Sicker than Fiction.

Sometimes I feel like I might be desensitized.  I write these weirdly twisted stories about secrets, many of which are sexual in nature and awfully deviant, and I wonder if I am sick in the head and I wonder if society has made me disturbed and if there is any cure for me.

And then I spend a few minutes reading the provocative news articles that go along with the attention-grabbing headlines on my news feed updater thing.

And I inevitably come accross something that shocks me.  Sickens me.  Scandalizes me.  Saddens me.  Scares me to tears.  Literally.

And it really happened.  It wasn't someone's imagination, but the nightmarish reality for some poor little girl somewhere, some young woman who made some poor choices and paid for it with the worst kind of humiliation and dehumanization imaginable. 

And I want to be wrapped up and I want to have never read the news article, and I want to pretend that these things, they only happen in tv shows and movies.  Violence for art's sake, shocking twists for a good show.  Moral transgressions that are layered with symbolism and tragic outcomes for the purpose of spiritual catharsis and higher-thinking.

Not random acts of violence, pointless, preventable, petty, and utterly devastating. 

And when I'm picturing myself in the shoes of these young women, I close my eyes and shiver.  When I feel the wave of panic that is only a shadow of what it would feel like to live the hell they lived before their murders or rapes or violent beating, I feel tears in my eyes, terror in my heart and grief so eep, so real, so helpless that I know I am not and probably never will be desensitized.  I feel it with an empathy that is raw and all too receptive.

And I shut it ut, and block my heart and turn my mind to other things, because the pain is too heavy, the worry too cumbersome, the grief too real.  If I opened myself up to it all the time I would be crushed under the weight of it, strangled by the overwhelming strength of it, diminished by the size of it.

And, like many, I feel powerless to turn the tide against these sick, devastating private acts of criminal violence.  Alone, despite our numbers, useless despite our desire to help.

And so it goes largely ignored, as we read instead about some celebrity getting thrown in the slammer for public drunkeness or some other such frivolous misdemeanor.

Because it is more manageable. 

Because that's the sort of crime we can look at and laugh at and live with.

The other stuff?

I honestly wonder how we hear it, read it, learn of it and can continue on unchanged.

And I am back to wondering if maybe I'm desensitized.  If society has made me sick...