A thought:

Once you say something, it can never be taken back. It's out there in the world, affecting things, and you have no control over it anymore. You can say "I'm sorry" and "I didn't mean it" or "that's not what I meant, you know that" but you can't reverse the affect that your words have. The best your apologies and protestations can do is layer over top of the wound you caused, cushioning it, dulling it, blurring the pain. But the wound cannot be undone, anymore than a physical wound can. It doesn't matter how sorry you are. It doesn't matter that the person you hurt knows that your sorry and accepts that you didn't mean it and forgives you. That doesn't erase the pain that they felt. They forget about it, get over it, they may have only felt the pain for a moment. But somewhere, in their soul or their unconscious emotional memory, there's a record of that pain-- an invisible mark, a scar... and they carry that with them forever. And in dark times those marks come to the surface and cause new pain, the mass of them, collected over years from many sources, manifesting themselves as a weight, a weariness, a sadness that seeps around the edges of perception, seemingly from nowhere and yet from everywhere at the same time.

Or is it more an issue of an overly sensitive, depression-prone person (wrongly) seeking an external explanation for their inner demons?


Another thought:

Sometimes things need to be taken as far as they will go before you can move beyond them. The whole catharsis is necessary-- the tears streaming down your face, feeling as awful as you can possibly feel... is what finally pulls down those walls that you've both thrown up-- those walls that promise to insulate you from the pain the other is causing you, but instead numb you to the pain you are causing. You can't pull the wall down once you've put it up, so you both trade blows, hurt after hurt, until it escalates to the point where you're overwhelmed and both your walls crumble and you're left standing together in the rubble, suddenly vulnerable and conscious of your vulnerability and aware of the other person's vulnerability. And seeing this person so vulnerable in front of you reminds you that you love them, which brings on a wave of compassion and tenderness and regret and forgiveness.

Or is that just a couple of emotionally fucked up people fighting in an unhealthy way?



Is attempting to analyze our emotional experiences a necessarily futile task, because it's impossible to view any of them outside our own frame of reference? Because you can't take a personal internal subjective experience and trying to make an objective external judgement about it... from the very beginning, in choosing words to describe it, you're altering it, shaping it a certain way... there's no such thing as "what's true" or "what's right" in regard to your emotions, because your emotions exist on a pre-verbal, non-rational level and in order to bring them to the level of analysis and dialog you have to interpret them.

It's the fucking Uncertainty Principle (but a more extreme application)-- you can't look at them without affecting them, and your affect renders objective analysis an impossibility...

Quantum physics always made me depressed. Quantum physics applied to psychology and self-analysis is even worse.