My life took the pretense of indifference

My life took the pretense of indifference

By Makiniah Sylviah

 I like to say my life took the pretense since I am defined not by life's imperfect moments, but by my reaction to them and because there is joy in embracing rather than running from the utter absurdity of life. If I pretend to be good, the world takes me very seriously. If I pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism. Come to think of it Good, Bad, Stupidity we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

I can finally see all the terrible parts of my life, the embarrassing parts, the incidents I wanted to pretend never happened but funny thing is the things that make me weird and different are actually the most important parts of my life.

The key is just to ignore the pain, because physical comedy only works if you see someone get hurt and they aren't actually hurt. If someone gets hit in the face with a ball, falls down and gets back up, it's funny. If they stay down and their jaw is wired shut in the next scene, it's really tragic and weird. You have to pretend it doesn't hurt. Someone thought of that, I am not sure who.

I've learned to get really good at this - say one thing when I'm thinking about something else, act like I'm listening when I'm not, pretend to be calm and happy when I'm really freaking out. It's one of the skills you perfect when you decide to be me.

But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along. Being able to live my life transparently does empower me to feel like I can be myself more.

Love always involves a modicum of pretence: really loving someone requires that you must behave as though you love them, deep down, even when they appall you. And appall you they will: no matter how genuinely smitten you are, eventually everyone you ever fall in love with will do something that is a bit horrifying.

I think that this kind of pretending is probably among the most loving things you can do in a committed relationship; nothing says "I really do care" quite like "I won't leave you even though sometimes I find you kind of weird.”

I’m pretending that I don’t miss someone, and I bet he doesn't even know. Why would he/she? I’ve put a lot of effort into this charade and I’m pulling it off with such ease. I’ve almost even convinced myself that I don’t miss him/her like that. Sort of like that creepy thing people do when they’re sad and just smile anyway; eventually the smile becomes real, and the forced weirdness just fades away.

Right now I’m wondering if you’re reading this and wondering if it’s you, because if you are then maybe you miss me like that too, or maybe you just see right through me and my façade isn’t as perfectly curated for emotion as I thought it was. Sometimes I think that you miss me, but it’s not hard to convince myself of my former opinion that of course you don’t. So I’m going to keep pretending I don’t miss you maybe forever because I’m terrified that you won't miss me like that in return.  Don't mind me, this is all in my mind, it's just a thought I had in a dream.

What you don’t know is that sometimes I can sleep at night because I’m thinking about you. I’ll smile about something you said and concoct scenarios in which you’re madly in love with me and we’re vacationing in some exotic location (we can only dream). 

In this world sometimes I feel scared and alone, and while I’m pretending I don’t  miss you like that, I know for certain that you will always be there for me when I need you, and I’m scared that if you knew how I really felt, you wouldn’t be there for me at all.

Someone said we should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgment of the intellect is only part of the truth.

While falling in love might ideally be an activity that occurs on a plane more elevated than that on which many of the rest of our usual activities happen the fact is that its mechanics can be equally dull. And going through the motions to trick ourselves into thinking that we are happy with our lot is something that we do to cope with many other crucial challenges in our lives.

So today I'll dust myself off, I'll suck my gut in, I'll face the night and I'll pretend I got something to believe in and while on that I’m going to break away from the routine for a second and be completely honest…I have no fucking clue what is going on. 

You know what happens to feelings when you hide them? They grow like one of those goddamn toys that you put in water which expand to like 1000x their normal size and get totally unmanageable and damp and weird looking.

It isn’t always a spheroid of fun to tell someone that you have feelings, because it puts you in a place where you are super vulnerable and most people really want to be cool because then the person they have a crush on will crush them back but this is not a logical course of action.

None of us are cool. We all have feelings. Somehow, you must communicate your feelings before they get so confusing and disproportionately large that you forget how to speak. You aren’t uncool for feeling. Obviously don’t hammer the person over the head with your feelings - but express them, take in their response, breathe, move forward.