I Have This Sick Fantasy Where...

I don’t normally do this.

I don’t post and say, “It’s been 4 months since” BUT the medical woods we just went through were so much more intense than social media will ever show that I feel like doing so.

I share about dance theater shows coming together (in the past) and relaunching again soon… why not share a survival reflection, one month in?

But I DO have a confession to make… and it’s pretty twisted.

I have this sick fantasy where people I know could get to experience what my body feels like for one day.

Super f***ed up, yes… but it’d make a clever movie for sure. A 24-hour-only “Freaky Friday”, “17 Again”, “Family Swap”, “Hot Chick” sort of a situation but like… more organ pain, less Efron. A 24-hour empathy experiment that I think would end differently than you and I might think it might end.

Initially, my competitive Monica-from-F.R.I.E.N.Ds side thinks someone would go “You’re still walking around in this level of pain?” and then I’d do an ‘I told you so dance’ because I’m petty… but only 24-hours of petty, you know?

I’d probably regret the science-fiction fast, and give the ‘Alice in Wonderland cookie’ or ‘Matrix pill’ that reverses it back again.

Living like this gives you 2 options: live with it and not fight it (something I’ve considered more than ever before this year), or continuing to pretend you’re not as bad as you are as best as you can. If you love your life or - more importantly - the people you’re lucky enough TO love, then the pain at disappointing others is often harder than the somatic.

Shame > suffering.

My Pain CosPlay concept would maybe result in some weird “Ego-Id off” in terms of validation for a fleeting fanciful moment … but would a mass empathy exercise actually work? I sadly think: no. I think the sadistic stroke of any ego would be a sweet blue-red swallow got a second, sure…. BUT then…

Humanity.

Any human experiencing another human’s pain would do what we all forget the second it’s not OUR bed to sleep in: We forget. Emotional amnesia. We all have it. We have it after labor and deliveries. We have it after each and every heartbreak. We have it even after the most simple of medical procedures sometimes.

Forgetting pain is the primary thing keeping us going out our front door.

If more of us realized that even when we can’t feel what someone else is feeling, we can still feel FOR someone else …

Maybe more of us would feel.

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