Emotional Risk, or My Brief Emotional History
I know what the next major hurdle in the development of myself is, and that's emotional risk. Emotional risk isn't so complicated a subject and I'm sure it affects everybody to some degree or another. All I mean by it is the potential emotional pain you may cause yourself by committing yourself to any personal endeavour. For me my problem is largely to do with interpersonal relationships, so I'll be talking about that, though 'personal endeavour' could refer to anything really.
I've come to realise that my entire life has unfurled in such a way that it has made me feel as though emotional risk ought be avoided at all costs. I can trace this progression. Firstly--and this is me much younger, so I don't have active memories of this; rather it's speculation--I was born in Botswana and moved to England at a very young age. In this period of development, I'm willing to speculate that subconsciously my lessons first began in avoiding attachments too deep, being able to cut yourself off at will. Avoiding deep attachments is another way of saying avoiding emotional risk.
Secondly--and I'll group two separate instances together here--I've lived in the United States twice; once for a short time at around the kindergarten/grade 1 stage, and another when I was about 9 or 10. On both these occasions I connected deeply with people I had met in these countries (especially the second time, at about age 10) and was forced to move back to the UK by parental decisions, thus feeling the pain of broken attachment and seeing that emotional risk is a heavy price.
Thirdly--and again, I'll do more grouping here for the sake of brevity--I've felt the painful side of emotional risk multiple times with girls I have loved. My love was fathoms deep for A1 (the 1 is to differentiate her from further As to come) and lasted from about 2007-2010, deep in the heart of my adolescent growth. I mention her first because she was perhaps the first with whom failure left a lasting impression. I mean, as a 10 year old, I did love V before her in America, but I'm willing to dismiss that due to age and how it feels I overcame that more easily. What made A1 especially pertinent to the theme of this post is that I went all out, told her I loved her many times (and meant it), and he were intimate and cutesy physically, but she could not commit to me in the same romantic way that I was committing to her, and it broke my heart. I forced myself to shut down my feelings towards her and I began to actively develop a stoic attitude towards life.
The second girl, A2, was more of the same, but now even more intense, as I was 18 years old and at the beginning of a new life. We were able to get to know each other deeply and quickly through our excessive openness on Tumblr and we soon grew very close. I was infatuated, madly in love, and let her know as much. She was wary but not decisively rejecting, and this made me throw myself in full-throttle. I have somewhat of a jealous disposition and one day, on her birthday party, she seemed to be actively avoiding me and it hurt me so much that I just left. She grew worried sick and practically conducted a search party to find me. When she discovered I had just walked out, she wouldn't forgive me, claimed that I couldn't handle being her friend. Long story short, I agreed with her and cut off all contact. My heart, which had already been shattered by A1 but that had begin to heal, was demolished, exploded, by A2 and I was left reeling from my loss of her for months. I'm 20 now, almost 21, and I still think of her. She remains a permanent loss for me, a potential perfect love, lost forever. Emotional risk is expensive.
The third, my first true girlfriend, was N. Though I had had months to move on, part of me was still reeling from A2, but I was introduced to N and we hit it off rather quickly. By the time we met, I was deep into a fear of emotional risk and it took a lot for me to come around to the idea that perhaps something worthwhile could happen with her. In fact, some of those thoughts are documented on this blog. Slowly but surely, I did open up and we had something short-lived. But over the summer, she bored of me and, in a drawn-out fashion over the Fringe festival that involved not meeting up with me and seeming bored and unbothered when she finally did, decided to end it with me. It still hurts now, the way everything came crumbling down with seemingly no good reason. Emotional risks are random and unaccountable, it seems.
There is a half-fourth, or rather a 3.5. I began to love this girl H sometime last year and was beginning to make the moves so that it was known, but had that crushed and shut down early when I discovered she had a boyfriend. I know this is just a thing that happens, but the fact remains that I entertained the emotional risk and was quickly punished for it.
More recently, there has been this girl, A3, that caught my attention and I developed a crush on. However, nothing between us developed properly because my fear of emotional risk has clamped around my mind like shackles and weighed me down, unable to do anything. This is contemporary stuff, so I feel terrible about it right now, but she's going back to Germany in February, so there's no use in my doing anything about her in particular. What I need to do is tackle my fear of emotional risk.
Thus ends the historical segment, and so begins the reflective segment.
I mean, there are certain things I know about the concept of risk that apply here just as much as to economic risk or anything. The higher the possibility of profit, the higher the chance of risk. The more you put in, the more you can lose. So it should obviously follow that if I want the strong, transcendent feelings, the powerful passions, I should put more in and accept the fact that the risk rises proportionally, right? Well, yes, and I do, but that doesn't help me, because I'm afraid of the risks themselves -- the broken heartedness, the raised anxieties and neuroses, the self-inflicted solitude. I want to love and be loved, but I'm afraid of the shark-infested moat that surrounds that palace.
What's more, it spills over into innocuous things like friendship. We can expect as much from romantic pursuits, but even in making friends I seem to be wary about potential emotional risk. In fact, it's almost worst with friendship, because you can't expect a friend to love you over and above everybody else like the aim in monogamous romance is. The risk that you attach and consequently break is much higher in a scenario where the pieces are less socially obliged to each other. In my subconscious mind, friendship almost doesn't seem worth investing in actively; I have to stumble upon it by accident, friends have to come to me. This makes me more solitary than I need to be. (Sometimes more solitary than I want to be, but you reach a point in solitude whereby you learn to accept it and the line between voluntary and involuntary solitude is blurred significantly).
I think I can learn to fear the emotional risks of friendship less if I break down what friendships are. What I need to do is focus on the constituents of friendship, the things that make certain people fun to hang around with, and think of it as investing in those, instead of large, capital-F Friendship. I suppose ultimately a friend is somebody who supports you in some way, whether it's a support in doing something like clubbing or skiing or travelling -- a friend is a crutch and makes existence just that easier. In this way, then, I can focus on the things friends support as opposed to Friendship as a big, scary concept. If there is something that I particularly want to do, I'll seek to reach out to friends. That way the risk isn't in destroying a personal connection, but rather in simply not being able to do certain things as easily. (I should add here that, likewise, to be a friend you have to lend your support, which is another failing of mine. However, I think doing things with somebody is how you cultivate the space for trust, to get people to want to your support, so, calculated and cold as all this may seem, I think it's a good place to start with my thoughts).
I think the idea of Romance is much harder to break down into digestible chunks like that, though. There are too many unexplained, almost mystical components to it. Too many undefined 'clicks', invisible underlying biases. Perhaps the way to break down romance is to reduce it to a kind of friendship, and then break it down in a similar way. I think there's something in this, but I'm not going to solve it in this post. I'll keep it in mind, though, for when the next girl comes along.
I've come to realise that my entire life has unfurled in such a way that it has made me feel as though emotional risk ought be avoided at all costs. I can trace this progression. Firstly--and this is me much younger, so I don't have active memories of this; rather it's speculation--I was born in Botswana and moved to England at a very young age. In this period of development, I'm willing to speculate that subconsciously my lessons first began in avoiding attachments too deep, being able to cut yourself off at will. Avoiding deep attachments is another way of saying avoiding emotional risk.
Secondly--and I'll group two separate instances together here--I've lived in the United States twice; once for a short time at around the kindergarten/grade 1 stage, and another when I was about 9 or 10. On both these occasions I connected deeply with people I had met in these countries (especially the second time, at about age 10) and was forced to move back to the UK by parental decisions, thus feeling the pain of broken attachment and seeing that emotional risk is a heavy price.
Thirdly--and again, I'll do more grouping here for the sake of brevity--I've felt the painful side of emotional risk multiple times with girls I have loved. My love was fathoms deep for A1 (the 1 is to differentiate her from further As to come) and lasted from about 2007-2010, deep in the heart of my adolescent growth. I mention her first because she was perhaps the first with whom failure left a lasting impression. I mean, as a 10 year old, I did love V before her in America, but I'm willing to dismiss that due to age and how it feels I overcame that more easily. What made A1 especially pertinent to the theme of this post is that I went all out, told her I loved her many times (and meant it), and he were intimate and cutesy physically, but she could not commit to me in the same romantic way that I was committing to her, and it broke my heart. I forced myself to shut down my feelings towards her and I began to actively develop a stoic attitude towards life.
The second girl, A2, was more of the same, but now even more intense, as I was 18 years old and at the beginning of a new life. We were able to get to know each other deeply and quickly through our excessive openness on Tumblr and we soon grew very close. I was infatuated, madly in love, and let her know as much. She was wary but not decisively rejecting, and this made me throw myself in full-throttle. I have somewhat of a jealous disposition and one day, on her birthday party, she seemed to be actively avoiding me and it hurt me so much that I just left. She grew worried sick and practically conducted a search party to find me. When she discovered I had just walked out, she wouldn't forgive me, claimed that I couldn't handle being her friend. Long story short, I agreed with her and cut off all contact. My heart, which had already been shattered by A1 but that had begin to heal, was demolished, exploded, by A2 and I was left reeling from my loss of her for months. I'm 20 now, almost 21, and I still think of her. She remains a permanent loss for me, a potential perfect love, lost forever. Emotional risk is expensive.
The third, my first true girlfriend, was N. Though I had had months to move on, part of me was still reeling from A2, but I was introduced to N and we hit it off rather quickly. By the time we met, I was deep into a fear of emotional risk and it took a lot for me to come around to the idea that perhaps something worthwhile could happen with her. In fact, some of those thoughts are documented on this blog. Slowly but surely, I did open up and we had something short-lived. But over the summer, she bored of me and, in a drawn-out fashion over the Fringe festival that involved not meeting up with me and seeming bored and unbothered when she finally did, decided to end it with me. It still hurts now, the way everything came crumbling down with seemingly no good reason. Emotional risks are random and unaccountable, it seems.
There is a half-fourth, or rather a 3.5. I began to love this girl H sometime last year and was beginning to make the moves so that it was known, but had that crushed and shut down early when I discovered she had a boyfriend. I know this is just a thing that happens, but the fact remains that I entertained the emotional risk and was quickly punished for it.
More recently, there has been this girl, A3, that caught my attention and I developed a crush on. However, nothing between us developed properly because my fear of emotional risk has clamped around my mind like shackles and weighed me down, unable to do anything. This is contemporary stuff, so I feel terrible about it right now, but she's going back to Germany in February, so there's no use in my doing anything about her in particular. What I need to do is tackle my fear of emotional risk.
Thus ends the historical segment, and so begins the reflective segment.
I mean, there are certain things I know about the concept of risk that apply here just as much as to economic risk or anything. The higher the possibility of profit, the higher the chance of risk. The more you put in, the more you can lose. So it should obviously follow that if I want the strong, transcendent feelings, the powerful passions, I should put more in and accept the fact that the risk rises proportionally, right? Well, yes, and I do, but that doesn't help me, because I'm afraid of the risks themselves -- the broken heartedness, the raised anxieties and neuroses, the self-inflicted solitude. I want to love and be loved, but I'm afraid of the shark-infested moat that surrounds that palace.
What's more, it spills over into innocuous things like friendship. We can expect as much from romantic pursuits, but even in making friends I seem to be wary about potential emotional risk. In fact, it's almost worst with friendship, because you can't expect a friend to love you over and above everybody else like the aim in monogamous romance is. The risk that you attach and consequently break is much higher in a scenario where the pieces are less socially obliged to each other. In my subconscious mind, friendship almost doesn't seem worth investing in actively; I have to stumble upon it by accident, friends have to come to me. This makes me more solitary than I need to be. (Sometimes more solitary than I want to be, but you reach a point in solitude whereby you learn to accept it and the line between voluntary and involuntary solitude is blurred significantly).
I think I can learn to fear the emotional risks of friendship less if I break down what friendships are. What I need to do is focus on the constituents of friendship, the things that make certain people fun to hang around with, and think of it as investing in those, instead of large, capital-F Friendship. I suppose ultimately a friend is somebody who supports you in some way, whether it's a support in doing something like clubbing or skiing or travelling -- a friend is a crutch and makes existence just that easier. In this way, then, I can focus on the things friends support as opposed to Friendship as a big, scary concept. If there is something that I particularly want to do, I'll seek to reach out to friends. That way the risk isn't in destroying a personal connection, but rather in simply not being able to do certain things as easily. (I should add here that, likewise, to be a friend you have to lend your support, which is another failing of mine. However, I think doing things with somebody is how you cultivate the space for trust, to get people to want to your support, so, calculated and cold as all this may seem, I think it's a good place to start with my thoughts).
I think the idea of Romance is much harder to break down into digestible chunks like that, though. There are too many unexplained, almost mystical components to it. Too many undefined 'clicks', invisible underlying biases. Perhaps the way to break down romance is to reduce it to a kind of friendship, and then break it down in a similar way. I think there's something in this, but I'm not going to solve it in this post. I'll keep it in mind, though, for when the next girl comes along.
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