When a Heart Breaks, it Don't Break Even

By: Kelly

So far my "diary" type blogs have been annoyingly chipper but now I'm going to swing to the other extreme and blog about how anxious and depressed I feel. The root of those emotions is my own actions and how annoyed and sick I am of myself. Listening to myself complain about it just makes it worse but I'm going to do it anyway. I can tell I'm out of sorts because usually I have a clarity of mind when writing that lets the words flow, but this post has been rewritten three times already.

It's funny how the more liked I am, the more I dislike myself. I think most people are the opposite- they live for other people's reassurances that they are in fact a good person. I don't because people constantly overestimate me- they think I'm this successful, kind, smart person with a pure conscience. And my actions and words do attest to that on some level but who I really am, when it comes to my personality and thoughts and I'll just say it, soul, is something completely different. I'm vastly selfish and I can be unflinchingly cold and judgmental and animalistic. It's this survival of the fittest, rationalistic attitude I have. I guess everyone could say that about themselves but I really do think most people do things with better and more noble intentions than I do. Or maybe I've just gotten so good at analyzing myself that I see through the bullshit lies other people will feed to themselves with no problem. I never try to justify my actions; I'm always my own prosecutor.

I want people to see my "bad side" because only then will they really know me. That's why I love to be insulted or called out when I'm wrong. I can probably count the people who know my "bad side" intimately on one hand. But when people like you- and I'm not talking about tolerating you or getting along with you, I'm talking about when they idealize you or are romantically interested in you in any way- they're being fooled. And the less they see you, the more you see yourself. You start to feel like you're acting around them because everything you say could be taken a different way than the way you meant it. And you hate yourself more and more for it but there's nothing you can do because you can't tell them they're wrong.

When asked if I'd rather break someone's heart or be the heart breaker, I always choose the heart breaker because I will always choose guilt over inadequacy. Like John Green said in An Abundance of Katherines:

"The world contains exactly two kinds of people: Dumpers and Dumpees. A lot of people will claim to be both, but those people miss the point entirely: You are predisposed to either one fate or the other. Dumpers may not always be the heartbreakers, and the Dumpees may not always be the heartbroken. But everyone has a tendency."

People who are too morally good for me will always fall for me and I will always somehow end up taking advantage of them. Meanwhile, those who are as "bad" or "selfish" as I am will always blow me off and disappoint me, because that is the nature of being a bad person. That is my love paradox. I know people are more complicated than that- that it's not always predator vs. prey and that we all love and hurt each other in different shades of gray. But that's not the way we feel about things and feelings express their own version of the truth that cannot be denied.

I had this profound example of this shown to me in class, but it is a pretty technical analogy so bear with me while I explain. My German teacher was teaching us the difference between the nominative case and the accusative case in German. In the nominative case, the subject and the direct object are equal. Example: "Die Frau ist da." or "The girl is there". "Girl" and "there" are balanced- they coexist on the same playing field. But in the accusative case, the subject is acting upon the direct object. One is in control while the other is helpless to do anything but receive the action. "Ich esse den Fleisch" or "I eat the meat". The meat is being eaten by me, whether it likes it or not.

My teacher wrote on the chalkboard "Ich liebe dich." (I love you) and said, "This is the ultimate example as anyone who has ever been in love knows. There is no equality in love." One gives while the other receives. It doesn't have to be mutual. You can receive the love I give you, but you can never repay this debt. Because true love is unconditional and demands nothing from the person it is given to. That is why being the predator or the heartbreaker will always leave you feeling just as helpless as the prey or the heartbroken. Their love is greater than you not reciprocating and therefore the Dumper will always be the cowardly one (hence, my current stage of self-loathing).

To end this blog post on an even more depressing note, I'll leave you with another Katherines quote that describes my state of mind at the moment:

"And then he lay there in his fever of sorry and repeated the now memorized note in his head and wanted to cry, but instead he only felt this aching behind his solar plexus. Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears. But the feeling Colin had was some horrible opposite of crying. It was you, minus something."