Disconnecting

I think we deliberately disconnect ourselves from each other. I sometimes find myself disconnecting myself from someone whose pain I don't want to feel. Maybe the word "dis-identify" describes the process better. It's as if I were to say to myself, when watching someone in a painful situation, "that's not me". I don't let myself feel what they are feeling. I'm afraid sometimes that what they might be feeling is unbearable.

Watching someone enduring terrible pain or facing a miserable death, I find myself becoming detached, distant, analytic. How interesting, I might think, as if I were watching an actor on the screen. It's really a pretty basic way of protecting myself from pain, I suppose. However, I begin to wonder if splitting may not lead to dehumanization and denial of reality. Maybe that's how we can look down the sight of a gun at another person, and think of them in a detached sort of way as just a "target", like a video game. We don't at that moment think of the other as someone's child, lover, best friend, father or mother, good cook or bad cook, having terrible moments of fear or pain or longing. If we did, how could we hurt them?

Perhaps we have to keep pretending that we are not like every other person in the world, but somehow separate and unique, not doomed to suffer the same miseries but magically exempt, and "special". This is, of course, a kind of child-like narcissism, arising not from a false sense of superiority but from fear that we are capable of suffering the same pain they are.

Young people look at us old people through the wrong end of the telescope. They want/need to see us at a great distance, not just themselves grown older, but as a different breed. I remember how frightening it was to see my parents age, and to comfort myself with the (delusory) thought that their age, illness, and death were because they were old, not like me. I didn't really believe it could happen to me.

I remember having a fantasy as a young man, a fantasy so vivid it really frightened me. I started to look in a mirror one morning, brushing my teeth, and suddenly wondered if by magic I would somehow see myself as an old man, looking back out the mirror at myself, and would find that I had suddenly "jumped" forty years and had most of my life behind me. When I made myself finally look up, I saw I was still young, but I also saw the old man i would become behind that smooth exterior. I could imagine myself old and remembering the youth I had lost with great sadness. It was at that moment that growing old became (at least for the moment) real for me, and I knew in my bones that someday I too would grow old, sick and die. I suppose I really lost my fantasy of eternal youth in that moment when the veil seemed to dissolve.

It's just us, wherever we look. We each feel the same. The greatest irony of all is that we each think we are unique in exactly the same way. It's the same looking out from my eyes as it is from your eyes. One thing we absolutely have in common is our sense of unique identity.