Memento

Felt it in my fist, in my feet, in the hollows of my eyelids

Shaking through my skull, through my spine and down through my ribs

(Florence and the Machine - Blinding)

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. It’s true. When you hit the bottom of the sea and you lose all your words, and everyone and everything has hit you, you either die or you learn to breathe underwater. And then you start floating – not swimming, but floating, accepting and letting go of your own fury, pain, and all the unforgivable things.

We live in a world of hypocrisy. We teach something to our children, but we show off in front of others to be seen as cool people; in reality, we are self-centered and would sell everyone for our own well-being. Money is everything in this world. In psychological books narcissism is a disorder, in real life, it’s part of normality, and those few with strong principles and that kind of morality that goes beyond stage 4 of Kohlberg’s theory ofmoral development are the abnormal ones.

A small good thing. Like in Carver’s book, you don’t get that small good thing in times of need from the people that you expect, but from strangers.

Empathy vs. Pragmatism. They can go hand in hand. And during this week I have understood the point where my empathy ends. As long as we have ourselves, there are solutions. We are all in pain, on the same ship of fools, but while others take their grief and bury it inside themselves and are capable of seeing others and always giving a hand to those in need, others scream and demand to be heard and have a different status, not taking into account what others feel. The only time when there is no solution is when you have lost yourself.

Vulnerability can also be a strength. On my road to breathing again, I received this question: "How can you make vulnerability your strength?” We tend to hide our own vulnerability, be ashamed of it, and we want to protect ourselves. But do we really protect ourselves when we hide? Few people dare nowadays to show vulnerability, and fewer know how to see it as their own strength because everything is like a coin with two faces, with its strengths and its weaknesses, and nothing is only black or white: vulnerability, empathy, independence, memory, and so on.