If i imagine myself the person saying these words...
I'm someone who always took pride in my efforts to overcome my preconceptions and aversions, and perceive everything for exactly what it is, rather than what i want it to be.
Resisting my own prejudices and fears of contemplating what scares me or disgusts me or angers me in other people, i've focused all my life on undertanding and accepting the world no matter what.
Over time, though, this mission has made me into someone who cannot take my focus away from all the pain i've learned to perceive so well. I compulsively observe, and feel for, and have ended up too fixated on observing and feeling =for= others to actually just participate myself.
The shock came when I finally saw that, apparently, the very people i'd learned so well to feel for, were themselves proceeding to live their lives, and in fact, more relaxed about their place in the world than I probably was. They haven't come to see things as clearly as I probably do, but it looks to me like they've retained something I've lost - something I never intended to lose; and now that i see i've lost it it's bitterly ironic.
In trying so long to clearly see, understand and feel the exact situation of those around me, and bravely face it, i've forfeited my own sense of living life for and as myself, and, ultimately, the ability to feel my own heart break.
If i imagine myself the person saying these words...
I'm someone who always took pride in my efforts to overcome my preconceptions and aversions, and perceive everything for exactly what it is, rather than what i want it to be.
Resisting my own prejudices and fears of contemplating what scares me or disgusts me or angers me in other people, i've focused all my life on undertanding and accepting the world no matter what. Over time, though, this mission has made me into someone who cannot take my focus away from all the pain i've learned to perceive so well. I compulsively observe, and feel for, and have ended up too fixated on observing and feeling =for= others to actually just participate myself.
The shock came when I finally saw that, apparently, the very people i'd learned so well to feel for, were themselves proceeding to live their lives, and in fact, more relaxed about their place in the world than I probably was. They haven't come to see things as clearly as I probably do, but it looks to me like they've retained something I've lost - something I never intended to lose; and now that i see i've lost it it's bitterly ironic.
In trying so long to clearly see, understand and feel the exact situation of those around me, and bravely face it, i've forfeited my own sense of living life for and as myself, and, ultimately, the ability to feel my own heart break.