"When everyone is staring at you, wanting you to be somebody else who is terribly sad, you can catch that self-impression like a disease"
So I have a prosthetic eye which is not even 2 years old, so it's still pretty new to me and everyone in my life. But I've gotten fairly used to the experience of having only one real eye, because wtf else are you gonna do, and I make ridiculous one-eyed jokes all the time (the lack of depth perception leads to many comical moments. You should see me play tennis). In person, I'd occasionally get shocked gasps from people who assumed I'd treat the situation with much more seriousness, but usually people would eventually relax and laugh with me.
On Facebook, though, I'd try the same thing, and each time, I'd get inundated with those "care" reacts, and the fact that that reaction is meant to imply sympathy and, in my mind, in my situation, poorly-disguised pity, was humiliating and just caused me to delete the posts after a few hours and effectual stop making the jokes there altogether. A handful of normal people would laugh with me, but the ones who thought my obvious joke was a plea for digital pity made me want to, well, punch rotted-out 2x4s in the basement. Or concrete walls, only in anger instead of jubilation. I wanted to tell them all not to drag me into their performative sadness because who the fuck are they to feel sorry for me when even I don't feel sorry for me? They all mean(t) well, but it was — IS — infuriating.
Great story. All people ever want is to be treated like they are normal. Laughing at or with them like you would with anyone else is a great way to do that.
I have a friend who introduced a friend of his to me (in a noisy bar) as "One-Eyed Jim" I'll call him. "Hi!" I said and turned back to my friend to ask "why is he called 'One-Eyed' Jim?" "He literally only has one eye! The other one is glass!"
I didn't see One-Eyed Jim again for many months, and when I did, each of was with a small group of friends and we vaguely recognized but couldn't place one another until I suddenly realized, "oh, you're [let's call him] Bill Mark's friend! One-Eyed Jim!"
There was almost an audible gasp as his friends recoiled like I'd suddenly struck him, and only in that moment did I realize, of course, that either NOBODY or ONLY Bill Mark called him "One-Eyed Jim" and it was, in fact, UTTERLY socially unacceptable to call someone who'd lost an eye to cancer as a baby "One-Eyed Anyone" but too late, MY clueless friend asked, aloud, and not in a noisy bar where Jim couldn't hear him but in this quiet lounge where everyone could, "why are you called One-Eyed Jim?" and Jim rolled his eyes demonstrating that only one of them moved.
We then awkwardly extricated ourselves, under a cloud, though Jim himself seemed unphased. Bill and Jim later both independently related to me that Jim's friends were appalled and SO mad at Bill for telling someone to call Jim that, but both Bill and Jim thought it was funny as hell.
In high school, I was somewhat of an emotional mess. I have no idea why. In Science class I would sit in the back and silently cry. There was this guy who sat next to me, Josh. He was the only one who knew I cried during class.
He would get my attention and whisper something hilarious that would snap me out of my spiral. Or we would play this game where I would mimic whatever he did until it was too outrageous to continue.
Josh was popular, good-looking, good at basketball. He had a sort of devil-may-care vibe like a smart slacker. Did a lot of “annoying older brother” type teasing. What I’m trying to say is, he wasn’t Mr. Rogers. He was here for a good time. But when no one was looking, he took care of me in a way I didn’t know I needed.
Our senior class (all 9 of us) were required to write a speech and deliver it in front of the whole school on our last day. I was absolutely shocked when Josh sobbed the whole way through his speech. Laughter, boredom and anger are the only emotions I had ever seen from him. I hadn’t known there was anything else there.
After the speeches were over, I found him in the hall and finally acknowledged the thing we never spoke of. I said “Thanks for cheering me up when I was crying in science class”. He just grinned and said “Yeah, no problem” before turning and walking away.
I guess in case you weren't joking: His family looked good on the outside, but around graduation some stuff came out that made me wonder how on earth he survived in that house.
Excellent story and told well. I find it difficult to “fake” sympathy, especially if I don’t know the person and sometimes say, what others consider, inappropriate things but I just look at the recipient of my comment, if it makes them smile and nod then all is well
My last one was a workmates brother had died early November of last year, there was a card bought for condolences extra and the obligatory “ sorry about your loss” speech… I just remember shuffling forward and he was looking down at the card, a little stunned, and I said “ look on the bright side, you don’t have to buy him a Xmas present( pause) you haven’t, have you?
Around me the crowd went silent but the guy smiled and glanced at me and said thanks I needed that you bastard and we moved on to other things. He told me later it was just good to hear something “ normal” instead of every conversation having that awkward start of condolences.
I’m not a religious person but do like the expression, there but for the grace of God….. when I see something that’s not quite right and I also follow the “ treat others as you’d expect to be treated and for me that’s just a little human dignity and understanding , not much in the grand scheme of things
I should have found a way to add in here (except that it got long) that your “authentic self” changes as you know more. So what I always tell people is to know a lot and then be their authentic selves. That did ruin my ability to use profanity at whim, though.
Damn I love your stories! This line sticks out to me "The individual person is the measure for all value in the world." Because I have come to see things this way- all of God is in one person, and yet God is spread out among all of us, and where we really see Him is in the synapses between people, where "two or more are gathered" - like between you and B.
I think something like this is very true and maybe the reason from God’s eye that we are all here together. I grew a lot from all of this. I wasn’t the same after. Still, I wish this had never happened to B.
And yet, nobody could control it. We can’t go back in time. We can’t fix all brain damage (yet.) There’s a natural inclination to recoil when confronted with this powerlessness (and maybe hopelessness.) Maybe that’s why some of B’s friends drifted away, but you didn’t. You could face it somehow. I remember reading a comment from a mother who had a disabled child. She had been very politically liberal, very hip, like all her friends. When her friends spoke to her about her child, it was always about how she could have prevented the disability, and could she have discovered it earlier in her pregnancy so that she could have had an abortion. This woman ended up befriending some religious people, and she said they never looked at her child this way. They accepted that he was disabled, and offered to help. They weren’t fighting God. They could cope. I’m not saying you have to have religion to cope, but it seems to help.
“You don’t even have a right to be sad, I told myself. She had better friends. Nobody even really knew you were friends. So crying would only be selfish. She probably didn’t even think of you as her friend. You’re just someone she talked to for a few minutes every morning.” That’s good shit. It’s an excessive application of it, but the principle “I should be skeptical of my feelings” is so good; do we take it too far, hurting ourselves and others? Yes.
I would be good at Hooter’s but I assume their vape policy is a deal-breaker. Loved this one man.
I've been a few times. Once in 7th grade, a boy wanted to go there for his birthday and his older brother took us. I don't remember anything about Hooters that day, but I did smoke my first cigarette and it seemed gross (lol).
Later, I had a friend whose cousin had been a waitress and worked her way up to management! So we went somewhat often for free food, since we were broke. Being sensitive young morons, we usually ate outside so no one would think we were there for leering purposes. It was awkward as hell.
I almost sent you our prom picture but I have decided it’s better to not continually use you as my evidence keeper. You are a good dude and thank you for not being upset that I said you would be a really good hooters waitress. I mean it, in my own way, as a high compliment.
I literally laughed out loud. Well done. That's actually very hard to make me do.
We must be on the same wavelength. I do this with children sometimes when they do some dumb child thing and upset the social norms. I usually laugh at them. Most parents appreciate the opposite reaction of horror or surprise that other people give, as if they are shocked a human with an underdeveloped brain would spaz out when they shouldn't.
I feel like this is something critical we are supposed to have in our development so that we don’t grow really anxious and self-conscious as we age. It’s meant to anesthetize us.
I agree. Bad feelings have been so taboo for so long no one knows how to just accept the fact that bad things happen to everyone. It makes everyone powerless when any sort of bad thing happens.
I agree that part of growing up is recognized the world has bad things in it and that you should be fixing some of it. Being incapacitated by it is very bad.
The first part, This brings back a memory. My first year in grad school I had this... more or less friend (not someone I was close to, just someone I'd sometimes sit with for lunch in the dorms). I didn't exactly have a crush on her, but I vaguely felt like I should, since she was nice and kinda sweet and nice to talk to.
Anyway my second year in grad school I stopped running into her in the dining hall. Like you, I idly wondered in the back of my head if something had happened to her, but realistically I knew she'd probably just moved out of the dorms.
Anyway, the next semester she was back and it turned out my fear had been right all along - she'd been hit by a taxi going ninety miles an hour and had almost died, then spent the next six months in rehabilitation. She could still barely walk (she used a stroller. She definitely couldn't do stairs).
I'm going to go a bit off topic here and talk about urbanism. 95% of the time when urbanists (including me) talk about "ban cars" or whatever we really are just fighting the culture war and aesthetics and, in terms of real emotional depth, it's just shallow culture war, not the kind of deep feeling you have when talking about old friends like B. It's actually important because it saves statistical lives, but statistical lives are fungible and don't feel like real people and you can't feel genuine connection to them. It feels small and petty to even bring up something like that here. Except that somewhere down the line statistical lives somehow turn into real people. I'm a pretty cold and analytical person but even I don't know exactly how to do the mental translation.
Also I’m for safety as long as it human shaped. I may need a piece to expound it but basically my problem is when the statistical maybe hypothetical person replaces all the actual real people.
TBH I probably shouldn't. I think this is, in a weird way, the exact opposite situation to you - someone who on paper I should have grown close to, but with who I didn't quite feel comfortable just being my weird self and for who I probably wouldn't have thought to get a yearbook. Which makes me a bit sad about myself - usually when I feel that slight distance with someone (which I do with almost everyone) there's a good explanation, when it's still there without one it bothers me. But, well, there it is.
Yeah but my point is, it can be really hard to find the line between human shaped and not human shaped. That statistical life saved by some kind of traffic safety measure is as inhuman as it gets until it's your friend who gets in the crash. On the other hand it's also easy to justify absurd safetyism to the point where we're all cogs in a machine if you mess with the numbers just right.
I don't have a general solution for a good way to think about this. I can just about barely manage it in short horizon stock trading, where we have lots of data, fast feedback and things are relatively simple. It's much harder to do when there's real people and complicated real world ideas at play.
Go ahead and ban cars in cities, I could care less, do not try it in the country where stores are miles away and there is little to no publican transportation nor is it feasible, or there will be a fight.
This is fundamentally missing the point. I want less car traffic because I want to protect people from being horribly injured, but you can't or shouldn't protect people against their own will. Best we can do is figure out how to do it better in places people want it.
"When everyone is staring at you, wanting you to be somebody else who is terribly sad, you can catch that self-impression like a disease"
So I have a prosthetic eye which is not even 2 years old, so it's still pretty new to me and everyone in my life. But I've gotten fairly used to the experience of having only one real eye, because wtf else are you gonna do, and I make ridiculous one-eyed jokes all the time (the lack of depth perception leads to many comical moments. You should see me play tennis). In person, I'd occasionally get shocked gasps from people who assumed I'd treat the situation with much more seriousness, but usually people would eventually relax and laugh with me.
On Facebook, though, I'd try the same thing, and each time, I'd get inundated with those "care" reacts, and the fact that that reaction is meant to imply sympathy and, in my mind, in my situation, poorly-disguised pity, was humiliating and just caused me to delete the posts after a few hours and effectual stop making the jokes there altogether. A handful of normal people would laugh with me, but the ones who thought my obvious joke was a plea for digital pity made me want to, well, punch rotted-out 2x4s in the basement. Or concrete walls, only in anger instead of jubilation. I wanted to tell them all not to drag me into their performative sadness because who the fuck are they to feel sorry for me when even I don't feel sorry for me? They all mean(t) well, but it was — IS — infuriating.
Great story. All people ever want is to be treated like they are normal. Laughing at or with them like you would with anyone else is a great way to do that.
Whenever you lose an argument, you should say “And the ayes have it.”
Definitely saving that one for later.
I have a friend who introduced a friend of his to me (in a noisy bar) as "One-Eyed Jim" I'll call him. "Hi!" I said and turned back to my friend to ask "why is he called 'One-Eyed' Jim?" "He literally only has one eye! The other one is glass!"
I didn't see One-Eyed Jim again for many months, and when I did, each of was with a small group of friends and we vaguely recognized but couldn't place one another until I suddenly realized, "oh, you're [let's call him] Bill Mark's friend! One-Eyed Jim!"
There was almost an audible gasp as his friends recoiled like I'd suddenly struck him, and only in that moment did I realize, of course, that either NOBODY or ONLY Bill Mark called him "One-Eyed Jim" and it was, in fact, UTTERLY socially unacceptable to call someone who'd lost an eye to cancer as a baby "One-Eyed Anyone" but too late, MY clueless friend asked, aloud, and not in a noisy bar where Jim couldn't hear him but in this quiet lounge where everyone could, "why are you called One-Eyed Jim?" and Jim rolled his eyes demonstrating that only one of them moved.
We then awkwardly extricated ourselves, under a cloud, though Jim himself seemed unphased. Bill and Jim later both independently related to me that Jim's friends were appalled and SO mad at Bill for telling someone to call Jim that, but both Bill and Jim thought it was funny as hell.
This brought back a great memory for me.
In high school, I was somewhat of an emotional mess. I have no idea why. In Science class I would sit in the back and silently cry. There was this guy who sat next to me, Josh. He was the only one who knew I cried during class.
He would get my attention and whisper something hilarious that would snap me out of my spiral. Or we would play this game where I would mimic whatever he did until it was too outrageous to continue.
Josh was popular, good-looking, good at basketball. He had a sort of devil-may-care vibe like a smart slacker. Did a lot of “annoying older brother” type teasing. What I’m trying to say is, he wasn’t Mr. Rogers. He was here for a good time. But when no one was looking, he took care of me in a way I didn’t know I needed.
Our senior class (all 9 of us) were required to write a speech and deliver it in front of the whole school on our last day. I was absolutely shocked when Josh sobbed the whole way through his speech. Laughter, boredom and anger are the only emotions I had ever seen from him. I hadn’t known there was anything else there.
After the speeches were over, I found him in the hall and finally acknowledged the thing we never spoke of. I said “Thanks for cheering me up when I was crying in science class”. He just grinned and said “Yeah, no problem” before turning and walking away.
Was he also a really good carpenter?
No, but he has since become an electrician.
His parents must be really religious.
I'm torn. I don't know if you're joking or not. Damn the lack of intonation in internet comments!
I’ll make a fun post in the future to make it clear.
I guess in case you weren't joking: His family looked good on the outside, but around graduation some stuff came out that made me wonder how on earth he survived in that house.
Great piece, man. There's a lot of truth here. Powerful.
Thanks Ernie. Would you say this is to writing what Tillamook ice cream is to other ice cream?
Indeed!😂
Beautiful piece of work, man; thank you.
Thank you!
Great piece. One question: how are you sure the principal wasn’t talking about you?
…
….
… I may have maligned a good man.
Excellent story and told well. I find it difficult to “fake” sympathy, especially if I don’t know the person and sometimes say, what others consider, inappropriate things but I just look at the recipient of my comment, if it makes them smile and nod then all is well
My last one was a workmates brother had died early November of last year, there was a card bought for condolences extra and the obligatory “ sorry about your loss” speech… I just remember shuffling forward and he was looking down at the card, a little stunned, and I said “ look on the bright side, you don’t have to buy him a Xmas present( pause) you haven’t, have you?
Around me the crowd went silent but the guy smiled and glanced at me and said thanks I needed that you bastard and we moved on to other things. He told me later it was just good to hear something “ normal” instead of every conversation having that awkward start of condolences.
I’m not a religious person but do like the expression, there but for the grace of God….. when I see something that’s not quite right and I also follow the “ treat others as you’d expect to be treated and for me that’s just a little human dignity and understanding , not much in the grand scheme of things
lol on the exchange.
I should have found a way to add in here (except that it got long) that your “authentic self” changes as you know more. So what I always tell people is to know a lot and then be their authentic selves. That did ruin my ability to use profanity at whim, though.
Damn I love your stories! This line sticks out to me "The individual person is the measure for all value in the world." Because I have come to see things this way- all of God is in one person, and yet God is spread out among all of us, and where we really see Him is in the synapses between people, where "two or more are gathered" - like between you and B.
I think something like this is very true and maybe the reason from God’s eye that we are all here together. I grew a lot from all of this. I wasn’t the same after. Still, I wish this had never happened to B.
And yet, nobody could control it. We can’t go back in time. We can’t fix all brain damage (yet.) There’s a natural inclination to recoil when confronted with this powerlessness (and maybe hopelessness.) Maybe that’s why some of B’s friends drifted away, but you didn’t. You could face it somehow. I remember reading a comment from a mother who had a disabled child. She had been very politically liberal, very hip, like all her friends. When her friends spoke to her about her child, it was always about how she could have prevented the disability, and could she have discovered it earlier in her pregnancy so that she could have had an abortion. This woman ended up befriending some religious people, and she said they never looked at her child this way. They accepted that he was disabled, and offered to help. They weren’t fighting God. They could cope. I’m not saying you have to have religion to cope, but it seems to help.
Yes. I keep re-reading this. And crying and laughing. So many wise perceptions. Thank you.
Thanks Betsy
Oh my gosh, this was a wonderful piece of writing. So beautifully done. 👌🏼❤️
Thanks blue.
“You don’t even have a right to be sad, I told myself. She had better friends. Nobody even really knew you were friends. So crying would only be selfish. She probably didn’t even think of you as her friend. You’re just someone she talked to for a few minutes every morning.” That’s good shit. It’s an excessive application of it, but the principle “I should be skeptical of my feelings” is so good; do we take it too far, hurting ourselves and others? Yes.
I would be good at Hooter’s but I assume their vape policy is a deal-breaker. Loved this one man.
PS I have only been to Hooters once when some of my friends, who are Marines, forced me to go and I found it viscerally uncomfortable.
I've been a few times. Once in 7th grade, a boy wanted to go there for his birthday and his older brother took us. I don't remember anything about Hooters that day, but I did smoke my first cigarette and it seemed gross (lol).
Later, I had a friend whose cousin had been a waitress and worked her way up to management! So we went somewhat often for free food, since we were broke. Being sensitive young morons, we usually ate outside so no one would think we were there for leering purposes. It was awkward as hell.
I don’t understand the psychology of old dudes who can just be in a Hooters. At minimum, I feel like a vampire entering a church.
I almost sent you our prom picture but I have decided it’s better to not continually use you as my evidence keeper. You are a good dude and thank you for not being upset that I said you would be a really good hooters waitress. I mean it, in my own way, as a high compliment.
I literally laughed out loud. Well done. That's actually very hard to make me do.
We must be on the same wavelength. I do this with children sometimes when they do some dumb child thing and upset the social norms. I usually laugh at them. Most parents appreciate the opposite reaction of horror or surprise that other people give, as if they are shocked a human with an underdeveloped brain would spaz out when they shouldn't.
I feel like this is something critical we are supposed to have in our development so that we don’t grow really anxious and self-conscious as we age. It’s meant to anesthetize us.
I agree. Bad feelings have been so taboo for so long no one knows how to just accept the fact that bad things happen to everyone. It makes everyone powerless when any sort of bad thing happens.
I agree that part of growing up is recognized the world has bad things in it and that you should be fixing some of it. Being incapacitated by it is very bad.
The first part, This brings back a memory. My first year in grad school I had this... more or less friend (not someone I was close to, just someone I'd sometimes sit with for lunch in the dorms). I didn't exactly have a crush on her, but I vaguely felt like I should, since she was nice and kinda sweet and nice to talk to.
Anyway my second year in grad school I stopped running into her in the dining hall. Like you, I idly wondered in the back of my head if something had happened to her, but realistically I knew she'd probably just moved out of the dorms.
Anyway, the next semester she was back and it turned out my fear had been right all along - she'd been hit by a taxi going ninety miles an hour and had almost died, then spent the next six months in rehabilitation. She could still barely walk (she used a stroller. She definitely couldn't do stairs).
I'm going to go a bit off topic here and talk about urbanism. 95% of the time when urbanists (including me) talk about "ban cars" or whatever we really are just fighting the culture war and aesthetics and, in terms of real emotional depth, it's just shallow culture war, not the kind of deep feeling you have when talking about old friends like B. It's actually important because it saves statistical lives, but statistical lives are fungible and don't feel like real people and you can't feel genuine connection to them. It feels small and petty to even bring up something like that here. Except that somewhere down the line statistical lives somehow turn into real people. I'm a pretty cold and analytical person but even I don't know exactly how to do the mental translation.
Go find her and marry her if she’s still single!
Also I’m for safety as long as it human shaped. I may need a piece to expound it but basically my problem is when the statistical maybe hypothetical person replaces all the actual real people.
> go ahead and marry her
TBH I probably shouldn't. I think this is, in a weird way, the exact opposite situation to you - someone who on paper I should have grown close to, but with who I didn't quite feel comfortable just being my weird self and for who I probably wouldn't have thought to get a yearbook. Which makes me a bit sad about myself - usually when I feel that slight distance with someone (which I do with almost everyone) there's a good explanation, when it's still there without one it bothers me. But, well, there it is.
Yeah but my point is, it can be really hard to find the line between human shaped and not human shaped. That statistical life saved by some kind of traffic safety measure is as inhuman as it gets until it's your friend who gets in the crash. On the other hand it's also easy to justify absurd safetyism to the point where we're all cogs in a machine if you mess with the numbers just right.
I don't have a general solution for a good way to think about this. I can just about barely manage it in short horizon stock trading, where we have lots of data, fast feedback and things are relatively simple. It's much harder to do when there's real people and complicated real world ideas at play.
Agreed. It’s an eternal and endless struggle.
Go ahead and ban cars in cities, I could care less, do not try it in the country where stores are miles away and there is little to no publican transportation nor is it feasible, or there will be a fight.
This is fundamentally missing the point. I want less car traffic because I want to protect people from being horribly injured, but you can't or shouldn't protect people against their own will. Best we can do is figure out how to do it better in places people want it.
I agree with this. It’s an eternal battle on appropriateness of intervention. There’s no one single settled solution.
Wow.
Thanks Think.
Incredible story and writing.
Thank you, Mr. Raven
I think you should make all these essays into a book.