The Masochist in Us

For you, I bleed myself…


A line from Coldplay’s Yellow which made me ponder on some things that I, a human being, often neglect and/or failed to realize.

As human beings, apart from logic and reason, emotions are what separate us from the other species in the Kingdom Animalia. And pain, of course, is one of them.

We, human beings, regard pain as a natural condition in our life, a part in our life that we would be able to overcome. The same goes within the context of love. Being hurt (emotionally) is inevitable once we love. However, since we are human beings, we embrace pain wholly, thinking again that it is a natural and a normal condition in our life. This makes us, human beings, masochists. Why do I have this conclusion?


When we love, romantically speaking, we do not readily tell the person right away, out and loud. Why? Human as we are, we tend to be consequentialists in our decisions. That is, we think of every consequence of an action or decision we make. And we would resort to the decision of which the consequence would outweigh the other.

Once we tell the magic words to the person, we could no longer take them back. When words fly, it is impossible to catch them. And telling the person would basically result to two possible things; either you end up rejoicing or your heart shatters into pieces. However, we tend to consider more the latter than the former. We set our minds that the latter would have a higher probability to occur. That is, when we tell him/her, we would be more likely rejected.

Then why set our minds this way? Simple. We make this an excuse and/or alibi so as to evade ourselves from too much pain. Or more correctly, to save ourselves from too much pain and embarrassment just in case the former fails. We would rather prefer internal pain thinking that this is more bearable.

Still, pain. A real manifestation of the masochist in us.

More so, telling a person is like jumping off from a building expecting someone to catch us, with thoughts of death awaiting us. Yes, death. Once you landed, your brain splatters on the ground. However, you do not die. You bleed for so long.

As for me and my case, whether to tell him or not is the same thing. It is suicide. Telling him does not necessarily assure me of him throwing it back. The same goes with keeping it, I only bleed slowly to death. But if I were to choose between the two options, I would rather keep it to myself.

What would be the point of telling him when I knew from the start that I am already bleeding?