PERSONAL

0

3,476

Invisible Love

7 years ago930 words

Being caught in a blizzard and told that there's a 'nice warm fire out there somewhere' doesn't exactly ward away frostbite.

I know I'm updating this twice in less than 24 hours, but ugh, I'm just frustrated about something and need to vent.

I use an app, as I've said before, where I can record my moods and see them all on a graph (for over a month now, all my posts have been at the lowest possible mood; these were rare before, saved for especially unpleasant occasions). You can write diary-like posts accompanying the mood recordings, and other users of the app can read and comment on these.

Sometimes, people leave comments to try and help, but often they're just things that make me grit my teeth and glare.

Some are blunt commands about how to 'fix' whatever you're talking about, which... well, here's an example:



I suppose it's better than them being outright aggressive, like worse people I've come across in the past, and they do at least seem to be compassionate... But I suppose it just baffles me how some people can think that saying things like that can be helpful. I always have to fight the urge to say something like "really, make new friends? Why didn't I think of that?! Oh my god, you've completely changed my life with your wisdom!!!" I probably come across as rude in my replies anyway though - and I'm worried about doing the same in replies to comments on this blog - but it's essentially just tiredness, exhaustion, the inability to even graciously accept what's offered so then the other person can feel good about it because I feel so abysmal myself. I know and appreciate that they're taking time out of their own life to try and shed at least a little glimmer of light on mine... but I'm just terrible about pretending that they have when they've actually had the opposite effect. I feel bad about that. Ungrateful. Like I'm swatting away fireflies, and eventually I'll just be left with uninterrupted darkness, and it'll be my fault.

Anyway. A kind of 'help' I see offered a lot to the lonely and depressed - usually in places like that app, as I feel it's usually women who say things like this? - is the reassurance that "someone loves and cares about you", or sometimes it's even the commenter themselves (a stranger) who tells you that they love you. I've read guides and articles and things about why you shouldn't commit suicide (because that's how mentally healthy I am), and some have ended with something like "even if you feel that nobody else loves you, I love you! So that's one person!"

Here are the comments that prompted this:



It irritates me, a lot. Maybe I've even ranted about it before, I don't know. I don't even think I can effectively put my frustration into coherent words, but perhaps the analogy I started this with (and said to that person) gives some idea of how it feels. What comfort is 'love' if it's some informed, abstract thing? If it's coming from someone who doesn't know your name? In what meaningful sense does that actually matter? If someone truly loved and cared about you, they'd spend time with you, be there for you, be a part of your life. When people think they can just throw out such a weighty word as if its effects will hold regardless of its source, it feels so... insulting, or something. Sympathy, compassion, maybe, but to call that love? It isn't. At least not in any meaningful sense of the word. If I do not feel loved, then in what sense could it be said that I am loved, or that love is 'always with me'? Saying you're in the heat when you're shivering and blue just isn't true.

Or maybe I'm just unusually ungrateful? Maybe some people actually are helped by this? I wonder. Maybe just hearing that 'someone' loves them - no matter how nebulous or distant that someone is - is enough to create a bright crack in their dark cocoon? Their minds certainly work differently to mine, if that's the case.

Perhaps it's similar to the 'relationship' that some people have with God, actually. The feeling of reassurance that even if He's silent, He's always there watching over them, loving them. It's always seemed too insubstantial to me, but if people can make it work for them, I suppose that's only a good thing. If it helps them feel better.

I won't go on about it any more than this. It's just something I've seen come up a lot, and I always wonder whether it does help anyone, since it only makes me feel worse.