Butterflies and red flags

“When all you know is fight or flight, red flags and butterflies all feel the same.”
~ Cindy Cherie

The more you desire someone, the more you fear being ruined or destroyed by your vulnerabilities to them. Your early butterflies, slowly but insidiously, transforming into red flags. In the heat of your desire and need, your fear becomes exaggerated; and you make the decision to either fight the invisible enemies within, take flight from them, or do both. The irony being that either way, the fight or flight pushes away what you wanted or thought you needed, your fear being the real enemy.

Alternative version: Free verse

The object of desire is your greatest vulnerability; the path to your elusive joy or inevitable ruin: recycled and reimagined.

Early butterflies—slowly but insidiously—transform into the red flags of paranoia. The fear of loss and humiliation enclosing you like a vice grip.

In the heat of desire and neediness, you fight or take flight from the invisible enemies within: the delusions of demons who would steal your joy or facilitate your shame. And this will assuredly keep you separated from your object of desire; your fear and paranoia being the most crafty of enemies.

The enigma of fear

“…it is certain that the problem of fear is the meeting point of many important questions, an enigma whose complete solution would cast a flood of light upon psychic life.”
~ Sigmund Freud

The mind revises and sometimes denies our experiences of reality, deciding that we are better off not knowing some things, for the sake of self-preservation. When we attempt to know these things, fear—in one form or another—stops us dead in our tracks. There is no technique, therapy, or form of psychoanalysis that successfully outwits or penetrates this barrier of fear. The mind has its reasons for keeping secrets, guarding them as if our lives hang in the balance.

No surrender

It was your neediness against her lovelessness. You reached and she held back, sometimes dangling, but never bestowing, not to where you felt bereft of loving kindness.

So many iterations of reaching versus dangling, but never the bestowing, never her surrender. Love was her commodity, her convenience, to be withheld for fun or bartered on the run.

The spiral of pain

Often, we obsessively seek love from the people who find it the most difficult to love us. Their holding back, mirrors where we feel the least loved and most needy, committing us to the long, painful, downward spiral of pursuit, seemingly without end, until at last, at the lowest point of our despondency, the spiral itself reaches its end, mercifully kicking us to the curb.

Screams in the night

It keeps me awake some nights, a chorus of screams, pitching up and down. It is not heard, but rather felt as a dreadful depression of the gut, weighed down upon by the memories of abruptly terminated pasts, the cries of a dying present, and an infinity of aborted futures. All of this accumulated and gathered upon me within the night, packed into a chorus of silent screams: An endless, collective reverberation of all that happened and never happened; paths taken and not taken; and my fate having been indifferent to it all, as if nothing ever mattered, despite what I’d once wished for, had hoped for, prayed for, and strived for.

Note of hope:

I was once told that my feelings of distress is a form of depression known as Weltschmerz, or world-weariness, meaning that my vision of how things should or could be, is not compatible with reality. However, it seems to me that reality always defies us on some level, shaping and reshaping itself to avoid the complete fulfillment of our needs, wants, desires, and idealistic visions.

Consider the possibility of this defiance being a kind of soul moving resistance. One that challenges us to continue evolving and reaching for something better, higher, or more humane, rather than it being a force of malicious intent, or an obstacle course of random obstructions.

Love: Jungian style

“People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
~ Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I’m reminded of the Jungian concept of men having a feminine aspect, referred to as the anima; and women having a masculine aspect, referred to as the animus. The theory being that “all” human beings are composed of both masculine and feminine essences, with one essence being the consciously dominant one in an individual, and the other being relatively unconscious, “appearing” as the qualities one desires or despises in others. In Jungian psychology, this is the basic mechanism of attraction: the recognition of the other half of ourselves in others, facilitated through projection and imagination. The illusion being that what you search for or recognize is outside of yourself, when it is really the opposite, less conscious side of your inner nature – the masculine or feminine – seeking consciousness through your interaction with others.

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