The Placebo Effect
I feel like for all my talk about being a cynic, I never really believed any of it. All my sarcasm, and cutting witticisms were merely smoke and mirrors. My cleverly crafted diatribes on the ups and downs of love and loss and relationships et cetera, were penned the air of a man impervious to everything except a little self-deprication. I’d loved, I’d lost, and I’d come out the better man; smartened to the world and hardened over with an icy heart.
Well, frankly it was all bullshit. Don’t get me wrong. I’m cynical about a lot of things. I think the majority of people on this planet are unfit to do more than breathe and consume mindless reality television programming. I even prided myself on my prowess at helping friends navigate their troubled times with their “love du jour”, with a slight inward smirk. Karma, as they say, is a bitch. For all the times I knew exactly what to say, for all the times I’ve been the rock and the shoulder to cry on, for all the times I’ve cracked the perfectly timed misogynistic joke to break the funk, and for all the times I’ve recited the cynic’s Gospel on Love… I find myself now realizing I didn’t believe a word of it.
I always believed in true love. I believed in Romeo. I believed in Juliet. I secretly enjoyed love songs and pined for the one that I would pen about “the one”, my perfect girl. And when I fell in love, I kept that cynic’s posture, maybe even covered my tracks with bravado. In truth, I had never been happier than when I held her against my chest and let her listen to my heart beat.
Cynicism and sarcasm are misunderstood. They aren’t weapons to be used in offensive. They are defensive in nature. They create a shield. A barrier between a boy and the emotional trauma the world seeks to inflict upon him. He can watch his parents gunned down in an alley. He can stare at the pale, lifeless bodies of his coworkers. He can watch friends sink into self-destructive depression, offering to help them out when they turned their eyes to him. He can accept rape and murder and theft and death with righteous indignation and a venomous perspective that these things always were and always will be.
He can call love a joke. A punchline for teenagers and romantic comedies, and overrated novels about vampires. He can call it that, but he can never believe it. I felt betrayed because I convinced myself that I did believe it. As far as armor went, I was the “unsinkable” Titanic. But the Titantic did sink. The world, she found the chink in my armor. I built my entire life around one unalienable fact: I know, above all else, who I am.
I’m your average, everyday, run-of-the-mill non-conformist. I spend my time not watching “Heroes” or listening to “Hannah Montana,” or thinking up other ways to otherwise not conform. I quietly, and perhaps only internally, think of myself as a punk even though I know full well that the last person who had the right to claim such died somewhere around 1994.
And while to some extent this previous paragraph does describe part of my personality, it does little to distinguish me as an individual. Even a rudimentary description of what makes a person unique in modern times at some point degenerates into vagaries and a bullshit sense of superiority-through-enlightened-individualism.
It seems simple, it seems basic. I know what I believe in, completely. And though my opinions and beliefs may change, they are – inarguably – my own, and therefore what makes me. It turns out, I didn’t believe even myself. I believed in love. In fact, I believed in it fiercely and unwaveringly. Like the cynic builds the armor around himself, I enshrined my true belief in a chamber of sarcasm and snide, forgetting what I truly believed.
Break a window and the building still stands. Attack its foundation, destroy its cornerstone, and it crumbles like a house of cards. I made love my cornerstone. I love. I am loved. And nothing else matteres. Nothing else has to even make sense. No ship is unsinkable. No building is indestrucible. No man is untouchable. I stand before you as proof of that. As the shipwreck. As the rubble. As the shell of a man who once was.
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