Synonym

It’s hard when your brain plays tricks on you and makes you believe that one person is a synonym of everything good or bad in your life.


It happens a lot. When people are in love, they can tie their worth into another person, into their partner, and see themselves only through their eyes. Some can only value themselves when they are with someone, cannot function on their own, and cannot see their own possibility.

For some of us the opposite is true. We plummet into depression, and a person, a thing, an event becomes synonymous with everything that is wrong with us, or everything that could be right if we could change how we feel.

For others, we invest so heavily in pushing every negative thought out of our heads, in keeping it out of our consciousness that we have to focus on something else just to make things bearable. The guilt of acknowledging that which is wrong, of accepting it and looking it in the eye is too great a burden, so instead we seek refuge in the mundane, a distraction, something that prevents us from having to examine our own psyche too deeply for fear of what we may see inside ourselves.

It’s easier to hide the things that make us really uncomfortable with ourselves.

Human nature compels us to protect ourselves. Better to batten down that which we fear underneath years of self protection mechanisms than recognise it. Better to keep within our maudlin safety nets than risk trying to be happy, with the incumbent risks that come with it. Better to write it off as something we can’t do anything about than to see it is merely part of the pattern of us, as integral to our preservation as our DNA, than to try to address it, stop it and use it to our advantage rather than our detriment. Better to ignore it rather than ask ourselves why certain people, certain events and certain things provoke these responses in us. Better to run away – never fight, always take flight because, in the long run, it must be better to live without risk, easier to live without the possibility of being hurt.

What if we stopped, looked at that which we made synonymous with the negative, and learnt to disassociate ourselves? What if we risked being hurt in order to be happy? What if we suspended the ideology that we are all of us trapped and unable to amend our situations? What if we stopped ignoring it and started dealing with it? Not all of it at once, but bit by bit? Because we can – we could – it just takes a little bravery, and sometimes a little medication too.