Saturday, May 14, 2005

Hypersensitive

Maybe my life has been too easy. Maybe I haven't seen enough pain. When I hear about terrible things happening, I can't stand it. And when people make light of terrible things, my world seems to implode.

Today in chat someone pasted a joke he'd seen on Something Awful or somewhere. It basically put the events of the Scott Petersen trial into an Oregon Trail scenario. I could easily go into my chat logs and reproduce it here, but if I did I would have to look at it until this blog post gets pushed off the main page, and I can't stand to look at it.

I was in a pretty good mood before that. I was excited, actually, about writing some stories. I finally had an idea that seemed interesting, and I was already writing. They weren't anything I could get published. They were just going to be vignettes about my old AMRN characters going to see a psychologist/ship's counselor about their issues. I thought there was plenty of potential for depth and humor there, and I was eager to explore it.

But then I read that joke, and now I can't seem to will myself to write. I feel like the whole idea was trite, that I was taking real people with real issues lightly. That it is self-indulgent to worry about "issues" anyway, when people die every day. When people are murdered. When helpless children have their lives ripped away. And here I am happily going through my complacent blind little life, ignoring the pain all around me.

I feel like I don't have the right to enjoy writing about people's pain, even if they are fictional. I feel like I wouldn't do real pain any sort of justice.

The logical part of me realizes that this is a mood, and it will pass. But until it does, I'm helpless. I can't write, and I can't even stand to be logged into chats. I feel like the only way is to just get my mind off it, to watch something or read something, or even just go to bed.

I also want to eat something.

I'm angry at myself because I'm so weak. I feel like I should be able to handle things. If I can't see the humor in a dark joke like that, at least I should be tough enough not to let it cripple me. I would prefer not to see the humor, to be honest. I don't want to lose the part of myself that refuses to dehumanize. But in order to remain open to pain, do I have to then let it control me?

Oddly enough, writing this all out has been cathartic, and I'm feeling better now. Maybe that's all there is to it.
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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

In my reading, I discovered this kind of sensitivity and worry about the world is a trait of gifted people, and I feel you qualify for this label, as you well know. Don't desensitize or dehumanize, this is actually a wonderful quality that many lack. It can be transformed into something that may someday help the world, even if only a small part of the world. In the meantime, for your own sake, their are some coping skills you could learn.

Saturday, May 14, 2005 10:21:00 AM
Anonymous said...

I don't think there's anything wrong with "dehumanising". Personally, I view it as more of a loss of the "shock" element rather than the loss of the ability to sympathise with those that are brought pain.

The Army brought out its own free first-person shooter to the masses, to show training exercises - to help educate possible enlisted to the ways of modern warfare. But there's not a man or woman that played that game that wouldn't feel something different when that gun recoiled in THEIR hands and killed a real person. But maybe they would be less likely to hurl on their boots or mess their pants. It would be real, then, but it would be a re-enactment of something that they had known before, in another way.

If the sight of blood makes a person bring up their lunch or pass out, and so the sight of blood is avoided by them, then that person is never going to be properly prepared to deal with a crisis situation in which a man is needed to move quickly to save the injured.

The modern depiction of "dehumanising" doesn't work for me. Certainly there is a limit to how much you should force yourself to look at - there are some things out there that no man or woman should accept to be - but having a greater understanding of murder and rape and tragedy doesn't make you blank to it when it happens around you. If anything, it better prepares you to look at a hard situation set before you without panicking - without SHOCK - and thus you can make judgements more clearly. And it helps you to be able to comfort those with the inability to handle the tragedy.

To care about the world around us isn't something only granted to the gifted - that's in anyone that can appreciate what we have, what we see, what can be taken for granted. To care about the world is an emotion riding deep within any that know how to love: to love people, to love animals, to love food, to love the beauty of nature.

Lewd jokes, harsh words, things said that make light of the grave situations about us - these are coping techniques themselves. The people who say them may not be attempting to cope with how they feel specifically about what they ridicule, but somewhere inside them they have decided to use this method to make it easier for themselves with some level of emotion.

Reading - watching movies. These are coping methods as well. When we crack open a fiction novel, we know that what we're going to see is not real. That the suffering is false, created by the author with the intention to move the story along and to make the characters grow and to make the readers feel. We need escapes from the real world, and sometimes it doesn't hurt if those escapes, while fictional, seem to come awful close to home while dealing out its issues.

To read, someone must write. To watch, someone must perform. To listen, someone must play. To get, someone must give. If you have the desire to give, and if you have that passion, then you have to find your own way of coping with real-world issues that are troubling, disheartening, sometimes devastating. Because when people turn the pages that you've written for them, they'll be looking to you to help THEM deal.

There are some publications, some songs, some movies, that of course do the opposite - they take you in, they make those issues real. They bring them to the surface and then some, leaving the readers feeling knowledgeable and depending on the subject matter, sometimes chilled. Now, most of this is easily non-fiction (I've always appreciated that the root word to describe the two main types of writing is "fiction", and that you must add a word to it to find the true stories. While non-fiction may be in many cases more apt to teach you the truth, I do believe that it's the fairy tales that do we readers the most good).

To give, be it through writing, composing, acting, or simply through a trade or skill, one must find their way to cope with what is around them. I don't agree that the brightest and the best are those that cannot handle the imperfections in the world around them. Those are the washed-ups. Those are the dreamers and the wishers. They are the takers, and they are the ones that need the givers, so that they themselves can make some sense of the world around them through another person's eyes.

Now, I think you do know how to cope, even as you write that you don't know how. I think that your method of coping is exactly that method with which you hope to help others cope - through your writing. You know that too - this is no revelation.

But I also know that at times you are much too sensitive in some areas. Certain things lock you up - like this joke apparently did. I don't agree that you should accept your inability to move past it. I think that doing so may not wreck you, but it may keep you from achieving your aims. With a certain level of hopes of achievement comes a need for a certain level of tolerance.

I've no desire to be the man I was ten years ago, nor five. I think that with age, we must grow. We must advance. To learn to deal with the things that shake you does not mean that you give up who you are and how you feel. Learning to ride a bike properly keeps you from tumbling onto the pavement, but the pavement will always be there, and you will always know it.

Nor do I mean that you should have laughed at the joke. The level of humour in a joke depends quite a bit on the ears that hear it. But to let that sink into you - to allow yourself to compare the dark humour to your writing of fictional problems and somehow come out of it feeling like your "fake" problems that you're penning are somehow mocking the true pain in the world is not right.

I think you had the right of it in your post, and maybe all I'm doing is trying my best to support your reasoning. I know how you feel on a great many things - from the moral questions of our time to what you want to do with your life. I hope you can reach all of your dreams, and I know that you'll always be true to the person you are.

Should you manage to learn ways to deal with what troubles you and with what "locks you up", I don't think you'll be doing anything but helping yourself and gaining more ground. Meantime, if all it takes is a quick blog entry to get yourself back on track, then you may be just fine the way you are. ;>

Saturday, May 14, 2005 1:48:00 PM
Heather Meadows said...

Thanks for your comments.

AJ, I think you meant to say "desensitizing". When I said I wanted to avoid "dehumanizing", I meant that I never want to get to the point where I forget that the tragedies that happen in the world are happening to real people. I don't want the victims to become statistics for me.

After I finished writing, I was feeling quite a bit better, and I actually went on to write one of the stories I'd planned. I thought about doing another one, but by then it was 3 am, so I went to bed instead.

It would seem (and I'm pretty sure I already knew this) that my best method of coping is writing about how I feel. I don't think I can do allegory when I'm upset. I have to be completely honest. No frills. But once I get past that raw emotion, I seem to be able to move on to more complex writing. (And hopefully I'm able to inject some of that raw emotion.)

I do want to learn and grow. I hope I never become complacent.

Saturday, May 14, 2005 2:58:00 PM

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