From winter to spring…Persephone the Goddess…Hamilton the Musical…Picnic Island Park (Tampa)…When empathy hurts in surprising ways
My stomach has flipped, which means my internal landscape has switched from fall/winter to spring/summer. (My stomach operates on or around cross-quarter pagan holidays.) So I am abruptly in a much more cheerful mood. Ray, thank goodness, knows the drill and just smiles and nods and lets me run amuck. I’m back down to a point where things are a little easier to manage–but I’m still one bad pun and a cookie away from turning into Tigger.
Of all the Greek gods and goddesses, I’ve always liked Persephone/Kore best; I often wonder why nobody shows her bouncing off the walls when it’s time for SPRRRIIIIING in the underworld.
“And I’m gonna leave for six months and do everything I’ve been planning to do for months! Look at all these seedlings!!! They’re already sprouting!!!”
“Yes, dear, I know.”
“It’s gonna be so much fun!!!!!!”
[Six months later.]
“Fuck growing things, I just want to sleep for six months. Spoil me.”
“Welcome back, darling.”
Ray and I went to Hamilton at the Straz Theater in Tampa; I enjoyed myself but couldn’t kick my brain out of critical mode. The cast was solid but not spectacular, and I found myself comparing Hamilton to Hadestown (Persephone again). Because the possibility of me ever writing a musical is low but not zero, I guess, I’ve been ruminating about what made Hadestown better for me than Hamilton.
Early guesses:
–Hamilton uses complexity to tell a complex story, trying to shove ten pounds of complexity into a five-pound bag.
–Hadestown uses simplicity to tell a simple story, sneaking two pounds of complexity (hey…maybe this is about modern-day capitalism?) in a four-pound bag and giving it plenty of room to rattle around.
–Hamilton summarizes its events, then illustrates a few points. Toward the end, it summarizes A LOT.
–Hadestown (mostly) demonstrates its events, then hints that one may extrapolate some lessons learned from those events.
–Hamilton’s main male roles (and female roles, if you compare female roles against each other separately) are musically similar and are even COSTUMED similarly. Except for the king.
–Hadestown’s main roles are all sung and costumed dissimilarly, as far as I can remember. (I’ve heard Hamilton a bajillion times, but not Hadestown.)
I went to a new-to-me beach, Picnic Island Park. Pardon, this next bit may be TMI. I had to pee by the time I got there. First toilet = closed. Second toilet = closed. And my joints all hurt (hoping I didn’t catch anything at Hamilton, we were masked but still). So I was in a powerful bad mood, walking around glaring at the people playing frisbee golf, muttering, “If they think I won’t just pee behind a tree they have another think coming, I literally did grow up on a farm thank you very much and it wouldn’t be the first time.” Fortunately, there was a third bathroom and the ibuprofen kicked in, and I ended up having a pleasant time. Today a mild headache, feeling much better.
The rest of this year, I’m going to be working on some pretty heavy classes. I will likely be swinging between despair and exultation. Last week was more on the despair end; this week I’m doing “who’s a real writer now” strut. Give me a week, though, and I’ll be back to throwing myself on the ground and dying with embarrassment over all the things I don’t know.
Writers. We’re weird.
…
When empathy doesn’t just feel bad, it feels surprisingly bad.
One of the powerful things that I know (I know several powerful things) is that other people have their own lives. I sometimes forget that I know it, but I *do* know it, and very deeply, too.
Part of it is simple empathy. I see someone feeling hurt, I feel hurt; they stop feeling hurt, I feel better. And I see other people acting in the same way: I feel hurt, they act as though they feel hurt; I stop feeling hurt, they act as though they feel better. It’s therefore possible–if maybe not guaranteed–that other people have the same type of internal life that I do.
Part of it comes from reading. Not only am I brought to other worlds and other experiences that I could not have imagined on my own–how wonderful! how terrifying!–but sometimes I am brought back to thoughts that are similar to my own, either by the character or (invisibly) through the entire work, from the mind of the author themselves.
And so it’s therefore possible–if not guaranteed–that other people have the same type of internal life that I do.
There are probably more elements that contribute to my sense of other people having inner lives, too.
But the part that moves me (and makes me very proud of my past self) is knowing that I chose not just to believe, but to give myself over to the belief, that it’s possible–if not guaranteed–that other people have internal lives that are similar to my own.
“Is the thought of a unicorn is a real thought?”
When I first encountered that question, I felt hurt. How could someone even ask that? Why would they? How cruel! Who decides whether the thought is real or not? Who decides who is a unicorn and who is real?–It’s taken me a while to realize that it’s a question that should be asked. I’m just the wrong person to ask it.
To me, the thought of the unicorn is a real thought (although not, perhaps, the thought of a real unicorn). I have no objectivity about this.
Sometimes the powerful things we know aren’t answerable to reason. If I were ever in a position where I could no longer believe that the thought of a unicorn wasn’t a real thought, I would probably have a severe mental breakdown.
Or I would hedge my belief until it was something that I could feel like I believed, but didn’t have to act upon. Ehhh, I hate it when that happens and try to root it out when I catch it. Hypocrisy.
Or–and this is actually more common for me–I’ll shut down, turn off, pretend everything is “fine” and not even be aware there’s a problem.
Anyway.
Because I know what a mess my internal life is, I can also guess what a mess other people’s internal lives are.
What makes me uncomfortable is knowing that other people can guess the same thing about me.
It feels like it should be a joke: an infinitely regressive game of “I know that you know that I know that you know that I know that you know that…”
But instead it feels terrible.
What if, because I can wriggle out other people’s inner muck based on my knowledge of my own inner muck, *they* can wriggle out mine?
Eughh.
Some days I just shut down. (Which, from me, looks cheerful and funny, because that was a safe way to defend myself as a kid.) I *do not* want compassion, or understanding, or forgiveness, or even a shoulder to cry on. Those things mean that I, myself, have no safety or privacy inside my own mind, because if someone else knows that I’m hurting despite my best efforts, then I have no safe place to hide. It was difficult for me to learn to accept love from people, because it mostly just felt like an invasive form of pity.
But: some people just kept showing up. I’d go radio silent and they’d poke me to see if I was okay. I’d say I was fine and they’d smile and nod and continue the conversation in another direction. And then they’d check in again later.
Eventually I’d stop fighting it. I still don’t open up about everything (despite how much I overshare), but I can at least countenance the fact that other people are picking up on it, at some level.
Some days I can even feel grateful. Blessed, even.
And, slowly, often as carefully as a toddler with a family pet, I learned to reciprocate. I don’t really notice the passage of time as such, but I do notice when a pattern shifts. Air currents shift. I can smell a storm.
I still assume I’ve done something terrible, most of the time. I struggle with boundaries (because of my mom and ADD, I’m guessing) and when other people are having a bad day for any reason whatsoever, I assume that it’s all my fault and I should feel bad about it, or worse things will soon follow.
But I’ve come to know enough to go, “If I feel like there’s a current of ‘it’s all my fault’ in the air, I should check on the person.”
(Other things will make me check, too, like getting sick. My internal radar goes nuts for a few days when that happens.)
“Hey, I’m here, are you okay? Do you need anything? Mad at me? Need to vent about anything?”
Mostly what I really want to say is, “I see your mess and it is acceptable to me.”
I know I shouldn’t say that, in the moment; I know it will feel like an invasion of privacy; I know it freaks people out, whenever I *do* say it, or hint it. People have yelled at me, gotten mad at me, refused to talk to me ever again, or have clearly switched me over into permanent “cheerful fun fine!!!” mode. I have done the same.
The people who kept showing up eventually showed up again, though, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. A couple of people have done so quite recently. I have to laugh at myself, at what I doofus I still am, and how very LOUD I am about tuning out other people’s concern for me.
So here we are. The mess in me salutes the mess in you. On the one hand, thank you for being patient, and on the other hand, yes, it’s still me, throwing rocks at your window when I go by.
…
Another video on the creative life, on using photography to see the world differently.
Midjourney prompt that I was using as inspiration for one of my writing class assignments this week.
Guy out fishing on Picnic Island Park yesterday.