Circle of Life

Peter Moran
Sep 9, 2018 · 6 min read

Newsletter has been delayed, yet again. It’ll probably come at a monthly cadence or so now. Honestly, the quality will decrease, and similar to your last failed relationship you’ll start to realize a stark difference between the effort you’re seeing now and what you experienced in the beginning stage. Anxiously, you’ll wonder if it’s your fault, you’ll start to question what happened and why things had to change when they were once so good. You’ll bring it up, but I’ll merely invalidate you, assuring you that I’ve just been busy and nothing’s really changed. But you’ll know. The distance is real. You’ll bring it up once more and I’ll put the blame on you, now saying that you just want to complain and you can’t appreciate a good thing. It’s your fault. You’ll become sad, but you’ll hide it because you don’t want me to know, seeing as you’ve already been portrayed as the negative one, the one who can’t appreciate what you have. Your mental health will begin to deteriorate and the one with whom you want most to share will continue to create distance and you’ll feel unable to speak your piece. Finally, I’ll go dark for a few days and then create some excuse about how my work schedule has really picked up and I hardly have time for anything else. I’ll suggest a break, nothing official. You keep it together, nodding along to everything I say, knowing it’s fake and knowing it’s over. The second I leave you burst into tears, wishing you could’ve done something. But there was nothing you could do. It’s the circle of life.

A few days pass and you see me on Snapchat — the only Snapchat story you view since the format changed — out with friends and appearing to have a good time. You knew I was lying about my busy schedule, but it still hurts. You continue to view my stories, most of which have transitioned to Instagram as it becomes the increasingly relevant social media platform for such posts, and based on how often her face recurs in my stories it appears that I’m with someone else now. You kick yourself, wondering how you ever could’ve trusted me in the first place. Such a liar, such a fake. How will you ever trust anyone again? You thought this was the real deal, but it’s just another case of someone unable to be open and honest with you, allowing what could’ve been wonderful to be yet another tragedy, a victim of the intimacy-fearing, commitment-avoiding generation of which we’re a part. You try to move on, but you made the mistake of being with someone so similar to you. Someone who shared your taste in food, music, entertainment. Now all your favorite things — things you enjoyed even before the relationship — have a bitter taste to them. What was once comfort food, an escape from these sorts of feelings, is now a cruel reminder of exactly why you’re feeling so empty. It’s a vicious cycle. But time heals all, and you start to move on. You develop a hobby. You tell yourself it’s a passion because without love and without someone to do the things you do for, you need a passion just to wake up in the morning. Your “passion” consumes you — it’s all you think about. You don’t have the time or mental energy to remember your past heartbreak; I would’ve just slowed you down as you put everything you have toward this newfound and elusive goal. Then one Saturday you decide to take a break, slow it down. Recover, recuperate. A few episodes into the show you’d put on hold since dedicating all your free time to this so-called passion, your mind starts to wander. You take a step back and review your life from a distance. You haven’t had a clear thought in weeks and everything starts to hit you at once. You haven’t moved on. This isn’t your passion. You don’t know what is; you don’t even know if you have one. All you have is pain, fond memories turned sad, and a gaping hole where a happy heart once lay. Was it me you missed, or was it something deeper that I was blocking? Perhaps it wasn’t me at all, perhaps I was simply a distraction from the deeper issues in your life, and in my absence these issues flowed freely through. Maybe you’ll never know. Therapists are just humans who have read a couple more books than you; they wouldn’t be able to answer all these questions. You feel overwhelmed, alone, unsure if the feelings you’re experiencing are universal or if you’re just weird. Maybe you’re the only one like this, and that’s why you’re alone.

Time passes and your heart heals, or at least you get so used to feeling broken that it feels healed, which is good enough, you suppose. Your friend invites you to her birthday party and you meet an interesting stranger. You hit it off, laughing at each other’s jokes, not out of obligation or social anxiety, but reacting sincerely to the beautiful melody that is two matched wits combating. You come home and scream into your pillow with glee, a sharp juxtaposition to the anguished moans it was used to receiving. It all comes back, butterflies, cute texts, inside jokes and tepid hand-holding. You throw caution to the wind and rush wholeheartedly into this new adventure with the one whom your heart adores. This time it will be different!

It won’t, of course, because — statistically speaking — duh, but at least you tried! Anyways, the newsletter will be monthy-ish from here on out.

I think the greatest indicator of how humans are capable of any sort of behavior — good or bad — is the “wave.” It’s probably the dumbest thing in practice, but there I was, watching a stadium of twenty-thousand rise and fall on cue. First, who started this tradition, and why? It’s hard enough to get the wave going with a dozen people connected to a crowd that already understands what’s going on, but imagine the first time through. If the wave-starter(s) were able to get a full group involved just by doing it themselves repeatedly, what if they had just done something else? How far would the initial wave-group have gone with their impromptu game of Simon-Says? If I were the leader, I wouldn’t have stopped at simply standing and sitting in unison; I would have at least tried to make some money or start a fight. Secondly, what was the goal of the wave-starter and what were they trying to represent? Even now, the wave has no obvious meaning; it’s just kind a thing people do at sporting events. Granted, the same could be said for life, but that’s a story for another every single newsletter. Most of all, though, it shows our general incapability of critical thinking. If the majority thought critically when the wave was occurring, they would think of the wave critically; that is, they would be critical of the concept as a whole. But we don’t. We go along with it. We’re all just sheep who associate Alexander the Great with greatness and Ivan the Terrible with being terrible because the extent of our analysis is the adjective assigned to their name. They both just killed people to get land and money! And if you read this and you want to fact check me, you will google it, scan a few headlines, maybe open a page and take a glance before shrugging in agreement. You don’t know who wrote these pages, and whose writings they referenced when they wrote what they did, and so on. Based on standard research methods, every iteration of history takes us further away from a true understanding of the events in reference. Increased margin for error. Face it, we know nothing and all we have is how we feel so we pay to to watch other humans perform activities we can’t, scream in reaction to their performance as if we had agency in the events benefiting a team based in a location we were born in by no action of our own. Finally, we stand and scream for no reason other than the fact that the people near us are also doing that. And when the wave comes back around, we do it again, because we don’t know why we wouldn’t. It’s the human experience.