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Forward Progress vs. Repairing Damage

A Rant

By IanPublished 6 years ago 5 min read
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The Best place to think about broken things is a table full of them.

Forward progress vs. repairing damage.

In very few cases do I see it making sense to try and fix a fractured relationship when trust has been broken. To be clear, I am all for healing hurt, accepting responsibility, and trying to move forward in a healthy fashion. What I am NOT for is going through the cyclical mistrust: the kind of trust you, oh-no-something-similar-is-giving-me-flashbacks-so-now-we-are-back-to-square-one bullshit. It is toxic. It is unhealthy, and more importantly, it robs all parties involved of any dignity or ability to actually focus on beneficial aspects of their lives. Broken trust is like a swirling vortex of entropy; it only leads one direction. At least while wounds are still fresh. People are truly incapable of the age old adage of forgive and forget, and I feel like we do ourselves a disservice by pretending like that is a thing. At least without a prolonged break from the situation that caused us the hurt. This is a large part of the reason I refuse to engage in a lot of situations. It’s like pissing in the wind. It is wasted effort and energy.

Since I have noticed that all of us humans are less analytical than we like to portray ourselves given situations like this, let us examine the above statement in a more visceral way. Let’s say you scrape yourself badly. Your skin is likely so raw that ANY touch is going to cause extreme pain. Because of this, you are likely to view any contact as harmful, and that makes perfect sense, because it IS; your nerves are on fire. You can’t distinguish between medicine and sulfuric acid on your skin, so you avoid EVERYTHING. Until your nerves calm themselves to the point that the touch of the wind won’t set off your pain receptors, it's best to just leave it alone. It is impressive how our body realizes what our brain doesn’t, because we, as humans, never take the time to let something breathe and THEN repair it. We want to fix it right away because we can’t stand the ache and the pain of brokenness, so we stand in the same place we were when we were hurt or deceived and rail until we have answers, until we have “closure." The shit doesn’t exist. The only closure anyone truly gets is a callous to carry. Some are less noticeable than others. Some heal better than others and don’t impede function, but they are there.

Because I refuse to pretend like trust is something that can be restored to factory settings, I also refuse to halt life while trying to repair fractured relationships. I would rather commit seppuku. It is the faster version of what people attempt every day. If I have hurt you, you have every right to feel that way. You have every right to your anger and mistrust and ire. I would never say you didn’t. Whether I intended to hurt you or not doesn’t impact reality. But what you don’t get to demand is for me to throw time and energy into a bottomless hole just because you don’t realize there is a bottom. That is something that no one on this planet has a right to demand. That is more selfish than almost anything in the world. Also, it's rather stupid. You are demanding the person who injured you to heal you? Really? Is that the best use of your time? I am no longer surprised you got hurt in the first place. You don’t know where security and healing come from. That is like asking the stove that burnt you to UNBURN your skin. It just doesn’t work like that. You need to step away, put some cream on it, and then reevaluate the relationship you have with the stove. Respect what it is, respect what it isn’t. Understand what it can do and how it can hurt or help. Only then can you move forward intelligently.

And I guess that is what this all boils down to; intelligence. People think that, if they focus on their emotions, life will be peachy, because they just want to feel good and make others feel the same. They throw their brains out of the window; a combination of a diet based on carbonated drinks, rom-coms, and the wave of “sensitivity” awareness we have been forced to swallow has erased the need for INTELLIGENCE. For the sake of all we hold dear, use your fucking brain. Someone who is drowning shouldn’t look towards the person who is holding their head under water. The intent doesn’t matter. Maybe they are panicking, too. Maybe they don’t mean to do it. Maybe they don’t know anything other than what they are doing. Or maybe it is intentional. No matter what it is, incidental or otherwise, it won’t benefit you to stay in the middle of the shit storm to figure it out.

Distance equals perspective, if you know how to use it. Get some fucking perspective. Move FORWARD. Know why? Because hindsight is 20/20, but in order to to gain hindsight, you have to put things BEHIND you (for the people in the slow section, hindsight is just [BE]hindsight). Anyone who tells you that disengaging from a situation is running away from it is just a codependent piece of shit who doesn’t realize how healthy life works. Distancing yourself is different than running away. Assessing that something isn’t working and taking the appropriate steps to preserve your energy and wellbeing isn’t bad. It is mature and necessary. Staying in a situation hoping for some pyrrhic victory or some chance at martyrdom is just dumb. It scores you no points, and just wastes time you don’t have. Knock that shit off.

That is why I refuse to repair damage past a certain point. It is a zero sum game that no one benefits from, except our ego and the stories we tell about how “hard we tried to make it work” after the fact while sobbing on some new person’s shoulder that will just fall into the same routine and implode the same way because you haven’t learned lesson one from the previous situation. And at that point, anything that happens is YOUR fault, not whomever hurt you.

Deal with it.

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