill that need, than it is to be with others and experience it naturally. We may choose to live inside of ourselves where it remains temporarily [pseudo-]safe as opposed to experiencing reality holistically — through pain, joy, laughter, tears, fear, contentment, excitement, dullness, and so much more.
Like Jeremy, our self-victimization can be ignited from experiencing a normal phenomenon of being rejected and more generally not being able to experience life our way — like Burger King.
Without restriction or limitation.
The natural feelings of sadness are followed by either a burning will to avoid a painful reality or the self-infliction thereof. Here, an abyss begins to take shape — one that grows large enough until we coerce ourselves to pour our attention, emotions, and presence into it.
The self-inflicted pain paves a path for what we mistaken to be (self) love. What transpires is an invisible arena that is unlimited, unmitigated, unhinged — and as Jeremy and Sadie both alluded, unreal. Being untethered from reality facilitates the conjuring up of an infinite array of fake scenarios within said arena, using whatever real or unknown characters to elicit whatever feelings are desired.
This is, in fact, the antithesis of reality.
"M. Scott Peck, an American Psychiatrist famously said, “Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.”
When we are disengaged from reality, we become deeply troubled.
Something seems off and doesn't sit right with us. Jeremy and Saide both felt this — despite the freedom and opportunity to provide themselves with whatever comfort they wanted through their conjured-up scenarios.
Regardless of how deeply unreal our fake situations may become, luckily, we also appear to have a natural affinity towards being in tandem with objective reality — and by proxy an intuition of knowing when we’ve veered off its course.
To ignore these intuitions that are intrinsically aligned with reality is in and of itself a choice to lean into falsehood through the perpetuation of self-victimization.
Sooner or later, this self-centered, attention-seeking persona — one that can be ignited from the slightest discomfort (as in Sadie’s perspective) — can quickly colonize our mental perceptions of reality and cause what is real to seem false and what is false to seem real. Then, as Jeremy noted, it becomes difficult to see, accept, and live through the outer, objective world.
Tolerance towards objective reality as a whole quickly dissipates, as we find ourselves on edge when the spotlight is not on me, myself and I. This may be due to growing accustomed to giving ourselves an abundance of the spotlight.
At this point, we either subconsciously or consciously ask ourselves: “Why is so and so not considering me [the way that I consider myself]? Why are they not talking to me, or about me [per the expectations I set for myself within myself]? Why is no one caring about me [the same way I do for me]?
The more we give ourselves, the higher our expectations become, and the lower our tolerance for others is — since they can not even come close to the amount of love we incessantly and overindulgantly give ourselves.
Then, sooner or later, we question “Why is no one loving me?”
The truth may be that others may very well love us. They just don't explicitly place us on pedestals as frequently as we would like or expect based on our warped perceptions of what care and love should be.
"In turn, we begin to feel comfortable living within ourselves, where we have full creative control over what emotions we elicit and receive — false as they may be."
Why experience joy with others when we can initiate it ourselves by feeling it vicariously through a summoned version of ourselves?
Why experience pain in the outer world when we can just inflict it upon ourselves through fake situations, then immediately follow it up with a rush of self-loathing and pity disguised as love?
Why give attention to anything out there when we can maintain our attention, energy, imaginations, and emotions solely to ourselves, in here?
This type of artificial attention-administering can become difficult to abstain from, as was the case for both Jeremy and Sadie. A dependency upon initiating ourselves as the victim in any situation, even when in the wrong, may very well be the only way we remember how to experience any kind of emotion, care, or love.
In such cases we may also find ourselves not being able to admit our wrongs, leading ourselves further and further astray from reality. This further compounds the need to conjure fake situations for three reasons:
- To be in control
- To self-soothe, commonly mistaken as love
- To maintain incessant validation through self-centered attention
Our needs then become a craving, a self-centered obsession, and desperation, as our tolerance for anything beneath that arbitrary threshold plummets.
Somewhere, deep in our bowels and neglected diaphragms, we know that these mental play dates are wrong. They clash with objective reality and obstruct any opportunity to experience life and love holistically with others. These mental play dates attempt to satisfy us through ourselves. But ultimately, it fails to bring us any real fulfillment.
The only thing it does seem to give us is loneliness and longing.
Here, we find ourselves disquieted and unfulfilled despite having an infinite array of possible characters, scenarios, and emotions at our imaginative disposal.
Bored and perhaps even fed up with the limply insufficient shadow puppets, a force within us aspires towards something with more dimension.
Something Greater.
Something more holistic, alive, and full
— something real.
As established earlier, love appears to be the core of human desires. To arrive at love necessitates reciprocity — which naturally requires the involvement of others. Our connection and emotional reality with others is what disburses our once-hoarded emotions, allowing others to benefit from their amazingly infinite capacities while also benefiting ourselves from the infinite capacity of others.
When emotions are hoarded for the sake of self, we become like dams that trap water, which, in objective reality, is stagnant and limiting no matter how much water there may be.
Consider the difference between a lake and an estuary.
- A lake is a body of water that sits in a smallish sunken piece of land. It neither interacts with other bodies of water nor with an abundant variety of species. It remains isolated, and because of its lack of movement, its waters are likely to rot, becoming murky and to an extent useless.
- Estuaries, on the other hand, are bodies of water that can generally be the same size as lakes, but the difference is that they meet with other bodies of water, namely rivers, streams, and oceans. The ebbing and flowing between two life forms generates sweetwater — which in some cases is drinkable — and invites a myriad of species to benefit from its qualities of abundant, and enlivening generosity.
We think we may have more control over our fake situations. But it may not be in any competition with real human interaction and what greatness results from it, despite having less control over an external objective reality.
The fabricated situations we conjure up for ourselves appear embarrassingly underwhelming when compared to the experiences we can have with others. Real love, thus can be said to activate when our emotions, time, energy, and attention flow to and from those around us — rendering our wondrous visceral waters pure and purifying to both ourselves and others.
Ibn Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī, the illustrious theologian, jurist, and linguistic master of the Classical Arabic language, penned the imperative of movement; not just for human beings, but for the cosmos in its entirety:
مَا فِي المَقَامِ لِذِي عَقْلٍ وَذِي أَدَب
مِنْ رَاحَةٍ فَدَعِ الأَوْطَانَ واغْتَرِب
سَافِرْ تَجِدْ عِوَضاً عَمَّنْ تُفَارِقُهُ
وَانْصَبْ فَإنَّ لَذِيذَ الْعَيْشِ فِي النَّصَب
إِنِّي رَأَيْتُ وُقُوْفَ المَاءِ يُفْسِدُهُ
إِنْ سَالَ طَابَ وَإِنْ لَمْ يَجْرِ لَمْ يَطِبِ
والأُسْدُ لَوْلَا فِرَاقُ الأَرْضِ مَا افْتَرَسَتْ
وَالسَّهْمُ لَوْلَا فِرَاقُ القَوْسِ لَمْ يُصِب
وَالشَّمْسُ لَوْ وَقَفَتْ فِي الفُلْكِ دَائِمَةً
لَمَلَّهَا النَّاسُ مِنْ عُجْمٍ وَمِنَ عَرَبِ
والتَّبْرَ كالتُّرْبِ مُلْقَى فِي أَمَاكِنِه
والعُوْدُ فِي أَرْضِهِ نَوْعٌ مِن الَحَطَب
فَإِنْ تَغَرَّبَ هَذَا عَزَّ مَطْلَبُهُ
وَإِنْ تَغَرَّبَ ذَاكَ عَزَّ كَالذَّهَبِ
There is no rest in residence for an ingenious person of culture. Travel and leave where you’re residing!
Travel! You will find a replacement for what you have left. And strive! The sweetness of life is in striving!
I’ve seen that water stagnates if still. Becomes pure if it runs, but not if it doesn’t flow
If the lion doesn’t leave his den he cannot hunt, and the arrow will not strike without leaving its bow
If the sun stood still in its heavenly course then people, Arab and non-Arab, it would bore
Gold dust is as the earth where commonly found, and in its land, oud is but another wood in store
If one travels, he becomes sought out If one travels , he is honored like gold.
The desire to want to experience some kind of emotion is not the problem, in fact, it is part of the solution when expressed appropriately.
After all, these emotions are an integral part of our humanity and can not, and should not, be “turned off” or substituted for in any plane other than reality.
Conversely, the moment when there is no avenue to express these emotions is precisely when the hoarding begins, which quickly becomes toxic and self-sabotaging in nature.
Initiating healthy engagement with the outside world is what allows us to experience the magnanimity of our emotional (and in turn human) potential — which is exponentially greater than when we experience it independently.
Bottom line. Do something with someone.