Tim Barrus, New York Times
Sometimes (often) a shadow passes over you that you can recognize as raw despair. I often write about how we as people find it convenient to ignore the part pain causes a trauma that is so hard to recover from. It is a neurological reality that trauma changes a human brain’s ability to evaluate what is an individual’s capacity to survive. We grant the brain’s prowess to produce emotional response, but the latest research by neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, illustrates that we were wrong. The brain does not produce emotional response even if we seem to be responding to external stimuli. Remembering is not a part of what we think of as linking us to sorrow. The brain controls response. Temperature. Breathing. Cortisol. And a lot more. But the brain does not CREATE sorrow.
We do that independently.
We remember, therefore we are. Is without either data or relevant investigation. We assume too much. We grant the anecdotal as a broad, science-based reality.
We were wrong.
The shadow that passes over you is just the default of the thing we call sky and the obstruction of protons we call light.
Despair is a designation language paints. The brain doesn’t paint anything. It records and then edits that recording.
Our despair is on us. Personally, I am addicted to it. I see nothing but despair. I can only change my chemistry if I get enough sleep, consume water, eat nutrients, consume glucose, and make enough movement, motion, that creates cortisol that protects my brain. This is too simplistic. But it’s a beginning.
I commit the act of creating way too much metaphor. But I am learning how to confront that as a witer by pushing myself HARD to not make what I have made before. If you do not push yourself HARD to hear your own voice, and you second selves singing in cadence, you are not a writer. If you keep all your bullshit within the context of a feedback loop, you are masturbating. Not writing.
I am editing GOING ROGUE relentlessly.
No prisoners.
When people respond to my work with despair, I try to communicate empathy.
I don’t really know if that is a lie, but I think it probably is. But what do I have as responsibility to someone who gets plunged into sadness by mt work.
In this person’s case, it’s the statement that for me I WRITE not because I write. But because the act of writing is what internally validates me, and they can do those things, too.
Or we grow crazy and die.
Tim, your comments haunt me as do memories of growing up poor in NYC where the good life was always a train station away yet never within our reach. I watched my community disintegrate. Lost family members to all the illnesses that affect the poor- addiction, mental illness, and self castigation. I left many years ago but have never forgotten that sense of looking longingly through a window where the inhabitants couldn’t or would never see me. Thank you for your comments. My heart goes out to all those who hurt and whose despair is immaterial.
Your despair is not immaterial. You are not immaterial. You are a human being in the same boat as the rest of us. We need to learn how to validate ourselves when it just doesn’t come from the more affluent castes. I validate myself with writing. Watching a community disintegrate is the worst. You are a survivor. It is something. It is a lot.