Coming out of the closet
When I was a little girl, and feeling unloved, or that my folks were being mean, I would go sit in my tiny closet with the light out and the door shut. The bizarre kid logic behind this demonstration was to make myself suffer even more, to make myself so pitiful that my mom or dad would come rescue me and feel great remorse at my ending up in such forlorn misery because of their actions.
I would go into the closet, shut the door, sit on the floor in the dark and wait for someone to notice my absence, wait for someone to notice my abject despondency and do something about it.
No one ever did.
And eventually I would get bored, get up, and go back into my room and play. I played out this little one-girl show more than once, with the same result every time. Eventually, I learned that it wasn’t working for me.
What made me remember that?
I have been gratified by people expressing their admiration for my strength in the midst of grief, for my openness to experiencing enjoyment despite everything, including my own misgivings. It makes me feel like perhaps I’m doing something right, making progress, and I’m glad that someone thinks so. But in my heart, I don’t feel it as strength. It is all far too precarious for me to claim it as such, or even claim it as my own. The most I can claim is that I’ve made a decision to try to follow Goethe’s advice, enjoying when I can and enduring when I must. To do otherwise is to go sit in the closet in the dark. Nobody feels bad about it but me, and to insist upon sitting in the dark on some bizarre indefinite principle or mistaken sense of propriety makes me nothing more than my own victim. It makes me ungrateful, too. If I can laugh, I have a duty to do so. Because I know without question that there will be times, again, when I will not be able to. I try not to suffer any more than I have to; sometimes I’m successful, sometimes I’m not.
"Suffering is not holding you. You are holding suffering. When you become good at the art of letting sufferings go, then you’ll come to realize how unnecessary it was for you to drag those burdens around with you. You’ll see that no one else other than you was responsible. The truth is that existence wants your life to become a festival."-Osho