Acceptance and Attachment

Some days, I wish the ache would erase me, and some days I wish I could set myself free

Some days, I wish I could save you, and some days, I wish you could release me

And every day I see the dagger carving with its shiny blade, enslaving me in this agony

They say acceptance is the final stage. A stage I visit and then return to the gridlock - time and time again. It is not a destination. My visits to the promise of acceptance have varied in their duration and scope. In these visits, I find my surrender and my agreement with defeat. The storms finally put the fire out. In this cold, dark, uninspiring corner – I learn so much about myself. 

They also say intellectualization of emotions does not allow an individual to feel the said emotions. And without the courage of standing defenseless in front of the tough emotional realizations, one could never reach acceptance. In line with strange ironies and miserable coincidences of my life, I have found myself to do all of the above – intellectualize to a fault, feel to my soul, realize to a destruction, and reach acceptance only to be pulled under, and thrown back to the hell of chaos to sort it out all over again.

I manage this chaos and pain by turning them against each other. It is a battle that nobody wins but it keeps me from reaching acceptance that is a façade of my disintegrated love. I walk down memory lane to purchase more chaos and pain so I can fuel this battle. And in those strolls, I learn about me. And when I learn about me, I learn about you. Could I separate myself from the idea of you and not intellectualize what I learn? Maybe. But then how would I purchase chaos to keep pain at bay and vice versa? 

I used to think I had the courage to face all truths as they are, with whom they are. And when the curtains lifted, the truth I was left was that I am not courageous enough and there are no raw truths. When one truth is in focus, the other is blurry. In the past, like an artistic rendition, I have assembled images of all my truths to reach what I thought would be the final stage of acceptance. Ironically and tragically, all those truths - all in focus - were not real together. Schrodinger’s cat is both dead and alive. The unobserved truths are both real and unreal. My acceptance is both stagnant and accelerating.

 

Once I pretend I understand this acceptance, I turn to you and my attachment to you. In all its glorified addictive dependence and contradictory sacred puritanical resolve and the love that is stuck in the middle trying to be liberated, I see the nature of my attachment to you. And I ask myself the forbidden question of why it is so uncharacteristic of everything I learned about myself in the memory lanes where I purchased pain and chaos. And for once, my intellectualization comes in handy, and so it whispers:

Remember, the façade of your acceptance? That was not just acceptance, it was you and your truths and your loves and your entire journey to this final stage. And this is why you would always be thrown back to the gridlock. You created this hell to protect your heart without understanding its truth. And now you must live in the decay after the storms put the fire out.