It’s hard for me to speak the truth sometimes to people I love. In a way, it’s easier to tell it to complete strangers. For some reason they just seem more forgiving – they don’t know the experiences you’ve been through (which usually would engender some sort of sympathy I guess?) but when you get rejected by complete strangers the rejection is, at the surface, less painful. It’s harder to get rejected by someone close to you.
It’s harder still when you know you gave them every reason to reject you.
We should commission stories from people who live through suicide attempts just to see the last emotion they feel before they pull the trigger. Is it euphoric? Is it numb? Maybe if we understood that better, we could help more people who get to that point. Maybe we can simulate that feeling right before and give it to them in a healthy way. Maybe in the future we can just download emotions from a cloud-based network, 3D printing them in flesh with neural tissue and synthesizing the chemical reactions behind them.
I always knew right before I was going to barf because I’d get a weirdly salty taste in my mouth. It was never enough for me to be able to warn people around me. I barfed in the back of my parent’s car on a trip to LA to see the Hercules premiere as a kid. I barfed on my teacher, Ms. Matson’s, shoes in 2nd grade. I barfed when I got food poisoning from Giulia’s, an Italian restaurant in West Fresno. I think I probably barf more now than when I was a kid, probably at a rate of about once per year. At 3 meals a day which I definitely don’t eat, that means that 1 out of 1095 meals hits the porcelain before its time. That’s a pretty good rate I guess. I’d feel really bad if I bought an expensive meal and then threw it up.
Sometimes we don’t realize the kind of underlying situations that create how we feel. That’s why we feel hopeless or depressed or euphoric. I don’t want to understand why I’m euphoric, I just want to feel it. If I rechecked why, I’ll probably find a reason I shouldn’t be and then stop feeling euphoric.
I wonder how that guy who drove through the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market felt. I wonder if he was rejected by his friends and family. I wonder how he felt, knowing that strangers knew the truth about what happened sooner than the ones he loved. I wonder if he felt suicidal. I wonder if he knew what a cloud-based network or 3D printing was. I wonder if he threw up. I wonder how he felt having a meal again with produce from a farmer’s market.
I wonder if he ever felt happy again.
In the future, we can download emotions and all of these concerns will seem as trivial to us as remembering the crank the engine on the Mercer before we drive to the market is today.
The only thing we have to worry about is getting there in one piece.