Will it pass? Fleabag’s greatness and the difficulty of letting go.
«Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.» David F. Wallace
I’m not going to talk about Infinite Jest, though, but it seemed like a good moment to quote it. We can talk about Infinite Jest some other time, but today we’re going to talk about Fleabag and the ‘art’ of letting go.
Sometimes relationships end, and it takes longer for your feelings to catch up with it. It’s only normal. The decision to let go has nothing to do with how much we love the person. We might love a friend deeply but recognize our lifestyles don’t align anymore, or we can fall in love with a father in a church and immediately realize any relationship outside the love of god won’t work out.
Feelings are not permanent, and they do pass, but the thing is, when we’re feeling them, they feel eternal. This doesn’t mean feelings last forever; it means that when we feel them, they occupy an entire dimension of our existence, and we equate size with time. Like, the bigger the feeling, the longer it lasts. It’s funny how we involuntarily imply that time has a spatial quality.
What if a feeling can be eternal in the time and space it occupies, even if it then ceases to exist? Maybe if we accepted that, it would be easier to let go.
As we get older and accumulate more romantic experiences, we know heartbreak doesn’t last forever. We just have to push through its perceived eternity until one day, it’s no longer there.
When we’re in love, we can feel the feeling always existed and always will, and in a way it’s true, but we were alive before, and love reinvents itself. It finds new ways to creep into our experience. We just have to wait for it to find its way and re-accommodate.
We will wake up one morning and realize we stopped feeling that way. Not because the feeling became less infinite, but because it belongs to another dimension.
Anyway, shout out to Fleabag and all the other greatly written shows that make us question things like this, and laugh and cry at the same time.
Feelings have duration, volume, size, smell, depth, and all sorts of qualities we should take the time to savour before they inevitably PASS!
Enjoy today’s meme list then!
