Falling With Style: We Get Deep
The November after my engagement ended, I did NaNoWriMo. It was a rotten novel in so many ways--I got to 50,000 words, so I can't actually call it a failure. A shame, too, because it was just a gorgeous plot and story. I just wasn't emotionally able to really write at the time--my engagement had ended in mid-September and it was a quite sudden and hurtful end of a relationship. Maybe I'll go back to the novel some day, but a lot the writing can go away. However, sometimes, the emotions that I expressed during that month were so very raw and went to deep places of my soul that I don't explore much.
One of these concepts that I explored was the idea of your story being someone else's story. The narrators of my story were the servants of a family, but the story was not theirs--but their lives were dictated by the story of their employers. I think that this was exploring a minor theme in my own life--trial by someone else's story. Not really owning your story.
How does that analyze my story, you may well ask? I'm a very out-spoken person, I have my own life. I really do. But there is a huge chunk of who Hannah is that has nothing to do with Hannah. And there is no song on earth that expresses my feelings about this better than "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen. I know that this song means a lot of things to a lot of people. And what Leonard Cohen actually intended it to mean, I don't think anyone really knows. But one thing that makes good art beautiful is that it means something different to everyone--and maybe even different things to the same person at different times.
To me, this song is about loving someone with depression, and the impossible task of trying to help someone but not knowing how. I can't go into a lot of detail, because as we have discussed, these stories are not mine. They don't belong to me, and they're not mine to share. But I have loved a lot of people--friends and family (close family)--with different depressive disorders.
I don't mean to sound like a privileged person complaining--I know that I don't have depression. But it's popular to talk about loving people with mental illnesses. It's not popular to talk about the pain that that causes. This song of trying to assuage someone, but not seeming to know the "secret chord," and knowing that they are sending out your "flag on the marble arch," saying that they need your help. But when you try to help, they draw away. It can be aggravating. It can be despairing. You do your best, and many days you fail, but you don't regret it. You don't understand it at all. But you still sing Hallelujah. You can't feel, so you try to touch.
I am not very good with people. I feel for them, but I never know what to say, and I am very good at detaching myself from other people's pain (very useful when you work at a Children's Hospital, though). To try and combat this, I read a book called "The Empathy Exams." One thing the author said was that one of the most empathetic thing a person can do is to acknowledge that they don't understand. And that they'll never understand. Because pretending that you understand someone is very presumptuous. And there's a profound respect for a person's self in saying that they are a separate person and that their combined experiences and challenges can never actually be understood by any other human being (Christ excepted, but I'm pretty sure this author is an atheist, so we'd differ on that opinion). The point is, we are all actually alone on this planet. And all of our attempts to understand one another are feeble and pointless. And yet, "even though it all [goes] wrong/ [we'll] stand before the Lord of Song/ with nothing on [our] tongue[s] but Hallelujah."
Remember, however, the Falling With Style Philosophy!
One of these concepts that I explored was the idea of your story being someone else's story. The narrators of my story were the servants of a family, but the story was not theirs--but their lives were dictated by the story of their employers. I think that this was exploring a minor theme in my own life--trial by someone else's story. Not really owning your story.
How does that analyze my story, you may well ask? I'm a very out-spoken person, I have my own life. I really do. But there is a huge chunk of who Hannah is that has nothing to do with Hannah. And there is no song on earth that expresses my feelings about this better than "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen. I know that this song means a lot of things to a lot of people. And what Leonard Cohen actually intended it to mean, I don't think anyone really knows. But one thing that makes good art beautiful is that it means something different to everyone--and maybe even different things to the same person at different times.
To me, this song is about loving someone with depression, and the impossible task of trying to help someone but not knowing how. I can't go into a lot of detail, because as we have discussed, these stories are not mine. They don't belong to me, and they're not mine to share. But I have loved a lot of people--friends and family (close family)--with different depressive disorders.
I don't mean to sound like a privileged person complaining--I know that I don't have depression. But it's popular to talk about loving people with mental illnesses. It's not popular to talk about the pain that that causes. This song of trying to assuage someone, but not seeming to know the "secret chord," and knowing that they are sending out your "flag on the marble arch," saying that they need your help. But when you try to help, they draw away. It can be aggravating. It can be despairing. You do your best, and many days you fail, but you don't regret it. You don't understand it at all. But you still sing Hallelujah. You can't feel, so you try to touch.
I am not very good with people. I feel for them, but I never know what to say, and I am very good at detaching myself from other people's pain (very useful when you work at a Children's Hospital, though). To try and combat this, I read a book called "The Empathy Exams." One thing the author said was that one of the most empathetic thing a person can do is to acknowledge that they don't understand. And that they'll never understand. Because pretending that you understand someone is very presumptuous. And there's a profound respect for a person's self in saying that they are a separate person and that their combined experiences and challenges can never actually be understood by any other human being (Christ excepted, but I'm pretty sure this author is an atheist, so we'd differ on that opinion). The point is, we are all actually alone on this planet. And all of our attempts to understand one another are feeble and pointless. And yet, "even though it all [goes] wrong/ [we'll] stand before the Lord of Song/ with nothing on [our] tongue[s] but Hallelujah."
Remember, however, the Falling With Style Philosophy!
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