How can I speak of a foolish heart? It is not logical to believe that a heart can have ideas, thoughts, or beliefs! Yet I still sense that my heart is foolish. How can this be?
After countless hours of intellectualizing I still cannot help but fall victim to that powerful heart. How it weighs on me hourly! What is to be done. Do I need to finally become heartless before I can overcome its spell?
How confusing. Where is my exit, I am still looking. Perhaps I have not looked deep enough. Perhaps I have not delved into the darkest corners of my heart.
What exactly is my heart, this thing that I speak of with such disdain. Let me explore and see what I can find. I see in my parents, those monsters that have played tricks with my mind and my heart. They have attempted to corrupt my being, my ego, my existence, and I have allowed it? Why? Because of my heart!
In them I see my own failings, my own fears, my own loneliness, my own meaninglessness, my own finiteness. Perhaps in them I have attempted to find the solution. The epic struggle to attach myself to something beyond myself, to increase my strength, to justify my existence. In them I have allowed myself to be defined in the fruitless attempt to cover my own fear. This is what my heart has given me.
It is empty, full of pure conditional love. They do not look at me as this individual Steve with feelings, with pains, with ideas. No I am only their tool that they use to satisfy their own failed existence. In me they have attempted to live and I have allowed it. In the process I have sacrificed myself, that all too Christian ideal of human sacrifice lives on in me. How pathetic!
Still I have no clue what this thing is that they call the heart. Perhaps it is because I have never felt loved. I remember being 10 years old and crying myself to sleep in the words "no one loves me." How does a 10 year old child even conceive such a thing. How was it that at such an early age I felt so alone, so unwanted, so unloved.
Yet, there I was, a pathetic puppet looking to get approval, looking to be liked, looking for adoration, looking for LOVE.
But it was not forthcoming. No, my friends, it was not forthcoming unless I achieved what was expected of me. There I was jumping through the hoops like a trained dog. I never realized that a trained dog in no better for itself than an untrained dog. I did not realize that I was altogether perfect, the most perfect that I could possibly be. No, I was in search for that ever elusive goal of LOVE.
Still no answer! All that has been said so far is in the negative. Where is the positive, where is the direction, where is the road out of my terror?
Could it be through courage? Is it courage that allows us to transcend that most evil of human emotions: fear. And is fear even that evil. Does not fear help us when we need to protect ourselves from those monsters that exist in this world?
Yes, it is fear that is evil and it is fear that is essential. But how we react to that fear, how we fight it, how we defeat it, how we make it work for us, that is the key to survival. If we allow fear to get the upper hand we end up looking for saviors, looking for allies. And where do we look? We look to our parents. Those larger human beings that protect us. So in our fear we create a new emotion called love and look to our parents as the guardian against fear. In their love we find the fear is dissipated.
But what do they do when they realize this power. In their own fear they latch on to us and abuse us. They use our own armour against fear, love, against us. They take that beautiful thing called love and totally invert it. They take it and control us. And what do we do, well we know no better, we play along. And in the process we destroy ourselves.
I guess at the end of the day I need to realize that courage is the armour that i need and not the conditional love that was provided by my parents. Courage is what will make me slay that evil monster of fear and finally take my life back. It is courage that will tell me to finally divorce myself from my parents. To realize that yes, they are weak and in fear, but that they have manipulated this and their son to achieve their own ends. By courage I can finally transcend them and my own fear. I can finally say, good bye and good luck, now I live for myself.
Steve
