-18- To Live by the Shadow
Should misery stay hidden in the soul?
To live by the shadow is not a choice you willfully made...
I have an inclination to suspect that none choose misery, but whenever it is the case that misery presents itself in our lives, we hope that we have the good conscience to attack its assumption. To my mind, we may just as easily regard misery as something deserved, and as something given to us for a reason, and in turn, stumble into the delusion that it ought to be handed off to others as payment to ourselves, because misery can also be its own remedy when superimposed in directions away from its main source. A miserable soul can turn both ways, it can be hurt by misery, but it can also be satisfied by it as well.
I find no reason to doubt Seneca when he says: "Never to wrong others takes one a long way towards peace of mind." If it is peace in misery that we wish for, then it is incumbent on the one possessed to activate themselves in favour of honesty, and to find also in themselves the part that is worthy of inspiration. We help others partly because we wish also to be helped. We wish to be felt and made useful. In misery, the leading suspicion is that we are nothing to no one, not even to ourselves, that we cannot be good nor do any good, and so to wallow in sadness and in despair is exactly the correct response rightfully taken. But in doing so we also admit to an interpretation of our failures in so easy and unjust a manner that it becomes second nature to disregard ourselves as the one in need of help. We are but shadows, unworthy of light.
... but a repercussion of having lived in hatred of yourself.
It must be said that misery breeds hatred, of oneself and of others. By association of our humanity, we grow entitled to want pieces of everything offered under that label, even those intangibles that cannot be grasped or ordered or made whole by any kind of purchase. If we do not receive our share of recompense, we may relieve the notion of attempting to discover it by way of virtue, and instead take it for ourselves, as vice also allows to be done. It is when we come to see the latter way, by understanding life only in such limited terms of its misery, which enables in response an urge to destroy life and its improprieties. One's own life is a sidebar to the quest offered by re-directed misery. The main reward: to enact destruction in a justified attempt at displaying how life truly is. We believe it, so we must show it off as fakery.
"People who know no self-restraint lead stormy and disordered lives, passing their time in the state of fear commensurate with the injuries they do to others, never able to relax." - Seneca
Living with misery is so unavoidable, which is why it is so necessary that we, in good conscience, come to understand its effects.
I cannot bear it in the ways that I do for all my life, out of fear that I might end up watching myself slowly fade by my own hand, alone. I find it a near impossible endeavor to resist misery. It's gruesome witchery cannot be merely an illusion because it works through me in real enough time so that I, as me but another, am embraced and strung up behind a make-believe stage, limbs gone astray, words spoken apart from where my tongue is otherwise located; I can no longer see for my eyes have been sedated through all of the hatred coursing through my veins.
But if I truly were to hate what I become, if I truly hated my misery, would I not be eager to contravene in those decisions that bring forth fear? In truth, I am eager, and in truth, I am honest about it, but in truth, I have found that I cannot play the creator of all things sequestered by my own mind. But then I recall that I engage in hated actions and hated activities from time to time, and in a decisive manner, with a grain of dis-honesty attached, only to receive in expense, a fair portion of misery for my own doing. So how is it that I may know when I have made a choice and when not? How can I find out?
"After every act they tremble, paralyzed, their conscience is continually demanding an answer, not allowing them to get on with other things." - Seneca
Always I demand an understanding but am given none such facility to be able to provide one. Asking is an exercise in folly, as though yelling into a canyon and expecting an echo to be returned in a voice other than my own, in a pitch other than what I sent to reverberate. At some point there is no wind left in the pipe, and to feel the air again we must jump, if only to see where we might land.
Seneca knew that "to expect punishment is to suffer it; and to earn it is to expect it." The classic dilemma that abides the soul of misery is to judge what is unworthy of being judged. It is not the event that causes us to suffer, but rather our self-interpretation of why it is we ought to suffer. I deserve the suffering that comes my way, is what I say, but I no longer wish it to be so, is what I choose to believe. This belief in wanting better, my conscience knows all about, and provided that symposium of knowledge, is also how I am able to interfere with my outward destruction. Inwardly, I possess all the tools for my utter collapse into madness, but you would never know it to be true by my appearance alone, nor by the actions I present, or the prose of my voice. It is all an illusion to all those on the out.
"Where there is a bad conscience, some circumstance or other may provide one with impunity, but never with freedom from anxiety; for a person takes the attitude that even if he isn't found out, there's always the possibility of it." -Seneca
Oh, how I sometimes hope it would be the case. But then, to be documented by my miserious ways would only be proof of all the power they have lorded over my landscape, their domineering commandments which sent me spiraling so far off course that the ditch in which I happened to be found laying flat was the inevitability manifested. Who would be surprised by the sight if I were to let them into the painting? He continues:
"Whenever he talks about someone else's misdeed he thinks of his own, which seems to him all too inadequately hidden, all too inadequately blotted out of people's memories." - Seneca
And so it is I am unsure how to prevail over my own apprehended horrors. I am but an imperfect soul, in search of a deluded perfection, and this causes me a misery, as though I am occupied by a throuple fighting over who gets to keep the house.
This perfectionist attitude sinks into my stomach, and in burning acid moreover turns to dirt. Back to back to back, over and over and over and again.
And then if someone asks me how I'm doing, I always say, by second nature, "I'm doing great".
This is excellent, and reminds me of Nietzsche "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how".