Speaking With Tongues

Chapter Two and a Half

Chapter Two and a Half, “If I Were In Your Shoes, I Would...” Is Not A Valid Speculation


Nobody understands my problems the way I do. Sometimes I even wonder if the same painful incident, perhaps a finger caught in a car door, feels the same to any other person as it does to me. I even imagine that any pain I feel would actually be unbearable to any other human being. I usually wonder if that’s true, but sometimes I actually believe that it is. Like I said, I'm a damn narcissist.

Joy once told me that she’s certainly had some of the worst childhood experiences than anyone she’s ever known, but “that’s no reason to drug your life up and fry your body away,” she’d say, her atrophied, arthritic finger pointing sharply at my eye, uncomfortably near it. “I was molested countless times, but I’m still a normal person now”— says Joy—“making normal, right choices, loving people the right way, and letting myself be loved. Why can’t Sally-the-raped and Betty-the-beaten do the same? Nothing- nothing!- is an excuse for bad choices, for inflicting self-pain. We are not our circumstances.” Though I was hearing what she was saying, I couldn’t stop focusing on that crippled finger, about to scratch my cornea, and I said “I will kill myself before I’d let that happen to me.” She glanced at her finger for a second then peered at me quietly, reproachfully. She crossed her arms against her diminished, grandma chest and shook her head from side to side, giving up on me.

She was right though, what she was saying about people making choices despite their circumstances. And it is this that sometimes makes me refute my previous conclusion that we experience pain differently; instead, I wonder if it is a homogenous experience, like a pill given to cloned sheep of the exact same DNA structure, a pill called Pain in a billion different categories of types of human pain; but something- and that something must be outside of us, of who we are- makes us simply react differently. Maybe it’s weird stuff, like our names. Joy. Maybe that’s why she’s making all the right choices. Because her name is Joy. Kedzie is a street name...streets make no choices. Things just happen to streets.

Inescapably, though, my pride brings me back to my first conclusion that it is I, out of the entire humanity, somehow chosen to experience pain ten-fold greater than any other being. And Joy and all the other sheep are given the placebo pill; hence, the possibility to react outside of their [pseudo]pain.