My 10 yr old daughter asked me what Ego meant, one of her vocabulary words for the week.
I laughed. “Good question. What do you think it means?”
“I wouldn’t ask if I knew, Mom.”
“Well, use it in a sentence, in context. You’ve heard the word enough to have an inkling what it means. And an inkling is as close as you’re going to get to defining an abstract like Ego.”
Her brows narrowed and I could see her pondering in the rearview mirror.
“My ego got hurt when Ms. Brown told me I was singing flat this morning.” She paused. “And she really said that.”
“Sorry. We’ll get back to that. OK? So, Ego is a feeling then?”
“Well, sorta, I guess. But not exactly. It’s more like how we see ourselves. To me, I’m a good singer. You can hurt my feelings by being mean to me. But you hurt my ego when you tell me I’m not how I think I am.”
“Do you think you were flat this morning in glee?”
“Well, yeah. When I listened, I wasn’t hitting the notes sometimes. I guess I’m not such a good singer.”
“Ah, but you could be.” I glimpsed her rolling her eyes in the rearview. “Being a good singer doesn’t happen inside your head. What is the only way to get good at anything?” (One of my many canonical refrains.)
“Practice,” she huffed.
I sighed. “My beautiful daughter, I think your definition of Ego is excellent — it’s how we see ourselves. Ego is an idea, even an ideal — who we want to be, but generally are not. We are what we do, my dear,” I repeat another of my refrains. “If you want to be a good singer, you’re going to have to practice becoming one.”
“So you don’t think I’m a good singer?” she asked woefully.
“We’re still defining Ego here, right?”
“Yeah. And my ego says I’m a good singer now, Mom. So is ego always fake, just pretend inside our heads?”
“You tell me. Do you think our ego ever gives us an accurate depiction — paints a real picture of how we operate, how we act, what we do in the real world?”
“Probably not.” She sighed, deflated. “Just cuz you think you’re good, or talented, or special doesn’t mean you actually are to anyone besides yourself, except if you’re famous. When you’re famous, it’s not just ego, you know you’re good.”
“Really? Let’s explore that. So, there’s a famous chef recognized for his delicious creations. As you noted, it’s not just his ego telling him he’s a good chef. He has a thriving restaurant, and 1.7 million dedicated Insta followers. He decides to create a new dish. And his customers hate the meal. The combination of flavors tastes just terrible. So, is the guy delusional that he’s a great chef—that’s just his ego talking?
My daughter considered my little tale carefully before answering. “Well, if he thought of himself as a great chef with everything he made, then that’s his ego thinking he’s good all the time, that everything he creates will be a masterpiece.”
“So then, is our ego ever an accurate depiction of ourselves?”
“I guess not. Just like there’s no such thing as smart.” She quoted another of my canonical refrains. Her bright smile in the rearview mirror lit up my world. “Smart is as smart does,” she mocks playfully. Yet another refrain we preach to our kids.
“It is not our potential, or what we believe, or believe in that defines us,” I said to my daughter as I pulled into our garage. “Regardless of what your ego says, you will never be more than the choices you make that guide the actions you take.”
According to Zuckerberg: “Young people are just smarter.” True or false?
I responded to an ad for a Traffic Manager position at an ad agency in San Francisco 25 years ago. Downtown, in one of those glass monoliths. Eighteenth floor. Made me nauseous being up there. I couldn’t stop thinking about an earthquake waiting for my interview.
An older guy, at least 20 years my senior, sat in the lobby with me. Mid-50s, receding hairline with only a tuft left on top, but the sides were still full, more salt than pepper. He wore a wedding ring, black slacks, and a white shirt under his gray suit jacket which did not conceal his slightly protruding belly.
We’d probably been sitting there five minutes, but it felt like twenty. Was the building swaying? Sure I must be delusional, I asked the older guy for a reality check.
“Excuse me. Hi.” I flashed my friendliest smile. “Do you feel the building…moving?”
“Oh, yeah,” he replied. “These buildings are designed to sway in the wind. And earthquakes too.” He gave me a shy smile, like he was sorry he brought them up when he saw my concern. “They have upwards of a five foot arch depending on height, and design, of course. Doesn’t sit well with some people. My son hates it. You one of the motion sensitive types?”
“You bet,” was all I could manage to avoid barfing.
He smiled. “Not me so much. I’m not the sensitive type. You here for the Traffic position?”
I nodded. “You?”
“Yup.” Then the guy went on a diatribe describing his education and work history, as if I was the one interviewing him. A few minutes into his years at a compact list of famous ad agencies, a young woman, maybe early twenties hiring manager/model called the guy in for his interview.
I watched them go into the all-glass conference room in the center of the open office maze. From my vantage point, I saw him sit at the end of the long table only after the woman sat. She had a tight build, silky auburn hair, and the milky skin of youth. She sat straight, but he seemed to wilt as the interview progressed.
But why? His experience was substantial, and in the exact areas required for the job. I’d been on the creative side and knew nothing about running Traffic in a large agency setting. I’d applied for the position hoping for an entree into their creative department.
Less than ten minutes later, the hot interviewer was escorting the pudgy older guy to the glass door. He gave me a basset hound nod as he passed.
I was called in next, and felt twitchy in the fishbowl of their glass conference room the entire time we were talking. I kept losing eye contact with the young Director of Digital Traffic, focusing instead on every passerby. She went through my resume with perky interest. Reviewing my portfolio, I described my primary roles in each campaign, hoping she’d get the hint and refer me to one of the impossible to reach Creative Directors on their staff.
“Are you aware you’re dressed the epitome of chic?” she asked me, which seemed very personal. I had no idea how to respond so I kinda laughed her off with a shrug.
“The black leather jacket with that maroon lace dress. Stunning. Really. Good choice. So, do you want the job, or what?”
And I would have said, ‘No, not really,’ and launched into why I was a better fit as a creative consultant, but then she told me the salary.
“$110,000 to start. Full medical. And for coming on board, there’s a $5,000 signing bonus.”
I was working my ass off for around $70k annually—getting the clients, hiring the teams, doing everything from the creative, to production, to accounting as a consultant, and paying over $500 a month for medical insurance. An annual salary over a hundred grand seemed easy money working for someone else, performing a single job function.
I told her I needed 24 hrs to think about it and I’d get back to her tomorrow. “Well, I hope you join us,” she said as she walked me out. “I think you’d be a great asset to the team, and our agency.”
On my drive home across the Bay Bridge her words echoed. Why exactly would I be a great asset to their production team? Unlike me, the older candidate had the experience and education the agency’s ad asked for. And he surely needed the job more than I did, with a wife and at least one kid. I told the young director I’d only trafficed my own projects, but she didn’t hear that. She was too busy checking out my attire. She based my fit into the agency’s misguided ‘brand’ on my looks, and my age.
Fast forward 25 yrs…
I applied for a Marketing Copywriter position at Facebook a few years back. They rejected me. Bewildered, as I had every qualification required, I asked the HR woman why.
“We are looking for someone less qualified.” Her response.
Hmm…Less qualified. Why would that be? We’d discussed no salary expectations. The FB’s job post didn’t ask me for any. Someone at FB had looked extensively at my online portfolio, as I had a huge spike in page views, from one source, in Menlo Park. The HR woman began her personal rejection email with: “Your portfolio is amazing! However, we’re looking for someone with less experience…”
What she meant was, “We’re looking for someone younger.”
Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg, who is now over 40 yrs old, which, according to his own words at Stanford in 2007, makes him unemployable since “young people are just smarter.”
Why would anyone with half a brain say something so stupid? Oh, I know, at 23, he only had half a brain to work with. OK. I’ll give him ¾. No. ⅔. His parents were wealthy, and provided their kids with every opportunity for financial success.
The problem with 20-something brains— their neural connections aren’t fully established yet. Until our 30s, decision making skills, complex reasoning from navigating life experience, and regulating impulse control, are just a few of the skills young people generally lack. Additionally, different areas of our brain peak (and degrade) throughout our lives. Our brain’s raw speed data processor peaks around 19. At 23, Zucky’s was still 20-30 years away from the ability to evaluate other people’s emotional state, rendering him unable to process the complex ripple-effects of what he’d created.*
Well, our omniscient Zuckerberg built a global company, his converts proclaim. And that he did. He started FB (then Facemash) in 2003, at Harvard, copying the site Hot or Not, which put up pics of female students for others to vote which was hot, and not. As a woman, and mother of a daughter, WTF, Mark! As a purveyor of human behavior, I get that, much like teens, young adults are often still motivated by appearance, not the complexities of substance.
Mark was verging on 30 when FB became profitable through PPC advertising revenue. And Zuckerberg didn’t make that happen alone. Peter Thiel, at almost 40 yrs old, invested half a mill in 2005, and helped The Facebook 20-something founders get $13 million from Accel Partners a year later. And you can bet, Accel didn’t leave it solely up to Mark and his young, naive crew to make them billions.
Mark’s not proselytized this truth. He’s now old/smart enough to know that if you stroke the ego of the young, which is still fragile and forming, you’ll get them to work 24/7† for a 5th of the salary he’d have to pay experienced pros. Young people aren’t particularly gifted, talented, or brilliant. They’re cheap to employ, and easy to manipulate.
Facebook is the 8th largest employer of H1B foreign workers as of 2025. Not because Asian college grads know more, as tech is an emerging industry we are all learning dynamically, but, again, because they are a fraction of a U.S. worker’s salary and required benefits. Limiting hires to young (and immigrant) workers is shortsighted at best. Study after study show older employee’s productivity, creativity and reliability is higher than that of their younger colleagues.
Until the startup boom in the late 1990s, most corporations valued experience and skill, substance over looks and cheap labor. Zucky and his Silicon Valley friends like Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google), and Evan Spiegel (Snapchat) helped cement the lie that innovation comes from youth. Venture capitalists looking for “the next Zuckerberg,” reinforced the belief that younger = more disruptive.
We now know that ‘disruptive’ often leads to ‘destructive.’ Most apps and platforms were, and still are designed to addict users while stealing our private data to sell us more crap. Most middle-man SaaS apps and social media platforms have proven to be costly, unproductive, emotionally damaging wastes of our life’s time.
Hooray, to the youth who has invented, and keeps pumping out crap that’s creating personal and global meltdowns, not to mention getting fascists elected—from Trump to Netanyahu (PM of Israel). It’s made/making a few rich though, as if that’s all that matters.
We are ALL born solipsists—our brain power so limited that our only awareness of others is how they serve our needs.
We grow to narcissists in our teens—we gain awareness of others, but coming out of solipsism, we don’t care so much.
We advance to maturity with age. Experience teaches us we serve a greater purpose than just ourselves. We recognize we are part of a family, community, planet, and our actions have consequences beyond just us.
Youth grows old, if you’re lucky. Wealth may provide a comfy life for the very few, but regardless if it’s millions or billions, their children’s children’s children may likely have no life at all.
We have the power to annihilate each other and most everything on this planet now. Along with disruptive, youth is generally arrogant and impulsive, their brains not yet fully-matured for controlling behavior. Humanity can’t thrive, and likely most won’t survive if the generations following Zuckerberg and his like continue repeating the same destructive mistakes by ghosting those with the experience and knowledge that only comes with age.
—
*The debate over the value of Facebook, Insta, all social media is ongoing. Its contribution to humanity is proven rather negative.
We are ALL racists. Every human being on the planet is BORN a racist.
NO! you’re screaming at me. BULLSHIT, you whacked-out bitch. I am not a racist!
Racism is taught, not inherent to our nature is the common wisdom. And while it’s true racism, hate, fear can be taught by parents, community, schools, religious leaders, and conservative media, we are all born, to varying degrees, racists.
Mammals, the genome to which Humans belong, are born with an innate FEAR of THE OTHER — anything outside what is familiar to us. And this fear manifests as RACISM, and SEXISM, and NATIONALISM.
“FEAR of THE OTHER” should be the universal definition of racism. And humans manifest our fear in a variety of ways. Some, their fear is so overwhelming, their ignorance so great, it aligns with HATE, and they are violent against THE OTHER.
But sometimes, when our fear is acknowledged, and then examined, it motivates us to learn about THE OTHER. Only then, do we discover that regardless of color, or even gender, we are not so different. We all FEEL the same feelings.
BULLSHIT, you calling me out again. You don’t know how it FEELS to be Black.
You’re right. I’m White. But I know what it FEELS like to be dissed. I grew up overweight in chic L.A. I was the butt of fat jokes through elementary and middle school. I never got asked out on a date until I dropped the weight in my senior year of high school. And while I am now in “good shape,” I will go to my grave feeling fat. I will never fit in to the world where thin is the only way to be “in.” And I know what it FEELS like living forever on the outside wishing to be in.
So what if you were fat, you say. You lost the weight. Skinny or fat, I can’t stop being Asian, or gay.
And I am a woman. I know what it FEELS like being judged as lesser than because I am not a man. I know how it FEELS to be making two-thirds the salary of the guy next to me doing the exact same job. My first job out of college as an art director for a major jewelry manufacturer, the CEO of the company came into my first big meeting and grabbed my breast instead of my outstretched hand. He squeezed my tit like it was an orange and said, “Nice!” I know how it FEELS to be objectified for my body alone.
Being disrespected makes me FEEL valueless, ashamed, awkward, angry, mystified, enraged, scared, small, sad. And all these negative feelings manifest inside each of us when we are dissed. The fact is, Black, White, Fat or not, we’ve all experienced each of these feelings independently, or simultaneously, regardless if we are consciously aware of them. Each of us may react to our feelings differently, but most all of us are intimate with feeling dissed.
Most of us are also intimate with feeling happy, engaged [in a pleasing activity], safe, content in moments. Our reasons for feeling these things may vary, though not as much as you think. The love of a parent, guardian or friend, the comfort of a home, full bellies from tasty food makes most of us FEEL good. The intensity of our feelings varies wildly from person to person. Some enjoy positive feelings far more often than others born with internal angst, or into external misfortune. But the feelings of HAPPY and SAD, GOOD and BAD, PROUD and ASHAMED, EMPOWERED and DISSED are common to all of us.
Being alive means FEELING. The enormous, complex range of feelings we get to experience, both body and mind, is exclusively Human. The capacity of our brain power is what separates us from every other living creature on this planet. And while we all have different experiences, feeling the same things provides a natural bridge to unite us, a window for empathy, even camaraderie through our shared feelings.
We are all born racists. You, me, all humans are born with an innate fear of THE OTHER. Once again, we are standing on the precipice of change, Racism and Sexism the topics de jour. Perhaps this time, we will get off the politically correct train, admit we are all racists and choose to fight our innate fear of THE OTHER. We’ll acknowledge the benefits of integration and globalization as an opportunity to learn from the best of each other. We’ll not only believe in, but practice equal rights.
Stand up, or take a knee, but SPEAK OUT against hate, and educate the ignorant that there really are no substantive differences between us — not color, not culture, not gender, not religious or sexual preference, because most all humans being FEEL the same things.
“They’re coming back. Make no mistake about it. Doesn’t matter what you think you are, they are coming back for you. You are a Jew,” my mother often told me.
I’m not. I’m an atheist. At 5, I told her so, thus creating a chasm between us that went unresolved, even with our last goodbye, when she died of lymphoma nearly 20 years ago.
My mother displayed her fears, though always quietly, through the years I was growing up with her continual barrage of warnings. As children, she insisted my sister and I go to Hebrew school, regardless of my protests as an atheist. In my teens, she insisted we join her in watching The Holocaust mini-series. She sat riveted through each episode, hand to mouth to stifle gasping in horror.
Regardless of her indoctrination, I didn’t feel afraid the Nazis would return because in my family then, and my own family now, the Nazis never left.
I will not deny my mother’s fears were warranted. She’d lived through WWII, saw the rise of fascism allow the murders of six million of her family and faith. She was old enough to witness Hitler’s speeches ignite the German underclass to hate, and blame everyone but themselves for their strife. She saw the world forever changed by our ability to destroy it, with the advent of the atomic bomb.
I tried often to dissuade my mother’s fears. I argued, “We’ve learned, Mom. That’s the best thing about us. When we’re standing on the precipice of disaster, we DO change!”
I was so confident in our uniquely human ability to ‘rise above’ our misfortunes, I married the son of a Holocaust survivor. My father-in-law was 13 when his family was forcibly removed from their suburban home in Łódź, Poland, and imprisoned in the ghetto northeast of the city. He was there for eight months when his father, mother, and two younger sisters were murdered in front of him, and he was put on a train to Flossenburg concentration camp in Bavaria, and eventually to Auschwitz. A prisoner for five years, his teens were spent as a slave, laboring in an Audi factory, watching people murdered and committing suicide daily, until Auschwitz was ‘liberated’ by the Russians in 1945.
My father-in-law came to the States as an immigrant several years later. He settled in New Jersey, started his own business, and then married. My husband was born a year later, and his sister — my sister-in-law — 3 years after that.
Growing up, the kids knew vaguely of their father’s plight. They’d awake, frightened by the “horrific screams” of their dad’s nightmares. As my husband described it: “My dad told us he was ‘in camp,’ and I had a problem with that. I’d gone to summer camp, and I knew this wasn’t the same thing, but it wasn’t clear to me why he’d had such a bad time.”
The Holocaust was not discussed in my husband’s household. He didn’t dare ask his dad for any details, though his father’s nightmares woke him often during his formative years. His father’s screaming frightened him as a child, but even more as he grew up and studied the Holocaust in school, and learned, even in the abstract, what may have happened to his dad. His parents had made it clear by their silence — in almost all things of intimate relevance — they were not open to discussing virtually anything beyond the day-to-day logistics of living.
My husband was in his last year of college when his sister gathered the family and recorded their father’s experience before, during, and after WWII for a history assignment. The ‘kids’ were young adults when they discovered the details of their father’s past during this singular interview. No one in the family ever spoke of it again.
My father-in-law learned young that the only way to survive was to avoid conflict at all costs. His wife, my mother-in-law, having experienced her own traumatic youth, had adopted the same position on the emotional safety of stoic silence, likely long before they met and married. My husband’s parents were married 50 years before my father-in-law passed. They did not discuss their life experiences with their children, or even with each other beyond the surface of these painful events. Neither went to counseling, ever. They ran a small business and raised their kids in their loving, yet separate way, never really letting anyone in, too afraid to get intimate.
Understandable, with where they came from. But, oh, so very costly.
Feelings don’t just GO AWAY when we don’t talk about them. More often than not, when buried , feelings of hurt, frustration, sadness, fear will resurface, and manifest as unwarranted aggression, especially towards the people we love, since it’s likely they’ll still love us, regardless of the slights.
These powerful feelings of anger and fear, buried deep in my husband’s parents, prevented them from validating their children’s feelings, forcing their kids to bury their own feelings under the suffocating weight of shame associated with having any. The 27 years I’ve known my sister-in-law, she won’t watch a sad movie, read a sad book, and has never admitted to feeling sad, even through her son’s ADHD hardships, or during her very contentious divorce. She never talks about feelings, hers or anyone’s, and refuses to even acknowledge emotional questions I ask her by ignoring that I’ve spoken to her at all. My husband’s sister has played the role of ‘good girl’ to avoid conflict, well known in the ‘survivor’ community, suppressing all negative feelings, never getting honest, and therefore intimate with anyone, even herself.
My husband has Asperger’s syndrome, commonly understood to be a mild form of Autism. Though never formally diagnosed, we’ve seen enough therapists together and most have identified specific autistic behaviors that fall within the Aspergers spectrum. Higher rates of Aspergers is well documented among Holocaust survivors’ offspring. He ‘floods’ with intense emotion, his or anyone’s directed at him. He shuts down completely, becomes calmly and coolly irrational, contentious and attacking when pushed to engage in dialog in this flooded state. He’s the victim in most of his narratives and refuses to be held accountable for the conflicts he creates when he’s flooding. And with any conflict, flooding can last anywhere from a few hours to months.
When my husband is with me, is present and open and unafraid, he is the love of my life — kind, smart, respectful, responsible, fun. He is my best friend in every measure when he’s all there and we’re connecting, but married 27 years, and I know not to trust this behavior will last. Conflict is a part of life. And whether I say something he doesn’t like, or a boss has, my husband begins the flooding process and cannot hear and does not remember what is said in the exchange. Since I’ve known him, he’s been fired or forced to quit 15+ full-time positions after pissing off his supervisors enough that my brilliant software developer husband held most jobs for less than 2 yrs.
The effects of the Holocaust are still powerful, present, and residing in our house. The hate Hitler ignited still reverberates almost a century — three generations later — embodied in my husband every time he shuts down to avoid conflict, dismisses or ignores his feelings, or mine, or our kids, or his bosses, as his parents taught him to do. The fear the Nazis instilled in so many has been passed through the generations like a genetic disease.
My mother carried this fear with her to her grave. As a matter of course, she made me afraid, of all people — our ability to abandon our humanity and turn our backs on neighbors we once held dear, in response to fear. I got lucky, though. My mom felt passionate about so much, and shamelessly displayed feelings of joy, anger, fear, and sadness at times, gifting me the opportunity to acknowledge and express my own.
My husband understands that he floods, and how destructive this is to establishing and maintaining trust in him, his parenting, and our partnership. During peaceful times free of conflict, he works to connect with me, and our kids, and open up his awareness to the effect he has on the world outside his own head. In moments, when he wins the war with himself, and he can see his own behavior clearly, share his vulnerability and acknowledge his culpability, we touch intimacy. And in those moments, we stop Hitler’s legacy at our doorstep.
Clearly living is a choice most all of us make every day we live.
Almost 42,000 of U.S. will consider suicide today. Have you? I have. Not once or twice during hard times, and in passing, but many times throughout my lifetime, from my tween years, likely till I die. Yet, virtually daily, I make a conscious choice to stay living.
I don’t believe in any higher power than the laws of physics. There is no “Jealous God” (Exodus 34:14) watching, or judging our behavior from ‘beyond’. There is no heaven or hell. I cease to exist when I die. I’ve never been able to pretend we are more than the collection of cells, chemistry and neural conductivity that make up our bodies and consciousness.
I can choose to go hang myself in the doorjamb of my office after I finish writing this without fear of damnation. The only eternal soul we possess is our hope that we matter past our limited time alive. But we don’t. Not really, beyond our effects on the lives we touch while we are living, like our family, and a handful of friends and colleagues. Even if you’ve done DNA ancestry, other than their genetic contribution to your existence, your dead lineage are names in a ledger, nothing more.
Too dark a view for ya? It ain’t depression. It’s reality, and a scary one knowing that regardless of what we believe, our life adds up to what we DO with our short time of awareness.
Individually, we really have very little effect on, well, anything beyond our small realm. Even those who have ‘made it,’ like celebrities and ‘influencers,’ most will be forgotten over time, and lost to later generations. And we’ll never even know the names of most innovators, especially women, who invented the tech we use today.
For the religious reader, this blog probably isn’t for you. I’ve likely lost you in the opening bit, as suicide in most sects is a ‘sin’. If you are a true believer, it is equally likely you won’t off yourself. The only reason to continue reading is if you want to help someone who seems like they may be suicidal.
How do you know if someone is suicidal? You don’t, and likely won’t. Each of the above celebs were either flat out rich, or at the very least financially comfortable. So, it wasn’t poverty that drove them to suicide. They ‘made it’ doing what they loved, instead of a lifetime at some crappy job just to pay the bills. Yet, each made a choice to die. Why?
Every day I make a conscious choice to keep living, but a lot of days the choice to stay is hard. Very hard. Some days, hope drives me with purpose, that I can make a positive contribution to those I touch. But other days, on days where it feels as if I reach no one, or I get nothing done, or humanity is doomed to our own stupidity, hope abandons me.
Give it up. Walk away. Stop trying so hard. You’re getting nowhere. If there is nothing beyond death, and what I do doesn’t really matter in the scheme of things, then why not just check out, be done. At times, my life feels as if it defaults to the mean of hardship, and I obsess about exiting the scene, fading to black, longing to feel nothing at all.
How do I stop the voices of fear and hopelessness, either before they ramp, or even after they do, when I look up from I laptop to notice I’m not breathing? I think of checking out, conjure my exit strategy. I imagine taking pills, or maybe going into the garage, turning on my car and rolling down the windows.
What stops me?
I picture coming on to the Oxycontin, or choking on carbon monoxide, then throwing up, then blacking out. Then nothing. Ever again. No awareness, no consciousness once the neurons stop firing. No taking it back. No second chance. No waking up. Feel nothing, ever again. Or I try and feel what it feels like to feel nothing, but obviously, this is an oxymoron. Living and feeling are synonymous, as are death and feeling nothing forever— beyond black— non-existence.
When I’ve lost all belief in myself, my work, my world, I’m left with only one reason that keeps me here. Regardless of how lost I feel, how insignificant, how hopeless, I hold on to the one truth I know is real.
Every day I make a conscious choice to stay living— to FEEL.
Living is all about FEELING— glad, sad, mad, good, bad, proud, humbled, jealous, accomplished. And the list goes on… I get to feel them all, and many more throughout my lifetime, expressed in a thousand ways. Enjoying chocolate mint ice cream while watching TV. In awe of natural wonders. Heartbroken with loss. Swooning in love. From the physical to the surreal, we all get to feel— experience being alive.
Strip away the religious sales pitch that rewards us for charitable behavior, in exchange for an eternity in paradise. Ignore the social pressure that tell us our value lies our physicality, or our job title, or the acquisition of wealth. Let go of the pretense we are going to make a substantive difference to anyone beyond our small circle of connections. And the point of living becomes simply to feel the moments of our life.
Death— feeling nothing ever again— will come, regardless if I hasten it. The permanence of suicide becomes daunting when I consider I’d never get to taste anything again. I’d never see, smell, or feel rain on my skin, or someone hold my hand. If I take my own life, I kill even the possibility of feeling different, and finding ways to enjoy more moments of my brief existence.
I teeter on the edge of suicide when all reason and purpose has abandoned me. But you can help me during these times, or others who stand at the precipice of ending their life. When I’m consumed by doubt, black and sticky, pulling me under, please don’t tell me to “Hang in there, it’ll get better.” Though it may be true, as feelings DO change, sometimes in minutes, sometimes days, or even weeks, it feels like bullshit in those moments of darkness, as if blackness is all I’ll ever feel.
To help me, or someone you know whose depression seems all consuming, remind us, with empathy, that living is about FEELING, and the fantastic range of feelings we get to experience being alive.
jcafesin.com 