Posted 8 months, 2 weeks ago in the early morning by oso
I don’t complain. I’m allergic to it. Incapable. I don’t know how. I try. And I fail.
I realize that complaining, to a certain degree, is the currency of compassion. We sit, a coffee, a glass of wine, an apertif. You complain, I soothe. Then: I complain, you soothe. We relate, we bond, and we tell our friends how close we’ve become. I try. Like I said, I fail.
Instead I roll up into a ball of fierce silence. Preservation. My way of coping. Attack it if you will. But in just a few hours I’m back, felling better, giggling under the shaded breeze of public spaces. The complaints aren’t repressed. They’re there, part of life, but digested and accepted. And, eventually, no matter what, we either move forward or we don’t. Right? Suicide has never been an option. And so forward I march, sitting, cross-legged, under the shaded breeze of public spaces.
But complaining is the bad way of saying, “expressing your needs, your desires, your wishes” in a situation where they did not get met. When we complain, we are actually letting people know what we would prefer - how else would they know, otherwise? It’s not just about bonding, and drinking, and soothing — it’s about human *information*. The complaints you never express, the ones you ‘digest and accept’, are regurgitated in the form of you then dismissing the thing you were complaining about; of “crapping out isolation,” if you will. You return ‘feeling better’ because you have pushed away the thing that was causing you confusion or a sense of complaint, not because you actually fixed it or grew from the experience. That’s why it’s interesting that your typo in this post, your own Freudian Slip, is “felling better” rather than “feeling better”.