On Love, Truth, and the Antidote for Indifference
If it’s so easy for the world to erase me, why can't I erase myself from the world?
At age 11 I was forced to come to Canada, dragged by my now-dead Deaf parents from a communist dictatorship to a cold, foreign land that symbolized “freedom”, but ironically, destroyed my life - through exploitation, corruption, and most of all, indifference.
Hardly a day goes by without me wishing that I’d died before I ever stepped foot in this wretched country. At least Romanians living under Ceausescu’s authoritarian rule KNEW we lived in a corrupt system where people were bribed/bought to rewrite history and silence dissent. Here, people choose to become deaf-mutes. Indifference reigns supreme.
This widespread, ubiquitous indifference I encountered most of my life is, at its core, a byproduct of selfishness. As a first-generation immigrant with no family or social supports in a foreign country, you quickly start to note an endemic selfishness reflected in most native westerners – the idea that ultimately you’re always going to be safe, that nothing bad ever happens here, nothing truly is a matter of life or death because there are safeguards in place. You can always pass the buck, make a phone call and deflect responsibility to the next person, the next social service department. There are shelters, soup kitchens, looney bins, jails, tons of places that someone with no support or safety net can access without you having to break a sweat.
Although it’s fed by intellectual and emotional laziness, and the antidote requires unplugging from indifference and replacing it with the kind of empathy that involves traversing beyond Hallmark card-style platitudes of sympathy into the realm of stepping into someone else’s shoes and genuinely engaging with them in order to grasp their reality, ultimately this isn’t the public’s fault.
It is the result of being born into and programmed by the environment of a country where the government and media shelter the public by feeding them just enough outrage to keep them busy and distracted from what really matters, but not enough to allow people to get a sense of how artificial and contrived this reality really is, how it all depends on our manufactured consent to keep propagating itself.
Indifference permits us to abdicate responsibility - even if we have the means of easing someone else’s burden, we seldom give what is fully within our means. We console ourselves with the reassurance that surely there’s someone else out there handling the situation, ready to pick up the torch and get the job done. We convince ourselves that what we give of ourselves to others is sufficient, standard, the minimal amount of energy expended to say we cared, the semblance of having done what we could – even though deep inside yourself, you always know when you gave nowhere near your best.
If it’s not enough, it’s because the other person wanted more than you were prepared to give. That’s on them, the fallibility of expectations; never on you.
Paradoxically, the more you have, the more it feeds your selfishness.
The more creature comforts surround us, the less we care about others – because death and suffering, like other serious existential threats to our survival, appear too remote. Trauma and suffering are abstract concepts in a North American society that loves to sweep real pain under the rug, while reenacting fictitious scenarios of cruelty for vicarious entertainment.
Popular culture has built an altar to trauma – movies, tv shows, endless pop culture entertainment is milked from brutal assaults, savage murders, terrorist acts, acts of vengeance and gore. It’s all vicarious entertainment, a train wreck best watched from across the street, and it’s turned us all into walking oxymorons.
The hypocrisy of living in a tribal, polarized society, is that victimization has been weaponized to the point that it’s been both glorified, and cheapened and diluted, in equal measure. As a result, we’ve grown desensitized and deaf to calls for help.
In our insulated “first world”, we outsource pain to others. We outsource trauma to “specialists” who make a career and income from it, allowing the rest of society to breathe easy in knowing they don’t have to tackle any icky feelings of discomfort. That’s what police, hospitals, rules and regulations are for – to absolve us from having to deal with pain first-hand. From having to care for suffering loved ones first-hand. From seeing true injustice and heartbreak first-hand.
It’s all sanitized away with concocted pop psychology terms about purging “toxicity”, “triggers” and “negative emotions” from your life, as if you can excise a significant part of the human experience out of your psyche and still call yourself a human being.
You are trained to turn numb, to compartmentalize your humanity, to exclude and excommunicate others, and virtue-signal about it afterwards to others who will cheer you on and justify their own numbness by invoking the example of your actions.
We outsource and medicalize intense emotions, grief, sadness, loneliness caused by a society that is numb and indifferent to pain, and then pathologize those who don’t fit into it, those who lack the supports to keep going.
So much of what is considered depression, anxiety and “mental illness” is a result, a byproduct, the logical outcome of a dysfunctional society, not a broken person.
But when pain and anguish creeps beyond the conventional expectation of how long and how much is “appropriate” to grieve, the onus of blame switches from the environment to the individual – why can’t they get over it, why can’t they move on, why are they still stuck in the past, why can’t they stop mourning or just try harder? What’s wrong with them for wanting to die, despite having no opportunities or support networks or anyone who cares whether they’re still alive?
Worse yet, there are the people who invoke trauma, exaggerate suffering and claim illnesses where there are none, because perfect victims – those who have the privilege and platform to gain sympathy and support from an extended network of supporters – are more readily able to get back up on their feet, and maybe gain emotionally or materially in the process.
Conversely, those who have no similar supports, who have learned that wearing their trauma on their sleeves doesn’t gain them sympathy but contempt and punishment, because they are imperfect or unlikely victims – those people fall to the wayside.
Ultimately, none of you would ever want to imagine what it was like to have lived my life. To deny the seriousness of what happened to me is to ease your conscience, at my expense.
I don’t need to tell you what happened to me, for you to understand this:
Believing the worst about those you don’t really want to help, allows you to walk away with a clean conscience – because the wounded animal in the road either isn’t really that hurt, or is beyond saving. Again, there’s nothing you could have done.
Those who are the most sheltered will always be the most inflexible and unforgiving. They’re the ones most likely to accuse the sufferer of exaggeration or manipulation. You have to vilify the Other, to justify why you won’t help, even if helping is within your means. The cruelty of indifference gives you the peace of mind; it allows you to sleep at night.
Conversely, those who’ve known hunger will always be the first to break bread with you. Those who have encountered trauma will most readily understand suffering and pain, because they’ve lived it. Some of the kindest, most selfless and forgiving people I’ve ever met – people I credit with saving my life, once upon a time – were poor themselves, were immigrants or visible minorities, were people who had experienced hardship and recognized it on my face before I ever had to ask for help.
A dysfunctional society will manifest every iteration of its disorder through its citizens. But not everybody is permitted healing. Even among the wounded, there are hierarchies that ensure those considered worthless or not worthy of your compassion remain on the periphery until they are fully erased.
But the erasure has to happen gradually, methodically, soul-crushingly; God forbid that it should come from your own hand because it’s not “legal”, because your suicide would offend the sensibilities of those unable to comprehend the amount of suffering that precedes it, or who defer to select religious doctrines while ignoring precepts from the same holy books about love and compassion.
Even when your life is hopeless, you are not allowed to take yourself out, and if you try to end your own suffering, they punish you with further traumas: police, mental holds, the deprivation of whatever little “freedom” you have left.
In my case – I was erased from history, erased from my own work, from my own articles, erased from a movie about my own lived experiences, erased by just about everyone I ever loved, erased from a world that rendered me inconvenient because I spoke the truth about a government corruption that was deliberately suppressed for thirty years.
And yet, no one will answer my question – if it’s so simple for the world to erase me, why all the fuss now about me erasing myself from this world? Why is autonomy for thee, but not for me?
Erasure is so simple; what’s difficult is hanging on.
From cruelty, courage can emerge – but this is not our default mode. Not after we’ve been taught numbness from birth. It takes reaching outside ourselves to evoke a transfiguration of the soul.
For me, the antidote to indifference is choosing love and light – like love, sunlight makes all things grow and flourish; it warms our bodies and creates the elixir that is photosynthesis. Light is life. Light is love.
Darkness – defined as the absence of light – is the land of all things cold and unseen. The absence of sight and vision, of warmth and love. To me, evil is no more than the absence of truth, courage and kindness. Evil is indifference – looking away from injustice when it unfolds right in front of you. Placing self-interest and partisanship over doing what is right.
Renowned British journalist Marie Colvin, who was killed while covering the Syrian Civil War, once said, “In covering war, can we really make a difference? The real difficulty is having enough faith in humanity to believe that enough people will care when your story finally reaches them.”
As an aspiring writer and freelance journalist, I struggled with self-doubt for so many years. Would my writing really make a difference? Does everything depend on an audience’s lack of apathy and indifference? Can you still draw motivation to tell a story, even when you lack the faith in humanity’s ability to care, or even wish, to hear that story?
I realize now, as I stand on my own precipice, that it’s not about the audience. It’s not about gaining popularity, clicks and accolades. It’s not about self-promotion, because fame is fickle and fleeting. And if our society wasn’t structured around making a competition of such artificial rewards, if the measure of success wasn’t counted by the number of followers, retweets and clicks a story gets, our reality would be a whole lot more authentic.
It’s about standing on that stage and speaking your truth, even if the theatre is empty. Your conscience is your audience.
In a dysfunctional society, all is not what it appears to be.
Just because everyone around you appears to be happy, doesn’t mean that they are. Just because they appear more successful, or they seem to live “normal lives”, doesn’t prove the existence of “normality”.
You could be so broken that you are stuck in place, rooted in time like a tree whose roots sank so deep into the earth that it became frozen under the weight of all its ghosts; but because you are “broken” does not mean you are wrong.
Because they are not broken, or don’t look broken, doesn’t mean they are not.
People can hide their entire lives under the masks of normalcy and perform all the conventional things expected of them – get married, have families, block out the kinds of memories that marked them most. Those are their value judgements, which are entirely subjective.
Just because they “moved on” doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you for not doing the same.
Just because they choose to forget because it feels easier, doesn’t mean that is the right decision for you.
Sometimes “moving on” is not being authentic to your pain – it can feel like indifference to the trauma you were forced to face. Sometimes people can only think by consensus, and when consensus dictates that you “move on” and forget, you feel that you must force yourself to forget.
When life becomes too painful to bear, we forget – it’s easier to hide a truth with a lie. But sometimes you are stronger when you don’t “move on” and don’t forget.
When you do choose to remember, stand firm with the truth of what happened.
When you are rooted in place by pain or trauma and refuse to move until your suffering is acknowledged, it can take a lifetime – to be acknowledged, to get an answer, to have what happened to you recognized.
More often than not, that never happens. You never get the apology, the vindication, the healing – and they will laugh at you and make fun of your pain.
They will call you broken, bonkers, defective, vindictive, a loser, because you chose to defend the young girl who nobody defended, the one nobody thought was worth defending, the one so worthless they made her invisible and gave her life away to someone else.
Just because they win, doesn’t mean you are a loser. Because what is loss, in such an artificial setting? Throughout our lives, we’ve seen people who win while losing their integrity, compromising their beliefs, ignoring their conscience, siding with liars and sycophants, sacrificing Truth for an illusion in order to please and appease powerful men from whom they hope to extract favours – an illusion that gets them success and accolades, things that this world considers indicators of what makes one human being better than another.
From cradle to grave, we are pushed to bend, to become warped by categorizations of perceived value, a valuation of a human being’s worth filtered and imprinted into your psyche by the society and culture you’re born into.
What kind of win is that? Winning the right to pass a lie as truth, will never make it true.
A thousand years go by, and you are still rooted in that forest – a gnarled tree weathered by time and memories. But you stood true. And in the end, nothing matters but how true you were to your self.
Just because they had families and normal lives while nobody gave a shit about you, doesn’t mean you are as worthless as you see yourself through their eyes. They prize normality, but you are no less innocent and pure than they are. And yet they treat you as though you are beneath them, lower and inferior, because they were lucky enough to be born into supportive families and had a privileged upbringing.
But you did nothing wrong. You were as pure and innocent as any child. You were not born stupider and uglier than any other soul, and yet they made you out as one. You are not less lovable because you were born into a family that didn’t love you.
You know the truth, because you saw it in first-person. You are the star witness to your life. You are the owner of your reality, the only witness on the stand, the only one who walked through your reality from beginning to end.
Truth cannot be defined by those who have framed papers on the wall, conferred by clusters of elite gatekeepers and privileged old boys’ clubs who, through gauntlets of higher-education institutions created by their forefathers, regurgitate the ideas of the establishment to young minds that emerge, years later, as the cookie-cutter, automaton mouthpieces of their predecessors.
Your gut instinct and intuition are your only compass. Everything else you filter from the world around you is a subjective interpretation through someone else’s lens – which is shaped by their own biases, interests, (sub)conscious influences and value judgements, and the biases of those who, in turn, shaped them.
The world is one gigantic courtroom – and everything is persuasion. Those who are born into privilege and can buy their way into positions of power and authority, most often get to decide the outcome of the external story. They can certify and endorse each other’s version of reality and impose it through brute force or majority-rule, but it does not make it the truth.
We might be a byproduct of our world (in the sense that the narrative we’ve been immersed in since birth shapes our sense of identity), but our awareness does not need to be confined, or defined by it.
Always trust yourself. You are the only eyewitness to your story. Everything else is external and dependent on your interpretation. Ultimately, you are the sole gatekeeper of your own reality, the only person who gets to define the truth, as filtered through your limited senses and mental processes.
The bruise is on your body. You don’t replace your pain with your aggressor’s version of truth, because you were not in their body when they acted. You can only be the witness of your own experience.
The bruise is on your body. That is your only truth. You can only speak to your pain. You cannot assume or diminish someone else’s pain, or make excuses and justifications that diminish someone else’s responsibility in causing your pain.
Own it. There is no point in wondering why they did it. You are responsible for caring for, and defending, the vessel that contains your consciousness. Be true to its experience, for it is all you have.
Your truth is no less real, and no less valid than anyone else’s, because you were unloved. Just because someone is prized more by the world through biased, judgemental and subjective eyes shaped by centuries of kings, boyars and gatekeeper elites who invented and disseminated mainstream media to broadcast their values and biases to the masses as a way to program them to stay in line and model society according to their whims, doesn’t mean they are any more valuable or important than you are.
I will say it again – Erasure is the simple part; what’s difficult is hanging on. Both for the one teetering at the edge of a precipice, ghosted by the world until they become a living ghost, and for the one who chooses to build a bridge to reach the unreachable.
Choosing love and hanging on is much more difficult. It involves pushing past the darkness of fear, pain and anger, and journeying toward forgiveness, transcendence, and the light that illuminates our interconnectedness.
To be in sync with one another, to understand each other’s feelings as if they were our own – that is to tap into, and recreate, the Oneness we are all a part of.
Even if it’s too late for me, I ask only for this –
Always choose love. It is the antidote for indifference.
