illusion

I enjoy thinking about shades of meaning and relationships between words. When my daughter was young that was one of the aspects that I really enjoyed about reading out loud to her. Taking that moment to play in my mind with the various connotations and explain to her why maybe an author chose a particular word at that point in the story, it always taught me something.

This morning, just for the hell of it, I was laying in bed thinking on disillusion. When we say we're disillusioned, it usually comes with connotations of sadness, disappointment, unhappiness, sometimes even regret. Those are some pretty weighty emotions. Odd I think, if something was in fact an illusion, not real, fake, false, a mistake, just plain wrong... then wouldn't it be a good thing to be rid of the it? to see through it? to correct the misconception? But we do not say "Yay! the veil has dropped! I'm so happy being disillusioned!"
"I was blind but now I see", has a slight bit of a celebratory nature to it, but you don't see it coupled with "Whoopee!" (And that's too bad, cause the rhyme is so awful, I'd rather enjoy using them together and watching people grimace :)

merriam-webster dot com defines disillusion as ": to free from illusion; also : to cause to lose naive faith and trust".
Yeah, I'm thinking maybe that's it, the "losing naive faith and trust", that's the painful part. Yeah, that's definitely it, the naive part. Everything is easier when you're naive. But like virginity, there's no going back.

This disillusionshit has been weighing me down lately. And there will never be any unloading it, will there? Damn!

Don't get me wrong, I am thankful that I've been able to see through the illusions of my marriage and lifetime of fucked up personal relationships. I believe I am finally at a point in life where I can begin to recognize where and how it all went wrong. I accept it, you can't change the past. I want to move forward but all I feel right now is sad. I am disillusioned. I am tired. I just want to curl up in the arms of someone safe and strong and be held there until I can fall back asleep and just float free, just for a little while, puleeezz. But there is no one; never has been. The only comfort to be had is virtual, just another insubstantial illusion.
Same as it ever was.