The Theater of Care

A friend of mine commented on one of the earlier posts and later asked me if these posts dealt with personal issues. Everything to me is always personal. But that does not necessarily mean that there are specific people involved. Within the individualistic culture in which I thrive, the notion of personal is deep, for in my home the self is foregrounded and autonomy is often prized over obligation (Triandis, 1995; Markus & Kitayama, 1991). My existence matters, and what I write may not be directly personal, but they certainly deal with issues that people experience. As one of my friend and colleague reminded me—I take everything personally because I refuse to live on my knees as do many of my readers refuse to do as well. And thus, yes, it is acutely personal because I feel strongly about the ethics of relationships and the way in which they are treated with callous disrespect. When a relationship collapses into the act of discarding, the wound for the discarded is not just in the rejection but in the time needed to adjust to a life where absence replaces presence. Adjustment becomes the slow process of learning how to carry silence, how to absorb the emptiness of conversations that will no longer arrive, and how to name the void left by the one who chose to walk away. And that is personal to me as to numerous readers who generously take time to add a comment to the blogs. Yet the story of the discarder is never clean. Even in the cozy space of gaining a new person to replace the old, the one who makes the decision works through a phase of delusion of “I had to do this for my sanity” threatened by the nagging question “Is this risk worth taking?” There are two guilts that sit heavy. The first is the admission, often unspoken, that discarding has happened. The mind circles back, clawing for what is lost, attempting a return that is less about affection than about soothing the ache of conscience. The second guilt comes in the realization that the discarded is not fooled, that the gestures of clawing back—apologies, sudden attention, late-night messages—show through as what they are: a performance meant to mask the break. The cruel irony is that the discarder, too, knows this performance is transparent. They sense that their actions ring hollow, but they persist because the ritual of pretending offers temporary relief from guilt. Pride then enters as a defense. To protect the self from humiliation, the discarder clings to the fiction of control, insisting that the discarded has not seen through the act, even when the cracks are obvious, even when the discarded’s silence itself is a form of acknowledgment. This is the theater of denial, where both sides recognize the charade but only one is expected to perform ignorance. The charade, once begun, grows larger. The discarded may play along, smiling, responding, performing the same gestures, but with knowledge that the performance is hollow. Authenticity has left the room, replaced by ritual and façade. And in a cruel twist, the one chosen—the new friend, the new presence—watches and sometimes even feeds the charade, their very existence validating the decision to discard, their silent approval reinforcing the illusion that the discarded’s awareness does not matter. What emerges is a theater of relationships where the discarded becomes both actor and audience, aware of the script yet powerless to alter its lines, perhaps even disinterested. Psychologists have long noted the lingering effects of “ambiguous loss,” where the person is physically present but emotionally absent, or vice versa, leaving the other to live with unresolved grief (Boss, 1999). In relationships marked by discarding, the ambiguity is not in absence but in the counterfeit gestures of presence. The discarded is not a fool; they see through the hollow performances and feel the cruelty of being asked to ignore what they know to be true. The attempt to erase guilt with performance only deepens the wound, for the discarded learns not only that they were replaced, but also that their insight into the performance is dismissed as irrelevant. This double injury—the loss and the invalidation—marks the true cruelty of being discarded. That it is the soind of silence that they live with just as Simon and Garfunkle said in their song: "Hello darkness my old friend/I have come to talk to you again."