Throughout my life I have heard people say "Misery loves company" and until recently I thought I understood what this meant. I believed it to mean that misery would bring about more misery. That while one is miserable they act and speak miserable and thus bring those around them to become miserable as well. At other times I thought that this meant that people who are miserable will only gather others who are miserable around them through commonality and that those who are not miserable will not want to be around them. These were the two main thoughts I had and understood to be true where misery was concerned.
I was thinking about misery again over the weekend, trying to understand it and why it loves company. Was misery trying to grow its numbers, gather a force? If it is true that misery loves company, why? What purpose would misery have for wanting additional misery around?
As I pondered over this, trying to get inside misery's head I started to come to another point of view. I thought about where misery comes from, where it likes to hang out, what it does from one day to the next. I was it turns out building a profile on misery much the same way an investigator builds a profile for a "person of interest". I was filling in the unknown details, fleshing it out and bringing it to life. Yes, I said life. Misery is a living breathing life form. It has a birth, it feeds and grows, it reproduces and most of all it is self aware.
With my new profile in hand I took another look at misery and the common quote about it and realized it was not correct. Misery does not love company...it longs for it. Misery needs understanding, it needs an ear to bend. Misery needs to be nurtured and embraced. Then like the catepillar turns into a butterfly so will misery morph into something beautiful.
I think that in your final paragraph, you hit the nail on the head. We all go through various stages of misery. What we have to try and remember is that we should not let misery engulf us and even though we seek out others to share our misery, we are, indeed, looking for solace, comfort and understanding so we can squash misery and get on with out lives.
ReplyDeleteWe must remember to, misery will push us away from others at a certain point and leave us along to wallow in our misery. Best to express it and move on and put as much positive in its place.
I think the person who contributed to your blog with the article about suffering the pains of rejection for seven months, has definitely not tried to replace those feelings with the positive but is wallowing in the negative. No one will continue to listen to sobbing for 7 months! Get a life, move on and realize that the world is not a perfect place but as you make it.