Giday Gebrekidan
No need for any alarm I’m not in a bad place, but I have lost the world and I was grieving that. Now that the grief is over I can write about it. When I was grief stricken and passing through the different stages of grief it was all the more confounding because I lost the world to stupidity. Stupidity! This made acceptance of its loss even harder.
My grief is not neatly arranged in all the five stages perfectly. Sometimes there were lapses, sometimes there was nothing, until the final acceptance.
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, the five stages which I might call the five floating stages because they are confusingly on and off and don’t necessarily appear in linear stages.
Denial. For a long time all through my student years and most of my twenties I lived in denial, in denial of the true nature of men and the world. I believed in justice and had hope that people in the right circumstances will do good and have no intentions of hurting or abusing others. I was nice to people. My denial was so strong I tried to live as perfectly as I could. If I did right by people, they would do the same by me. That made me pay a lot, until it was no longer possible to live in denial.
Anger. When everything I tried failed I became angry at the world and everybody in it. Still this anger was directed at individuals and individual incidents. I spoke against such things and felt bad for handling them poorly and not confronting my sources of disappointment directly and now I turned my anger against myself. I was angry with myself. The crux of the matter was by finding targets of anger, handling them poorly and making myself more angry was only another way of having advanced denial. I couldn’t stay permanently at this advanced denial. I would amount up to nothing this way and I wanted more out of this world than anger. Because things were becoming clear. There was something awry in the human condition itself. Society cannot be good or evil, only careful.
Bargaining. If only something can be done about the human condition. If only I can offer my contributions to humanity to make them see the error of their ways, to make them see what makes them turn against each other, to make them see the problem at the root of things. Then they would mend their ways and become good. If only I can save just one person, that would be enough. I told that to myself.
Depression. No nothing is to be fixed and the motive of trying to help others is only an escape. What an empty circus the world is, how ridiculous the affairs of men are, everyone is in denial. They are just robots programmed to function in a specific way until their expiration date.
Acceptance. It’s ok. I’m not a robot. But I live with robots. It’s a grotesque world where the most grotesque fiction won’t start to match it in absurdity. If only robots can be programmed to be free. Only the free can truly love.
March 11, 2016.
No need for any alarm I’m not in a bad place, but I have lost the world and I was grieving that. Now that the grief is over I can write about it. When I was grief stricken and passing through the different stages of grief it was all the more confounding because I lost the world to stupidity. Stupidity! This made acceptance of its loss even harder.
My grief is not neatly arranged in all the five stages perfectly. Sometimes there were lapses, sometimes there was nothing, until the final acceptance.
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, the five stages which I might call the five floating stages because they are confusingly on and off and don’t necessarily appear in linear stages.
Denial. For a long time all through my student years and most of my twenties I lived in denial, in denial of the true nature of men and the world. I believed in justice and had hope that people in the right circumstances will do good and have no intentions of hurting or abusing others. I was nice to people. My denial was so strong I tried to live as perfectly as I could. If I did right by people, they would do the same by me. That made me pay a lot, until it was no longer possible to live in denial.
Anger. When everything I tried failed I became angry at the world and everybody in it. Still this anger was directed at individuals and individual incidents. I spoke against such things and felt bad for handling them poorly and not confronting my sources of disappointment directly and now I turned my anger against myself. I was angry with myself. The crux of the matter was by finding targets of anger, handling them poorly and making myself more angry was only another way of having advanced denial. I couldn’t stay permanently at this advanced denial. I would amount up to nothing this way and I wanted more out of this world than anger. Because things were becoming clear. There was something awry in the human condition itself. Society cannot be good or evil, only careful.
Bargaining. If only something can be done about the human condition. If only I can offer my contributions to humanity to make them see the error of their ways, to make them see what makes them turn against each other, to make them see the problem at the root of things. Then they would mend their ways and become good. If only I can save just one person, that would be enough. I told that to myself.
Depression. No nothing is to be fixed and the motive of trying to help others is only an escape. What an empty circus the world is, how ridiculous the affairs of men are, everyone is in denial. They are just robots programmed to function in a specific way until their expiration date.
Acceptance. It’s ok. I’m not a robot. But I live with robots. It’s a grotesque world where the most grotesque fiction won’t start to match it in absurdity. If only robots can be programmed to be free. Only the free can truly love.
March 11, 2016.
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