An Open Letter

“A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusion.” – Alan Watts

Edgy quote aside, I was talking with a friend earlier about the bad stuff that’s happened in the past, and how it’s ‘character building’. I’ve thought about this a decent amount, on whether or not it was worth it to have bad things happen to me in the past. I guess to some extent, thinking about it is pointless, as the only answer you should have is that it was worth it – as you cannot change it so something about imagining a guy happy pushing a rock. But I also do think that there were a good amount of things that happened in my life that I wish didn’t, and I don’t think were necessary for my development as a person.

It’s incredibly easy to see someone’s reaction to some traumatic experience in the past and think “Wow that’s incredibly irrational”, and almost trivialize it. I think there’s an important distinction to make about how your gut instinct and knee-jerk reaction to it will be drastically different because you haven’t gone through the same pain that causes that aversion to it. Not to make this another series in the vent posts, but I was thinking about this earlier – a relatively innocent action ended up becoming incredibly harmful due to scars of the past. I was thinking of an analogy earlier so I might as well write it down here:

Imagine you had your foot crushed horribly badly, to the point of excruciating pain and breaking all the bones in it. Picture going through so much pain, just the thought of your foot touching something makes you terrified of that pain again. Now imagine it’s been about a year, and your foot is more or less healed, but still very fragile. Now suddenly you start feeling pain again – a lot of it is mental, so it’s easy to tell yourself that it’s just in your head and it isn’t real. But this pain lingers around, and you keep telling yourself nothing happened and you’ve recovered, the pain is just mental. Then you find out oh, someone stepped on that foot a bit ago, and that pain is all justified.

Honestly, I’m pretty upset with this as I feel like this analogy is just stupid, but I can’t figure out any analogy to convey that feeling. I went back and looked at the specific messages, and I honestly agree with them. If they want to spend less time than we did over the summer, that makes complete sense, as now that there are other friends and other things in person obviously we aren’t going to spend virtually 100% of our time together. That being said, I still want to remain at the same (if not more) level of friends, and still try to spend quality time together. But this also goes for my other friends, new and old – not just them. If they want to be a lower level of friend, that I do have an issue with, but I don’t necessarily think that’s the case. And if it is, oh well, I’d rather not be close friends with someone who wouldn’t want that. In a weird way, I’m glad for this situation, as I think it will help crush some doubts.