8 Fold Fence and Character Arcs
There is a Japanese belief of the 8-fold fence. The belief holds that one must guard their heart. The poetry has been written which this particular metaphor. I have been thinking about it ever since I heard about it. My heart is easily shattered and thrown at will. I am constantly worried about the future, and regarding matters of the heart or even professional life, I am known to be impulsive and make decisions based on the heart rather than from the mind. Respect is a far more difficult thing to get and give — as I grow up, I understand this. I don’t respect my employer, he does not respect me, and thus we are entirely just caught in a maze of humiliating each other. Although I have not humiliated him until now but he has a lot before. To an extent that even my father judged me when he insulted me over the call a lot.
I remember this scene from The Sopranos, a character, Pauli, who eerily reminded me of Chinki's mother because of his lack of vision beyond the life he lives, a sort of indifference to the world, but still constantly wanting to talk about it. He talks about how there hasn’t been an overarching arc in his life. In a scene, he talks about having lived a perfectly ordinary life in his respect and how it still doesn’t matter. How do I overcome my superstitions? I am unable to write freely about what goes on in my life and in my mind, quite simply because of the fear that something will go wrong. But that’s the thing, something does — actually, everything that has to go wrong always does. I have pissed my employer on multiple occassions and he has pissed me off on multiple occassions and now I am worried that I will leave and he is not going to give me my money for the work I have done, or jeoperdize my future jobs, or just quite simply act so horribly that it ruins a part of my life. I have broken toxic connections before; it hurts before it gets better. Imagine a bloodied hand that is holding onto a rope for years, and it has left scars on the hand that refuses to let go. You immediately feel the rope burn when you let go, actually, I think they will scar for life, but the healing from it is going to take a long time. And how do I recover from this? How do I move towards the better things in my life? How do I also sit down and watch the early sun come over the entire balcony sweetly? Why can’t I be the person to sit with the notebook at the end of a cafe, just being with himself? I try to be, but I am always thinking about what goes wrong. In the larger scheme, it doesn’t matter, just like it doesn’t matter what he did to me.