Challenge!
So I am a bit of a masochist, especially emotionally.
That is a person who enjoys an activity that appears to be painful or tedious.
In some INTJ/Masochist mash up, I enjoy having my values challenged to see how well they stand up in theory vs practice. If I say I believe something, throw some exercises at me. I want to see if I am strong in my convictions. I enjoy digging around in what I feel, especially when dealing with disruptive emotions and reactions. Cognitive dissonance type experiments…thrill at being disgusted by things and digging into why I have those sort of reactions to get to the root of it all.
Black Mirror is one of my FAVORITE EVER shows and is fantastic at stirring my pot in that way.
And as you know moderately infatuated with the purple world…which is also a constant stirring of my pot whenever I am engaged with it.
I saw a fb memory of me being excited about getting tickets to his last concert stop a year ago today. At first I re shared and purposely was positive about it. I hate all the tear/sad reactions with the “a year a go today was the last time he…”posts.
But later I got sad…again for selfish/unrealistic reasons. (ie. I SHOULD HAVE BEEN IN THOSE DM’S FOR THE LAST BIT OF TIME WE HAD WITH HIM….lol)
It’s a tough time for fams though as we approach the anniversary of the duck out. Ex-wife’s book coming out next week…and as I mentioned, that book TRULY is a challenge to the psyche of fams. As much as you have to eat previous judgements of her, you also have to eat feelings of upchuck regarding him as well…again his humanity is VERY sharp in that book and though the revelations aren’t new, it’s unsettling to read about certain situations as depicted by the person who was actually in them with him. Reconciling the age gap and how he engaged her during with age gap (technically all legal, but….), reconciling the babies and how they dealt with those tragedies, reconciling the end of their marriage and how that fell out, reconciling the overlap between wife 1 and wife 2…
It’s again all known, but had never before been depicted with that level of revelation. The rabbit hole is deep. Real deep.
Reconciling, reconciling…really none of our business anyway…but reconciling…
Again. To believe in opposite things at the same time…tough to reconcile…
Everyone I know who has read this has struggled with it to some degree.
Some emerged as huge champions for her…
Some needed a second to understand how this new information jived with their admiration of him as a person vs him as an artist.
Some had a real shock…and backed away from him completely.
Some developed an ever deeper sense of resonance with him.
Some read it…stored it in a vault in their mind to be forgotten…and continued previous infatuation , actively trying to ignore the additional context they now had.
All of the reactions though are ENTIRELY personal…based on their own methods of processing information via their own experiences and projections.
I’ve read some reactions and the absolute leaps of “logic” have been astounding and says WAY more about that person’s own issues than anything P and May.te did…like…fall back dude…
But of course that is a valid reaction….because they are seeing it through their own personal lens of experience.
For me, it took a second to process as it ALWAYS does when it comes to emotionally disruptive things. Like I’ll hear him do some song some way…have a lightweight panic attack, and then blog about it 3 days later after I’ve figured out why, lol.
It took about a week for it all to sink in. I totally understand the reactions of everyone in the book. I even understood the upchuck parts…why I had the feelings of disgust, but also seeing, understanding, and even relating to the reasons behind why he did certain things. (Perhaps some of the disgust was because of the light shined on the parts of myself that were the exact same as his?)
I truly…TRULY…enjoyed being checked in my fandom…my having to read difficult things about him was the DIRECT check…my having to step back and read that book as someone’s experience, someone’s reality and not as explorations for “tea”…my exercise in stopping myself from judging anyone in that book based on my own insecurities/fears/experiences…and dealing with the absolute RAWNESS of the descriptions of how things went down….there in my face in black and white.
I LOVED wallowing in that space…and loved the reflections it made me face about myself.
Like I mentioned elsewhere. What a GROWTH experience it has been for me.
If you truly live your life in a transparent way that is true to yourself, like 100% you at all times, nobody can really fault you for that. Everyone who engaged with him knew what they were getting into. He legit has been consistent HIS ENTIRE LIFE IN ALL THINGS.
There truly is no mystery at all.
You can either accept him as he is, or get your feelings hurt when you ignore that and go by what you want him to be instead.
That’s on you to decide though.
And is a lesson not just in relation to P, but to all people.
See people as they are, not as you want them to be.
Be YOU. Not who people want you to be.
#LessonsFromTheProfessor
