Continued from “Chocolate Loving”
I would not even presume to have had a hard life.
But I will say I have had my hard knocks, more than many but less than most. Life’s tough, cry me a river, wah wah. I don’t seek sympathy because I’m pretty stingy giving it out myself.
So chin up, young man or woman, get a hold of your figurative balls and blaze a trail that no one can ever take from you. I value and admire resilience and I try to uphold that mindset myself. I may fail and I shine more.
I am a resilient person, but I do have my coping mechanism that helps me weather this life’s many tests.
I mock fate and chide reality. I find too much humor is what isn’t funny and I make a three-ring-circus of the tragic.
This is the third and final installment of my catastrophe series.
This is where I explain my “recreational catastrophization,” as I call it. Or maybe it’s not an explanation; it’s a form of Substackian self-exploration (which is what david deconstructed is). My childhood was largely comfortable, for I was never at a loss for roof, food, or parental love. Unfortunately, like most modern parental love, it was fractured and capricious, interlaced with periods of stress and tribulation. Parents are busy people as they contend with their adult lives while conducting a parental life they were never trained for. They love, though not in that placid, idyllic manner pop culture promises. Or was that just my parents?
Life is not without its obstacles.
I was talking with my trainer at work and she said her dog is getting old and near death. Her voice took on a somber tone. She said she is horrified that her dog doesn’t have many years left and she doesn’t know how she’ll take it when he dies. She said her family has never experienced death, a fact she cited as a soft spot that leaves her vulnerability to death a big question mark. I didn’t say much because I had experienced death before the age of 10. I lost a very close step-grandmother to cancer in 1971, and 2 years later, two of my close cousins burned to death in a horrible truck accident. It didn’t stop. Over the next 10 years, before I was 20, I saw many other relatives, acquaintances, and even a couple of schoolmates, perish. My aunt died from ovarian cancer over a period of a year and a half when I was 30. Death and disease were always close at hand during my formative years and I could never figure out if my exposure was unusual for someone my age.
The experiences exploited my anxiety and fearful nature. As a child I was consumed with nightmares and death. I saw ghosts and was susceptible to a horrible nighttime imagination. Shadows of monsters, inner and external, lingered where I couldn’t see. Even as a teen I was pre-occupied with death.
I suspect this personality trait was a result or a reaction to the ubiquity of death and suffering I witnessed in my youth. I was extremely sensitive to it all. It wasn’t until I was an adult that this existential timidity evolved into a caustic, dark, gallows humor that helped me cope by mocking those things I feared most. You can either be helpless and frightened, or you can be helpless and bold. I chose to be bold and defiant, and this is why I am a recreational catastrophizer, a brooding death-obsessed man who can’t take his eyes off the doom.
By fixating on life’s horrible surprises which lie in wait and attacking them with hyperbole and satire, I trivialize its edge. This is how I cope and the source of much of what I write here.
Suffering is my happy place.