How Do We Haunt Ourselves?

"If you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you."

- Nietzsche

The word "haunt" is usually associated with ghosts or the existence of the paranormal. But I'm not really talking about haunting in this traditional sense, no. You may wonder what does this guy mean by us haunting ourselves. We'll get to that. For a long time, I've associated the term with the negative connotation it often gets used for. But it wasn't until very recently that I realized that it has much too deeper a meaning than we realize. Haunting can take many forms.

To begin with, let us consider the haunting by expectations. As the phrase would suggest, all of us are always haunted by the burden of either one's own expectation or with that of the others being thrust on one's life. Having expectations for your own life is not necessarily wrong. It simply provides a mind map for understanding the goals we could set in order to achieve said expectations. But, there is always going to be an element that possibly cannot be controlled. Sure, we as humans are arrogant and egotistical enough to believe everything is within our control. But that's where we are so wrong. Everything is within our grasp but not necessarily in our control. And the sight of us wanting to ascertain any form of control makes us set higher expectations for us ourselves. And sometimes, those are a little impractical to get through, at that point in time. And as a result, when we realize that we may not be able to garner to the expectations we do righteously set for ourselves without even thinking of our inherent ability to satisfy them, we let the haunting begin. It is similar in the case of expectation set by others. In fact, it's even worse than the above, because we feel the constant need to get the societal acceptance through trying to fit into the their image of who we are and as a result, destroying our own image of who we are.

I was flabbergasted to know that many students who are in 10th through 12th grades nowadays are seeking therapy with their schools as a result of their own parents thrusting their expectations onto their kids, pressuring them to study more and score more marks, apart from teachers' pressure. Now, I'm not going to argue against seeking psychological help and therapy, especially after having witnessed the past couple of years in the pandemic-prone world. In fact, I'm very much in support of that. Further, I'm not going to say having pressure is wrong. Hell, I work well only under pressure, for there is the basic need for a cosmic clock to tick down slowly yet swiftly in order to facilitate us to function normally in our lives. But, I just want to show an instance of how we haunt our children by burdening them with massive projections of ourselves onto them. These expectations would haunt both the kids and their parents down the line.

Then there is the haunting of an event, wherein we let a particular event or situation that happened in the past play out in different scenarios repeatedly in our minds, in an attempt to understand what went wrong and what we could've done to salvage a bad event. And this, would begin our devout haunting of this sort.

And finally, there is the actual haunting of ghosts. I'm in no way a believer in ghosts. But there are, at times, I do feel the existence of something beyond my capabilities to understand and explain. That doesn't necessarily make it paranormal. When you stare deep in the dark and tell yourself that there is someone or something there, you actually trick yourself into believing it as you convince your mind that you're not alone in such darkness. But here's the question- what about the same, when you're grieving? What if you don't want to let someone go away, even after they are long gone?

I started pondering about these questions after I read Ronald Malfi's latest work "Come With Me", which is about Aaron Decker, a recently widowed husband grieving the accidental loss of his wife and tries to make sense of what really happened. The story is mostly thriller based, but it does have horror elements in it. But, I don't mean "horror" in the usual sense. There are pages after pages, explaining the tumultuous mind of Aaron and how he grieves and what he does to stop hurting. It hurts us as we read the way he feels inadequate and empty without his wife in his life, and that right there, is the real horror. As a result of his fragile state, he believes to see his wife at times in their home. But that turns to be untrue immediately as there would be some logical explanation given by Aaron himself the next sentence.

This book is similar and in the same veins as a lot of Stephen King's works- Bag of Bones, Pet Sematary, etc. The same kind of "haunting" can be seen in Shirley Jackson's legendary novel "The Haunting of Hill House". Even in the excellent Netflix adaption of the same novel by Mike Flanagan, the main focus is on relationships in a family of brothers and sisters with their father, having had a long lasting impact by Hill House in their lives, not by the house itself, but simply by their experiences as a family in that place. And this further goes on to define their lives as well. For instance, most of the siblings are hot under the collar by the fact that their eldest brother (Steve) wrote a fiction novel based on their experiences at Hill House without seeking their permissions and made money out of it.

All of these works show us how we, as humans, are ready to believe and do anything just to have another second with our loved ones, after their accidental/incidental/subsequent moving away/demise. In the end, we end up getting haunted by haunting ourselves. I believe that we all are running constantly towards darkness, aspiring to be in the light. A juxtapository supposition from my side. We can't really achieve everything we want to and be the happiest we could be, if we are going to bludgeon our present actions with past experiences and constant expectations. We don't have to forget the people that forged us the path in which we travel, but at the same time, we don't have to let their memories taunt and haunt us.

I started this piece with a quote from Nietzsche. The thing about his philosophies is that, it is always open to interpretation and relative to an individual's own understanding. The way I see it, the abyss is nothing but the den of unpleasant feelings, bad experiences and heavier expectations. And when you sustain your life based on these elements (gazing long into the abyss), the chances of having a life free from the shambles of such abyss is often grim. There is a time to lament and there is a time to rise, and we solely have the power to decide which to choose when.

- Pranav