I’ve been thinking about Codi and her view of the
world. She persists in believing that
her pain is somehow unique and can never be understood by anyone else. She holds herself apart from others, using
superficial or artificial personas, and then complains about feeling isolated
and unconnected. She’s full of anger at
her father and sister for abandoning her, although she focuses most of her
anger on her father.
It is true that no one else can ever completely understand
your pain. It’s a completely subjective
experience and since we’re not telepaths or empaths, we can’t know for sure
what other people’s pain feels like. We
can only extrapolate from our own experiences.
It’s a system which has worked pretty well for us as a species but it’s
not perfect.
In Buffy, there
was an episode where Buffy got telepathy.
At the end, she’s talking to a boy who she believes is planning a
killing-spree. He complains that no one
notices he’s suffering. She tells him no
one sees his pain because they’re all too busy silently screaming out their
own.
We all scream silently and pray someone hears us. We hold back and hope someone else will reach
out to us. But most of us are deaf to
the screams around us. We look at the
surface and marvel at what a competent, attractive person someone is, never
knowing that inside their head is a very different picture. We assume everyone can see our own internal
pictures, forgetting that we can’t see theirs.
The thing Codi doesn’t realize is that we have to
communicate our pain to have it healed.
People may never understand your exact pain but they know their
own. They know how awful pain is but
they’re not good at picking up when other people are in pain.
It’s hard to reach out, especially when you already feel
vulnerable. But it’s usually not as
awful as you’re afraid it will be.
Sometimes people really are there to catch you when you fall.
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