“offensive” and use that word to make it wrong to see or hear them. (Not to mention, we’re more “offended” by a woman’s nipple and a swear word than we are half of the global atrocities of famine and war and the destruction of the environment.) We police people into only saying and doing things that make sense to us. We grew up in a culture that taught us to put ourselves last, even when “putting other people first” is fake and disingenuous and rooted in resentment and dishonesty. We are all dying of some untouched, unrealized internal loneliness, grasping onto the bits of writing and music that speak in the way we otherwise cannot. We’re suffering from anxiety and depression and loneliness and uncertainty and fear and failure mostly because we have to continue to paint an outward picture of the opposite. The inability to realize those natural, crucial parts of life are what make them “bad.” Nobody is honest and so nobody is finding anybody who loves them for them, because they aren’t being who they are.
There are only finding people who love their shells, which, as we all know, easily break.
So many of our relationships hinge on whether or not we continually fulfill a set of expectations that we often know about but sometimes do not.
Our fear of honesty and change is rooted in no longer being acceptable or wanted or held in high regard by the people who claim to love us.
We associate “doing what we want” and “putting ourselves first” with being selfish and with not considering others. We’re taught that what we
should want is what makes others happy. But do you want people in your life who secretly don’t want to be there? Is it really surprising that we’re all lost and scrambling and disconnected from ourselves when we’re taught not to follow our instincts and truths for the sake of someone else’s ego? (No.) It’s not “mean” to tell the truth; we’re just not used to hearing anything other than what we want to hear. We’ve chalked anything that isn’t coddling and placating and aligned with our most delusional and comforting thoughts to be “wrong.” “Truthfulness” and “meanness” have become synonymous because so long as people aren’t doing and saying what we want to see and hear, they’re wrong, and they’re hurting our feelings by, subconsciously or not, making us feel unaccepted, unwanted, and invalidated (because we’re only finding those things externally).
What you have to keep in mind is that the people who shout the loudest about needing to behave a certain way are, undoubtedly, the very people who have most deeply and profoundly had their lives shaped by doing what other people wanted. They listened to the people who shouted loudly at them, and for that, they got emptiness. The very emptiness that their words are echoing through and out of.
At our core, there is only light. I guarantee there is not one person you wouldn’t love if you knew their true story, their whole story, if you lived a day or a year or a lifetime in their shoes. We can’t expect equality when we’re holding up façades of inequality through dishonesty. How can we expect people to treat all others as equals if they’re constantly feeling beneath someone else?
The root of equality, and understanding equality of the human condition, is being honest about it.
The only way to change the course of our society, to enlighten the closed minds, to shift the way we perceive gender and race and humanity itself is first and foremost by getting it all on the table. We are talking in circles and affirming only with people who inherently agree with us, rather than trying to understand where the people who don’t are coming from. This is not change. This is ego-steroids. There’s so much value placed around “helping others” and “being selfless” and forcing people to volunteer when they don’t genuinely want to.
The only kindness we grow and support is that which we force on other people, the sort we perceive as correct.
Fake kindness is not worth it. It makes the world worse. It is the root of resentment and ill will and self-hatred and bigotry and prejudice.
Often the kindest things we experience in life are the moments in which someone cared more about who we were than how our feelings would be hurt to tell us the truth that saved us or showed us some otherwise invisible reality. Often the way we are kindest to ourselves is by saying “no.” Often the things we are most grateful for are the ones that were (and are) the most trying, the most deeply compelling, the most wholly changing, even if, at first, they aren’t necessarily comfortable.
So you should say no when you want to say no. You should speak precisely and kindly and with understanding but directness when you see a friend struggling to make a simple choice that will have a profound effect on their entire quality of life, instead of walking away and discussing with everybody else but them. You should leave your house if in it; you’re not wanted. There are ways to pay the rent; there is no way to make somebody love you when they don’t. You should say how you feel before it stays in the darkness so long that it becomes the foundation on which the rest of your life is built—and then collapses through. You should tell the people you love that you love them. You should tell the people you don’t that you don’t, and let them find people who really do. You should dig deep into the untouched abyss of yourself and see what you come out with. First, it will be the unhealed wounds you didn’t know you had. Second, it will be the light and love and passion under which they rest. Third, it will be the desire to take those things and run with them and build something remarkable.
You should evaluate your choices not in light of how other people will perceive them, but how in line with your deepest, truest self they are.
You should rise and say, “This is who I am, even if you’ll crucify me for it” in the very way so many religious and political and social idols and icons have, even if their fans and followers are the very ones who will do the crucifying.
You should give to others what you most need. Which, more often than not, is to say the following: You are not loved by everybody, but that does not mean you are not loved at all. You are not the most beautiful, but being the most beautiful is not what matters most. You are bound by nothing but your own fear, so you will not find freedom anywhere but within yourself.
Everybody suffers. Not everybody comes out on the other end shimmering and ready to let that light reverberate through the dense and otherwise
impermeable darkness. Not everybody has the guts to be truthful, but everybody has the capacity to. And the greatest irony, the most profoundly cunning thing of all, is that the very love and passion and acceptance we are seeking resides nowhere else but within our own unbridled honesty. So go to it, and let it finally breathe.
65
7 REASONS WHY
HEARTBREAK IS
often crucial
FOR HUMAN GROWTH
There have been so many poets and thinkers and philosophers who have spoken to this idea: the purpose of suffering. The wound through which Rumi claims the light enters. The beautiful people Elisabeth Kübler-Ross says had to know defeat and suffering and struggle to know appreciation and sensitivity and understanding. The pain Khalil Gibran believes sears the most incredible characters’ hearts. The suffering through which Fyodor Dostoyevsky claims a large intelligence and deep heart can be born. The people C. Joybell C. sees as stars: dying until they realize they are collapsing into supernovas, to become more beautiful than ever before.
Heartbreak may not be responsible for fundamental, biological human growth, but rather the kind that we also know: in our minds and of our hearts and throughout our souls. If the philosophers couldn’t speak to it well enough, surely you’ve experienced something of the same strain in your own life: the pain that was crucial to the process, the things that were lost to prepare for those that would be gained, the excruciating experiences that made you who you are now.
It’s a phenomenon so many people talk about but most can never quite define: the catalyst that breaks you open, the rock bottom on which you build the rest of your beautiful life. The suffering that was somehow so crucial, you’re grateful for it when all is said and done. It’s the human equivalent of metamorphosis, the darkness against which we can finally see light.
It’s my belief that if we could understand why our pain is necessary, we could bear it with more grace, or at least learn to listen to it before it forces us to. Here, the 7 reasons why heartbreak is often necessary for human growth…
01. Suffering is only necessary until we realize it isn’t, but it usually takes something to make us realize that.
Pain and suffering are not the same thing; I’m sure you’ve heard this before. We love pain. We make the same expression during an orgasm as we do while being tortured. Crying is cathartic, the physiological sensation of pain ultimately keeps us alive. It’s suffering that we don’t like. Suffering is a resistance to pain, and it’s in resistance that we suffer. We don’t choose what pains us, and that’s a good thing. We do choose what we suffer for, and that’s even better. It was always only of our own volition.
02. Human beings think they are seeking happiness, but they are seeking comfort and familiarity above all else.
People are incapable of predicting what will make them happy. This is because all we know is what we’ve known. Our culture, however, is big on “planning” for the future, choosing our happiness, and chasing it. In an effort to do this, we just choose something we knew from the past, even when, objectively, it wasn’t happiness at all. It was something we desire more: comfort. Until our loyalty to our comfort zones becomes too uncomfortable to bear, we won’t be forced to seek something genuinely greater than whatever it is we once thought was best.
03. Suffering teaches us that trying to change the external world to be happy is like trying to change the projection on the screen rather than the projector that’s playing it.
Byron Katie speaks to this beautifully: “Once we realize where the lint is, we can clear the lens itself. This is the end of suffering, and the beginning of a little joy in paradise.” She is referring, of course, to our minds, and the fact that we don’t realize to turn inward until we dig ourselves deep enough into a dark hole of trying to change what’s outward. Your mind is the lens through which you perceive the world. You must adjust its focus to change your life, not the opposite way around.
04. Often “suffering” comes to us in the form of a breakdown, which is really just a breakthrough that we haven’t seen the other side of yet.
Through learning that sometimes (…oftentimes) we don’t know what’s best for us, and yet somehow, our subconscious, instinctive
selves do. I’m not claiming to know that there’s necessarily a divine intervention responsible, but I am claiming to know that many times even in my own life, I somehow knew when it was time to break my own heart for the sake of something greater, even though I didn’t know what that greater thing was at the time.
05. A capacity to feel joy must be balanced by a capacity to know pain.
Our world is born of, and exists because of, duality. This is a fundament of our natural world, but it’s also important to see in our own lives. The truth is that the greater capacity you have for darkness is as much contrast through which you can see light. The yin/yang of our emotional selves is always in balance; it truly just depends on what perspective we choose to view things through—
both are equally available to us, the choice is always, ultimately, ours.