A personal reflection on the internal suffering felt from self-abandonment that explores the psychological cost of fear-driven inaction, and the subtle, often overlooked, erosion of identity that can follow….
by: Tom Basu
There is a particular type of suffering that is not new to me. One that doesn’t come from anything outside, but from within. Over time I have found it to be the predictable consequence of self-abandonment. I write this because I believe that many people experience something similar. The kind of suffering I have in mind is one that happens the moment we turn away from those passions that define our character — not out of necessity, but out of fear. This separation, a sort of misalignment between our deep desires and our everyday lives, is often imperceptible at first. But if ignored, it compounds. And by the time it becomes unbearable, it has already reshaped the psyche.
What hurts is not the world’s hardness nor the realization of it, but this very distance between the self and the thing it was meant to move toward — or rather, return to. We all have certain desires that are embedded in us from young. Ones that as we move from one part of life to the next become lost, people and events blurring their location. And so as we move through life more urgency becomes needed to rediscover our own character. But we cannot just blame the events of life for the fact that our knowledge of ourselves escapes us. This distance widens with each day of passivity, each postponed attempt, each decision to wait a little longer. If we let it grow wider bit by bit, and without any effort on our part to recognise it, eventually it becomes indistinguishable from despair.
We are brilliant at avoiding these fundamental desires within us, whether we realize it or not. We convince ourselves that it is just tiredness. Or perhaps disillusionment, stagnation, or burnout. All clever tricks to persuade us that our inaction is justified. But these descriptions hide the nature of what is really happening — a kind of rot. A gradual erosion of our capacity to care. That general orientation with which we were once familiar, where we could see, or at least accurately predict, the stops along the way, starts to break down. We no longer know what we want, after which we no longer believe even in the importance of pursuing anything that we might think we want.
This progressive disintegration between our identity and our lives is not accidental, I want to say, but chosen. You choose self-abandonment not because you are lazy, but because you are afraid. Afraid to be seen striving. Afraid to see yourself striving. And with that the inevitable fear of failure that comes with it. I do believe fear is the root of this suffering: the fear to act, disguised by whatever name is given to it instead. The choice becomes self-protection, where we default to what’s comfortable. And to reconcile this estrangement of self, we adjust our story, or tell ourselves it’s not the right time.
Some may read these words and scoff, thinking of all those people to whom describing inaction as fear is a luxury. We don’t all have time to spend thinking about our”‘passions” and how best to rediscover them, let alone pursue them. I can’t offer much encouragement here, only my belief that this suffering begins in the same place for all. It may hide more easily in exhaustion, in the grind of necessity, but it’s the same internal fracturing, the same distance that opens between the self and its source, just obscured.
There’s never an easy way around fear. However it is overcome, one must pass through it, avoiding it is impossible (unless suffering is the goal). But even in attempting to achieve this overcoming, an illusion presents itself. As far as my own experience, when I “go for it,” I often think that I am only doing so insofar as that striving is comfortable. Whatever real courage I imagine myself to have is limited by the point at which discomfort begins. The deep end is an alluring abyss that doesn’t take too kindly to anything but a letting go. Some way in which I see the world must change in order for me to act with any respectable form of courage, or I remain stuck, only tempted by this abyss, and then retreating when I realise the real depth of it.
But it must be reminded, otherwise new and clever tricks will surface, that any alternative is just a prolonging of this internal suffering. We should opt out of security and buy into uncertainty — a principle that can generally be counted on to guide action. So don’t ignore the subtle ache, is what I tell myself. Don’t fall quietly back into that fatally familiar day-to-day, because there is nothing else that will animate the life you are failing to build.
Tom Basu is a recently graduated philosophy student and aspiring writer. His work largely takes the form of blending introspection with personal experience and the broader human condition.
