The Overwhelming and Unexplainable Longing for Heartbreak and the Privilege of Pain and Change

A picture I took while on a walk on a freezing day- by choice, of course.

Have you ever met someone and secretly thought to yourself, “They have it all.” Not in a negative jealous sort of way that human beings are prone to feeling but in the matter-of-fact- kind of way when you meet someone who so evidently has their proverbial "shit together." To compare yourself to others is a human trait, we all do it. I for instance secretly admire couples who found each other early in life and have a house and a closet full of beautiful memories by the time they are 40. I know, I shouldn’t compare myself to anyone but if you are honest with yourself, admit it, you do it too.

But it’s not just stable couples that I look upon with admiration. I admire anyone who does good things with their life. Those who make things happen, those who strive to be better and those that welcome change. You will understand the irony and complexity of everything I just stated but now let's continue. In April 2016 I met someone I still consider a close friend. It's a long and comical story involving me thinking he was my Uber driver but I will spare you the details. He was my age, lived in a beautiful Lakeshore condo, made almost 6 figures and from the outside you could say, he had a life that was worthy of admiration. Fast forward to today and this exact friend is living with a friend and is unemployed. I wish I could tell you that something tragic had happened to him that derailed his life but nothing of that sort occurred. He is a perfect example of what plagues us all, that being the desire to ruin ourselves and crank our lives down to, “hurting” when its currently set to, “doing good.” Simply put, human beings do not like being happy and give them enough time feeling safe, and dare I say, comfortable and they will go out of their way to take everything that is positive and turn it into devastation. Just like my friend who can now only reminiscence of his former life of stability and prosperity.

I for one am in no position to cast judgment as I myself am not too different. If you have known me for 10+ years you’d probably say, “This is the happiest you have ever been” and I would smile, shrug and reply with, “Yeah” but secretly there exists a longing for a life that is the complete opposite of the one I lead today. Like so many other people before me who have demons, who know how it feels to be metaphorically trapped in dark rooms you thought you closed and threw away the key. Truth me told, sometimes I miss my old life of being unhappy and it is in those moments I understand the decisions my friend the Uber driver made.

You see, there exists a curiosity of wandering back on the dark path that lead you to those exact same rooms, because after all, you visited them so many times. No need to leave bread crumbs because you know the way back perfectly. What’s even more astounding is the longing for those dark rooms when you are in nice, spacious ones with lots of sunlight and fresh cut flowers. Who would choose dark over light, you may ask? Someone who is very familiar with the dark. Or perhaps being in a dark room one can dream of a bright fresh one and once within the light room, perhaps that dark room didn’t look so bad after all. The dream of light will always make dark more appealing. Maybe that’s why some people go to therapy for 10 years. There is a sense of comfort in being unhappy, always trying to find yourself and ultimately your unhappiness becomes the security blanket that becomes the one constant in your life. When sadness is a constant, you actually start to miss it when it starts evaporating. There are times I miss the comfort and above all, the familiarity that existed with being sad.

Going back to admiring stable couples, one would think that that which they admire they would want for themselves but that is not always the case. The truth is, I have gone out of my way to sabotage things in my life that I seemingly wanted. I did just that not too long ago. Let me take you back to early June and a certain birthday was approaching. I’m one of those, I want a kiss at the end of the night of my birthday party, kinda girls. Basically, my birthday is like New Years for other people- wanting to lock lips at the end of the night with a special someone. Unlike other past birthdays, this past June like never before I felt a sense of sadness that I wouldn’t have a kiss and a hug to look forward to on my special day *cue violin*.  So like me to hatch my eggs before they are ready and to play the “woa is me” card prematurely, he came.

Two weeks before my birthday, he came. He wasn’t on a white horse with his hair blowing in the wind ready to take my hand but he was wearing a Megadeth shirt and we hit it off from the first, “What are you drinking?” I liked him. When he told me he was in a band I replied with “Cool”. When I got the sense that he was a gentleman I kept the conversation going but was starting to get suspicious and when he started telling me he was Slash in a Guns N Roses cover band, I took a sip of my gin and tonic and I knew I had to get the hell out of there. Like a switch that rang off in my head, all signs lead me to say, “Abort mission, walk away from this unicorn at once” but I stayed anyways and I allowed myself to be happy. And I was happy. We spent the night talking about the possibility of working together on a few tribute shows, how much we both loved GnR and it took every inch of my being to not utter, "Who sent you?" I liked everything he was saying and though a part of me thought, “Perfect, now my birthday can be what I wanted it to be,” that still didn’t stop me from telling him I'm not interested a few days before my birthday. Even though I was interested. The more I got to know him the more I realized I had met the man I said I always wanted to meet. I knew I had met a man that could potentially make my very happy but the hesitation and the longing to destruct was still there. It’s still there. For someone like me, when presented with a gift of a great guy and someone who I could potentially build a life with, the hesitation is always there and the desire to do something to ruin it, unfortunately, it also there. Coincidentally, show me someone I know I’d never procreate with and I feel safe and usually pursue it without hesitation.

With the days leading up to my birthday, the confusion as well as my feeling towards him grew. I sat there and asked myself, “Isn't this what you wanted, a serious guy (a GnR fanatic like myself no less) that wants a commitment? I broke it off a few days before my birthday and I sat there on my birthday (with the fun, hysteria and noise surrounding me) and I thought, “It would be nice to have him here.”

“Slash” and I are still together but I am not done fighting the part of me that says, “Get out now.” I say that even though he is everything I said I wanted and so leads me to believe that I, just like my troubled friend/Uber driver, long for heartache and go out of my way to create devastation where there isn’t any. Where there shouldn’t be any. Or maybe I feel undeserving of love and to be loved. Maybe every person on this planet not only feels that no one will ever truly love them and if they do, they feel they are somehow undeserving of that love. They tell themselves they have to leave before the other person sees the facade and wakes up and realizes that yes indeed, you are not worthy of being loved.

Or maybe, I long for heartache because to me that symbolizes downfall and after every downfall there is a rise. One cannot have rise without downfall and one must embrace the fall in order for the rise to happen. Or maybe its the idea of rebuilding that is so appealing to human beings, myself included. Tearing yourself down, destroying every ounce of both the good and bad, every morsel of the plentiful and abundant as well as the lacking and rotting and rebuilding a stronger self. I should know, I have done it many times before. Like clockwork, after every crisis and tumultuous phase I have come back a bigger, brighter and stronger self. But first one must get back to zero, one must feel pain and what stronger purifier exists for the soul than pain?

The idea of transformation, change and self-discovery are all things that need to be considered here. Someone once told me, "To stay the same is to die slowly" and I never forgot that. To me, the search for happiness is to be in constant movement of something and in the same breath to be in constant change is to never stay the same. To explore is to search for happiness. How can one want to explore and rediscover identity over and over if they are within the safe cocoon of happiness and safety. Why would one ever even want to leave the cocoon if it makes you safe and happy? Only misery forces you to move and to explore. Only in misery is there self-discovery. Only in misery is there growth and above all, only in misery is there an emergence of identity you did not know existed and a discovery of a new self. Within happiness there is a constant recycling of the old self. You stay in that cocoon, safe, warm but growing more complacent by the minute and to me complacency is the ultimate mental and spiritual death. How many are dead and don't even know it?

With that said, it can be disputed whether pain is a necessity to growth but in my world it always has been. First came pain, then came change. One couldn't have existed without the other. If one is not given the privilege of pain, then one cannot be given the ultimate privilege, that being growth and change. You see, even within the privilege of pain, with enough time, aching thoughts turn into strong beliefs and a once broken heart usually comes back stronger than before. So is it so insane that my current full heart longs to be broken so it can beat faster?

Or maybe human beings need to dream in order to live. Simple as that. What good is life if every dream is now a memory or worse/better yet, a reality? Maybe I love the idea of stable couples and fairy tale stories. Maybe I am infatuated with the concept of a white picket fence and it is the dream of having that which keeps me warm; warmer than another person ever could. You may find all this odd- to not fully pursue something, to not pursue a dream in fear of it no longer being a dream but that is the reality of so many. My Uber driver and I talk about this all the time and it is those same thoughts that make us understand each other every time one of us does something the outside world labels as self-destructive.

So many pursue their dreams, believe in them fully and even take the steps to see them come to life but stop dead in their tracks when it is evident that the dream may become a reality. Or maybe it’s not that I wake up and I long for heartbreak and pain when my current life gives me joy and success, maybe its just that I’ve lived long enough to know that nothing lasts and when the heartbreak and the failure comes, I want to be ready. And one can only be ready if they themselves never fully allow themselves to have that which they dreamed of. Or maybe it is the search and the hunt of the unattainable that gives  fire and drive. To attain all that you seek may extinguish that fire and it is within that fear that I find myself at times having an overwhelming and unexplainable longing for heartbreak. In fear of losing that fire that I long to experience the privilege of that which is to feel pain and subsequently, to experience change, over and over again. 

Paranoia Will Kill You.

As someone who has kept a journal for over 15 years, I like to look back and remember where my head was at and most importantly how I felt then versus how I feel now. I’d like to think I’m always growing, teaching myself how to be a better person and not repeating past mistakes (which conveniently are all documented in case I need a reminder). Something I started doing the last 2 years is having a quote or some words that resonate with me at the very first page of a new journal. I feel it sets the tone for the beginning for that particular journal and is indicative of where I am at when I start my first page of many. For instance, last July (right after I celebrated my birthday and had met a certain someone), I simply wrote, “Fuck Yeah!” Looking back now it seems juvenile to write something so crass but it made sense to me. It still makes sense to me. That “Fuck Yeah!” represented how I felt that day. I remember feeling motivated, like the world was my proverbial oyster and nothing could take me down. Of course feelings like these seldom last and when I started a new journal this past month, the first page had the following written: “I’ve had thousands of crises in my life and most of them never happened.” I read it in a magazine and it really stuck with me for the simple reason that I would categorize myself as a part-time worrier of what may go wrong. I blame my conservative European mother who raised me in a quasi-coddled, you never know what may be type of environment. For instance, when I was a little girl I feared roller-coasters like the plague. Having been convinced by my mother that they may literally give an 12 year old a heart attack I didn’t go on them. Rather, I watched my friends scream and giggle as they got off one chanting "That was amazing, we have to go again" while I waited at the exit (yes, I was the wait-at-the-exit-kid, you can laugh now).

My mother always meant well and though her over-protectiveness came from a place of love, now as a grown adult I sometimes wonder if I do not pursue things or people as much as I should for fear of being hurt or like a fast roller-coaster, them giving me an early heart attack. Being afraid of the unknown and having anxiety for what can go wrong versus what may go right is something I think every person struggles with. Some I have seen it to the point of being delusional. You know that saying, “When you are dead, you don't know that you are dead. It is difficult only for others.” Well, it is also the same when you live with paranoia. You sound irrational, most times things don’t add up and a lot of times you may even come off as stupid. Sometimes I think human beings find comfort in being worried and not doing certain things for fear of those crazy thoughts in their head actually being true. That way you are in a forever state of safety. Missing out on the joy of being a giggling 12 year that just got off a roller-coaster but nevertheless safe and in the waiting/exit side of the ride.

With that said, let it be known that I have been on a few roller-coasters in my life (peer pressure is one hell of a thing when you are 12) and what I realized only after the ride was that the 30 plus minute line-up on a hot teenage infested Canada’s Wonderland Saturday was more terrifying than actual Vortez itself. The rapid dips over the pond were nothing compared to the endless “I’m gonna have a heart attack, my mom was right” thoughts that ran through me and beat all the adrenaline and speed that was involved in the ride. Being paranoid is similar. It overtakes you, it consumes whatever positivity you had or have and above all, it drains you.

The belief that paranoia will diminish your mental capacity to think logically, unbalance your emotional sanity and drain you spiritually is something I have seen first hand.

I have seen people that I would describe as highly likable say things like, “I don’t want to go out, I know people talk about me and generally do not like me.” I have seen men and women go through phones that have nothing on them for the simple fact that they live in paranoia and I have seen what could have been amazing Friday nights turn into shit shows because someone looked at someone the wrong way and they were convinced that it was a sign that they were about to be disrespected. In other words, paranoia will kill you. It will take everything that is good or can be good and it will turn it into something bad.

I sometimes ask myself if I took all the time I spent being worried about something or someone and do something that actually benefits me, how much more would I achieve on a daily basis? How much productivity is consumed because one spends their energy on worrying versus living? How much creativity is lost because your brain is set on paranoid/negative versus hopeful/positive? And lastly, how much richer would our lives be if we focused on what needs to be done and completely disregarded all the possible things that can do wrong?

I am not immune to feeling like the number of things I have described in this piece and what bonds us as human beings is that we all feel a multitude of similar things. We all fear that those who act friendly to us in actuality don’t like us. We fear that that person we held on Friday will be holding someone else on Saturday and we all fear that everyone sees that we are all scared and just doing our very best on this super fast, will give you an early heartattack if you aren’t careful roller-coaster called life.