Guster Suffering & Healing

Dissolve by Guster, I think, is about when someone you love is torn and left hurting by the actions of another lost soul they thought they loved or indeed did actually love. A person who maybe once was a good person but who became a monster who learned to manipulate the good hearts of good people. Or maybe a person who became lost and unable to accept your hand when you reached yours out to them. It's about not being happy because of that effect. The desire to heal someone or help someone who doesn't want the help. Who resents you for your help. Who resents you for your happiness.

Sometimes when you try to help someone who you love, who is lost and maybe isn't the person you knew and never will be again... you find that you resent that person. Or if you are like me you can resent that lost person because of what they are doing to someone you love. My wife has a few of these situations in her life and it breaks my heart to watch. To watch her good intentions be turned against her good heart. And how cold hearts can't see the damage they do to her. Hers being the kindest heart I've ever seen. My side of this is selfish because they take her good heart from me, which I resent. I want more of her and their suffering robs me of some of that is what I sometimes feel like. I want her to stop wasting time on them because she's been doing it for years and years. Not really that she should give up on them but she needs to maybe accept where they are and wait for their cries of help. But she feels they aren't strong enough to get there and honestly they probably aren't. So she tries to help. But it all goes nowhere. Maybe, hopefully, it is going somewhere slowly?

I'm not much better I guess. Because I fall into the trap of resenting them. For blaming them for where I am. And that is, as Guster so aptly points out, "a mental suicide". We all want to fix things. My wife wants to fix her family, I want to fix my wife. A nasty cycle. I'm not really even sure what the solution is. If my wife stops trying to help? That wont work. She'd feel like she failed and she'd suffer for that then. If she did that, she would give up on one of the qualities I most love about her. She doesn't write you off. If you fall down she helps you up.

She's helped me up so I guess I just need to do some accepting myself. What can a person do to remove this barrier on happiness? I've spent many hours thinking about that to no avail. Do you wait for people to get better that might not ever get better? Do you figure out it's not your fault? We are happy now, but I want more. I don't want people who don't seem to want to be happy pulling us down. But there seems no way around it. Not if you are caring people. We don't want to give that part of us up. To stop caring can't be the solution but to care can really really hurt.