Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen

A couple of days ago, my best friend Sherry called me, completely overwhelmed. After a lifetime of dreaming about it, she decided that she doesn’t want to be a doctor. She was watching a video in her medical sociology class that followed some painful medical stories, most of which had heartbreaking endings, not only because of death, but also because of all the featured doctors’ corrupt heartlessness. While she was sobbing her eyes out watching the video, she looked around in, and to her horror the rest of the students had completely blank faces – “blanker than a white sheet of paper.” It seemed like they had lost the ability “to suffer together with, [and] feel pity’ (X41). Those kids are all brilliant – they’re going to school at Rice. Yet Sherry says, everyday, she sees how brutal and ruthless the race is. How much empathy is lacking. And for that reason, she couldn’t do it anymore.

People like her give me faith in humanity. But sometimes I feel it too – that I’m turning into an android. I feel so caught up in this life that has been built around me; it’s a constant rush of class, food, homework, sleep. I feel like a robot, mechanically going through life, whizzing and whirring around in order to get everything done. As of late, I’ve been feeling like the “control over [I once had over my] emotional life is impaired” (X59). I don’t know what it is; I can’t describe what I feel. I’m not going to lie, after reading the passage on alexithymia, I was a little scared. But perhaps that’s my tendency to read way too far into everything. I guess since I was a little scared, that makes me not an alexithymiac?

Usually, I like to think that I’m pretty good at interpreting emotions. Like Dana said, I too have assumed there are a few types of intelligence. I have enough of the book smart to get by and the street smart is a little shady, but empathy and the ability to relate to others has usually been my forte. I was always the one who had to settle the elementary school fights over the cookies, and throughout the rest of grade school, was the one to counsel numerous first heartbreaks and cases of unrequited love. I don’t know why, but I always cry at the parts in movies when the protagonist is lost/confused/feels like nobody can understand them. That's part of the reason I hope to go into psychology. I hate to see people without a listening ear.

I think lately, I have become a victim of compassion fatigue. It’s not that I don’t care or feel..it’s just that I don’t care to anymore. There’s too much to care about, yet most of it doesn’t even matter in the end. I think that is what David Powell might have been feeling. (Don’t worry, I’m not going to do anything crazy.) He was brilliant –had plenty of that I.Q- but maybe he didn’t have the emotions to handle the world. It’s easy to lose touch with everything, when you get too caught up in minute details. Maybe he was once of those who had “Forgotten all…emotional lessons because they no longer have access to where they are stored in the amygdala.” Like Goleman says, “How we do in life is determined by both – it is not just I.Q., but emotional intelligence that matters” (X60). If one is way up, it is important to balance it with the other intelligence. In that spirit, I think I am going to work on finding that perfect balance. I can’t let my emotions overwhelm me and get me lost in the labyrinth of my mind. I don’t want to be “an escaped android [who can] hardly tell the truth about [my]self” (Dick 99) anymore.