When someone wounds you, what do you do? Do you retaliate? Do you obsess about the circumstances of the incidents surrounding the great personal injury you suffered? Or do you let it go? Like a butterfly, wings gently propelling the memories and the circumstances away from your psyche until you find peace?
Technology makes letting go a complicated process. We are all so hooked in. We are notified if anyone we knows makes a move, bakes a cake, has an issue with their boss, their husband, or their neighbors. We see it in living color. Sometimes too graphic. And there it is. We simply cannot get away from the everyday ramblings of anyone we know--or have known.
There is incredible discipline involved in healing a wound. We have all had that tiny scab in an inconvenient place that, no matter how much we know better, we pick at. I have done it. Scratching a mosquito bite never ends well, if I can trivialize this for a moment. But it's not trivial. It's instantly possible to track the whereabouts and daily musings of anyone with whom we have ever had a connection. Even our arch enemies. Blocking aside. Blocking is only as good as your willingness not to outsmart the block you or another has set in place. Really, with all of the various ways to circumvent a block in most social media, a block is simply a digital "fuck you." Something in place so that the very first time (or tenth time) that person you used to know checks to see if that block remains, you can once again send a technological Hallmark of rejection. I block you. I block you. You can't come to my birthday party. You can't play with my toys. Anyone and anything but you is preferable to you. And so on.
It's a dirty business, perhaps even more so in the clinical sterility of it all. It's not the same as the classic playground scuffle--everyone angry, everyone running home--maybe even a fistfight. A fight on a playground involves real people in real interactions in a real place, engaged. Technology makes it far easier. It allows us to remove a person, a loved-one, a family member, a colleague, even a lover with a simple press of a button. The email "Dear John" letter has become a simple setting in a myriad of social networking applications. The very hollowness and inhumanness of it all makes it wound all the more.
You can be rendered a nonperson with the touch of a button. Click. You never existed.
And that is what has happened to interacting with fellow humans in 2015.
Think of the ramifications of this. Life becomes one big role play game. If you don't like the players, turn the game off, and walk away. You don't have to concern yourself with their feelings or souls or anything at all. You can erase them. Delete, delete, delete.
There's a popular song that says it well. "Somebody That I Used to Know" by Gotye. In the official music video a naked man stands against a wall describing his pain. As he sings, the wall is painted like a huge geometric puzzle, and as he continues to lay out the circumstances of his relationship-strife, he, too, is painted like the wall and eventually disappears. He becomes the wall. Later a similarly painted woman turns to deliver some sort of harsh judgment and basically it's clear to the viewer that everyone naked and painted geometrically is having a very horrible day.
But there is some glaring reality in this song. Something that made it a huge hit. It's starkly real. (Even though it quaintly refers to his lover collecting her record collection. Circa 1984.) But that odd reference, presumably because "CD collection" is a shitty rhyme whereas "record" falls trippingly off the tongue, there is some kernel of incredible pain here. It is the pain of being rendered nonexistent by the person who was so terribly meaningful to you. It's the click death of social media. You are blocked. You cease to exist. He goes on to lament, "You didn't have to cut me off...act like we were nothing." Therein lies the rub: People want to exist. It's a natural human urge--we are wired to it. We especially want to be remembered (even with scorn) by someone with whom we shared a great emotional attachment.
You know there are those old movies where a patriarch of a family says with harshness and an unmistakable sense of forever, "He is dead to me. I have no son." This father, in all his infinite evil, knows that there is no better way to destroy his son in absentia. He deletes him. It would be healthier for the son if his father raged against him. Hell, even went after him with a baseball bat. But deleting someone who loves you will always be the quickest way to leave your mark. You are never forgotten in your heartless, evil, and everlasting cruelty. If only the son in this scenario could wash his hands of "Pop" too and go blithely on his way. But it doesn't work that way. The first person to delete the other person wins some subliminal war of sadism. It is the antithesis of honoring our connections with other humans, even the ones that have died a natural death.
So I choose to honor those who have fallen away from me today. I honor their memories. I honor the time spent. I honor the love I felt and the time and energy I gave. I honor the energy and love and time I received from another human being. And in the cases where someone left my life a misery, I appreciate that relationship is a two way street--even the worst of them. We all participate. It's just too bad we can't all come to peace.
However, maybe there is peace in the realization that we are not actually deleted. No one is deleted. We are not blocked from life. We are not erased. We don't even have to stand naked against a geometric wall slowly blending into it, eventually disappearing, like some horrifying Fellini film. We can embrace ourselves. We can realize (even if we don't believe in God or fate) that there is usually some order to things. People come and go. Even Billy Joel knew it.
"So many people in and out of my life, some will last, some will just be now and then."
He was optimistic. He was pre-digital. He knew that reality meant that he might just run into a person again. And hopefully when he did, he was healthy, wealthy and wise.
I wish you peace in all your relationships,
Beauty <3
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