EARLE
NB: Earle's original name has been altered in respect to privacy regulations.
There is a common dilemma in society, which one can not elude, manipulate or escape from. At some point, each and everyone of us will plunge into a nefarious darkness that often boasts a promising on-set, but is plagued with sorrow, desolation and and a deepened sense of expendability. Yep, you've guessed it. You fall in love. And by this, i'm not talking about that mushy cant-keep-our-hands-off-eachother-googly-eyed-puppy-dog love, i'm not talking about that 'we've been together for 18 years and in respect of that we'll probably get married' love, i'm talking about that dysfunctional, i-hate-you-but-i-love-you-cant-live-with-or-without-you love. I waver skittishly on the word love, because the truth is that it isn't love at all, it's something inexplicable. But what I can tell you is that it is completely self-inflicted, and it begins with a wounding to our truly unguarded ego. We subsequently enter a place which for all intents and purposes I shall herewith refer to as Earle (like Hotel Earle i.e. the worst place in the world. From Barton Fink - "Hotel Earle is quite literally hell")
All of us have been, or will go to Earle at some point in our lives. Usually, it is our first love that sends us to Earle, for this is when we are at our most vulnerable and impressionable. I, like every Earle survivor out there, can tell you this. Earle is a morbid, self-loathing place. Somber and terribly grim. It is characterised by a desire for solitude, a general lethargy, an indefinite TV coma for lack of wanting to leave the house, a 7-day pyjama cycle, an in depth and maddening analysis of every interaction that took place with you and the person who sent you there, a loss of friendships and general social interaction, and in it's most severe cases, unemployment. Earle will hands down be the worst time of your entire life. Anyone who has been to Earle will be reading this with an accidental smirk pulling up at the sides of their mouths thinking "Yeah, I'm familiar with that motherfucker." and the thing about it is that the only way out, is through. Once you're out of Earle, however long it may take, the only justifiable reason for your return should be death of spouse. One might even say "Send me to Earle once and it's shame on you, send me to Earle twice and it's shame on me." But here is the crux of my argument. The most poignant point about one's time in Earle is this. During their stay, they should learn something very important. Something imperative to their well-being. Something remedial. Something that will shake them, break them down, tear them up and rebuild them again. Something that will not only change the way they look at other people, but also the way they look at themselves. Something that will ensure they never take the path that leads to Earle again. And that is - the recognition of the *reason* they are in Earle.
This could take weeks, months, years and many heartbreaks to identify. But luckily for you, you have me to give you the answer, so as long as you pay close attention to everything I'm about to tell you, you may just bargain yourself a one way ticket out of Earle, and better yet, a complete embargo of it's entire terrain. It's almost like skipping death. By the time you've finished reading this, I expect you to be mentally in a place so far away from Earle, that when it's daytime where you are, it's nighttime in Earle. When you wakeup in the morning, Earle is getting ready for bed. It'd take you AT LEAST a 24 hour flight to get to Earle, with multiple layovers. In fact, the distance between you is so far that you're ageing at different rates.That's how far I can get you from Earle, if you pay attention. IF, however, you do not heed my seasoned counsel, I shall await a postcard.
So let's get right into it.
The reason we are wounded so deeply, enough to send us to a place as antarctic as Earle, is 9 times out of 10 because the person we lust does not feel the same. Either that or, they do feel the same but they just keep hurting you. They use hurtful words towards you, they break your trust time and again and they never learn from their mistakes. They promise you everything and deliver nothing. They awaken your love with no intention of loving you. But would somebody who sincerely loved you, hold you in such disregard? For the 1/10 of you who are in Earle because your families are of different religions that prohibit interracial marriages, you can piss off. This post is only for those who had the courage to take life by the cahonas and desperately plunged into something they wanted, but were bitch-slapped in the face with rejection. You poor fuckers can keep reading.
So we've established - you'll usually find yourself in Earle because said lover does not love you back. Therefore, what we know of the situation thus far is two-fold:
1. We can be certain of how we feel, knowing they do not feel the same.
2. We can NOT be certain of how we may have felt, had they felt the same.
So mathematically speaking, on an X=Y basis, we can say that we love ONLY because we are not loved. Yet, we can never be sure of our feelings if we were. And thus I arrive at my cardinal estimation. The trigger of our love was not their breathtaking smile, their glistening eyes, their devotion to us in equal measure, their witty conversation or their sensual touch, the trigger of our TRUE, maddening love was a sledge hammer to the heart. So why is it that when we are hurt, we love the most? I will tell you why, because we do not love them at all. We love OURSELVES.
That is the first, and greatest glimpse into your omniscient truth.
That is your key to the Forte-Knox of understanding.
That is your proverbial green-card to the America of Happiness.
All of us are born with an ego, but people often attribute the ego to qualities that are associated with arrogance and social standing, they fail to recognise it's importance in how we learn to love. The greater bearing we place on our egos, the more defensive we become when it's bruised. The more gravely we seek to be valued, the greater will be the attachment we forge with the sole thing that collapses that image. This is why: when somebody inadvertently tells you that they do not like you, you either take it in your stride, or you bequeath your power to them. You let your ego roar like a lion and convince you that you are in a position of subservience. In your distorted perception, the person that does not like you has fundamentally pitted themselves above you, since they obviously like themselves, so why do not they not like you? What is missing in you that is found in them? In your mind, you ego has told you that you no longer have any meritorious qualities, this must mean they have many (to have noticed the lack of yours.) Your ego tells you are unlikeable, this must mean they are loveable (to have noticed your unsavoury taste.) Your ego tells you you are ugly, this must mean they are beautiful (to be able to compare themselves to you.) Your ego tells you you are stupid, this must mean they are intelligent (to have noticed how stupid you are.) Your ego tells you you are inferior, this must mean they are better than you (for having held you in lesser regard). And there you have it, you see what I did? I just explained to you, in laymen terms, how your ego convinced you to fall in love with somebody with a plethora of righteous qualities - that you invented for them. To put it bluntly, you fell in love with yourself.
Have you ever thought about what you THINK you're in love with anyway? All the amazing moments you DIDN'T have? all the wonderful and thoughtful things they DIDN'T do for you? All the times they WEREN'T there for you when you needed them? All the times they let you down? And yet you sacrificed everything and everyone in your life for them. It's amazing how blind we can be sometimes. It's enlightening to unearth how many toxic seeds we grow in ourselves.
This is why you often hear men talking of their ex's who left them, flaunting her picture and saying "look how gorgeous she is!" meanwhile you're furrowing your brows, holding the iphone at an angle, double tapping to zoom, trying to see what he sees. This is why you hear women talking up men who don't love them back, who treat them like crap, claiming they have all the talent in the world, and yet the rest of us are having a hard time trying to see it. 9 times out of 10, it was her ego that bestowed that talent to him. We do not really love the people we think we love, we are just so egotistical that we can not accept somebody inadvertently pitting themselves above us. It makes us feel worthless and inferior, so our defence mechanism cheats us into thinking we are in love, for we would sooner love somebody than hate ourselves. Our bodies are clever. This is how you find yourself stumbling clumsily into Earle, like a drunkard on Christmas. Moving ever in retrograde. Spending countless nights wondering why they did this to you, never realising that in fact you did it to yourself. Nobody can send you to Earle without your own consent, unless of course you are blindsided by your own signature on the acclamation. Your ego is the worst inside job since the Watergate scandal.
Now that you have learnt the truth about your conceited ego, I shall proceed with the cornerstone to my cerebral literature. In order to stop future vacations to Earle, in order to ensure you never again love the people that only hurt you, it is crucial to learn how to disengage from ones ego. How to ascend from ones ego. The ego is an unhealthy entity. It is the biggest internal assailant. What's worse is that it keeps feeding you poison until you grow so delicate that you submit to it's every whim. You become disillusioned. We can not love ourselves THIS much. There has to be an internal strength that takes every beating and undermining with a humble certainty. If you value yourself highly enough, a bruise to your over-inflated ego will not be the end of you, so long as you recognise it's voice the next time it whispers sweet nothings into your ear. If you can uproot yourself from your ego, if you can learn to walk away from whom-so-ever brings you down, with a certainty so great that nothing can impeach on your value, such that nobody can make or break you, you will walk free of the shackles of Earle. And you will learn to build and attract a pure love that is entirely disentangled from the savage ego. This is the type of love that lasts a lifetime, because when we remove the rose-tinted glasses, we can truly fall in love with another persons authentic and concrete qualities, and not the ones we've invented for them.
All that being said, people learn only from experience, not from reading blogs. And they will do what they will anyway. So in light of this, I have devised two quick and expert tips on how to best survive Earle.
1. You don't.
2. See 1.
