There has to come a point at which you say ‘this is the line beyond which I won’t care’. As a human being it is not possible to care about absolutely everything on this earth, much as I might want to. That way madness lies. I give money to charities, I write letters to politicians, it’s kind of easy enough to put the world’s problems at deal-with-able distance. I need to do something to engage with it, but as one person I can tell where my limits are. I rarely get down or angry over the likelihood or not of getting off this rock anymore. Hell, a lot of the issues I get most het up about, it really looks like they’re beginning to be dealt with. As if we are moving towards a more tolerant society, as if we are pushing education out over the whole globe.
Where I can’t draw the lines so easily is when it comes down to friends and people I care about.
I truly believe that negative emotions are bad for you. Sure, we experience them, we act on them. I’ve been depressed but weirdly enough I can’t seem to find this a negative part of my own life. I think sometimes that my strength, the part of me that I regard quite highly, is in making those unfortunate episodes in my life a full aprt of who I am. The downside of this is that I can’t seem to view them as bad things because I have made them a part of me.
It’s more the emotions that you can’t use, you can’t make go anywhere that I believe are bad. There are behaviours that I find wrong. Hell, there are values I disagree with but I don’t get het up about people going with their own values. It’s other things that get me, things that seem to me to be mean, pettty and childish. Yet the whole world, including my own actions are full of petty, mean and childish, if I were to get het up over all of those actions it would be useless.
The complexity of human relationships mean that I can’t confront people about their actions, I will do if they directly pertain to me, but when people who I barely know, and in some cases wouldn’t want to know act in such a way that offends me but does not directly affect me I am too emotionally involved over it. The lines I find so necessary to draw I forget to and I get upset about actions I find offensive to my friends but that they themselves don’t find offensive.
Negative emotions. They really are bad for you. But working out how to deal with them is equally puzzling.