these words are knives and often leave scars
a few weeks ago i had to use a bookstore's restroom, as one does, and felt obligated to buy a book from them, as one does, so i grabbed a typical self-help/pop-psych bestseller about relationships and happiness, as one does. but i found myself thinking more about a book i passed over, a manga drawn by an erotic manga artist to chronicle her journey after diagnosed with terminal cancer.
an entertainingly incongruous list of words, but i worried it might be too depressing. because she seemed upbeat about it in the first few pages (and also the extradiegetic fact that the manga had been published) i felt like it was hurtling towards some super optimistic-in-spite-of-adversity concluding message, and for whatever reason i anticipated that being more depressing.
at home i looked up the ending, which i won't spoil, but the whole thing brought to mind several other pieces of writing i had read online, strangers who had dealt with impossibly heartwrenching loss, and chronicled them for the world to read.
sometimes i wonder, why do i do this?
i am kind of picky with my news diet these days. i try not to read about bad news except to the extent they're actionable. for many issues i need to know a little bit to call my representatives about it; doomscrolling any further is just psychological self-harm. (i confess i almost never called my reps before this year, as i went into when last writing about politics, sort of. but i do now, and some of you can too!)
but there's something different between bad world news and a sad personal story, even when they're equally unactionable and conjure the same sad emotions; the latter feels... better for the soul, for lack of a better word.
i think, i hope by reading i can take little fragments of these people with me, live the life and take the opportunities they wish they had gotten to have with the people i have analogous relationships with.
in the end, what do we have but each other?