I don't value human differences

 

Something has changed in me over the past I-don’t-know-how-many years. I know that being close to seventy has dulled my sensitivities, my enjoyments and my outrage. Not all outrage: I still feel strongly that the right-wing sociopaths, those whose delusions are built from hate rather than from trauma, should die. Yes – these pols should drop dead without fanfare or grief. There’s something about stupid, cancerous malevolence that reaches into the rage furnace first lit in my childhood.

But there’s also a unique kind of heartfulness that has grown. Until now, I haven’t tried to figure it out. Here’s how it manifests: I cannot and will not watch any movie that has murder in it. I don’t know why I have “evolved” to this, or why I could tolerate such movies in the past. As close as I can understand myself right now, the feeling is: Don’t mess with life. There is nothing else. If someone is purposely killed in a story, why go on? What could possibly be of any value after that? A movie presents meaning, and the meaning can’t be one person’s life as more significant than another’s. This is what I feel. It’s not a belief, because beliefs are dumb. We get a conviction that may be – is likely to be – contradicted by the subtleties of our felt experience. Does a Con­serv­ative have no sense of altruism? Does a Liberal have no sense of the sanctity of personal prop­erty? Does an atheist never wonder if there may be something beneath eternal, unex­plained materiality? I suppose I do have a belief: No political party can be right because they all over-simplify human nature.

It occurs to me that my stance comes from a paradox: my dysthymic depression and my sense of the preciousness of life as it gets closer to the end. I’ve never felt that my shadowed palette, my roadblock to emotions, diminishes the fineness of existence. If anything, it makes existence more precious. And being in the last decade or two – well, doesn’t that speak for itself?

I haven’t become a hippie. I just published this simple bad-attitude comment about the award-winning movie Nomadland:

If the blurb used to introduce this movie to the public had been: “Depressed woman quits jobs and drives around from one trailer encampment to another forming transient, superficial friendships and experiencing absolutely no growth,” it would not have misrepresented it in the slightest.

That movie is an empty person’s idea of profundity and I’m ugly about it.

I think I don’t value human differences. I value human sameness: The fact of our one life. This is what makes me a “depth therapist.”