Prozac Prose Warning

DAMN serious alert - despair ahead. Really. Don't read this if you're expecting typical Tiff.....

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Even though I see the funny side of things more often than not, sometimes things are of a nature that I'm incapable of twisting them into anything even remotely amusing, no matter how hard I might try.

For example:

A story of a woman, wracked with depression, who hangs herself. She is found by her mother, and mourned by her husband and young children. What pain she must have been in to take that awful final step into oblivion. How tortured she must have been to reach that decision. What a chasm of loss has been left behind to be filled with her memory.

A story of a man, found years after allegedly killing a little girl (it was an accident, he professes. It still doesn't negate the fact that she's dead). What vast howling plain is the soul of a person capable of committing such a deed, how empty of empathy and devoid of the necessary safeguards of compassion and reason is it to do such a thing?

A story of suicide bombers barely old enough to shave, strapping explosives to their chests and proudly snuffing out the lives of strangers in a bid to enter the afterlife as a hero, a martyr, a paragon of religious fervor who is worthy of dozens of otherworldy virgins. What's to be gained from this? What's to be learned from the mass extinction of shoppers at the bazaar, or commuters on the bus, or travellers in the plane?

A story, told many times over, of genocide, fratricide, infanticide, suicide, pick-a-"cide," of violence or graft or jealousy or helplessness or victimzation that's enough to make a dedicated ignorer of angst a complete welter of emotion.

Every so often a door in my created reality opens a crack to the outside world, a gap just large enough to pain to enter. I try to shut it out, but know it's out there, waiting for my next weak moment. How to fight it? How to live with the knowledge that out there are people suffering so greatly that the thought of it is strong enough to take my breath away? How to deal with the inhumanity, the poverty, the violence, the pain of the collective suffering of so many?

It's far too difficult to try to understand, all on my own. It's far too difficult to try to fix, all on my own. It's far too difficult to try to fight, all on my own. So I shut the door again, and try to find my sense of humor, using it to fill the gaps to keep me safe inside my own little world.

And somehow, that just doesn't seem right.

I should be angry. I should have an outlet. I should open that door and embrace what pain I can, absorbing it and vanquishing it. I should DO something, anything, to help.

I should, but instead I hide in my comfortable world, in my artificial reality, ignoring the shouts of despair that are still faintly present, no matter how many layers of ignorance and avoidance are applied to the cracks I've tried to fix.

And then I shame myself with my weakness, believing, wrongly, that shame is action enough.

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Some days are just LIKE that, I guess.