Posted by boBB on May 28, 2000, at 18:05:14
In reply to Re: Thanks for the reminder, Kathie..., posted by brian on May 28, 2000, at 13:26:19
Thanks, claire 7 and brian, I figured some people would get it, eventually. Some of the responses to my self-expression were not supportive, they questioned the wisdom of my having learned to abide emotional pain.
The gouge your eyes comment was not strictly parrallel to the Bible's "If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out" passage. I take the biblical passage to refer to a wandering, lustful eye - at least that is the way most preachers explain the popular translation of the greek phrase. I choose that form of stark speech because it gets to the heart of the matter most effectively. The pseudobiblical choice of language provided me with an easy way to defend a style of speech that has been accepted (more or less, depending on who is the speaker) for centuries. Indeed, my rough paraphrase turned a pedantic Sunday morning platitude into a hard-hitting literary device. I could have said "if you don't like what you see don't look," but I was responding between tasks at work, and the person who was responding to my posts seemed to be just as swift. This all happend in a few hours time.
The issues here were deep and it was about all I could do to express the depth of my feelings, I needed somebody else to jump in and say its okay to be who I am - not so much for my sake but for the sake of people who are like me. Until the tide of battle turned against me, it was not likely that any one else would stand with me - the people likely to defend me in this are probably not likely to step into someone else's battle unneccessarily. I had a hunch emotional escalation would serve to let people deride my manner of speech in a futile effort to avoid confronting the content, and that others would stand up then to clarify the content.
I was not looking for therapy by answering Tina's question. I was trying to explain as succinctly as possible that I feel just as bad as many of the people on this board. In as much as accepting these feelings and sublimating them to a constructive social purpose is therapuetic, I was attempting to support anyone who might feel as I do, that they are suffering long term sadness for a reason, not because it is a disease but because things are very very wrong in our world. It would not be fair of me to constantly say to people wrought with distress that they should live with it. If they want to take drugs and be happy, more power to them. Maybe I did that or will do that sometime. But it is indeed very supportive of me to publicly share my way of coping, which has been practiced by billions more people throughout history than the few million who have experimented with psych drugs. Those who disagree with me would be less likely to get bitten if they discuss the matter in third person terms.
For tina, thanks for your sincere apology, but this kind of conflict is nothing new to me. I can handle it, and if I can't, I am prepared to suffer the consequences. In the end, a few more people are talking more supportively of me, and there are probably people reading who don't chime in that feel like I do. Your question served a purpose.
If I could share the whole story, another dramatic development occured related to one of the list of pains I shared - and it had nothing to do with me changing things in my life. If it had to do with anything here, it might have been when someone or someones secretly used the power of their own minds to push things along. Magical thinking might not sell well here, and correlation does not prove causation. I don't want to be more specific about what happened, but I did not in anyway try to make it happen. It doesn't solve anything either - this development opens a whole new set of difficulties for me and for others. But it happened. Pray hard, people.
poster:boBB
thread:34648
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000526/msgs/34995.html