h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This tract comes courtesy of Moth U224826, from the following thread in Ask h2g2;

F19585?thread=272471

Thank you.

The thing is, I've just realised this talking now. Is that when a person has any big traumatic event in their lives. They can't get back out of that dislocation. They can never get back to any kind of feelings. You spend the rest of your life feeling uncomfortably numb.
Because while you're numb to the pain, you're also numb to everything else. And this become intolerable after a while. So you go looking for the bigger feelings, because they might get through the barriers. You want to feel things so much that you search out trauma, just to feel something. You put yourself in the way of danger, just to feel something again. And the bigger feelings, you're desperate to have, can be either joyous or desperate, but since it is easier to find negative feelings in the world, that is what you end up testing.

Time after time you throw yourself in the teeth of the dragon to be able to feel something again. It looks like self destruction, but really that isn't the thought behind it. The thought is to feel something, anything. Race the car like a maniac, bungee jump, fly small spindly aircraft. Sail boats across rough seas. It's all about making yourself feel something. Except that Lily has this fear of physical pain, a deep very real fear. So Lily becomes an emotional dare devil.

And Lily looks up at Sarah across the room from her and Sarah is wiping her eyes on one of Lily's tissues and that makes Lily cry too. But crying is supposed to be a good thing. Right? I suppose it depends on how long you have to keep doing it. To Lily crying just means, a headache, an inconvenient running nose, a feeling of floating dizzy exhaustion. It's the splinter in her eye, that makes it look as if she craves sympathy. But she doesn't want sympathy, not really because it doesn't mean anything in the long term. What Lily wants is for someone to just say "I know."

"How do I ever do things again after that?" Lily asks Sarah. "How do I wash dishes? How do I watch television? Sweep the floor? How do I ever get to be like everyone else ever again? This is the sort of thing I'm asking myself. "You want me to be normal again, like everyone else, you have to rewrite my life."

How do I get to feel normal again, to forget this stuff thats keep making me different?

Yep, I recognise that feeling.

Any event - death, abuse, severe shock, a major accident - will cause that reaction. I floated through a gray and salty fog for a couple of years after my sister's death - didn't know it at the time, just knew that I had to avoid this huge pothole in the road that kept looming up at me and knocking my tires off. Eventually I learned where it was and now drive around it on a regular basis. I still know it's there, but I'm no longer incapacitated with grief when I think of it.

There's no way to forget. You don't want to forget. You can teach your brain to live with the knowledge, but you don't want to bury it in your head - it'll come back to bite you on the a**.