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functional disconnection
Sep. 30th, 2010 06:55 pmToday is Elie Wiesel's birthday, which made me realize how odd it is that his books had no effect on me. I remember Night in a very blank way; I know scenes, but they did not and do not alter me emotionally. I had the same problem with Anne Frank's diary; I read it many times, trying to feel some kind of identification, and I didn't. I thought it might be the translation, and later found out about the many missing passages, but that version had the same effect (or lack of effect).
When it comes to great tragedy, the newspaper rule is to personalize it -- tell the story about one person's missing son instead of the thousands killed in the earthquake. Give it a human interest angle.
I react the other way. Individual human stories don't matter much to me. Aggregates do. Tell me 17,000 people have been disappeared in Sri Lanka since 1980 and I start crying and hyperventilating. I'm supposed to care more about people who look like me or live near me, but I don't. I don't feel the impact of a lone blond child from down the street. I only start to care about individuals when they save other people. In tragedies, I'm struck not by faces, but by facelessness.
I've been feeling cloven lately, different and apart from other people in a way that makes almost every conversation frightening. To some extent, I feel different as in special, but for the most part simply without common ground, as though at any moment I might find out that we have not been talking about the same thing at all. I feel embarrassed just talking about it, because I suspect saying something like that will make people react as though I am 14, suicidal, or trying to assert some kind of superiority. It is actually very intimidating and unromantic to feel pervasively dissimilar from the rest of human beings.
Not that I think they should be more like me in a prescriptive "it is better to be like me" way, but "should" as in "logically, doesn't it seem like we would be more alike." We would maybe feel the same feelings or laugh at the same joke for reasons that are the same and not different.
This has been a hardship through most of my life, of course, but it is harder at some times than other times and I always thought I would eventually find the right people or get better at being within standard deviation of a chosen subgroup. For a long time, it seemed like I was getting more and more able to fit in, but lately I have trouble not being aware of the reasons people find me difficult to be around, which as you might guess makes it harder for me to be someone it is easy to be around.
I am attracted and repelled by the idea of withdrawing from all contact with anyone who has ever expressed a dislike of me in even a small way, which is most people, just in hopes of building my own ego back up a little so that at least I can come back and be offensive on my own terms instead of by accident, uncontrollably, but I don't think this is something I will be allowed to do and it would probably just upset Ciro. And most of those people are also people who regularly make clear that they like me.
Maybe the right therapy would work, but the wrong therapy would be disastrous, and I tend to expect the wrong therapy, which is made for a set of people with the opposite problems to mine, who there seem to be more of. I don't need to see my behavior more clearly; I need to see it less clearly, at least in the areas where it is genuinely beyond help.
In the meantime, I am pleased by thoughts of how I will arrange my office in Boston, which will have an herb garden and milk paint murals and a tea kettle.
When it comes to great tragedy, the newspaper rule is to personalize it -- tell the story about one person's missing son instead of the thousands killed in the earthquake. Give it a human interest angle.
I react the other way. Individual human stories don't matter much to me. Aggregates do. Tell me 17,000 people have been disappeared in Sri Lanka since 1980 and I start crying and hyperventilating. I'm supposed to care more about people who look like me or live near me, but I don't. I don't feel the impact of a lone blond child from down the street. I only start to care about individuals when they save other people. In tragedies, I'm struck not by faces, but by facelessness.
I've been feeling cloven lately, different and apart from other people in a way that makes almost every conversation frightening. To some extent, I feel different as in special, but for the most part simply without common ground, as though at any moment I might find out that we have not been talking about the same thing at all. I feel embarrassed just talking about it, because I suspect saying something like that will make people react as though I am 14, suicidal, or trying to assert some kind of superiority. It is actually very intimidating and unromantic to feel pervasively dissimilar from the rest of human beings.
Not that I think they should be more like me in a prescriptive "it is better to be like me" way, but "should" as in "logically, doesn't it seem like we would be more alike." We would maybe feel the same feelings or laugh at the same joke for reasons that are the same and not different.
This has been a hardship through most of my life, of course, but it is harder at some times than other times and I always thought I would eventually find the right people or get better at being within standard deviation of a chosen subgroup. For a long time, it seemed like I was getting more and more able to fit in, but lately I have trouble not being aware of the reasons people find me difficult to be around, which as you might guess makes it harder for me to be someone it is easy to be around.
I am attracted and repelled by the idea of withdrawing from all contact with anyone who has ever expressed a dislike of me in even a small way, which is most people, just in hopes of building my own ego back up a little so that at least I can come back and be offensive on my own terms instead of by accident, uncontrollably, but I don't think this is something I will be allowed to do and it would probably just upset Ciro. And most of those people are also people who regularly make clear that they like me.
Maybe the right therapy would work, but the wrong therapy would be disastrous, and I tend to expect the wrong therapy, which is made for a set of people with the opposite problems to mine, who there seem to be more of. I don't need to see my behavior more clearly; I need to see it less clearly, at least in the areas where it is genuinely beyond help.
In the meantime, I am pleased by thoughts of how I will arrange my office in Boston, which will have an herb garden and milk paint murals and a tea kettle.
