A Psychological Analysis of Life: "WHY"
Life is a game. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. You learn your lessons, constantly training your inherited ML algorithm, trying not to commit the same mistakes and optimizing it to achieve the "goals", which are subjectively and objectively defined by you. Your goals change, your interest change, your priorities change, people around you change, conditions change and inevitably everything change. But what differentiates humans from other species is the ability to find the explanation for the change. The curiosity, excitement, frustration, feeling powerless: all these comes along on the path of finding the answer of "Why". The whole universe is chaotic in itself but that has never prevented us from trying to find patterns all around us! This whole ordeal makes life both interesting and challenging.
This is my attempt to list down my observations of finding explanations for one such change. There is a very common pattern of people's behavior around this particular change and how they address/react to it. I think conveying it via a specific situation gives a certain perspective to the reader and they can relate to it more closely. There are some anecdotes here and that's what the entire focus of this article is: To somehow get the message through.
This won't last forever!
To be honest, there were signs. There were small but subtle signs, which I choose to ignore especially after August, when the first major blow was dealt. But how did we ended up here? What changed exactly? Could I have done something to prevent all this? If I could go back, what all will I change and would it have an effect? And most importantly: "why"?
I am not gonna start from the beginning. I want it to be a short story instead of describing a quarter of my life. So, this is just gonna be about finding the explanation. Firstly, I have very limited information about what is going on the other side. Unlike movies, where we know both the perspectives, I think the hardest part is that, in reality, you are walking on a cliff blindfolded, analyzing and predicting things as much as possible from the little amount of information you get. So, I lot of things I write below might be wrong but the theory at least satisfy all the data point available with me.
Part I: Things leading to the inevitable!
It's been a long distance relationship from day 1, but I thought in 6 years, that kinda settled in. I think over time people stop valuing the small things in life. You got admission into a good college. Getting out of home, living in a hostel gave you a new kind of independence which you never had before. You start getting attention from new people. At that moment, you just want to get rid of the difficult things and move towards a more comfortable and easy life. I think somewhere in that moment, the long distance became a burden and the independence and attention too hard to resist. And that's where it all started. This was the first step.
Anger is one of the most intriguing part of human behavior. It's strange in itself. In my personal experience, I usually get angry only on people whom I care about. But our human mind perceives anger differently. We tend to link anger with disrespect and violence. We think that when people get angry, they do it because they don't care about us and it's only going to get worse, resulting in physical violence at some point of time. This is actually true in some instances but not all cases are same. If we know the person, we should first try to understand why exactly the person is angry. One of the reasons of anger is pain. If the person is in pain, they try to channel that through anger. This is where I came in. I wasn't innocent in all this. I didn't make anything easy in this whole ordeal you have been going through. But I never thought that there was a life without you. Well at least not anymore at that moment. I was scared. I was scared of losing you and I was in so much pain everyday and all I wanted was reassurance from you. I got angry. A lot! And this was the second step. The burden to understand my anger wasn't on you and it was all my fault. It was my insecurity, it was my frustration, it was my pain, it was my fear. I can justify it in many different ways but it was my fault. period.
People have a tendency to run away from situations. They create random reasons, they will pretend things don't affect them, they pretend they are happy, posting pics on instagram, updating facebook status, but deep down, the conscious mind is aware of the truth. It can see though the fake smile and our tendency of self-guilt kicks in. But, people do find a way out. They just start running faster, without ever confronting the truth. They keep pretending to be someone else. All my anger moved you away from me. You couldn't see things from my perspective (understandably so, with so much going in your life) and that's all you could remember of me. Of all our time together throughout the years, the angry "me" become my representation. I am not sure whether this was intentional though. I think you wanted to run away. You wanted to remove the burden and this was your way of justifying everything. You finally found a reason to ease everything and with everything falling into place: a good internship, part of good clubs, seniors respecting you, people telling you how awesome your resume is and people seeking you out. All these successes blurred the more important things in life and the third step slowly crept in. In all this madness, you however forget that no matter how fast we run, we can never outrun our shadows. And guilt is the darkest of shadows there is.
Then there is ego. We never really realize moments when we are being egoistic. We feel confident about our actions. Ego disguises itself as self confidence. Ego operates out of self-interest. It seeks approval, accolades and validation at all costs in order to be seen as “right”. It is resistant to feedback and assigns motive where there isn’t any. All these attributes makes dealing with ego surprisingly complicated. And for whatever reason, this became the fourth and final step. I think somewhere through all this turbulent period, you started feeling no matter what you do, some things won't change, some people won't go away and you can always come back to the way things were. This is where everything came tumbling down. This belief pushed you further in the direction of moving away. But you forgot that change is inevitable and that one shouldn't push people to their limit, because they often retaliate in unpredictable ways. History has so many such examples and we became another one. I over-analyze things. I think this is clear from the start. Somewhere I also guessed your thought process and finally realized that I have lost everything. I think for the first time in our relationship, I gave up on us. This was my lowest point. This is where everything fall apart.
Part II: Since then...
On my side, I mostly struggled. That's it! I struggled and struggled and struggled and hid all my pain from everyone around me as much as possible. But I kept hoping. I kept hoping that maybe I will get my closure. On her side, I can only theorize what happened. I have very minute indirect information about the events and this is all just a guess. Now, there are some more details which are hard to list down and divide concretely into phases. There are tons of small things which happened and influenced the transitions from one phase to another but given that it's all a theory, I don't want to bore you with a lot more details. But whatever fits and explains almost everything is summarized below:
The Happy Go Lucky Phase: The first few months were good. I think perhaps the first 6 months were good, till the end of internship. All was smooth sailing. No major missing. New life, new adventures, new friends, new independence. Everything was on track, everything around was feeding your ego. You didn't care about me and didn't care that I never reached out to you. You changed essentially. I know because I have been in this situation. You start having people around you who said what you wanted to hear. This was an old trait of yours, it just intensified. The down-to-earth girl became the overconfident MBA brat I guess. People change!
The Fighter Phase: Then came in the next phase. You didn't get a PPO, while some of your colleagues did. You missed classes and had a hard time at college. You weren't taking part in events (and if you were, you weren't winning). And you end up taking consulting domain instead of operations. I think it was peer-pressure. The potential opportunities overshadowed the reality of your past experience in consulting. This was a downward spiral for you. You went back to the things you wanted to escape when you took the admission. This affected your confidence and somewhere the reality started catching up. Life was becoming hard again and this is not what you wanted. But you are a fighter. You haven't given up yet and you have to prove everyone wrong. You kept fighting.
The Denial Phase: Next in line was denial. Things weren't going as you expected. There were hints that somewhere deep inside you wanted me there but you kept denying it. You started realizing a bit about what matters and what doesn't, but you kept telling yourself that you have everything. You kept running faster. You have support systems in place but they weren't working anymore because they were only saying what you wanted to hear. But you also had distractions. You were busy in college and you still have tons of things to do. You also made sure to remember how angry I was along with all the mistakes I did throughout our relationship so that you can justify your decisions and get the desired feeling that you did the right thing.
The Turning Over Phase: In simple words, you reached the tipping point. I guess something major happened around you. Given the information, someone around you find the perfect guy and your perfect guy turned out not to be that perfect after-all. You got a job but you soon realized it wasn't the perfect one either. The whole 2 years of your imagination castle was getting cracks now. Also, the thought crossed your mind that it's almost an year and I haven't reached out to you. Your step four assumptions had serious cracks now and it started hitting you that maybe I might not be coming back. This was hard but there were still people around you who were keeping you on the edge. Your advisors kept holding you but deep inside you know what you wanted, but weren't strong enough to go get it.
The Realization Phase: To be honest, I am not sure you are here yet. I think you are somewhere in between the last phase and this one. I know that you have moved cities and you aren't happy there. The job satisfaction isn't there and you back in the same old loop you escaped once, but now the pressure is on you because you just can't keep giving up. Overall, wrt to me, I think this is the state where you will be able to see beyond my anger and see things from my perspective. I don't know how or when you will reach this phase and what would be the trigger. You think it's too late though and there is no way back to being us. So even if you come to this phase, it would take a whole next level of guts to reach out to me. Knowing you, there is a high probability that this might not happen.
Part III: To Infinity and Beyond
There were good times. I remember when we cooked our first meal together, pulao and maggi, in the middle of summer. I remember our first dance, our first morning walk, our first bike ride, our first movie together and our long long talks. I know there are a lot of firsts we didn't do and I so wanted to do all of them with you. And you know what the worst part is? The worst part is the fact that I don't know how much of that was real anymore. How much of those firsts were also special for you, how much of the time spend with me was because you wanted to, how much you actually meant the things you said, how honest where the feelings you expressed, how truthful you really were through all that time.
To be perfectly honest, I don't know what will happen if you decide to reach out. Somewhere deep inside I want to have a conversation with you to understand everything. I imagined a lot of possible scenarios but overtime I have lost hope and I think this is my acceptance state. But there are lessons, and there are tons of them. Some of them you taught me and some taught by the life itself. I think each scenarios teaches you a lot and I do want to take something good out of all this. I have summarized it into 3 major ones:
Patience: The most important lesson out of all this ordeal for me was patience. It's amazing what patience brings to the table and to see the things considering time as a dimension. I never imagined I will be back to normal, and I kept hoping for you to come back and that's where I developed it. I think it was a defensive mechanism to prevent me from breaking apart and it helped.
Not only that patience steers towards an emotional equilibrium. Looking back, the reason why I was angry and frustrated was because I was impatient. I wanted all the assurances from you on day 1 and I wasn't able to wait. All those emotions blurs the bigger picture and you lose sight of your goal. I also used to confuse patience with losing aggression. I think I am still aggressive towards my work but patient towards the end results.
Value each moment: Another one is enjoy every moment, both small and large. I was too focused on the larger and future ones that somehow I lost the present ones. I was always looking forward to the time we will be together and how each of that moment is going to look like. I think it was counterproductive because firstly, it didn't let me prioritize things at hand and secondly, when you left, it also took away a significant portion of my future dreams, making it tougher to get over the situation.
Looking beyond self: This is something I learnt from you, the old you, the original one whom I fell in love with. Over all our time together, you constantly (though indirectly) reminded me that each human being is unique, they are special in their own way and we should always respect their perspectives. As a young blood, it took some time to have this message reach through, but it helped me in numerous ways.
I now give the benefit of doubt to situations more often than before. I accept different perspectives and try to look at things from others' point of view. I also don't know what the other person is going through and I put in efforts to understand that before jumping to conclusion. Also, being patient helped.
I would be lying if I don't mention about revenge in this story. I thought about it but I get an uneasy feeling whenever I wanted to pursue that path. I think my values didn't allow me to do anything unnecessary and my faith kind of pushed me to focus on better things. Looking back, that's one of the best decisions I made. I don't have to take revenge, because ultimately, universe has an interesting way of balancing things and showing us the mirror. I lost someone who didn't love me anymore and you lost someone who loved you the most. One day you will realize the value of what all you have lost. One day you will realize that no one could have loved you more than I did. And that one day is much much closer than you think.
In the end, I think the combinations of these lessons helped me understand myself better and steer me towards a much better individual overall. I am not perfect. I never was and I probably never will be. However, there is a way to be perfect and there are perfect people out there. There is still a lot to learn from others and it's a long road ahead of me. This is just a new beginning....
This is my attempt to list down my observations of finding explanations for one such change. There is a very common pattern of people's behavior around this particular change and how they address/react to it. I think conveying it via a specific situation gives a certain perspective to the reader and they can relate to it more closely. There are some anecdotes here and that's what the entire focus of this article is: To somehow get the message through.
This won't last forever!
(Written from a perspective of a random stranger in search of peace!)
To be honest, there were signs. There were small but subtle signs, which I choose to ignore especially after August, when the first major blow was dealt. But how did we ended up here? What changed exactly? Could I have done something to prevent all this? If I could go back, what all will I change and would it have an effect? And most importantly: "why"?
I am not gonna start from the beginning. I want it to be a short story instead of describing a quarter of my life. So, this is just gonna be about finding the explanation. Firstly, I have very limited information about what is going on the other side. Unlike movies, where we know both the perspectives, I think the hardest part is that, in reality, you are walking on a cliff blindfolded, analyzing and predicting things as much as possible from the little amount of information you get. So, I lot of things I write below might be wrong but the theory at least satisfy all the data point available with me.
Part I: Things leading to the inevitable!
It's been a long distance relationship from day 1, but I thought in 6 years, that kinda settled in. I think over time people stop valuing the small things in life. You got admission into a good college. Getting out of home, living in a hostel gave you a new kind of independence which you never had before. You start getting attention from new people. At that moment, you just want to get rid of the difficult things and move towards a more comfortable and easy life. I think somewhere in that moment, the long distance became a burden and the independence and attention too hard to resist. And that's where it all started. This was the first step.
Anger is one of the most intriguing part of human behavior. It's strange in itself. In my personal experience, I usually get angry only on people whom I care about. But our human mind perceives anger differently. We tend to link anger with disrespect and violence. We think that when people get angry, they do it because they don't care about us and it's only going to get worse, resulting in physical violence at some point of time. This is actually true in some instances but not all cases are same. If we know the person, we should first try to understand why exactly the person is angry. One of the reasons of anger is pain. If the person is in pain, they try to channel that through anger. This is where I came in. I wasn't innocent in all this. I didn't make anything easy in this whole ordeal you have been going through. But I never thought that there was a life without you. Well at least not anymore at that moment. I was scared. I was scared of losing you and I was in so much pain everyday and all I wanted was reassurance from you. I got angry. A lot! And this was the second step. The burden to understand my anger wasn't on you and it was all my fault. It was my insecurity, it was my frustration, it was my pain, it was my fear. I can justify it in many different ways but it was my fault. period.
People have a tendency to run away from situations. They create random reasons, they will pretend things don't affect them, they pretend they are happy, posting pics on instagram, updating facebook status, but deep down, the conscious mind is aware of the truth. It can see though the fake smile and our tendency of self-guilt kicks in. But, people do find a way out. They just start running faster, without ever confronting the truth. They keep pretending to be someone else. All my anger moved you away from me. You couldn't see things from my perspective (understandably so, with so much going in your life) and that's all you could remember of me. Of all our time together throughout the years, the angry "me" become my representation. I am not sure whether this was intentional though. I think you wanted to run away. You wanted to remove the burden and this was your way of justifying everything. You finally found a reason to ease everything and with everything falling into place: a good internship, part of good clubs, seniors respecting you, people telling you how awesome your resume is and people seeking you out. All these successes blurred the more important things in life and the third step slowly crept in. In all this madness, you however forget that no matter how fast we run, we can never outrun our shadows. And guilt is the darkest of shadows there is.
Then there is ego. We never really realize moments when we are being egoistic. We feel confident about our actions. Ego disguises itself as self confidence. Ego operates out of self-interest. It seeks approval, accolades and validation at all costs in order to be seen as “right”. It is resistant to feedback and assigns motive where there isn’t any. All these attributes makes dealing with ego surprisingly complicated. And for whatever reason, this became the fourth and final step. I think somewhere through all this turbulent period, you started feeling no matter what you do, some things won't change, some people won't go away and you can always come back to the way things were. This is where everything came tumbling down. This belief pushed you further in the direction of moving away. But you forgot that change is inevitable and that one shouldn't push people to their limit, because they often retaliate in unpredictable ways. History has so many such examples and we became another one. I over-analyze things. I think this is clear from the start. Somewhere I also guessed your thought process and finally realized that I have lost everything. I think for the first time in our relationship, I gave up on us. This was my lowest point. This is where everything fall apart.
Part II: Since then...
On my side, I mostly struggled. That's it! I struggled and struggled and struggled and hid all my pain from everyone around me as much as possible. But I kept hoping. I kept hoping that maybe I will get my closure. On her side, I can only theorize what happened. I have very minute indirect information about the events and this is all just a guess. Now, there are some more details which are hard to list down and divide concretely into phases. There are tons of small things which happened and influenced the transitions from one phase to another but given that it's all a theory, I don't want to bore you with a lot more details. But whatever fits and explains almost everything is summarized below:
The Happy Go Lucky Phase: The first few months were good. I think perhaps the first 6 months were good, till the end of internship. All was smooth sailing. No major missing. New life, new adventures, new friends, new independence. Everything was on track, everything around was feeding your ego. You didn't care about me and didn't care that I never reached out to you. You changed essentially. I know because I have been in this situation. You start having people around you who said what you wanted to hear. This was an old trait of yours, it just intensified. The down-to-earth girl became the overconfident MBA brat I guess. People change!
The Fighter Phase: Then came in the next phase. You didn't get a PPO, while some of your colleagues did. You missed classes and had a hard time at college. You weren't taking part in events (and if you were, you weren't winning). And you end up taking consulting domain instead of operations. I think it was peer-pressure. The potential opportunities overshadowed the reality of your past experience in consulting. This was a downward spiral for you. You went back to the things you wanted to escape when you took the admission. This affected your confidence and somewhere the reality started catching up. Life was becoming hard again and this is not what you wanted. But you are a fighter. You haven't given up yet and you have to prove everyone wrong. You kept fighting.
The Denial Phase: Next in line was denial. Things weren't going as you expected. There were hints that somewhere deep inside you wanted me there but you kept denying it. You started realizing a bit about what matters and what doesn't, but you kept telling yourself that you have everything. You kept running faster. You have support systems in place but they weren't working anymore because they were only saying what you wanted to hear. But you also had distractions. You were busy in college and you still have tons of things to do. You also made sure to remember how angry I was along with all the mistakes I did throughout our relationship so that you can justify your decisions and get the desired feeling that you did the right thing.
The Turning Over Phase: In simple words, you reached the tipping point. I guess something major happened around you. Given the information, someone around you find the perfect guy and your perfect guy turned out not to be that perfect after-all. You got a job but you soon realized it wasn't the perfect one either. The whole 2 years of your imagination castle was getting cracks now. Also, the thought crossed your mind that it's almost an year and I haven't reached out to you. Your step four assumptions had serious cracks now and it started hitting you that maybe I might not be coming back. This was hard but there were still people around you who were keeping you on the edge. Your advisors kept holding you but deep inside you know what you wanted, but weren't strong enough to go get it.
The Realization Phase: To be honest, I am not sure you are here yet. I think you are somewhere in between the last phase and this one. I know that you have moved cities and you aren't happy there. The job satisfaction isn't there and you back in the same old loop you escaped once, but now the pressure is on you because you just can't keep giving up. Overall, wrt to me, I think this is the state where you will be able to see beyond my anger and see things from my perspective. I don't know how or when you will reach this phase and what would be the trigger. You think it's too late though and there is no way back to being us. So even if you come to this phase, it would take a whole next level of guts to reach out to me. Knowing you, there is a high probability that this might not happen.
Part III: To Infinity and Beyond
There were good times. I remember when we cooked our first meal together, pulao and maggi, in the middle of summer. I remember our first dance, our first morning walk, our first bike ride, our first movie together and our long long talks. I know there are a lot of firsts we didn't do and I so wanted to do all of them with you. And you know what the worst part is? The worst part is the fact that I don't know how much of that was real anymore. How much of those firsts were also special for you, how much of the time spend with me was because you wanted to, how much you actually meant the things you said, how honest where the feelings you expressed, how truthful you really were through all that time.
To be perfectly honest, I don't know what will happen if you decide to reach out. Somewhere deep inside I want to have a conversation with you to understand everything. I imagined a lot of possible scenarios but overtime I have lost hope and I think this is my acceptance state. But there are lessons, and there are tons of them. Some of them you taught me and some taught by the life itself. I think each scenarios teaches you a lot and I do want to take something good out of all this. I have summarized it into 3 major ones:
Patience: The most important lesson out of all this ordeal for me was patience. It's amazing what patience brings to the table and to see the things considering time as a dimension. I never imagined I will be back to normal, and I kept hoping for you to come back and that's where I developed it. I think it was a defensive mechanism to prevent me from breaking apart and it helped.
Not only that patience steers towards an emotional equilibrium. Looking back, the reason why I was angry and frustrated was because I was impatient. I wanted all the assurances from you on day 1 and I wasn't able to wait. All those emotions blurs the bigger picture and you lose sight of your goal. I also used to confuse patience with losing aggression. I think I am still aggressive towards my work but patient towards the end results.
Value each moment: Another one is enjoy every moment, both small and large. I was too focused on the larger and future ones that somehow I lost the present ones. I was always looking forward to the time we will be together and how each of that moment is going to look like. I think it was counterproductive because firstly, it didn't let me prioritize things at hand and secondly, when you left, it also took away a significant portion of my future dreams, making it tougher to get over the situation.
Looking beyond self: This is something I learnt from you, the old you, the original one whom I fell in love with. Over all our time together, you constantly (though indirectly) reminded me that each human being is unique, they are special in their own way and we should always respect their perspectives. As a young blood, it took some time to have this message reach through, but it helped me in numerous ways.
I now give the benefit of doubt to situations more often than before. I accept different perspectives and try to look at things from others' point of view. I also don't know what the other person is going through and I put in efforts to understand that before jumping to conclusion. Also, being patient helped.
I would be lying if I don't mention about revenge in this story. I thought about it but I get an uneasy feeling whenever I wanted to pursue that path. I think my values didn't allow me to do anything unnecessary and my faith kind of pushed me to focus on better things. Looking back, that's one of the best decisions I made. I don't have to take revenge, because ultimately, universe has an interesting way of balancing things and showing us the mirror. I lost someone who didn't love me anymore and you lost someone who loved you the most. One day you will realize the value of what all you have lost. One day you will realize that no one could have loved you more than I did. And that one day is much much closer than you think.
In the end, I think the combinations of these lessons helped me understand myself better and steer me towards a much better individual overall. I am not perfect. I never was and I probably never will be. However, there is a way to be perfect and there are perfect people out there. There is still a lot to learn from others and it's a long road ahead of me. This is just a new beginning....
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