I’d Rather Lose You to Happiness Than Keep You Miserable
On the Rare Art of Being Seen
After a particularly long bout of oppressive psychological weather, a colleague once pulled me aside and told me he’d rather I go off and enjoy life than feel obliged to stick out my obligations in misery. Wise words that, if only I had managed to process them, would have avoided a full career-ending breakdown in the months that followed. It’s hard to overstate what that word ‘breakdown’ really feels like, as if your mind is in rapid decomposition.
What kept me stuck was the usual tangle of uncertainty and guilt, despite those things featuring heavily in my life at previously opposing concentrations. I had reached an age and stage where the joys of being a free agent were revealing a hollow interior. After taking the adventure of life literally, I had dissolved much of what grounds us to our family and community. More than that, I had gone out of my way to avoid it.
I lived on the opposite side of the globe, not for a few exploratory years, but for twenty. I took every holiday as an opportunity to explore other countries, mostly alone, and in doing so felt that common untethered sense of self when one’s home of birth and foreign residence are both as temporary as each other. I would come and go from places and relationships like an Arctic fox loping alone for its next meal, never quite realising the impact on others or myself.
So to find myself bound to the same job and people for over a decade created an uncomfortable dichotomy. An instinctual need to move on, and a feeling that I didn’t have the energy to keep starting life anew. That psychological cage rendered me helpless to both desire and care. I no longer desired, I didn’t seem to care. That, I wager, is the essence of stuck.
My colleague had given me the kindest freedom, like the sage that he was, by recognising I needed permission. And yet like a fool I couldn’t take action.
Why is it that no amount of advice can save us from the need to suffer enough to elicit our own change?
I’ve been wrestling with this a lot lately. People return to me with the same problems, loops, and unlearned lessons, and I’ve had to reflect on the fact that being heard is the bigger part of being helped, and help is often not even what’s sought. Sometimes witness is the whole transaction. To have your particular darkness acknowledged by another person is rare in this self-obsessed economy. It may even be what my colleague was offering me, in the only language that might have reached me, had I been able to receive it.
Out hiking recently I crossed paths with a young lad on a mission. He was puzzled at the distance I must have covered, coming as I was from the opposite direction, and mentioned he was hoping to complete his route before dark. There was so much I might have said, so much I should have thought to offer. But I wasn’t quite present, my mind elsewhere. Later, as a predicted storm rolled in with the fading light, I found myself worrying about him and cataloguing everything I’d failed to say. But all any of us can really offer is the general direction of an outstretched finger.
I’m not alone in feeling my woes are hidden or ignored, that I’m surviving in the world despite being invisible. The most powerful thing my colleague did was not what he said, but what he showed by saying it. He saw me. He noticed. He wanted better for me and, without knowing it, validated my existence and my plight. I was just too engulfed in the shame of failing as a person to hear it.
As someone who prefers to live anonymously and go unnoticed, that kind of connection can get lost in translation. Years later I find myself returning to that moment, recognising it for the deep human contact it was, rather than the throwaway comment I took it for at the time. Which makes me wonder how many such moments I have let slip by, offered to others or extended to me, in the years I spent passing through without ever quite arriving.
I find myself wanting to hear others in return, wanting to know what their plan is should it get dark before they arrive.
