Everyone is Afflicted

You’re dealing with so much more than I am. I don’t want to bother you.

Ever since the loss of my teaching job in 2013, I’ve gotten messages like this from friends and former students. Someone who wanted my advice would ask how I was doing, and often, I would tell them the truth.  Sometimes I might be dealing with hypomania, or battling urges to self-harm; I might be facing a court date or struggling with living in my car.  I might be going through an agonizing breakup.

One doesn’t lie to one’s friends if one can avoid it.

Still, telling the truth about how hard things are can leave a friend in need feeling guilty.  I remember one instance from nearly five years ago. It was a week before Christmas. I was struggling with my accounting job, and had just had my heart shattered.  I had burned myself  with cigarettes again for the first time in ages.

My friend, on the other hand, had a difficult relationship with her in-laws, and was struggling with how much time to spend with them over Christmas. And suspecting that after four marriages, I might know a thing or two about all sorts of in-law issues, my friend wanted to run some things by me.

Once she heard what I was dealing with, however, she told me we could talk another time when I was under less stress.

I thanked her for her concern, but I made the point I always make: I’m not competing in the trauma Olympics and neither is anyone else. We can’t survive in a world where we’re constantly rating our suffering against everyone else’s.

Emotional pain doesn’t happen on a measurable scale like earthquakes or hurricanes or tornadoes. We can’t say “My friend is experiencing a category 2 traumacane, but mine is a category 3, so I have an excuse for not listening to their story.”

This doesn’t mean that losing a job is the same as, heavens forfend, losing a child to cancer. I’m not promoting false equivalence. I’m suggesting radical generosity when it comes to other people’s experience of pain. I’m suggesting we resist the urge to rank suffering, even when the entire world urges you to remember that some people’s hurt is more worthy of our attention than others.

The trendy thing these days is to distinguish between “punching up” and “punching down.”  The recent kerfuffle over Dave Chapelle’s controversial Netflix special has raised this issue once more; comedy, we are told by the cognoscenti, should be deployed to mock the powerful, not the powerless.  The terms “punching up” and “punching down” are reminders that it is okay to hurt some people and not others.  One group needs wounding; another needs recognition.  To the Woke, a skilled comic should be able to bring recognition, even joy, to the marginalized by allowing them to join in his or her cruel (but, of course, richly deserved, even overdue) mockery of the traditionally dominant.

The legendary journalist Finley Peter Dunne called on the press to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”  (The source of that line is an interesting and complicated one.)  I’ve heard that line quoted out of context by every activist from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine.  My standard riposte hasn’t changed, and it’s become all the truer to me as I live a life on the economic margins: “I’m happy to afflict the comfortable. As soon as I meet one.”

Affliction is universal.  It doesn’t mean that everyone is afflicted in the same way.  I lie in bed worried about how to pay the rent; a father in Syria lies on the ground, worried about the next drone strike; a wealthy dad in the Hamptons stares at the ceiling because his company is overleveraged and JP Morgan Chase is about to call in the note.  Three afflicted men whose circumstances are very different, but all three in pain and fear. Telling me and Hamptons dad “Just be bloody glad you and your kids aren’t in Syria right now” does not, in fact, put everything in perspective.  It just shames us for having these fears in the first place, and teaches us that the public expressions of our pain simply annoy, and we should keep our mouths shut.  Check out the suicide rates for middle-aged men to see how well that one’s working.

In our era’s eagerness to settle old scores, right old wrongs, and provide that long-awaited Reckoning, it is inconvenient to remind folks that, as REM sang, “everybody hurts.” To the activist mind, insisting that pain is universal is a dangerous flattening of distinctions, and a squandering of the precious empathy that should be rightly directed only to certain groups.  When we frame compassion as a threatened resource that can only be given to the few, we deny it to ourselves and we deny it to everyone else who truly needs it.

All I meet in my life are afflicted people. I keep looking for the comfortable, self-satisfied, smug ones that I’m told are everywhere (especially in my beloved Los Angeles), and I keep not finding them.  I see only facades and veneers; I see anger and anxiety and exhaustion from San Marino to South L.A..  Telling me that we need to punch up at one set of hurting people to avoid punching down at another set of walking wounded is as artificial a distinction as saying, “Let’s only make fun of blue-eyed people, because they richly deserve it, and let’s

whisper much-needed comfort to our green-eyed brethren.”

I tell my friends I have time for their stories, no matter how exhausted I am or how overwhelmed.  Some of that is because I still fancy myself a writer, and I’m looking for material. Some of it is because I like people. And a lot of it is because hearing what other folks are going through is the one sure thing that gets me out of my own considerable self-absorption.

The worse things get, the more painful things are, the MORE I need to hear other people talk about their pain. If I’m in a bad space — say, worrying about being homeless, or having flashbacks to severe trauma, or struggling with a brain that seems to burn too hot — I need comforting. But for the sake of sanity and self-esteem, I also need to feel competent as a friend and fellow human. And nothing makes me feel more competent than to help another person through something difficult.

I have rich friends. I have poor friends. I have friends who are homeless, friends who are in the precarious “gig class” with me, friends in the anxious middle classes, and friends who travel around the world on Gulfstream jets. I know their doubts and insecurities, and while I confess mine to the world, I keep their secrets. The further I fall, and the harder I work, the more I refuse to fall into the trap of ranking suffering, of discerning what is deserved and what isn’t, of deciding who gets my empathy and who just isn’t worth it.

Perhaps someday I’ll meet a truly comfortable person. And when I do, perhaps I’ll find a devastating bon mot with which to afflict them.  Knowing me, though, I’ll leave it unsaid in my head. Just in case theirs is a pain too well-disguised to sense.

That night five years ago, my friend talked to me for nearly an hour about her annoying sister-in-law while I tended to the oozing, infected burns I’d placed on my own shoulder.  Focusing on my friend’s frustration was the analgesic I needed, and I told her so.  She thanked me at the end of the conversation, and I her.  She asked me why, and I told her: you got me out of myself for a little bit, and it was glorious.  Just glorious.

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My favorite cover of that aforementioned REM classic comes from long-time bluegrass outfit, The Gibson Brothers.