What is the point of it all?

Currently watching, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation

What is the point of it all? They cried between bated breaths. Their  voice quivered with the pain of a recent heart break. And I really wanted to comfort them and say,”well, it all happens for a reason, it will only make you stronger”. What a load of lies. If anything, they were already proving to be strong. So, as a good friend, I just pursed my lips.

While writing this, there is a slight smirk on my face, because I realize just how stupid the world can make you feel for feeling your feelings. My friends might have said to me a million times, “it will make you stronger”. Alas, I might have said it to my friends a million times. But I don’t think anyone believes it.

All of our problems, as they come, if we face them, they just prove our resilience, and we should be proud of it. But the point of it all? No point, it added no tangible value. No heartbreak ever has.. It didn’t make any of us more empathetic. Quite the opposite in fact, I think heart breaks made us more pragmatic. And rightfully so.

Maybe this article has become way more pragmatic than usual. Let’s try and feel our feelings, huh?

What is the point of it all? Why did we meet this person? We invested time, effort and hopes and dreams in them. And once they broke, it felt like our undoing. Nothing worse in that moment. And from experience, at least my own, I have forgotten and forgotten - memories and the good times and the laughs and all that is left is a ghost of a being in my imagination - maybe it never happened. 

So from the point of meeting them to the point of the heartbreak and to the final point of their complete erasure of their being in our heads, was there really any point of it?

You meet some person, they fill some gaps, they leave, and when they leave, life resumes like they never existed. New people, new gap filling, new heartbreaks. Sometimes some people stick around. And we should cherish that. We should cherish those people. What is it about these people who we supposedly love but it doesn’t “work out” with them and they leave?

There is a popular theory that they leave imprints on us, we get influenced by hobbies, or preferences, or behaviours. Maybe we start liking the same Ramen as them, or we start enjoying Sabrina Carpenter and her antiques because of them, or maybe we start adopting their favourite phrases, “buddyyyyy”, or we start putting on perfume right before we leave the house because we kept seeing them do it. All of it is lovely to think about. But you know what? All of these habits have been adopted by me, or by my really lovely friends because of me. So it doesn’t matter who is changing you, who is leaving an imprint on you, it doesn’t have to be a lover necessarily, you don’t have to be someone else’s lover either. You can just be. And your ticks are going to be someone else’s icks. Someday. Hopefully.

But I wasn’t going to tell my friend all of this. I didn’t want to be the one who takes the Sheldon approach to dealing with my friend’s heartbreak. I did the next best thing, I listened. I listened to them speak, I agreed with them where needed. And I didn’t try to help by telling them to do things. I am sure they will get over it, because I believe they are strong. I don’t think they need to be “stronger”.