Hypersensitive
Yes, I’m hypersensitive. Always have been. Never tolerated horror movies or gratuitous violence or even obviously comic graphic cartoons.
That’s a problem, since I love books and movies but could never enjoy that so-called “delightful shiver of fear.” As a kid, I avoided school-sponsored haunted houses and even today, my idea of a fun Halloween is keeping the outside lights off to avoid trick-or-treaters.
I’ve forgotten the book, but I still shudder at a device-character’s three-day-torture death, described in a single line. A single line. I felt it, squirmed from it. Likely no other reader even noticed its passing.
I preferred Donald Hamilton’s edge-of-the-seat tales because he could show mayhem and death without the dripping gore. It took me days to get through Lee Child’s original Reacher due to the endless carnage, minutely detailed over and over.
For some reason, movies are harder, which makes no sense. I couldn’t watch Roots, never saw Schindler’s List, despite ghostwriting those same horrors—and worse—for Holocaust and child-sexual-abuse, and even satanic-ritual survivors. Hell, I still shudder at the Exodus scene where Paul Newman smothered the baby, a film I saw sixty-three years ago!
Therapists claim that hypersensitive children who non-outgrow the anxiety wrought by bright or flashing lights, violent activity, or other people’s suffering can learn to deal with it through treatment. Or drugs.
Me? I use selected avoidance. Yeah, it makes me a figure of derision, but all the mental-health gurus insist I must needs learn to put myself first. So I avoid what sets me off (and people who carry lists of everything that’s wrong with me at the ready).
I lost a friend because I immediately recognized the fraud in the first Trump attempted assassination. She called me hateful for not caring about Corey Comperatore, who allegedly took the bullet for the former president, or David Dutch and James Copenhaver, who were wounded.
Funny how their names disappeared so quickly. Wonder what the payoff was for that.
Alas, I wasn’t furious because I didn’t care about them, but because I cared too damn much. All I could see was the phony studio blood and Trump having set up three people to get hurt—one killed—for naught but the sake of a fuckingly obvious publicity stunt!
That’s when my hypersensitivity started boiling up.
Now in just the past two weeks, Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio have received bomb threats thanks to Messrs. Trump and Vance’s openly acknowledged lies.
Meanwhile, Javion Magee, a 21-year-old truck driver, was hanged from a tree in Henderson, NC.
High school student Domanick Stewart was hanged from a bridge in Prentiss, MS.
A Gettysburg College student carved… the N word… into a fellow swim-team member’s chest with a box cutter in Pennsylvania.
And Marcellus Williams was executed in Mississippi for a crime DNA evidence proves and even prosecutors admit he didn’t commit.
In the past two weeks.
Yes, I’m hypersensitive, but my nervous system is raw now… and I’m done pretending otherwise.