The Pain We Hold Onto

There was this Indonesian movie that depicts the lives of a bunch of people, screwed lives. They all are best friends, and each of them has different twisted stories of personal lives. One of is gay, another is a wife cheated by her husband and hence she cheats on her husband (they get divorced eventually), another is a woman left by her husband because they can't have any offspring due to her infertility. As the story of the movie goes on, two new friends appear, completed with two new screwed lives.

So yesterday a friend of mine tweeted that a couple of years ago when he watched the movie, when he was around 15, he felt somewhat disgusted seeing a woman in a midlife cheated on husband and couldn't stay faithful, but now as he has re-watched it again, he's realized that life is just that much complicated, not as simple as child's life.

Of course we all miss our childhood when all we had to was to beg or cry. Sometimes parents got mad at us for our selfishness as a child unable to understand or even not want to understand the adult's situation, but back then we just could not get it why the adults always complicated things just so much, reasoning everything irrationally and subjectively. We were so innocent and the adults were so much at horrible mistakes. For some others who did not live with parents, or their parents just simply neglected their children's existences, they tried to cope up with situation by excelling in academics. One way or another, being a child was always that simple.

But now we all are grown up. Our old coping up mechanism is no longer relevant to current situation our surroundings give us in pressure. Having experienced such thing must have been the reason why my friend has changed his mind about the movie, about the life of adults, at least about the life of 20-ish years old people.

Speaking of adult life, we won't go too far away from one little thing called love. In fact, it is always what life is about, even for children. You may deny it, but as a medical student who have learnt psychiatry, I know how being loveless in childhood will define your life in adulthood.

Unfortunately, love is not always what we expect it to be like in Disney stories, the happily-ever-after stories.  Often times, it's the contrary. To some of you who don't think so because love recently has always been nice to you, perhaps your turn will come later, but surely none can escape. As much as it is beautiful, love also brings an inevitable pain. It is painful much.

For there are two kinds of pain, one is physical and another is pain of heart. It may need time but the physical one will heal as soon as the wound heals, as soon as the scar is gone. But the pain in heart, it cannot be healed. We can only suppress it, pretending to be alright then facing daily life strongly in mental as if we didn't feel it. But somewhere within we all know the pain remains, it doesn't heal but it piles up, the old pain and the new pain. And we know that sometimes the new pain is caused by the old pain we are influenced in our subconscious demeanor.

So what is with us? Why do we keep bearing the pain we hold so long? We said we're tired and exhausted, but we didn't want to let go at all. Even after so many years, we're trapped in the memory we keep gripping firmly, the memory that can only cause the pain.

But perhaps that is exactly the reason. We don't happen to be in pain, we commit the pain. We choose it. Because holding on to the pain is the only way for us to stay the same, the only way for us to keep the beautiful memories that no longer exist in reality. We just don't want it to fade away. That's why we don't want to let go even though it's gone already. We don't want to move on anyhow.

So when the wound starts to heal, we end up hurting ourselves, digging it deeper and bolder. We don't want to lose the pain, because it's the only memento left we still have. In fact, we treasure it. We love to be painful. Painful person, no one knows since when we've started liking it to become our identity, to be identified with. And poorly, to some extent, we're glad when people see us that way, we feel relieved when people pity us with pitying eyes. Maybe because we need someone who cares, but also maybe because we're happy to drag people living the same sorrow from our past although just for a moment of gaze, because there is the only we wish to be living.

Soon when we realize so long we've been trapped and too many years have passed, we are startled. It feels as if things were still the same as they were years ago, but the truth is, they all have changed. Everyone has moved on. It's as if we fell asleep due to coma, not in one year nor 2 years, but 10 years or more. It felt as if it was just some hours ago we went to bed losing consciousness, but now we're totally in different world, different time, or even different universe.

We try to deny it, but no matter how hard we do, the sorrow will eventually surface. Perhaps not everytime, but surely at least once in a while. I sometimes wonder what if the sleeping beauty was awakened alone after 100 years, no prince and no of her family members, nor even her palace's employees. Would she still be able to survive the loneliness?

And I know I'm just one of those I'm talking about in this post, here still gripping to those beautiful memories yet ironically painful to be memorized, wishing and waiting things would return to how they were. I really don't want to be in pain, but committing the pain seems to be the only way I stay happy in my delusion and reality.