Good Morning Heartache, You're Like An Old Friend...

(*Note: I had almost finished this post & stupidly navigated away from the page, thereby losing it all. Crap. Please take this into account...this post actually took twice the effort of a normal post.*)

Lately I have found my mind wandering back to the same thoughts over & over again...

How many times can a heart be broken before it is no longer able to repair itself? How long can you be heartbroken over a person before you are just heartbroken, in general?

For the record I would like to state that I hate these types of posts. I hate writing them. I hate reading them afterwards thinking to myself "Man, I sound like such a whiner". I try to project a strong and unshakable exterior because I associate emotion with weakness. Truthfully, I am a very emotional person, but it's unlikely that you will ever see that. I pride myself on my strength. If you hurt me I will scream rather than cry. Crying is weak. Anger is strong. Most of the time I can't even be bothered with anger....I mask most of my feelings with witty sarcasm and humour so that it is at least entertaining to the masses. I'd much rather be perceived as callous than weak.

I am taking a class about Adapting Canadian Literature to Film. Currently we are studying Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" (Fantastic novel, I strongly recommend it) and I came across a passage that really spoke to me and I would like to share that with you now:


"Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time..."

"...With that man you wanted it to work, to work out. Working out was also something you did to keep your body in shape, for the man. If you worked out enough, maybe the man would too. Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, would go wandering off on a trajectory of his own, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawl, which you could counteract by exercise. If you didn't work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude. Everything that went on in your life was thought to be due to some positive or negative power emanating from inside your head.

If you don't like it, change it, we said, to each other and to ourselves. And so we would change the man, for another one. Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves."


Any thoughts?