Performing Pain

In the aftermath of the latest wave of #MeToo, I saw hundreds of people relive some of the most painful moments of their lives. They did this way out in public, engraving onto the internet memories that many of them would have spent years repressing or avoiding. They wrote it down on social media, knowing that hundreds of screenshots would be taken.

And all of us talked about the burden of having to perform our pain in the hopes that something would come of it. Not necessarily justice. But maybe for it to serve as a warning to other people. Perhaps some degree of validation of that pain. A deterrent, that this might stop happening to people.

People that try to spread awareness about any sort of pain or marginalization – be it feminist issues, mental health awareness, or caste, gender or sexuality based discrimination – are questioned so hard and so often that they end up having to display their pain so they can be taken seriously. They do this in as harsh a manner as possible, sparing themselves as little as they possibly can.

And such is the dubious nature of empathy that all this becomes necessary. After all, what does it say about me that I cannot empathize even with my severely depressed self, when I am moderately depressed? If I, who experience it in the most fucking firsthand fashion, cannot fucking remember how horrible it is, how can someone that has never experienced anything like it hope to empathize?

What I do for myself in such situations is to lay down axioms and rules of thumb while I’m going through the worst of it. These rules need to be blindly followed by the less ill version of me, so that we don’t all careen into yet another devastating tailspin. I’d love to say that this is how I resolved my empathy problem, but the problem is far from resolved. After all, insensitive people have no patience for blindly obeying things they cannot understand.

Honestly, it’s kind of a hit-and-miss scenario. But the point is to keep trying. And the larger, not-so-thinly-veiled point is that THOSE OF YOU who cannot understand need to just stfu and listen, and blindly follow.