Jaded

More than most people, I often worry that I'm jaded; desensitized. For example, I was recently on a date with a girl who my friend had told me got into a car accident on the freeway involving some friends of his. The account of the accident sounded pretty minor and no one was hurt, so on the date I jokingly brought it up. well, to say the least that openned a can of worms. As any normal person would've guessed, the car accident waws hardly minor in her eyes. In fact, she still complained of some minor shoulder pain from it, and was even still experiencing a high degree of what she described as post-traumatic anxiety (of course, she was heavily self-medicating on adderol, which she'd never done pre-accident, but we don't need to get into that).

the point is that I feel like many of my experiences that have taught me to instinctively dissociate myself from otherwise emotional situations (i.e. firefighting/EMS) may negatively effect the way I interact with people on a day to day basis. I don't think I'm incapable of empthay or sympathy or anything like that, I'm not sociopathic. But my sympathetic instincts probably don't kick in as often as they should. More than that, I feel like my emotiuons in general have been dulled (probably more from a years of depression growing up and a few romances gone rotten). It's gotten to the point where I tend to characterize myself as passionless. The fact that I'm kind of a loner and don't have many friends that i'm really close to (especially out here) doesn't help much.

consequently, I really enjoy those rare moments when I really feel human.

Tonight, instead of partying and all that jazz I went to the writing center and did some much needed HW. Mainly I didn't feel like partying; although there was a lot going on and my friends were practically begging me to come out, I just wasn't feeling social. But that's not the point. The point is, on my way over to the writing center, I saw a tiny little frog hoping around on the sidewalk, a pretty rare sight in SoCal. I tried to catch it and put it somewhere safer, seeing as there was a fairly large party going on about 50 feet south in front of the dining hall, but it kept escaping my grasp. I was on the phone with my friend at the time, and I mentinoed to him that I was worried someone would step on the frog.

Sure enough, as I returned to my room a little after 2 am I found the frog squished fairly close to where I'd found it earlier. I tapped it and tried to find a pulse to see if it was still alive; of course it wasn't. It kind of hurt a little knowing that I could've saved the frog if I had jsut tried harder to catch it, or at least chase it towards the grass. I decided no one else needed to know that a tiny little frog had been squished, so I picked it up by a hind leg and gave the little guy a fairly undignified trashcan-funeral.

As I continued back to my room, I was reminded of the only animal I've killed on the road (that I nkow of). Driving to school at the end of the summer, I hit a a crow in the midwest. I was going really fast on the freeway. it was flying across the freeway, then suddenly swept low and got sucked under my car. There was nothing I could've done about it, it happened way too fast. I was so struck at having killed the crow, I actually pulled off the freeway a few exits down, held a small memorial for it at a farm on the side of the road, and even erected a small monument of stones for the bird (I've even got a picure of the monument somewhere, it's apparently not on hand though or you'd bee looking at it).

I guess when I'm doing CPR on a soon-to-be-dead person, or cutting a screaming car accident victim away from their metal cage, i fell useful. My usefulness gives me focus, a goal towards which I can focus my energy, more easily putting my emotions aside. When I find myself in situations where I feel helpless or useless, emotions I would otherwise ignore or perhaps not even give my self opprotunity ofr come to the surface and dominate my experience. I suppose that means I feel most human when i'm in situations of distress. I sure hope that doesn't mean I feel pity stronger than I feel satisfaction or joy; i'm probably just making it seem that way because it's on my mind.

I mean, I am human after all.