for those joining late, minimizing suffering should be viewed as a means, not an end. survival is the same. making them into ends means congrats, you have picked goals you can only fail at and that will screw over your ability to accomplish things you could’ve succeeded at
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people who’ve lost someone they deeply loved have a part of themselves that grew together with that person, like trees with spliced-together branches. field-programmed neurology that literally exists to connect to and be completed by that person
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and because human neural adaptation mostly works by dropping what isn’t used, this is a part of them that was literally, physically carved like wood to serve this purpose. so yeah, when they’re gone, that part of them just hurts all the time
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they’re criticized for holding onto this pain. they say they feel like the pain is all of their loved one that they have left, and people tell them no, you have to let go, you have to move on
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*fuck* those people. the part of you that grew into your partner is also where your model of them, which is to say the part of them that lives in you, is sited. you feel like that’s all of them you have left *because it is*. your intuition about your situation is 100% correct.
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so you hold onto that pain as long as you damn well please. now, there are probably ways to rework that part of you to not be raw and to give what’s left of your loved one a comfy place to live in your head
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i can’t tell you how to do that any more than i can learn something *for* you, but maybe you can work it out. but this is very different from “letting go” because people want to coercively minimize your suffering. don’t ever feel you need to knuckle under to that.
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if you’d like to read a gorgeous treatment of this through a blessedly distancing science fiction metaphor, pick up Iain M. Banks’s Against a Dark Background. also has lots of things blowing up
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hey guys i found this cool chart of things that are more important than minimizing sufferingpic.twitter.com/sTOniBXuAk
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This is beautiful, thank you. I try to tell people this, but they never get it. To be clear, I have not lost a partner, but this perfectly expresses my feelings about the death of my mother 12 years ago.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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