Tortured is a sh*tty roommate
Being “tortured” is just not for dead artists, unrequited loves and those that live in the neighborhood where math was invented; but every single one of us. That no matter how hard we try — no matter how much fucking palo santo we burn when we run out of sage to cleanse our homes and souls, being quietly and internally tortured is just part of the script.
The late French Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said it best when comparing our mother tongues, “English is just badly pronounced French.” The third word of this blog’s parent brand comes to us via French from late Latin tortura ‘twisting, torment’ linguistically birthed from Latin torquere ‘to twist’. It needs to be said again: you cannot beat romance languages for making the dark stuff sound hot.
Twisting does a good job describing the hearts of those of us who actually did end up taking a couple of civics classes and can plainly see the lug nuts popping off the collective bus we’re all on. “Tortured” is also a word that has gotten a lot of play in the early 21st century due to some of the more repugnant actions of humankind in the form of opportunistic foreign policies and despots. But aside from CNN Breaking News and doom scrolling, there is also a darkly seductive quality to the word. Lamenting our suffering in the context of desire or purpose makes the word “tortured”, dare I say, sexy? Think about it, how many times has the romantic archetype of the “tortured artist” kissed the neck of your imagination. We love a good hero’s journey that involves suffering followed by redemption. We are also fascinated by the tortured creative soul that is consumed by hedonistic self-destruction and then posthumously celebrated.
So I guess what I’m saying here is that we need to dial it back a bit and admit we’re all twisted up and tortured af; as we breathe through filters, swipe left and order shit on Amazon.
In his book The Untethered Soul, Michael Singer likes to call the not-so constructive part of our head noise, the “inner roommate”. All the negative and self-defeating thoughts that cause you to seize up, were beautifully anthropomorphized by Singer into this image of a shitty roommate.
So let’s say we meet the tortured part of ourselves for coffee and hash it out. Agree that we both aren’t able to move out before the lease is up and we have to come up with a solution or one of us is going to do something rash. In that case, the best solution is harmony. Divide up the time equally spent in the head space, minimize contact and see if the other roommates, Smart and Funny can get a little more time to get to know everyone and maybe brighten up the joint.
And who knows, because you’re not squaring off daily with oddly hot and tortured shitty roommate, they may end up starting to crash elsewhere and spend less time in your head. Or, and this is where it gets good, what if you begin to see that roommate for what they are, what they bring to the table and just maybe you can recognize constructive elements and begin to play nice?
Is that the secret to life in 2022 and beyond? We don’t have to blow the lease, pay a penalty and start over; maybe we can work this out and just peacefully(ish) coexist with what we got.
