It's an ever-growing trend to go one of two ways in today's society: we either embrace our emotions and become seen as weak-willed and wishy-washy (or in a positive light, nurturing and empathetic -- though the extremes taken are seldom so positive), or we become so hardened and callous to the world around us that we lose the capacity for true empathy. This is particularly visible in the current trends in high-emotive/increasingly permissive parenting and low-empathy/increasingly self-centered teenagers -- one is most certainly partly responsible for the other, and the whole thing is certainly cyclical to previous generations. This pattern of personal growth reminds me greatly of working with raw metals. If steel is left too soft, it becomes unable to perform the task; if it becomes too hard and rigid, it snaps under the pressure far too easily.
I can say that I've seen both extremes from a very personal perspective. As a child, I was very sensitive and the rigors of bullying and general frustrations left me little more than a weak and pitiable mess, both physically and emotionally. I was very much the unrefined ore: soft, malleable, easily impressed upon by my surroundings, and easily broken for that weakness. I knew what it felt like to be powerless in that environment; to feel as though there was no hope and no way out of the emotional quagmire that I had found myself residing in. I would hardly call what I had in that period of my existence a "life". I had a miserable time at school, and had grown to loathe most of my peers, but most of all I had grown to loathe and despise myself for my weakness.
When I removed myself from the situation (at the end of 8th grade, I insisted upon home schooling to complete my basic education), the first refinements were able to begin. Those weaknesses that I had come to detest in myself were gradually worn away through a combination of simply removing myself from the triggers that made me so miserable, using humor to lash out at things which angered me, and beginning the steps to lose the morbid-obesity label that I had earned myself up until that point. This path continued until very recently, in all honesty, when I began to realize just how little concern I had left for those who I don't know personally, and how readily I could simply switch off even that distinction. It could be said that I had become so hardened to the world around me that I was on the verge of shattering.
In keeping with the metaphor, I had reached the point where a proper smith must decide whether to cease at the too-hardened point that has been reached, or to scrap the piece and start anew. Of course, it's not really that simple to just discard part of yourself, it's more a question of softening that hardened outer-layer that's been tempered into place -- undoing the process, in a sense -- that matters. You have to strive for that balance where you'll neither bend -- as the soft metal will do -- nor break -- as the hardened steel would. Much as swordsmithing, this is a fine art that takes a lifetime to perfect, and I am by no means a master in finding that balance.
I still consider myself to be too hardened in many ways. I lock any sort of outward show of emotions inside myself until I reach a breaking point, and even then that "break" is very controlled and carefully measured (always in solitude, mind you -- I think I'd be far too self-conscious to express it in front of someone else). Much like tempered steel, I use the fueled fire of anger and frustration to hold my hardened exterior together. Not the healthiest methods, but they have certainly proven efficient over the years. Further exploration of the spiritual part of me in the last few years has made it much easier to comprehend a lot of the reasons that I react and handle things the way that I do, not to mention the aid in developing better coping mechanisms than turning myself into my own whipping post all the time. I've been experimenting with the concept of resonant meditation (emotional resonance, not auditory) to remedy that, with some success of late.
The ultimate point of the process is this: Without being properly forged one cannot become fulfilled in their true purpose, and if one gives in to the forging too readily they can become far too rigid to sustain their integrity. One must become as the sword to reach that fine balance of flexibility and strength in order to know their true potential. It is a process that never truly ends.
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