Closet Extremist

Not (quite) compassionate.

I've realized here lately that I've got a particular character flaw...the inability to empathize with irrational behavior/thought processes enough to help out folks who have those symptoms. It's pandemic to my relations with the "fairer sex" I'm afraid, as if you're a guy who is acting a fool, then I'll happily disabuse you of your foolish notions, and if it "don't take" then I'll certify you as an idiot and basically ignore you in perpetuity. The ladie's always get dispensation, 'cuz after I attempt to steer them onto the correct path, I don't leave them behind if they fail to "get it". Maybe it's a pheremone thing...I don't know.

A few months ago a female friend of mine was going through an existential crisis...trying to determine self-worth, uncertainty in profession, and feelings of self-destruction up to and including suicide. Every time we got on the subject (after a few cups of beer and a bourbon or two) I'd just wind up getting pissed off at her for what she was feeling. This was stuff that I went through and figured out when I was fifteen, so I found her issues innane. No matter how much I yelled and screamed sense at her, I was unable to convey my point in such a manner that she could "grok" it. Essentially my message was: Your life is all you've got, so ending it now would take away the potential for any joy, or happiness, or resolution, or retribution you may ever experience henceforth. no matter how bad it sucks right now, it'll "get better" despite the plans and expectations you've placed on yourself.

It took the ministrations of one her family members to get through to her that she has some worth. My vulcan-esque logic just didn't hit home. Even when I spoke calmly and rationally at her, I couldn't make that mind budge. The view from my Ivory tower reaches long and wide, but it's forgotten what the view is from the mud level. (not really, but I can't seem to put it into a linguistic that someone in the mud will dig.)

The other day, My roommate's lady-friend Jennifer was expounding upon the circumstances of her recent "haunting". She was at the house with a friend from work, and they were just leaving, and Jenny (somehow) went "Ass over Teakettle" when exiting the abode. Her companion determined that there was nothing wrong with her feet, so she decided that there was "something" that tripped her as she went out the door. She regaled me with an assortment of happenstances that included: Lights flickering at her workplace, an electric eye operated faucet starting on its own, a TV screen flickering, and all like that. Things that could be caused by any number of electrical anomolies were attributed to an ethereal entity. I was sympathetic in my speech to her, but was emphatic in my plausible explanations of the events that she experienced.

I attempted to get her to take the things she noticed, and go: Gee the lights flickered...Well...what's for lunch? I was unsuccessful in convincing her that she could talk herself out of her "manifestation" in the same way that she talked herself into it. She decided to discontinue speaking to the people that had witnessed her "haints" and decided that that was why they'd gone away.

It's apparrent to me that I have not the compassion to expres to someone of thefemale of the species that they'd be better off "thinking" and "observing" than they are just "reacting" and ascribing things to whatever is convenient.

I ain't saying it's a Universal, but it's all I've ever seen. No matter how dire the circumstance, my compassion comes up lacking.

Posted by Johnny - Oh at February 22, 2006 09:46 PM | TrackBack