.. conflicts

It’s never easy navigating through a conflict. Whether with a close friend, a family member, a stranger working at customer service, or a colleague, it never becomes easy. As we mature, we fool ourselves into thinking that with age and experience (whatever this experience is), we’ll get better at it and handle clashes with finesse. We carry the belief that two souls can sit down and converse peacefully, unburdened by animosity or rancour, without the ego’s desire to prove to each other who is right or wrong and instead unravel the pain both sides are enduring. 

I think lately in my life, more often than not, this has been the case, but a conflict is driven by two parties, and sometimes, as much as one of the sides is trying to de-escalate the situation, it can be of no avail. I have been on both sides of the spectrum: as the one confronted and the confronting one. Neither of the two is easy nor pleasant to be in. Both are excruciating and draining, and bewildering, and often unnecessary. 

There is, however, something about people ‘thriving’ in chaos - where they can only express their feelings and thoughts through the medium of burning fire. It might be a way to release pent-up emotions buried deep within their souls for too long. Or it might be something completely unrelated that I currently have no knowledge of.

When I was in my early teenage years, my way of expressing interest in a boy was through meticulously planning and scheming a heated conversation, which would then enable me to escalate by yelling: ‘it’s because i like you. it’s because i like you. that’s why’. Then, for dramatic effect, I’d storm out of the room or, quite literally, run away, hoping the boy would follow me. This approach rarely worked (once) - given there were only two instances in which I expressed my feelings like this. That’s a 50% success rate, though. ha. ha.

Years later, I’ve come to understand that this peculiar coping mechanism had less to do with my introverted personality and more with the behaviours I had observed from the people in my life or the ancestral scars I unwittingly carried. It’s said that trauma attracts trauma - these realisations are difficult to comprehend when you are so young and even more challenging to navigate through.

Recently, I found myself part of an unexpected conflict with somebody in my life that left me bewildered for days. The relentless push-and-pull nature of the exchange, which lasted way longer than it should’ve, brought me back to my teenage years, although, as if this time, I was on the other side of the sphere. For a long time, I was struggling to grapple with what I could’ve done so wrong to trigger a reaction of such gravity that someone would tell me not to respond to their messages anymore.

I spent a couple of days going over the essay-long texts, mapping who’s said what and who’s done what, only to realise that I had engaged in a classic example of somebody trying to reveal something to me through the crucible of conflict and chaos.

hi!

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