By Rhea Catada

Writing on my journal after waking up has long been part of my daily morning ritual. I drink coffee, I smoke, then I force myself to write. This one was written on 29 October 2013, 6:30 am, copied here, mostly unedited.

A friend messaged me on Twitter last night, asking me what this line from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar meant: “It was comforting to know I had fallen and cannot fall further.”

My friend interprets “fallen” as falling in love. Thus her confusion. We are hormonal human beings, after all, and we love that gut-wrenching curiosity about whether that other person loves us back, or even just the idea of exciting new sex. Well, to that, I say (as that A Camp song goes), love is a poison hidden in a bonbon. Passionate love, at least. Like poison, it starts somewhere. Perhaps your stomach. Oh, the butterflies, the butterflies. Then it invades other parts of your body till it reaches your brain, and you can’t think straight any more.

Oh, and I had to mention that it can affect your sleep hormones, too. Passionate or romantic love can cause too much anxiety that sleeps becomes impossible. And then you could lose weight. And then maybe DEATH.

Love is poison. Which is why I can’t quite understand why people are so up to the idea of falling in love. It terrifies me. Especially now, after what happened with [redacted]. I envy those who haven’t had the sordid ordeal of falling madly in love. The so-called “spotless mind.” Unharmed. Unscathed.

But I digress. That line from The Bell Jar does not talk about love. “Fallen” there meant falling into a nadir. Esther falling into the depths of her  life and the only consolation she gets from this is she’s already at the bottom and things can no longer get any worse. And if things did, it won’t matter anymore for someone who has already resigned to the sordidness of her life. Nothing is going to hurt anymore.

But then, I am reminded of another line from another novel. This time it’s Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters in which the mouthless narrator said: “…I’d discovered that despite everything that’s happened, I still had an endless untapped potential for getting hurt.”

Which is true as well. Things can still get worse, yes. And, chances are, you won’t feel anything anymore OR you can still hurt further.

For me, the Invisible Monsters line is (maybe) trying to tell us that we always take comfort in the idea that once we’ve felt complete suffering, we won’t suffer as much in the future. But that is false. Things can feel as painful as the first time we’ve suffered something similar. We are still mortals, after all. Previous suffering won’t make us invincible.