let’s go get lost

“She’s had a hard life…” One of those things in the English language that is so open to misinterpretation and abuse it makes you think language should have a regulatory service “VOCABOF”. “Hard”; When people say someone’s had a “hard life” I do not meekly accept it as fact; I rigorously assess their behaviour. Because like everyone else (I can only presume to be correct here) I like to think I’ve had a bit of a hard life. No matter your friends’, external assessors’, opinions, it is what you think of yourself that is ultimately of the most importance. And it’s on that belief that I think, as I must because it is the bedrock of my self-efficacy, I have done well in my life. We must believe we have struggled against something otherwise all those young tears and the teenage agnst was for nought. So it is in this that we reject everyone else, from out innermost secrets and from this, the foundation of our self-confidence; we have struggled against something that has made us what we are and we are never to have that questioned by others.

Indeed it’s the disgorging of this idea, the admittance of struggling that can cause huge problems for people. If you are at a stage where you are publicly declaring your life “hard” or a “struggle” then others are already aware. As much as we try to hide our something from scrutiny, for fear it’ll come up short, when it is too great, it will spill over and be witnessed by everyone. This is why it annoys me greatly when people falsely claim struggle, if you are conscious enough of your situation to say you’re having a hard time you probably don’t need help (and it suggests you have never been close enough to someone to get a glimpse of what real struggle is). You must be modest about your struggle. The people around you should notice it first if it’s truly too great which is why having other people in your life is so important. Other people are there to comment on your life; there to cajole and encourage, to and berate and admonish. To believe you don’t have to reciprocate is to be very naive indeed.

You too must be waging the war on the side of the struggle, giving people the belief that they need. You also need to be trying to break down that wall to their something. This is not being nosy, this is not being a bad friend; this is being a very good friend indeed. You should never make it inside but people need to know that someone is curious. Problems occur when no one is curious, naturally leading to a feeling of loneliness. Another issue arises when someone has had too much time inside their mind and been busy shoring up their defenses, for these people have spent too much time under the eye of their something and often an infinitesimal part of it has crept into their conscious.

This is why when someone has “had a hard life” I get angry. Did their something spill over? Probably not. What probably occured was a judging of their item of struggle. What probably occured is that someone took a peak through a chink in their defences and extrapolated from there. Indeed they extrapolated so far that they ended up coming to the conclusion that the right thing to do was to tell others. No. The right thing to do is to continue to be that friend. The one always looking for the way in, the one appreciating the importance of the struggle, nevermind the size of the thing struggled against, the one valuing what they witnessed inside that person as a sacred thing, not of any religion but of life itself.