Can anyone teach me to feel love?
Because I don’t. At best I feel a little distant warmth, like sunshine on a bright winter’s day. It doesn’t come anywhere near penetrating the thick crystalline ice that accumulated around my fragile frozen heart through all these years of isolation.
I’m frozen because I’m isolated.
I’m isolated because I’m frozen.
Perhaps if I felt the love better, I would attract more of it because it would then motivate me to go seek more. Right now it doesn’t even feel like that’s a possibility. Like no matter which way I turn, there’s the same snowblind-bright eternal expanse of ice and snow and icicle-cold wind blowing through me.
Well at least it’s sunny tundra now. That feels like progress.
And the thing about this deadly chill is that it’s very easy to fall back into feeling like it means that nobody loves me and I am all alone in the world and will be forever,
Cry as I might, nobody is coming, because nobody cares.
If I can’t feel it, it’s not there. That is everybody’s default position.
But in my better, saner moments, I can remember that the love I want is out there whether I feel it or not.
Plenty of people love me, both online and real life, and the truth of that love is logically undeniable. Those who love me there beyond the ice-wall. I can’t reach them or feel their warmth but I know they are there, and I can see their smiles.
I assume they sometimes wish I was easier to reach.
I’m working on it.
I am trying to melt my way to freedom. I don’t deserve my icy prison. I am a kind, sweet, loving person who loves to use his big bag of magic tricks to make people happy.
I’m charming and funny and cute as all get out. I radiate the love I can’t feel myself in order to bask in its reflected glow.
It’s the only way I can feel it at all.
I deserve to truly feel the love I get from others. And I worry that my being distant and hard to reach despite how I act outwardly hurts the people I love.
I don’t mean to freeze people out. I hope people understand that. I love you all intensely but my terrified heart is holding me prisoner and I can’t let go yet.
I swear that I will be truly there for you one day.
But I have a lot of thawing out to do first.
Been feeling pretty depressed this afternoon.
Whatever. I won’t feel this way forever. It means nothing other than perhaps I need more sleep, or better sleep at least.
Or maybe it’s just part of getting better. Might be that in order to heal, I have to let myself feel that frozen sadness so it can thaw out.
As always, catharsis is the key to set you free.
More after the break,
After a tragedy :
A : Everything happens for a reason…
Me : Well duh, that’s called “causality”.
Fun game : Take a text file of the Bible and replace every instance of “God” with “Ed”.
Think about it.
Ed got so mad about the wickedness of the world that he drowned every life form on Earth except for this one guy and his extended family.
Ed gave the Ten Commandments to Moses.
Ed wrote the Bible.
Ed created the universe.
Kinda changes things, dunnit?
What belief is for
We live in an era where millions of people (mostly Americans) are literally going to die for their beliefs.
They think Covid is a hoax and as we speak, they are dying in droves every day. People’s last breaths as they die of Covid are spend insisting that nobody gives them that evil Covid vaccine. Children and relatives are left watching helplessly as otherwise healthy people die a horrible choking, gasping, smothering death because a bastard whose name rhymes with Dump (not a coincidence) told them that he knew better than science what was good for them.
The stakes of belief, therefore, have never been higher. Somehow, this mad era has turned political belief from a matter of dinner table conversation and elections into a very real matter of life or death.
People are dying from believing the wrong thing. This is unprecedented.
So I think this is an excellent time to examine what belief is and what it is for.
Starting with the basics : all beliefs are fundamentally datum about the world.
Whether the belief is “water is wet”, “driving in a snow storm is dangerous” or “God loves me”, it still represents a fact about the world.
But not all beliefs are equally important. In fact, most of them have little impact on daily life. Thinking that the capital of Canada is Toronto is unlikely to have any impact on your life beyond embarrassment. Thinking the greatest President was Calvin Coolidge is pretty unlikely to cost you money.
Heck, thinking the Earth is flat is unlikely to wreck your life.
That’s one kind of belief. Non-personal. Inconsequential. Theoretical, even.
But then there’s the core set of practical beliefs about physical reality, and on these we have a broad level of consensus.
A belief that gravity is a myth is hardly sustainable.
And then there’s the vast middle ground of beliefs that have some consequence but are not as clear as whether or not fire burns you.
A lot of our beliefs about others fit here.
The point of all these beliefs is to provide us with an accurate picture of reality through which we can make successful decisions that lead to the desired effect and thus allow us to negotiate reality and thrive.
The problem with Covid is that a Type 1 belief of the political type has jumped the rails to become a Type 2 belief about fundamental reality.
It sometimes seems to me like this whole era was designed to test the limits of democracy, freedom of belief, and personal autonomy.
At some point, we will have to abrogate people’s freedoms in order to save their lives.
Either that, or just let people die like in the days of the Black Death.
Neither option is acceptable.
But soon we will have to choose anyhow.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.