“L’enfer C’est les Autres”

-Jean Paul Sartre-

“Recontextualizing” this particular Sartre quote kept me from having a good night’s sleep. The hours spent pondering about how humorous it is that I am faced to a homecoming to my self— a satirist with a skeptical nature. The train of thoughts have left the station since two in the morning and it doesn’t seem to be reaching its destination any time soon. It is now past four, and so I write.

Image cred: Pinterest

Esentially meaning: “hell is other people”, the line brought upon a desperate chuckle out of my chest. How nice, how relevant can a sentence be. How in just one breath I can simultaneously mutter a vow and a curse. A long long time ago, I don’t really have that much faith in humanbeings and companionships. And while this brought about a familiar alarm in my system, it also caressed my psyche in such an I-told-you-so manner. Serving me the long awaited vindication. Resurfacing so many valid and logical reasonings I threw out of the window in the name of “trust”. Although in the end this wasn’t all bad, at most it’s an inconvenient that requires me to readjust. Because while it ended up shattering my will to stay soft, it at least challenged my perspective about my own sense of belonging (or rather the lack of it). Come to think of it, something must have happened in my childhood that helped me to grow up without the dire need to really belong and thus the lack of the need to nurture my corps d’esprit. The earliest memory of a community that I can recall, is one with me returning to the embrace of my mother and my older brother, because they were the only ones I can find security in. No ill wills, no schemes, no hidden daggers in saccharine sweet smiles. And so, my skepticism grew. Eventually I learned to keep my reach shallow and small.

In the absence of that desire to fit in, I discovered the sufficiency in being my own company and how I guard the safe bubble that I created for myself from every hyperfixation and train of thoughts interlaced with one another. At the end of the day I feel more at home with myself when I’m not burdened with the sense of belonging. As lonely as it sounds, as lovely as it sounds, as selfish as it may be. Sometimes I still wonder what went wrong and how this all came to happen. If you know me in person, you would know that pondering on the “hows” and the “whys” are my favourite pastimes. Along with this epiphany — and honestly a rapid descent into the spiralling staircase — I found out that despite all the things that I have accomplished, I haven’t truly healed despite every mental check marks and little goals. Turns out all this time I have found the reassurance from other people offering promises of loyal genuine companionships to be a crutch. In the end I have to relearn what are and what aren’t in my hands. And, oh, it’s interesting how I never actually threw my old drawing board out the window. It was buried somewhere in the backyard, beside my dead dog. I still have a lot of weeding out to do, maybe tend to my garden a little more strictly and reenforce the nice fence I used to have.

Well, enough talking about my regrets of opening up. The next time you’ll see me, I’d probably be talking about Ricin or sharing recipes. I feel the need to clarify that both topics are mutually exclusive and definitely unrelated. I don’t want my name on any watch list, thank you.

Au demain.

Momo