I met a friend for dinner a while back.
For a long time, she’s been a very sentimental person, someone who feels deeply for people.
Being so has brought upon several heartbreaks, hurt, and sadness in her friendships, romantic relationships, and professional ones.
As she’s gotten older, working in the corporate sector, she tried to be less sentimental.
Part of that shift was influenced by her senior colleagues who advised her to be less emotional and to be less attached to colleagues.
Today will be her last day at work. She said she’ll try not to cry as she did before; she wants to suppress her sentimentality.
While I can see how having felt intense hurt and sadness might deter someone from feeling deeply again, I couldn’t help but feel an impulse to tell her: feel into that sentimentality, don’t suppress it.
While there’s certainly some grain of truth in them, I’m always skeptical about blanket, prescriptive advice like “colleagues are not friends” or “don’t be emotional at work”.
Human beings and life are too complex to be summarized into a single, alleged truism that cannot but be built upon personal and collective biased experiences.
It is the collective subscription (often mindlessly) to a particular biased perspective that accumulates further confirmation bias, thereby cultivating an environment that perpetually reinforces the very same “false” truism.
Put another way, many “truths” are contextual and constructed, not inherently universal.
The fear of being backstabbed, criticized, and taken advantage of, suppresses—and sometimes even severely dulls—your own and others’ humanity.
Hence, led by fear as a default, you assume that people are fundamentally cold, transactional, and detached. To protect yourself, you behave similarly.
In doing so, others assume the same and follow suit even if they feel otherwise, leading to a never-ending cycle of distrust, cynicism, and perhaps diminished humanity.
But, if in the unlikeliest of circumstances, that despite the looming, cold detachedness of the corporate culture you still come to feel sentimental about a colleague, does that not say something about the meaningfulness and depth of that connection?
What if you could see the human beneath the persona of the “corporate worker”, and that human chose to engage you despite the thick atmosphere of corporate cynicism?
Should one abandon a rose amongst thorns just because all the thorns accuse the rose of being a thorn too?
To be clear, I am not suggesting for my friend or anyone to just dive into sentimentality and disregard the dangers of their environment. That would be reckless and naïve, though certainly brave and not necessarily wrong.
I think what matters is what you see as a “rose”, whether you trust your eyes and heart, and how important is it to you to have a “rose” in your life.
As you get older, you accumulate experiences. You learn from them and you become more perceptive (I hope). You can begin to discern, with more precision and accuracy, who and what would be a “thorn” or a “rose” to you.
You also learn that it isn’t necessarily true that being emotional/sentimental = bad/uncontrollable spiraling, because you learn to see the deeper meaning of being hurt.
You build a new relationship with your emotions, and you learn more deeply what it means to be human.
My friend feels deeply.
And yet, people are telling her how she should feel and what she should deem as meaningful. They might wish to help, but they’re also saying her authentic being is “faulty”.
Consequently, she has come to suppress and distrust her whole authentic being.
My friend feels deeply—and she has grown to be wiser.
Please do not corrupt her and let her be.
She sees beauty in people and in life. My little wish is that she comes to see what a wonderful gift she has.
I hope she continues to build the strength and wisdom she has already accumulated to embrace her ability to see beauty.
If life is said to be full of thorns and suffering, should you not all the more risk the potential hurt to embrace the occasional rose that you chance upon?
And perhaps, it hurts because it’s beautiful, and it’s beautiful because it hurts.
I do not know the answer, and I will continue asking myself that question.
Ultimately, I just want you, me, and everyone else to experience so much more beauty in life.
I hope that my friend comes to see that, in the grand scheme of life, she’s that rare “rose” of humanness that brings beauty to the people around her.
About the Author
Hello, I’m Gary: A recent Anthropology graduate from Yale-NUS College, and an incoming student pursuing a Masters in Counselling. If I were to describe myself in a sentence — which is impossible, but I’ll try nonetheless — I’m currently someone who’s in a perpetual existential mood!
I invite you to join me on my journey of writing to make sense of that mood, myself, and this crazy, complex world. I’m not following a fixed structure, so I don’t know what I would come out of this conviction — I guess we can only find out as I write!
