“Everyone everywhere has always treated me kindly. Very few people, I think, have had so few raise their voice against them, or been so little frowned at, so infrequently the object of someone else’s arrogance or irritability. But the kindness with which I was treated was always devoid of affection. For those who would naturally be closest to me, I was always a guest who, as such, was well treated, but only with the attentiveness due to a stranger and the lack of affection which is the lot of the intruder.
I’m sure that the source of all this — I mean other people’s attitudes towards me — lies principally in some obscure intrinsic flaw in my own temperament. Perhaps I communicate a coldness that unwittingly obliges others to reflect back my own lack of feeling.
I get to know people quickly. It doesn’t take long for them to grow to like me. But I never really gain their affection. I’ve never experienced devotion. To be loved has always seemed to me an impossibility, as unlikely as a complete stranger suddenly addressing me familiarly by my first name.
I don’t know if this makes me suffer or if I simply accept it as my indifferent fate into which questions of suffering or acceptance do not enter.
I always wanted to please and always found other people’s indifference wounding. As an orphan of Fortune I have, like all orphans, a need to be the object of someone’s affection. I’ve always been starved of the realization of that need. I’ve grown so accustomed to this inevitable hunger that, at times, I’m not even sure I still feel the need to eat.
With or without it, life still hurts me.
Others have someone who is devoted to them. I’ve never had anyone who even considered devoting themselves to me. That is for other people: me, they just treat decently.
I recognize in myself the capacity to arouse respect but not affection. Unfortunately, I’ve done nothing that in itself justifies that initial respect and so no one has ever managed fully to respect me either.
I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else.
I don’t have the right qualities to be either a leader or a follower. I don’t even have the merit of being contented, which, if all else fails, is what remains.
Other people of lesser intelligence are in fact much stronger than me. They are better than I am at carving out their lives among other people, more skilled at administering their intelligence. I have all the necessary qualities to influence others, but not the art with which to do so, nor even the will to want to do so.
If one day I were to love someone, I would not be loved in return.
It’s enough for me to want something for that thing to die. My destiny, however, is not potent enough to prove deadly to just anything. It has the unfortunate disadvantage of being deadly only to those things that I want.”
The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa
