The other night, in a dream I had of myself as a teenager,  I became lucid, suddenly aware enough to realize I was ‘modern day Alana’ in my old teenage body.  In the dream, Alex — my high school boyfriend — and I were fighting, he said he felt smothered, like the relationship had moved too fast, he wanted to break-up.  I was clinging, devastated by the end of the relationship. When today Alana took over the scene though, I calmed down. I saw his perspective, that my actions could be smothering, I let him know I totally understood. I wanted to honor his desire. I started packing and told him I would return to my parent’s home. I was suddenly calm (since it was today Alana), I wasn’t overly dramatic or demanding of how the relationship ‘should look/be”.  Just like that, things turned around, and worried about losing me, Alex asked me to stay.

When I woke-up I reflected the dream more carefully, and considered what it could tell me about suffering: In real life,  Alex did break-up with me (though for other reasons) and I did suffer terribly. The loss was crushing. In my dream, teen Alana was also clearly upset, until modern Alana became lucid and body snatched into the situation. It made me see so clearly, how something that causes me suffering can be so painful in one moment, one situation, and be totally irrelevant to me at a later time and in a different situation. Adult Alana has changed: I no longer love Alex, I am no longer, as I was as a teen, insecure about my marriage prospects, so of course I am not particularly upset by the breakup with my highschool boyfriend. I suffer so much in a particular moment, over a particular loss,  but later on, when the situation is different, when I have grown different, the thing I suffer for doesn’t even matter to me. The problem is, by that point, I just have something new to suffer about. It is an endless cycle because I am a serial clinger. I cling, I lose, I suffer and then, instead of learning that clinging  — > suffering, I try my lot again with something or someone new. Of course, there is a second lesson here: If modern Alana doesn’t suffer at teenage Alana’s loss then it means that suffering doesn’t exist innately either in the situation or in myself –escape is possible…

I got to thinking about a blog I wrote recently on zooming out –how when I stay myopic, zoomed-in, I can look at one problem at a time and prepare/figure out a way to solve it. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail, but when I look at life through the lens of overmounting each obstacle, acquiring each thing I want, manifesting each imagination, I get so easily distracted. I celebrate success even if it doesn’t endure, even if it lays the grounds for more suffering later. As for failure it is motivation to just try harder. But when I zoom out, I see it is like a video game: All that training and time to beat one baddie just means you have to deal with the next one. Only unlike video games, life never ends. There is no victory.

With my dream, I see that if I zoom out, it is proof there is no end to my suffering. I lost Alex and suffered. Now I have an Eric that fills the partner shaped hole in my heart. I will loose him too and then I will again suffer.  There will be no end to the loss. Sure, I get the gains too –I got an Alex, an Eric, countless other partners over the years. But if I am honest, now, all these yeas later, I remember the breakups and their pain more than I remember the relationships and their joys. There really is no winning. How am I not bored yet when there is no victory?

What is it I am so excited about? What is it I live for? I read the paper everyday and feel the world is falling apart. I can’t possibly be living to get to live in a beautiful harmonious place of my dreams. I imagine a future with Eric, but it seems quite possible I am only excited about it, about getting there because: 1) What I imagine it will be like; 2) what I imagine it means. I am wrong on both. I can’t know the future and I can know the meaning I overlay on my objects, my partners is irrelevant, its arbitrary, its not significant.

Days will flow into each other, some I enjoy, some I don’t and then it will end. And I’ll just keep going, new bodies, new shit to cling to, all because I am unsatisfied. All because I am looking for satisfaction that can’t be had, so I cling to the objects I think will satisfy me, or which at least allay some of my suffering for a little while. The objects that I cling to and crave however are not satisfactory. How do I know? If they were I wouldn’t have needed to replace Alex with Eric. But the real issue is my heart isn’t capable of being satisfied. I always want more. My imagination is always shifting and seeking and craving based on new information. I act like there is some Alana, some cohesive entity that I build a story around. That’s not really it at all. There are just these isolate experiences strung together temporally. There is memory and imagination filling in gaps and building bridges. When I strive for the future it is only because of this illusion of continuity? Because I hope for the future and ignore the cycle of suffering striving for that future brings.