Saturday, November 19, 2016
Whenever You Start to Feel Sorry For Your Life
You find someone that reminds you of, "I cried because I had no shoes, until I met a boy with no feet." I spent part of my afternoon ferrying a woman to a doctor then to an ER. Her story of tragedies kept screaming Victim with all caps, blinking, and fifteen exclamation marks after it. This was something that told me that there was a horrible tragedy in her youth to make her identify so strongly as a victim. She was molested by her uncle from 3 (her earliest memory) until she ran away from home at 13. Then at 14, she was subjected to a gang rape that exceeds even the tragedies in I Never Told Anyone. The guys who kidnapped her off the street in Salinas were apparently upset that one of her orifices wasn't large for multiple simultaneous occupancy, so they cut her to meet their needs wants. Talk about people in need of public and painful execution.
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One should always be careful of taking these people and their stories at face value. The difficulty involved in sorting out what is real from what is merely imagined histrionics is huge; and, because many of the people telling these stories have learned precisely how to engage your rescue instincts, it becomes almost impossible to tell if you're being cozened, or are listening to a real victim's stories.
ReplyDeleteWhat I've noted, through sad experience, is that the ones who talk about the many tragedies in their lives are often making things up. The ones with real tragedies will not, and don't talk about them, especially with casual acquaintances or veritable strangers.
Just like with fake veterans; the real deal doesn't talk about what they went through, or what they did. The fakers always will, and with stunning verisimilitude. The fact that she was "willing to open up" to you, and with such immediate intimacy?
Ought to make one think carefully about taking such a person seriously.