Stocism

I sometimes tell my friends, when I'm trying to avoid sounding maudlin even when I'm feeling it, that if my life is being scripted by Jane Austen then I will have a great life, but I'm so scared it is being scripted by Anton Chekhov.  

But Jane Austen valued stoicism.  Not only am I not particularly stoical, I don't honestly know if I should strive for stoicism.  

I checked synonyms for stoicism because I don't like using the same word in three sentences: endurance, passivity, patience, sobriety, indifference.  More words related: apathy, austerity, calm, fatalism, indifference, self-control, peaceful.

How the heck can one idea have such positive and negative things associated with it?  My British grandmother believed in stoicism and I adored her SO much.  I still miss her all the time.  But the only time she ever yelled at me in anger was when I was in about the 6th grade because I had some grapes from the center fruit arrangement and I didn't cut them off, I pulled them off, leaving the ugly stems for everyone to see.  I seriously doubt that was what bothered her.  She may not even have been mad at me.  She shoved everything down and it erupted and I'm sure she felt awful about it.  She also had a psychotic break before I was born.  She dealt with it, came back to her family and was an awfully giving, loving woman.  I think we adored each other mutually.  I can't imagine she ever faked the love I felt from her.  I have such uncomplicated love for her, and it is possible she just hid it when things I did bothered her (except the grapes, which really wasn't a big deal--an odd moment in a life of love).

I, on the other hand, try, when I'm in pain, to really feel what I'm feeling.  I believe that if I don't, it will dull joy I can feel and also is more inclined to make me cynical. I used to go to munches and there were women there with dead eyes.  When I smile, it still reaches my eyes. And I do believe stoicism can lead to a deeper sadness. But part of me wonders if Jane Austen (and my grandmother) are right.  Is it wiser to fake moving on--does the faking makes it easier?  Am I feeding the feelings or freeing them?

I'm having such a hard time moving on.  If what the 26-year-old says is true, it seems like such an easy thing to fix.  Honestly, I thought I was following the dance he was leading, until the last date.  And the last date, I felt like he was breaking up with me in every gesture.  I feel like if he had just kissed me once, quickly but warmly, I would have just relaxed with him and we would have had the kind of conversation in person that we had on the phone.  

Or maybe not.  I did notice on multiple occasions, I refrained from giving advice.  I tend towards the busy-body and there are a couple of areas where I do have more experience.  I even told him I was biting my tongue when he was bragging about something that I thought was really foolish and that was probably obnoxious. He also is more skeptical about politics than I am.  (Or maybe that isn't right exactly--I'm deeply skeptical about politics and I know the Democrats are seldom right, but I also believe, deep down, that the Republicans are not always wrong about everything, they are a dangerous cancer on our country and until they can move away from the cliff, we have to support the Democrats, even as we hope for a return to sanity on the part of the Republicans. It isn't that I'm naively idealistic, it is that I'm Manicheanly melodramatic.  I don't believe the Democrats are good, but the Republicans are evil!  And less evil is, well, less evil.  It's election day--pardon my rant.)

He is much more skeptical about the media than I am.  I can criticize much of the media, but he is far more rigorous in his expectations of unfiltered news than I am.  I'm fine with editing things down.   He and I share some popular culture interests (The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, John Oliver, I think Game of Thrones, but we never talked about it in depth), but other things he really enjoys don't engage me the same way. They're funny, but not necessarily memorable to me. And I sent him one of my favorite clips and he either didn't watch it or didn't like it; I didn't push it, but it was only 4 minutes long and if he had liked it, it was a relatively accessible way to explain some things I love dearly.  I also gave him a book by one of my favorite authors and mentioned my two favorite naughty books that I thought he might like, but books take time and that didn't happen.  I almost bought him tickets to a musical I like that is currently playing, but that felt too much a splurge when I actually was going to buy them--something for a month from now.  But he has never been to live theatre!

All of which is to say that it is possible we exhausted the things we cared about in common.  We had amazing conversations about religion and I really would have loved to know more about how he experienced some presence of the divine.  I prayed for decades to believe in God and that didn't happen, but he seems to have something genuine.  I'm jealous of that.  I respected his views on journalism but political activism is too important to my identity for me to question where I am on that right now.  It is possible the Democrats are just as awful as the Republicans, but if I believed that I think I'd end up on the nihilism/apathy spectrum of stoicism, and I get really, deeply depressed there.  I have to believe that the arc of the moral universe is slowly bending towards greater justice because, in some ways, that's how I justify my existence.  It is possible we could have started to develop another set of interests together (I would totally have taken martial arts with him, he was open to taking dancing with me, and he had an openness, to doing some of the things I love). But it is possible it would have taken work, or that we wouldn't have developed things.  

My head says "It couldn't have worked; be glad it ended quickly."  But my heart says "this is a man I could have fallen in love with; a pretty extraordinary man that could have cherished both my sides--he just wanted more of one of them. I could have supported him too--we might have been extraordinary together."  And if he was telling me the truth, it seems like such a little thing that would have been so easy to fix.  But, then there's still 16 years between us, and that would have impacted things in lots of ways.  Nevertheless, I cried myself to sleep, then woke up in the middle of the night.  I'm glad he called me to end things with kindness, but it is painful too because when I thought he'd just disappeared, it made me think he wasn't whom I thought he was.  And that would have made it easy to be indifferent, apathetic and fatalistic, but maybe not patient, calm or peaceful.  Maybe accepting that he was a really good man and it just didn't work because fate sucks sometimes (but not always) is the best way to keep joyous eyes.