Driven by Curiosity…

What motivates me to write today is that I have sadly lost a friend. The moment I walked into the place where I was supposed to meet him, after months of being away. This friend told me that our friendship came to end.. it is sad but it is true. I was so shocked from his greeting… but talking about it was pointless… his mind was made up… he is stubborn about his decisions and about his friendships and that was that.

I left the place feeling completely upset… I could not not understand what was I being punished for… I felt his reaction was too strong for whatever I have done… because a reaction this strong is only worthy of a big crime… and as far as I know I have not committed any crimes towards him.

My friend was punishing me for the way I function… needless to say I felt it was unfair… but let me explain a bit. I am one of those people who need some time off from the world every now and then… my life is so rich, so full of people, of colours of experiences of misery and stories ( which comes as a result of my work as a youth worker and anthropologist) that often, I need to shut down to make sense of it all… That is not the worst part about me.. but I am the type of person who gets completely absorbed into things… and then when these things are over I move on to the next things, only to get completely absorbed by them.

This is very difficult to handle…I admit that,  and maybe that explains why I was never good at keeping friends… they can’t handle my lapses of silence, my need to be away, to shut the world out… I always come back.  But often, when I come back they would have moved on, and no longer have a place for me in their lives… I have a few good friends though… I am not sure if they are the ones who don’t get affected, or the ones who have a more balanced relationship with me or they are the ones who are too busy with their own lives that this type of relationship suites them as much as it suites me…An example of this is my silence on blogging… I just needed to be away… and when I need to be away… I need to be away, a bit like a baby maybe when she is first born… she sleeps a lot, because she sees things and then needs to sleep to deal with them… ( this is psychology 101)

My friend… lets call him Nader, has been very important to me in the last few years, he was very generous and very supportive, he gave and gave and gave… but I was unable to match his giving, and therefore he just could not handle it anymore, he decided to downgrade me to an acquaintance… yes… what Marguerite Atwood says in her Blind Assassin is true ” the other side of selflessness is tyranny”… in a way I understand…

But what baffles me is this culture of punishment that we come from, where we feel that we have the right to punish people for doing things, or for not doing things. For saying things or not saying them, for acting in a certain way or maybe not acting in a certain way… I guess this is why a lot of us have compartmentalized lives… where we never reveal ourselves completely, we keep secrets about our true feelings, or true needs or desires or dreams from the closest people, from our best friends… we somehow know that if we don’t measure up to their expectations we will be punished… I guess it is in all cultures.. but it is very sharp and colourful in our culture… it has a RED ORANGISH colour that stands out sharply within the smooth colours of our days…

Is it something that we inherited from our Bedouin ancestors, where a mistake meant life or death? or maybe religion? And then we internalized as a culture and inherited the attitudes generation after genration?  

No resolutions… I feel sad.. but I need to concentrate on my thesis… it is due in a couple of weeks and I still have not written one word… the knowledge is there though…. I will make it… there is no other choice.

On a lighter note… I am rereading the Blind Assassin… one of the books that I loved a few years ago when I read it the first time… it was harsh… very harsh… but was so beautiful, so human… it touched me to the core… I am not disappointed… I love it even more this time around. To Nader I will light a candle… maybe one day he will learn how to accept me and love for who I am and not for he wants me to be.