Extreme statements about life's pain and loss seem justifiable only when people are already otherwise successful members of society. But those of us who're regularly marginalized and suffer loss--without support--daily are maligned just because we're not already valued society members. If you've read about the skiing accident that took the life of Jenji Kohan's 20-year-old son recently, you probably read the mother saying, "There is no justice. I'm broken. How is this real?" Or the father saying, "The cliches about moments like this are true, it turns out... The one about life forever changing in a split second, about the fact that we are all bound up in a web of love and loss, about the primacy of community in times of unfathomable tragedy."
I'm sorry they lost their son. Really. But something that, selfishly, upsets me about this is how when these rich, powerful, successful people suffer loss it's considered appropriate for them to make these grand negative judgments about life and to recognize that "community" (family, relationships...) means just about everything, but when we make these observations, we're condemned for being melodramatic. We're just suffering from wrong-think (CBT, DBT...). Expressing pain seems to be an entitlement of the already desirable, the successful. Chronically poor? Underemployed or unemployed? Disabled somehow? Socially undesirable and stuck in these "unfathomable traged[ies]" regularly? Yawn. Crawl under a rock and die quietly. No one cares to make the obvious association between the "primacy of community" and the devastating effects of lacking such community over a whole lifetime.
I'm sorry they lost their son. Really. But something that, selfishly, upsets me about this is how when these rich, powerful, successful people suffer loss it's considered appropriate for them to make these grand negative judgments about life and to recognize that "community" (family, relationships...) means just about everything, but when we make these observations, we're condemned for being melodramatic. We're just suffering from wrong-think (CBT, DBT...). Expressing pain seems to be an entitlement of the already desirable, the successful. Chronically poor? Underemployed or unemployed? Disabled somehow? Socially undesirable and stuck in these "unfathomable traged[ies]" regularly? Yawn. Crawl under a rock and die quietly. No one cares to make the obvious association between the "primacy of community" and the devastating effects of lacking such community over a whole lifetime.
