The Crossroads

Prelude

So, just like every other life changing thought train in the middle of the night which leads to a final moment of epiphany and then catharsis if I’m lucky enough, this night was different. I can feel it, it was not subtle this time, because I can literally feel my body heating up and my judgement being clouded but at the same time some choices seemed ever so clear. Like any of those other nights when you’re standing in front of the mirror, just you vs. you, at crossroads with your choices in life evaluating where you are and what got you here. Just this time it seemed liked somebody stabbed me with the worst kind of blade human has even crafted with his blessed hands.

Pain and Disrespect

Now like every other night this night did have a highlight question which is where the thoughts seemed to be headed trying to get into a meaningful shape, like beads trying to make sense in a string. The big question for the night was:

Would you rather choose Pain or Disrespect?

A seemingly simple question, well that is until you start thinking about it. Pain as in case of humans and as defined scientifically is

“A highly unpleasant physical sensation caused by an illness or injury”

So if we extrapolate some of the words and try to interpret it as loosely as possible we can say that pain is anything that causes us discomfort which is due to an external stimulus. But in fact pain is a very personal feeling.

We cause our own suffering.

The more we think about this, the sooner we realise that what causes us pain is often in our own mind. It’s a devil of our own making, a demon of our own creation.

Now coming to “disrespect”, it is literally defined as

Disregard for the feelings, wishes, or rights of others.

Disrespect can be of many forms ranging from one shown by others to one we show ourselves.

Action and Reaction

Now an interesting thing to notice is that, as humans we experience a very limited array of emotions and most complex emotions that we feel are a composition of these few basic emotions being felt at once in different permutations.

A psychological study identified there are 4 core emotions — happiness, sadness, fear, and anger, which are differentially associated with three core affects: reward (happiness), punishment (sadness), and stress (fear and anger). You can check out the study here. These core affects are analogous to the three primary colours (red, yellow, and blue) in that they are combined in various proportions to result in more complex “higher order” emotions, such as love and aesthetic emotion.

Now keeping this is mind and thinking about how we feel during instances of pain and disrespect, we realise the feeling is often very synonymous. A certain frustration and anger downs upon us which is the general reflex for most of the people as we are conditioned to feel that way.

Now anger is often viewed as a negative emotion and rightfully so, blinding anger can cause serious issues but anger in itself is not a bad emotion. Infact it is a very powerful emotion which gives you strength, the push you needed to do something you were on crossroads with.

Someone close to me once told me this verse from the Bible which stuck with me —

Be angry and do not sin, do not let the sun go down on your wrath. Nor give place to the devil.

— Ephesians 4:26–27

Which roughly translates to —

Never give in, into your anger and sin but at the same time don’t be stoic and let wrong happen with you.

Now coming back to the big question, would you rather choose pain or disrespect. Thinking about it you gradually conclude that you can control and even curb your pain as you get a hold of your mind and teach yourself to be more in control of the pain you’re inflicting on yourselves for no plausible reason. But disrespect is something that changes you as a person and has a deeper impact even though both pain and disrespect cause the same chemical reactions in our brain. Specially when it comes from an external stimulus, disrespect is even more profound as self-respect and self-esteem is something that takes a person long time to build and becomes the cornerstone of a person’s personality and persona and putting that at stake for short term pain relief doesn’t seem like a fair bargain.

That being said, both emotions do push you to be a different person and if channeled properly can lead to great personal breakthroughs. But if I had to chose one I would rather chose pain than leave my self-respect at the mercy of someone else.