no one ever wants to talk about anything bad
"Oh your mom died? I'm so sorry. At least it's a bright, sunny day!"
No one ever wants to hear about anything bad. Everyone has different strategies to pretend like bad things do not actually exist, or that they’re small, or insignificant, or perhaps everyone is just much better adjusted than I am.
I often wonder this, but I often conclude that it’s false. There’s something weird and fake about the way people push aside worries, the way they expertly segway into other cheerier topics, never able to be with any sort of pain.
I’m pretty p-factor as far as p-factor goes. There’s something going on with me, certainly, I would not describe myself as neurotypical. What the “thing” is, I don’t know. Sometimes I think the “thing” is just that I have more emotions than normal…? I feel things very intensely, am moved to tears by any small act of kindness, feel swells of divinity and beauty on lakes and streams, cannot help but be overcome with joy upon the joy of others, but also cry endlessly at their pain and the worlds pain and my own pain. I am depressed a quarter of the time, anxious the other half, and put on a show of normality for the rest.
Strangely enough, people don’t really notice. One of my new housemates asked me what my enneagram was and when I said “4,” she was like, “huh, I don’t really picture you as the broody emotional type.” If only she knew!
I brood a lot, and I am with pain a lot. I can’t “let things go,” it’s not really a mode that I have. It feels fake and disingenuous, like I’m just pretending that it’s all okay and there is nothing I like less than disingenuousness. And I don’t know, even though I feel like everyone is repressing the shit out of everything all the time, I’m also sure that I’m typical-minding the shit out of them. Because every time that you think you’ve accounted for typical-minding you should probably try to account for it again. Probably people who have less of the “thing” than I have just, at baseline, don’t feel as bad about the bad things.
But also, there’s something weird here too. When I was 20 or so, something really traumatic happened to me. And the way it was structured left me with no one to talk to. My parents were out of the question—anything more emotionally burdened than a stubbed toe was a prompt for their terribly adjusted coping strategies to come out full throttle. My friends were out of the question too, for reasons I won’t go into.
As I grew up and met new friends and had different people in my life, I would occasionally try to talk to them about it and quickly learned that this was not a viable option either. The thing that happened to me was just… pretty bad. It was not a pleasant thing to talk about, people didn’t know what to do. Friends who had never encountered anything worse than a bad breakup in their lives would mostly flit their eyes around awkwardly and utter an apology before looking for any excuse to move on. But even friends who were a bit more well versed in the horrors of the world were too wrapped up in their own pain, and would use my haunts as a sounding board of their own suffering.
And even friends who were supposedly self-aware and meta-cognitive and gentle and had done circling and coaching and all of that… even with those people, it was weird. A different sort of weird to be sure. They didn’t just handwave it away or launch into their own pain, but they turned it into some distant modeling process. Asking me all these leading questions about how that interacted with such and such other mental process I had. None of it was grounded in what felt like care. None of it had roots in that simple sort of empathy that mothers have for their children. It was all twisted and far away and fake, a different sort of fake than I was used to, but fake nonetheless.
So I never actually had anyone really listen to me. And that was almost the worst part of it. This awful thing happened, and I was trapped with it in my own mind, suffering alone. Like this person had just eviscerated me on a stage and the audience got up and left for intermission, averting their eyes and filling their minds with what they were going to do later that evening. I lost a lot of faith in humanity around that time. It seemed so impossible, that something that awful could happen, so jarring that it could happen at all and that everyone would pretend that it somehow didn’t, nonetheless.
I think there is a very sensical way in which avoiding pain is useful and important. I certainly do it, too. I think that I am on average much more dismantled by seeing suffering around me, I have a hard time walking around Berkeley because of this. But I still do manage to avoid a lot of it. You just have to, to survive. And I’m not trying to put myself on some moral pedestal, here. I certainly feel for homeless people, but I haven’t really done much to help them, either. It’s probably even worse, since I do feel it so much and don’t do anything about it. In any case I don’t think I’m a saint, just someone with a little more p-factor than the rest of us.
So, I get it. I even do it too. And yet… something feels wrong to me about the whole affair.
A few weeks ago I was feeling all this old stuff about all these old people, the ones who eviscerated me. And it wouldn’t go away and it was ruining my nights and I was mad that it was ruining my nights and on and on. One of those nights I just broke down and cried and cried and relived a lot of that pain, but my boyfriend was there. And he was really there, not flinching, not annoyed on some level that I was upset, not secretly wishing it would end. Just, there. Present. Caring about me. And I recounted all of these things and he hugged me and after it was all said and done I felt this immense wave of peace.
And I realized that at 28, almost 8 years after all of this had happened, not one person had been there for me, not in any particularly special way, but just being there, present to what was happening. I hadn’t even, at that point, realized that this was what I needed. That whole time I felt like these people from my past were the ones that needed to see the pain they inflicted on me. But it wasn’t true. I just needed to know that someone was there, that someone could see it, and could care for it.
I felt a little silly after all of that and also a little sad. Why was it so hard? Why is it so hard for anyone to be present with others suffering? It felt very unjust on some level. That people who are burdened with pain are also burdened with being alone, because no one wants to dig into that. No one knows how. It’s hard and it’s painful to feel someone else’s pain, confusing about how to respond to it, scary about being in a different sort of mode with someone. I feel it too. But I also think it’s crucially important to do it.
There’s a weird thing that happens when I talk to some people about AI risk. They are doing a PhD in ML or whatever and say something like “yeah man, the bitter lesson holds ground, seems like AGI is coming pretty soon.” And I’m like, “are you worried about that?” And they’re like, “yeah, seems like it might be bad.” And I’m like, “so… are you sure you want to keep doing this PhD?” And they get sort of flustered, like it is so implausible that I would ask that question.
And I get it. Making life-altering decisions in the face of uncertainty is weird and hard and I don’t really blame them. But also… there’s a strange fakeness to it that I can’t quite pin down. It’s like they understand the arguments around AI on some level, but they can’t viscerally accept that anything could ever be weird or bad. It’s the same sort of vibe I get when I tell my dad about something bad in the world and he’s like “well at least it’s a sunny day!” Like there’s this thread they cling onto, can return to, that has all the trappings of a warm homecoming—familiar, pleasant, assured.
But life isn’t familiar, pleasant, and assured. It is, sometimes, but it’s not always. Life isn’t always good, or fair, or right. Bad things happen, terrible things, unexpected things. And internalizing and eternalizing that within myself was certainly not the right update after I experienced all that trauma, but internalizing none of it would also have been wrong.
There is a way in which you’re supposed to let the world in, without strain or filters. There’s a way to be that is in accordance with how things actually are. That is balanced with the territory. That just sees. And that way of being includes acknowledging what is bad, also. It includes seeing the horrors and the joys and the familiar. It is about touching all of that, without flinching, without running or grasping. Just being there. Like my boyfriend was for me that one night, in a way that I couldn’t be for myself.
And you know what’s interesting, right after that experience of someone simply being present with my pain, I had this flood of good memories with those people. Dreams of having fun with them, all these old pieces that I hadn’t touched in almost a decade. It was wild. And it felt right, somehow. Like I could be a bit more balanced now, too. A bit more clear.
Holding onto pain is just as bad as holding onto positivity. Grasping is never the answer. But it does go both ways. Holding onto normalcy in the face of suffering is just as jarring, eats away at the soul just as much. It’s fake, disingenuous. Because there is real suffering, is real pain, real fear. Learning to face that, to take it in from the world and from others—to be present and there for those you love in their times of need—it’s one of the most important and beautiful things you can do.