The Days Of Whine And Poses, Internet Style

There are many truisms in life. Often they’re interwoven. Here are two so joined:

1. Your pain is legitimate.
2. That said, there are a whole lot of people in far worse circumstances than your own.

Let’s flesh that out.

The tortured artist suffering for their craft is an image well embedded in society. It’s an increasingly difficult description to accept the farther up the success ladder one has ascended. Nevertheless, more than a few who by all common definitions have “made it” seem furiously intent on bemoaning their lot in life even as they occupy a position the likes of which 99.999994% can only dream.

Even more offensive are those whose agony is self-inflicted. Bono described it most succinctly: “Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief; all kill their inspiration and sing about the grief.” Oh poor me, comes the cry. I sit alone and abandoned all day doing nothing but writing and drinking and pining away for a love that won’t tell me to get lost.

Yeah, cry me a river.

When someone is the sole individual responsible for their placement in this life, there is no sympathy. The person who’s endured the hammer blows — death of a loved one, an ongoing physical or mental malady be it their own or someone they love and care for, destroyed relationships, financial ruin, being brutalized physically and/or emotionally — for these people there is sympathy and often genuine empathy based on shared experience. As I wrote in God’s Not Dead (And Neither Are We), only those who have been through the fire can speak with authority to those still engulfed in flames. The rest of us can only do what we can do, which is love and support and take care of as best we can. But for the one  who whines about imaginary and/or self-inflicted wounds? No.

Why should the young mother with two kids, one autistic, who worries every time her husband leaves for work whether he’ll come home due to the dangerous nature of his profession be concerned with the kvetching of someone who sits in their apartment all day, gets paid for it and whose heaviest burden in life is when someone leaves an impolite comment on their blog? Why should the brokenhearted embrace worry about the ones who makes themselves as unlovable as possible, then sulk over not having someone to love them? What possible reason exists for the ones who must fight for so much as insufficient time and peace to express themselves via word, music, art or dance, if in fact they can carve out any at all, to offer sympathy toward someone who has nothing on their to-do list but write all day with the empowerment to do so?

Those of us with lives, therefore bearing genuine wounds and scars from when life has come crashing down, feel no pain for those who stick their finger with a needle so they can scream they’re bleeding to death.

None whatsoever.