Love, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits
“Her voice sotte voce, My heart sere,
Like the songbirds for fricasse,
She devoured her prey.”
Our life is one extended chase sequence. A never-ending pursuit for all things we desire, all the while looking over the shoulders to see if misery is creeping up unguarded. From my chance encounters with despair, I have come to realize it's diverse nature. It comes in myriad forms and affects people in myriad ways. There's one that seeps through your skin and drenches every sinew so that you trudge through your day as if in a trance. There's another that forms a solid lump in your throat so that you gasp for breath and forget your bearings for a short while. And then there's the needle in your chest that makes every breath you take an endeavor in existence. I suppose it might manifest itself in other ways but these have been my bedfellows in the past. Minor blots in the inking of my history.
And the diversity of it's being isn't limited to mere affectations. It extends in it's preambles too. There is no limit to the number of things that can make one sad. It is boundless. It's what keeps the therapists in jobs. There are, however, a specific set of emotions that give rise to sadness. Anger begets sadness. Anxiety begets sadness. But what hurts the most is when hope begets sadness. Hope kills. Literally. It's the one particular emotional state resulting in duality as an after-effect. Either the heights of euphoria or the depths of sadness. Each magnified in its essence by the pretext of hope. And nothing encapsulates this apparent symbiosis between hope and sadness than the pursuit of love.
An introvert by nature, I don't quite feel the sustained need for human company to subsist. But I do crave endearment. I grew up in a kind and loving environment being constantly showered with adoration. My life to a great extent has been decided through moments of love and pain. I learned Spanish because I was in love and I embarked upon grasping French out of spite for love. Granted I mastered neither, but the feeling was what guided me to these endeavors to begin with. So to now find myself amidst a cornucopia of spurned affection has been scathing to my self-esteem.
And that is not to say that I am unable to deal with rejection. Before I landed my current job at McKinsey, to my estimate, I may have had more than 30 odd rejections at various stages of the interview process. The whiteboards at Google, Facebook, Goldman et al. have borne my scribbles at various points in history. But with those dismissals came experience and an idea as to where things went south. There is a specific knowledge base to master and expertise to be gained. But dating is a primordial beast. It changes its shape with every encounter so that you are left second guessing every single time. It's the metaphorical Old Man of The Sea. Sometimes I wonder if Homer intended the metamorphosis of Proteus as an irony instead of an epic.
The problem lies in my propensity to get ahead of myself. For rejections only hurt if you are emotionally invested. If you are put down faster than a stray dog in Singapore, consider yourself lucky. For it's that much harder to reel in the tether when the kite is high up in the sky, buffeting and breaking in cold drafts. When it comes to dating, I function in the exact opposite manner of how I handle things in other walks of my life. I don't quite hedge my bets. I go all in with every penny I can muster. And so when the LOVE ticker takes a nosedive on NYSE, I am left with empty pockets and a bruised ego. Hope has always sprung eternal in me and it's not a quality, rather a hindrance when it comes to dating. Things need no rhyme or reason to unravel. One turn of the day and you are left wondering with no sense of closure. One moment you are surfing the crest of a wave without even knowing how to swim, next moment you are slipping into the very depths. And in your elation your forgot to strap on your life vest. And you don't know how to swim. And now you are fucked.
Being single in a place like New York is an exercise in endurance and disquiet. It's hard to connect with people. Its harder when they are distractedly gorgeous and uncompromisingly sullen. And its hardest when you have to wear your ethnicity like a disclaimer. The taffeta of your being becomes shallower and much more pragmatic. And so I have to come to a stark realization that I am horrible at dating. I certainly know how to love but I don't quite know how to date. I never shy or hide away from a situation. I am never "confused". I can convey precisely through words the depth of my feelings and I do so often; most times to my detriment. I am looking for something real -- like unicorns and centaurs and loch-ness and cupids. And I have met some amazing women too. Call it a perk of living in a global city; you meet people of all kinds, colors, auras and viewpoints. And, to be sure, I have never uttered one bad remark about any of my interactions or had so much as an untoward thought in my subconscious. Partly because in my worst moments I cling on to my dignity for support. And partly because I know that at some point in time I'll perpetrate the very same act of which now I am afflicted. Karma really is a bitch to those who believe in it. The problem, then, was that in all the accursed scenarios I led myself to be carried away. To unravel the reams of reality and bind them into my imagination so that it all became one. And when the end came, it was brutal not because it was cruel or an unordinary occurrence. But because in my haze of fervid oblivion, I hadn't quite contemplated a sudden withdrawal and it left me curled up in bed and not wanting to wake up to the sad reality.
There's a deluge of articles on the web highlighting the frustrations with dating. This isn't one of them. I don't think modern dating has in any way turned sinister. Rather it has highlighted the quirks of human nature. The technology has provided us with auxiliary options galore that lead us to indulgence or anguish at the swipe of a finger. The resonance of pleasure and pain has never been more stark, the reversal in fortune never as quick. So the same frustrated daters may very well be guilty of committing the same ordeals that they complain about. And that list must surely include me.
In any sort of interaction or relationship, there's a metaphorical string that binds two people together. Except that one is tied to the twine while the other holds it. Your happiness or lack thereof depends on which side of the string you end up. And for the most part, you'll always end up on the wrong end because we, as humans, are predisposed to hope for better things. To achieve beyond our station. You'll, at first, float like the papier-mâché at Las Fallas and then all it would take is a singular tug to unravel your essence. This is the source of my sadness but it is constricted to the next time I fall for someone again. So due to its limiting nature and my apparent familiarity with it, I know how to cope and recover from it in a short span of time. This may not be the case with sadness of the existential kind, the fear of which fuels our desire to work hard towards fulfilling our aspirations. Personally, it is what empowers me to eke out another hour of personal study after a 12 hour work-day and wake up dark and early on weekends to maximize the productivity. Sadness for me, then, or rather the aversion towards it acts as an enabler more than an inhibitor. Sometimes I do, however, wish that I could master my limbic system to a degree that enabled me to rise above the hum-drum of my being. But since I have no desire for psychedelics, I cope with my melancholia by putting it into words so that it isn't mine anymore. And hoping that years down the line I would pore over these pages with a tinge of nostalgia. Well not hoping per se. That would be contrary to everything said so far, non?