> can't stand our own thoughts, can't stand our own minds.

Just because it may sound like hipster "blah" doesn't mean that's not exactly right, IMHO.

> Our own vitality as well as that of others frightens us, if it still manages to surface, we respond with rage and turn against our own freedom. It is vitality itself that we are opposing.

-- Arno Gruen in "The Betrayal of the Self - The Fear of Autonomy in Men and Women" (1986)

The older I get, the more I really feel that a lot of conflicts that are confusing or complicated boil down to psychopathology. People with wings they never use for some reason will rarely say "oh that's interesting, why is this person flying, and why is my back suddenly itching". They will instead try to clip your wings, and they can become blind and stupid "on command" in ways that really don't make sense when looked at without that.

It's like a bunch of squiggles that seem random until you notice the areas they always avoid, because anything is better than facing oneself. If you live a life with a too fake emotions and too much sophistry, then really deep empathy, real love or hate, as well as critical thought cannot be accepted in earnest even in small quantities. That is, one might accept a correction stemming from critical thought, or an action coming from genuine empathy, but they cannot acknowledge that these were the "internal reasons". They don't know internal reason as anything but nuisances and sources of shame, their own reasons are external punishment and reward, so they always cook up sick schemes of why someone who is not (as) sick (as them) is doing what they are doing, while they themselves do the opposite. It's like when someone has a cellar full of salt and calls it sugar, they will never eat even a piece of your pie, and when they do, they will call it salty and spit it out.

Yeah, it seems way too simple and self-righteous even to me whenever I'm formulating it, no matter how often I experience things that lead me back to these thoughts; and it still would if I bloated it with all the missing qualifiers I left as exercises to the reader, or added that I don't totally exclude myself from those I'm kind of othering here. But still. every day I see and meet and work with people who out of their comfort zones, dragged out from under their blankets, they're like a robot that got water in them for a second -- they just fucking blank, it's like I can physically see the Homer Simpson monkey in their head playing for time until the moment passes, and they come up with a fake memory for it -- then waddle back safe land immediately. And if this sounds cold, it's because I sometimes despair... I don't observe and struggle with people because I don't like them.

But too often they force on me the decision to comfort them at the expense of all the "birds who are still flying", by entertaining their twisted reality, or to be offend them. That at the latest is when I prefer parting ways. I need to protect myself, and those who want my best, instead of fighting my every step of the way. I know that nobody in the world, ever, wanted anything but receive love and empathy as a baby. Nobody in the world, ever, was at fault for not receiving it. I'm not saying that explains the whole human life, but that this is true as a categorical statement. But I cannot turn back time, I can't be peers and families and friends and lover to a single person as a single person, I can't take them hiking for a year or whatever might "make a dent". When me stopping them from abusing me or others, or just saying what I see or think, hurts and scares them a bit more than they are every day already, then I prefer that to the constant layer of untruth and pettiness they weave people and situations into otherwise. What always clinches it for me is even if I was 100% blind and obedient, they would still be unhappy and hungry and scared. I'm not the hole in their soul, after all.