213. What Must Be Said

I’m trying to tell you how I feel, but it’s impossible to find the right words. Everything that comes out of my mouth feels wrong, and I have to keep pausing to restate what I’ve just said. I’m anxious about speaking my mind because I cannot know how you’ll receive my thoughts.

I’m trying to formulate the perfect expression of my feelings, but the result is that I’m not saying much at all. My words won’t flow because I’m being far too cautious. I’m afraid of saying something I can’t take back or something I won’t be allowed to take back.

212. The Freedom To Reject

Rejection is always painful. It means learning that someone I’m interested in is not interested in me. Strong feelings necessarily arise. I feel grief over the lost possibility of a valuable connection. I feel sadness over the discovery that I am not what the other wants. I feel anger over being discarded like a useless object.

It’s almost impossible not to experience such feelings after being rejected. As I highly value the person doing the rejecting, I also value their judgment of me. And they’ve judged me unworthy of an effort towards a lasting connection.

211. Changing The Game

When we think about how we can improve our lives, the range of our imagination is often limited. We have been raised and educated within the context of a given society. The options open to us seem predetermined by the ideals of that society and the existing lives of its members. Any possible change to the society itself seems unlikely or even impossible. We cannot imagine a major change, as we have never experienced one before.

210. Dangerous Desires

There are things you want that you know would not be good for you. Having them would in some way harm you or your loved ones. You know what these these things are, and you know to ignore your desire for them. You’ve sought these things before and terrible consequences followed. Your memory of this keeps you on guard against yourself.

From your experience, you’ve learned that not every desire you have is a good one, and you approach your own wants with skepticism. You interrogate your desires, you examine them closely, and you consider the potential consequences of their fulfillment.

209. Tension With The Other

When the other is still an other, there is a palpable tension with the self. The tension originates in the perception of the other person’s otherness. At the forefront of attention is the simple fact that the other is not the self.

Sometimes this tension results in feelings of repulsion or hostility. This happens when the other feels too foreign to the self and its values. But more often, the tension produces curiosity, the desire to know the other better and incorporate their otherness into the self. The other is not the self, so there is always something the other has that the self does not, and vice versa.

208. Hidden Treasures

He looks at her but she does not return his glance. Her eyes are aimed elsewhere, but where exactly, he does not know. She seems to be looking straight ahead, but there is nothing there but a blank wall. He decides she must be lost in thought.

He would like to know what she is thinking, but even more than that, he would like to know what she is feeling. He has noticed that she hides most of her feelings and shares only what passes through a narrow filter. He thinks most people do this, but she has taken the practice to an extreme. She hides almost everything, supplying little more than a carefully-curated portrait of herself. What is she actually feeling? This is the question he wants to answer more than any other.

207. Wanting To Feel Better

When I’m feeling down, I can also feel unable to do anything. There are tasks I need to complete, actions I must take to support myself and others, but I feel I can’t do them because my negative feelings are too strong. I logically infer I need to improve how I feel before I can take action. I feel it’s only when my emotional state changes that I’ll be able to start making progress.

206. The Pain Of Failure

You put your whole being into everything you do. You do this automatically, because you care about the things you do and you want them done right.

To act in any other way would feel hollow and false. You cannot do less than your absolute best. If you did, you would detect the lie in your actions. It would be like you were performing a simulation rather than doing the real thing. You either give everything to what you do or you don’t do it at all.

205. Building Patience

When I discover something new, I want to understand it immediately. I want to know its position in the interconnected web of objects that is my rational understanding of the world. I want to be able to justify its existence and grasp its full meaning.

It’s because I’m able to do this for most of the things I encounter that I expect every new thing to be quickly assimilated. Any delay in my comprehension is experienced as frustration, as though something has gone wrong. With unlimited information at my fingertips, these expectations are regularly emphasized and enhanced.