We who inhabit this place live through words; our own words, other people’s words. We know each other (or think we do) through words. We show ourselves (or think we do) through words. Is this a strange and unnatural way to live? Or, if we accept that language is one of the defining features of humanity, does it make us more intensely human?
It is a dangerous way to live, because when we read someone else’s words, we can never be sure that what we are reading is what they intended to say, or, worse, whether they are being honest and saying what they feel, or deliberately setting out to deceive us. So we trust, and sometimes our trust is rewarded, but more often we find that our understanding is wide of the mark, that we have built up ideas in our heads which do not correspond to reality.
I keep saying ‘we’, but I guess maybe this is just ‘I’.
I worry that my life ‘In Here’ is too significant. Most of my emotional life takes place in here, and that is definitely not good. Well, when I’m travelling, outside is good, but during the normal humdrum, outside life feels dreary, something to be got through. And this is certainly not a healthy situation.
I made a post on Ask or Answer yesterday – unintentionally, I meant to put it on Melinda or Cassandra, but that was where it ended up, and it provoked quite a reaction which it probably wouldn’t have done elsewhere. What I was asking was, if you keep taking chances, keep trying, and keep failing, do you eventually get used to the disappointment? And the reactions I got were on the lines of – why would you keep on trying? Why would you want to keep making the same mistakes over and over again? Someone actually used the expression ‘a loser’, and maybe that sums up what I am.
So what is the answer, then? Accept defeat, don’t try any more? Is that good advice?
Usually the advice that helpful people give me is that I should take more chances, try more things. So, encouraged, I try, and then I fall flat on my face.
Does this make me so unusual? Is this not a general experience of life? Judging from the reactions to my post about disappointment, it appears not. If it’s ‘normal’ for people to find their way through life by trying things and succeeding at them, and not being let down and disappointed and hurt, then it’s no wonder I’m so unhappy. But why is it that my life doesn’t work that way? What the hell is it that I keep doing so wrong?
The answer, so I’m told, is acceptance, acceptance of the way life is and the way things are, that suffering exists, that shit happens, that you just have to deal with it. It seems as though the options are keep trying and keep failing, or give up trying and resign yourself to how things are.
Is there really no other way out?