Delusion
By: Kavya Karuppusamy
To fall in love with someone is an easy task. It is learning how to fall out of love that is not for the weak. It is easy to fixate on someone without knowing who they really are. We latch onto the comfort derived from creating a version of them in our heads and placing expectations where they should not be. We fail to recognize that the character in our heads is not character at all but a person for whom we have created a facade. Inside that person is a mind which we can never reach. To expect from someone else is to induce premeditated disappointment because the way of their will is something we can never truly perceive. Now that we have dug a hole so deep we cannot crawl out without digging our nails into the dirt and pushing all the weight out from underneath.
On a superficial level there is the crush. The crush on the boy who sits next to you in class or the girl who was nice to you once but now you cannot seem to get her out of your head. If you work backwards on how the crush started it is all rooted in thought. You thought they were attractive or you thought there was some quality about them that you liked. Now your mind begins to plant that person back into your daily cycle of thought. It escalates. You start to think “what if?” Now you are fantasizing and invoking delusion upon yourself, imagining scenarios of you and this person when really you have no idea who this person is. You have no idea what they are like. Maybe you have observed them enough to get a surface level understanding of their personality but when it comes down to it, their wishes, wants, and desires are something you will never understand. So in your head you have imagined them knocking on your door unexpectedly with flowers, sweeping you away and taking you on a nice date, but in reality they might never appear. Now you put effort into your looks but when you go to class and they do not look your way the disappointment begins to hit.
There is always a chance your delusion could come true. Half of that is based on whether you have the guts to go after what you want. The other half is based on whether the character you have created in your head is actually true.
On the next level we have our day to day connection. This could be love (or whatever that level of attachment looks like to you). Romantic relationship or not this applies to all sorts of connections, people we have just met and even family who were there for our first breath. I want to emphasize that every person is a product of what we think of them. Just like we cannot get into their heads they cannot get into ours, so how you imagine them is how they are in your reality. Everyone has experienced an interaction that left a lasting impression on us. Typically with people we have freshly met. They can blow us away with their charm or perhaps an anecdote and we think “wow they were so cool” but think back to that person and decode what was so impressive about them, was it really who they were or was it just how you perceived them?
With our friendships we tend to know who we like quickly and brush off those we do not get along with. However even with our closest friends and family, the longer you get to know them, the more comfortable your relationship gets, you begin to discover that behind the friendly face there is an overwhelming amount of experiences, emotions, and thoughts which are inaccessible unless you happen to be the creator of the universe. Whoever it is you think you know the truth is you do not really know them.
An “ick” is defined as something someone does that is an instant turn-off, something that grosses you out in every aspect of your being. You want to know what an “ick” really is? An ick is a glimpse of reality when we see a person really be a person, when we realize that the identity which we held them so close to crumbled for a moment, and the truth we saw, was not comforting but it was just the opposite.
It is common to say “I am disappointed in you” but it is rare to be disappointed in a person. Most commonly the disappointment lies in the expectations which were held of them. It is a doomed endeavor to assign expectations to any person regardless of their status in your life or the amount of time they have been around. It is human to assign a role to the people in our lives but once we begin to unlearn the attachments we have formed we start to set ourselves free of disappointment. When we step back from delusion (small or large) we can focus all that energy we wasted applying identities to other people back into ourselves. To do this is to realize that everyone has their own lives. There is no need to get to the core of a person. By attempting to get into someone's core we hack away at the traits an individual is stamped with and oftentimes what we find is an ugly truth: The distinction between ourselves and another is as different as day and night. Our relationships exist for a reason. Every interaction teaches us more about ourselves than we could discover on our own. The qualities that we dislike in someone else are typically qualities we dislike in ourselves. Every failed relationship teaches us exactly what we need in the next. The best thing we can do for ourselves is to let others be free of assigning any sort of character to them.
Mind your business and mind your delusions. It is okay to be delusional, honestly it can be extremely fun, but be delusional about your own life. Do not apply your delusion to anyone else because when you get hurt that pain is a product of your own doing.
It is not an easy task to do this. It takes all sorts of will power, thought, and energy to remove the mess you made from your own brain. That is why it is so easy to love, because it is easier to fantasize and hope than it is to accept reality and realize that often what we look for, we will never find in someone else. What you search for in other people is just something you have yet to find within yourself.