Love sans courage; darkness without an end
The silence of anxiety has no space to breathe. The weight of worries constricts the throat, freezes the tongue, paralyzes several senses and holds you on pause. It’s in this state, that sadness tries to break free as tears but it fails. If anxiety were only hinging on worry, it likely would be a one-dimension problem to solve. But it has so many facets. Trauma, melancholy, self-harm, self-hate, regret, fear and pain. Several times, it sits in the lap of slow-steeping depression that fuels it to spike to a paralysis.
I deal with it as I have dealt with everything that has been
thrown forcefully in my face. With broken pieces of my strength that tell me I am
stronger than my anxiety, powerful than my depression, courageous than my fears.
Accepting emotional pain as a normal part of my life in my younger
years was not easy. Or wise. I think I got addicted to it because in that pain
lived the memories of whom and what I loved the most. It became a lifestyle that
I flaunted with pretense as its mysterious face. Pretense swallows you slower
than pain but its grip is stronger and long-term. But sometimes, it is the only
way to survive a crisis without absolute destruction. Although you avert annihilation,
you are still swallowed by the pretense. It takes over slowly and you lose
yourself to it unless you limit its conquest.
As intermittent periods of pain and pretense with overlapping
territories were practiced over a long period of time, sorrow and melancholy started
to root pretty deep in my core. They ran so wild and free that they expanded
beyond their initial causes, leaving my emotions unhinged in a darkness that soon
became the defining parameter of self-perception. This darkness is sinister and
distraught, violent and untamed. As more pain merged into it, it gained energy.
Trauma and distress added to its power and that’s where my anxiety attacks were
born.
I tell myself that I did this to myself because I allowed pain and
darkness to engulf me. I don’t know if my courage fell short to fight or my
will to fight disappeared because I was addicted to the pain. The addiction
that started in the strain of love and acceptance was also tainted by emotional
masochism that arose from anger. Accepting pain, at a young age, as fate that
later became a lifestyle was a mistake. A fight against that pain would have prevented
it from settling in and giving birth to pretense, sorrow and, darkness.
Now I see faces and events in sadness that escalates to anxiety
and navigates itself to a painful restlessness. One lesson I have learned through
this all is that love alone is never enough. Not for people, not for ambition, not
for events, not for self. Love can be a powerful force yet it can be the
greatest weakness. Love can move mountains but it can also throw you into an abyss.
It can conquer you and make you shine or it can destroy you to nothingness. Love
is a contradiction that changes based on perspective. It comes without
guarantees and it often leads to unexpected shores. Anything that brings joy is
capable of inflicting pain. Anything that makes you fly is capable of
shattering you. But when you are high on love, ambition and passion, you
automatically become blind to the possibility of falling. Dwelling on that
possibility won’t let you get high. And that’s just how love is. More important
than the awareness of the fall is how you channel the pain that love brings. That
is what determines the course of love.
For one to feel passion or love for anyone or anything, it is
imperative to find a foundation of courage that can hold the roots of that
love. Love that flies free and unhalted must be stabilized with the security of
courage for it to reach a destination. Without a destination, love is only a
muse - which is not a negative thing - as long as it is recognized to be
just that. A muse is a journey, not a destination. So many of us mistake love
that’s a muse to be a force to reach a destination. And when it doesn’t, we
fall prey to the darkness that is generated by the pain of unfulfilled love and
ambition. Once at the deep end of the darkness, the journey and the muse become
an irreversible reaction heading towards deeper turmoil and despair.