Hear Me Out: We Need Tragic People…

(But not in the way we think we do)

Did you get a chance to check out yesterday’s column?

It’s free to you now (Life In The Grey) BUT…

If it weren’t for you supportive Word Nerds here, I probably wouldn’t be able to justify writing every single weekday. A lot of people write once or twice a month on Substack for paying subscribers, so my neurotic self is over-doing the best-that-I-can as perpetual thanks to you but:

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Want to read on?

Shutting up now…

But one last thank you for the road: THANK YOU!

If there is one thing I wished we understood in this world, it might be the following:

We need tragic people… but not in the way we think we do.

Almost every time I am recovering from a major surgery or body-rebuild of some kind, I will watch an inspo-documentary that I don’t entirely believe in, in order to convince myself that “I too can make a triumphant comeback from anything”… and I believe we need comeback stories like we need oxygen.

(Though, some of us, from time to time, have experienced hypoxia, and thus know we need oxygen slightly less than we’ve been told, and a hand holding ours telling us “we can do it” maybe more so.)

I both crave and seek inspiration… and gruesomely resent it.

Because, though I am a vast and greedy consumer of comeback content (even while feeling a subtle-distaste for the world’s usage of those doing the coming-back), I also believe we need Tragic Honesty more than we allow ourselves to see or know. And how do I know this?

Well, you have to be feeling this type of pain and ponderance to understand that you need it. You may never know what I mean or what the hell I’m talking about, in fact, until the day you find yourself wanting someone to meet you where you are… Not remind you where to be.

If you’re lucky, you will never feel this in your lifetime.

You will continue to watch films about those missing a limb but illuminating onward for their sport, or those lilting softly into the night with grit and grace and nary a complaint… But somewhere between, beneath, and within all of us are the dark and dreamy drifters who we only call upon when their sadness or suffering matches ours. And when or if you do so, trust me: You’ll be happy they’re there.

But that’s the problem with having problems… Some of us will always resent anyone who can’t put on a brave face and make their sh*t seem to sparkle (really loathe that sentence, to be honest, but leaving it), and some of us will begin to feel a strange and radical rebellion against the ways we ascribe blame to the depiction of “tragic figures” such as Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, or Gloria Grahame (the ternary of which had a dance scene with Jamie Bell that made me think of the many free-flowing ones I’ve loved in other tragic-icon films like ‘Spencer’, or the fully fictionalized top-tier titlist with Andrew Scott in ‘The Pursuit of Love’)… Because we will see the magic within their tragic, and wouldn’t have it any other way.

And let me rephrase: We WOULD all want the people we look up to to be healthy, happy, and whole, as everyone deserves to be… But when someone shows their scars and still scrapes by to their next destination, it does something to everyone who’s here trying to be an Everyone: It makes us feel less lonely when we know what loneliness feels like.

It’s oxymoronic to crave connection at our most isolated, but it’s also sometimes the only cure-all for the ail.

If I watch one too many comeback creations while attempting to recover from my fortieth surgery and someone is being heralded for their first, and talking about it with almost no perspective in the process… I feel like the loneliest one that Nilsson ever did see. And I am. And even now, as I write this, I am writing this without perspective because we can’t have perspective without experiencing it, and somewhere out there right now is someone on their hundredth surgery looking at me and thinking: “If only I had it so bad”.

And that’s why I wish we resented tragedies less… and respected them more. Because the world NEEDS that honesty, but those being honest are most often told through terse, unmoving lips: “Not now, darling. We’re at the dinner table.”

We are the people that make other people lose their appetites…

And lately, I’m feeling more and more alright with that.

Because we all aren’t here to make everyone feel like an Everyone…

Some of us- sometimes, here and there- are still here just to make that one uncertain someone feel satiated, somehow, as the unseen one.

PART ONE.

More tomorrow to end the week!

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