For as long as I can remember I’ve felt that if I had the choice to go back and decide whether or not to be born I would choose not to be. Not that now I’m here I don’t enjoy life but, if I had the option, I would choose the peace of non-existence. In the same way that if you asked me if I wanted orange juice smooth or with pulp I would always say “with pulp please”. Don’t mistake me, I still find smooth orange juice delicious, sweet, and exciting. It’s not desperate or dire, it’s just a preference. I think this is a shared feeling, and while I sip my smooth OJ it’s comforting for me to know that there are millions of people in the world who would also rather have pulp. 

When I feel down I imagine someone sitting on a beach sipping Pina Coladas in Australia their eyes dull and glassy behind their sunglasses. I imagine one of my favourite celebrities like Emma Stone standing in her wardrobe with clothes thrown around the floor because ‘nothing looks good’. Or I picture some unknown person nearby like the woman living in the flat below me sitting on the sofa sighing listlessly. I find it helpful to twin my suffering and know that so many people feel this way and get through it because people have survived much worse. I’m thankful for the numerous previous generations who have strengthened themselves through depression, heartbreak, and grief. All of which has slowly grown the evolution of human resilience that means I can do the same. It’s not to dismiss the problem but to widen my view on it and feel like the problem is less personal. The world isn’t unfair to me, everything isn’t going wrong to me; most people have felt this way and it’s just a feeling.

However, I’ve had friends where this knowledge doesn’t seem to comfort them. Instead, they find it intolerable. Liking their struggles to someone else’s makes theirs less unique and I see how that could feel diminishing. I’ve made the mistake of comforting someone with phrases like ‘this is a normal thing to feel and a lot of people have felt this way’, only to watch their face drop and look uneasy. Dual suffering can feel dismissive, as if by pointing to the pain of others you are asking, which is worse, yours or theirs? 

In Regarding the Pain of Others Susan Sontag talks about a photographer, Paule Lowe, who photographed two wars, one in Somalia and the other in Sarajevo. He later put his collected works side by side in a gallery. Sontag writes;

‘Lowe thought the matter was a simple one. He was a professional photographer, and these were two bodies of work of which he was proud. For the Sarajevans, it was also simple. To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them, demoting Sarajevo’s martyrdom to a mere instance … It is intolerable to have one’s suffering twinned with anybody else’s.’

Obviously, this example is far more serious and nationally devastating than feeling low on a personal level. I can’t say if I would be upset or not in this instance because thankfully I’ve never experienced an atrocity like war. But the sentiment gave me a lot to think about. Should some things not be put side by side? Yes, some things require their own space. Does suffering not being unique make it not as bad? No, I don’t believe so. It just makes it less uncommon. It means the bad is less localised and is spread further than you thought. It doesn’t take away from the strength of your emotions just because other people have felt it too.

When I was eighteen my first boyfriend broke up with me and I was teenage-girl screaming into her pillow upset. It was the really embarrassing kind of devastation that makes me cringe to think about now. One of my close friends had also been broken up with at a very similar time. I was ignoring her calls, not replying to her messages, and avoiding her wherever I could. I thought if we spoke we would just wind each other up and it would become a competition of ‘who is more upset?’ as if that’s a crown anyone would want. I remember feeling frustrated and isolated at the time because ‘no one understood’, and then continued to shut out the one friend that would. How bizarre? If we had twinned our suffering we could have helped each other out of it. Although it’s difficult, even for the most mature people, to know when your suffering is not as bad as someone else’s and to resist reaching for the winning spot on the podium of ‘most tortured soul’ (God knows I’ve sat myself up there a few times for no good reason). I know that my everyday struggles are probably not that unique in theme and that’s a good thing; people can understand and help me with that. There’s this meme I like where it shows the Milky Way and has a dot with an arrow coming off it that says ‘You are here crying before work’. I love that meme. It helps me feel that everyone is the same and that everyday struggles are not always the end of the world. Orange juice without pulp is still delicious, zingy orange juice.

This week I had this delicious croissant from Monmouth coffee. It was SO buttery. Sometimes I really love the simple things. I would recommend this coffee shop although they don’t do take away cups but also don’t have enough seating, so be prepared for the frustration of that. I love the outside though, it screams London or is that just the grey sky and the rain-wet ground?

I would like to get baking again, I think I will bake week after next. It’s been very busy so I’m giving myself a little grace period. I’m proud that I’ve managed to be so consistent with the writing so far this year (even if the quality varies haha). This post has missed my regular Sunday spot because I was celebrating Lunar New Year! Happy Lunar New Year everyone. I hope year of the dragon is the best yet :).

Goodbye for now x