Aftermath

Who takes the breakup hardest?

It's such an odd and horrible place to be in where once you slept side by side and shared those once sweet secrets, now threatening.

The aftermath of a relationship must be largely dictated by the nature of it's end - how did it end?

Did it end in impassioned rage: each one tore at the others vulnerabilities with such savage vigour that only one who knew someone so well, would know how to do so, where to strike and yield the most pain?

There's this fantastic poem by Sylvia Plath called 'Aftermath' about a burning building that I can't help liken to a broken relationship, for several reasons.

1. "Compelled by calamity's magnet they loiter and stare" 
Don't you love how, like when you were first together, the end of your relationship signifies the rebirth of the gossip surrounding your relationship? Except this time, rather than being only mildly annoyed by the sudden interest in your life when before you were boring and pass-over-able, you have to hold back a tsunami of mixed emotions - the dominant rage and sadness coupled with the remanence of love and emerging, distant and desperately hopeful closure.

2. "No deaths, no prodigious injuries"
To this day I am happy to say I've never experienced grievous bodily harm at the hands of a breakup, and I'm awfully sorry to anyone who has - although I'm glad you're shot of the arsehole you gorgeous thing you. With this assumption in mind, I'd also like to ask how you can love someone so much it hurts? And how those logical reasons (or illogical) were in fact logical at all if being apart hurts so much? When people tell you love hurts, they're right.

3. "Her ruined apartments, taking stock of charred shoes, the sodden upholstery"
Perhaps the longest living aspect of the break up aftermath. The stuff. Your t-shirt that I'm wearing and the exchanged christmas present and the train tickets from our first and last date and the photos and the world clock on my phone that tells me what time it is where you are.

I wonder what you're doing, even if it's breakfast time for you, even though you don't eat breakfast I wonder if you've changed.

I wonder if you're happy and if it hurts for you as much as it does for me.

I wonder if you're healthy, I worry that you're not.

I get through the days of horrible news stories in your vastly vague vicinity by smiling, resisting the temptation to ask if you're ok, waiting for a pity text to let me know it's not so bad you can't text.

Do you still smoke? I miss the smoke on your t-shirt, it's toxic perfume filling my lungs whenever I was near you, it's bitter taste on your lips the last time I kissed you.

I wonder if mine were the last lips you kissed. I wonder what I did wrong. I miss you.

Overthinking

I often wonder whether my work is interesting to read, but I'm confident in saying I've always been pretty good at English as a subject. Largely this due to the fact I have a strange disposition to infer the most concrete of prose, I 'read-into' things.

In many ways it's a useful trait which has helped to get good grades - only working to improve a sentence structure or to competitively find a potential meaning out of class (no matter how obscure the evidence.) It's also one of my worst qualities. Looking back at my life so far, the deductions and conclusions are in every doubt, every rash decision and every regret.

The problem with an interpretive mind in the real world is this - we talk about authors who manipulate characters, the weather, the setting and we can't do that in real life. It seems a horribly obvious realisation that most people, including myself will pick up on having read Ian McEwan's Atonement. However it seems that this time, I missed the real, personal significance of this glaringly, blatant statement staring right at me. Briony, this little girl who wished life to be so quaint and smooth that she would predesign her world and expectantly wait for the pieces to fall into place, was my younger mirror image.

Looking at my relationships I see once more how a curious mind - one which was praised for questioning things and making up stories - had matured into a hurtful one. I'd begun to manipulate people and more often than not the people who meant most to me. Without constant reassurance it seems I would always struggle to enter willingly into the unknown, never able to believe without satisfactory proof, I had forgotten the innocent notion of trust.

But if I could trust myself that a terrible inference with little proof was correct, why couldn't I trust the people who told me they cared about me? Did I have this sad predisposition to believe the ugly truth and discard those wonderful people I deemed untruthful simply due to their wonderful-ness?

I could see myself hurting people and worse, the people closest to me where those being hurt the most. I long to believe in the good and the romance of life, and I think we're all capable of such beliefs if only we alter our perspectives and infer-the-other-way.

Try to stop explaining why things are good and simply enjoy the good. Otherwise we'd end up so deep in our own sadness we'd become selfish, manipulative creatures, constantly disappointed by an unyielding world. It's not the bad things in life that make me sad, it's the ones that I don't understand. It's the same things that in other circumstances, would feed my curious mind and fill me with such enormous satisfaction and validation.

So should we rework our understanding of real life analysis, perhaps we'd be capable of more positive thoughts and a happier life. Take the bad break up to a wonderful relationship that we could never understand; perhaps we should be more grateful for the things that person taught us, more accepting that things, sometimes, go inexplicably wrong. Despite our often cynical observations, I'd like to believe that people are still romantics who will mourn the loss of those they care for, and I know that one day we'll see the good in the pain, and we'll start to heal.

Objectivism

I find this idea pretty interesting: that we can steer subjectivity often for an individual's own happiness. For me it exemplifies what we're doing here, reading and writing self-published work which, apparently requires no approval than that of it's author. That's not to say I approve of Ayn Rand's theory of objectivism but I don't disapprove of it either; in today's society surely we have to accept that we are moving toward egocentrism in all walks of life.

Take the blog for example: a form of publishing grown out of the internet which inspired various off-shoots in the shape of social media that we all know and most of us use in a love-hate relationship. We justify this egotistical exercise as 'online diaries', 'personal journals', 'portfolios' and yet I have still chosen to write a blog, not a notebook. This is a conscious decision I've made to publish my work. Why?

Perhaps my seemingly self-validated piece isn't so gratifying in itself, while I may keep notebooks of real 'scribbles' this, what I am writing here, is mediated. In a notebook I'd be brash and raw when I liked and equally spend pages describing the face of my favourite, but that's too personal for here. Here I am representing myself however I would like to do so and while most people wouldn't write a blog, isn't the same true for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube? It's all become about self-projection and positive mediation of oneself - taking away our shameful qualities and amplifying those we are proud of. Perhaps it is fair to say that we live in a world where we show others who we would like to be rather than who we are.

Objectivism is often seen as the baddie of ethics, the selfish ethic; however what I find so interesting is how Rand's controversial theory is working it's way into the social mainstream. If we look at the 'self-love' movement emerging largely out of photoshopped supermodels who made mere mortals feel inferior, we see a generally positive response through platforms like Instagram. 'Individual rights' once more initially receive support, but when politics strays from protecting the minority, to selfish policies that protect the fortunate few, we begin to see self-interest as mean and greedy - see any immigration reform's opposition.

I'm not much of an authority on the topic but it seems to me, we should pay closer attention to our sources. Returning to social media's birth through blogs, we can infer that social media sites are essentially another form of self-publishing. No longer do people judge us solely on their perception of our personality, but of the projected personality that they've present to us through the internet. Thus the rise of objectivism presents an issue of trust where we are rendered unable to distinguish between vested and selfless interests.