Sobbloggy: the continuation
I’m reading this post on finslippy (via unfogged) about the Pain Penis Size Contest[1] effect, and I’m thinking about it.
Because there is actually a second side to it, the “well, it doesn’t matter, I don’t have it so bad after all” effect. Perspective is good, and it’s probably true that there’s always someone who has things worse, and it’s certainly true that things could always get worse, but this is a different effect, this is the one where it doesn’t matter because it happened to you, where the excuses are that it could be worse or other people have it worse or it’s not as bad as it seems. (This, unsurprisingly, correlates well with depression and low self-esteem.)
In part this kind of thing is always said because you believe it, but in another way, you say it because you want someone to deny that it doesn’t matter or that it’s not that bad, someone to agree that it’s reasonable to hurt. (I’m making fairly large generalisations here, obviously.)
I get those urges still, sometimes, both of them: I want to pull out the bad things that have happened to me and show them off, all glittery and packaged into My Life: The Novel. I want people to be amazed at how much it has been bad. Though in so many ways it’s been good, too, and I want to tell people how the bad things can’t possibly matter, because look at how lucky I also am, and, yes, because they happened to me. Perhaps I avoid all of this by not talking about myself much.
This is all true, but it’s also all lies.
[1] Well. That’s what *I* call it.
February 25th, 2005 at 8:39 pm
When I was a little boy my mother would watch daytime tv while she did the ironing, and there was a show called “Queen for a Day.” The idea was four different women would tell their hard luck stories and the audience would applaud, and the woman with the most pitiful story — gauged by the volume of applause; there was a big gauge on the wall — the one who was the most pitiful and got the audience to applaud the loudest got to be “Queen for a Day” and got money.
They don’t have that show on tv any more, though, so there’s no prize for being the most pitiful. Maybe you can get people to applaud your pitiful story the loudest but even if they do you won’t get any money for it, so what’s the point of making comparisons? No prize will be awarded.
February 26th, 2005 at 1:25 am
“Doom is never petty.” - The Fantastic Four
February 26th, 2005 at 5:08 am
I’ve been getting into western style Buddhism lately. You might find that helps. Try ‘Buddhist Psychology’ by Caroline Brazier.She’s very straightforwardly British about it.