Didn't fire-fighters used to put out fires?

I started re-reading Fahrenheit 451 last night. I read almost 60 pages in a little over half an hour. It was very intense to read and I felt very sad afterwards. The whole beginning is the blossoming of a ‘friendship’ between a firefighter (Montag) and his new neighbor Clarisse who is “17 and crazy”. Clarisse challenges everything Montag has ever known. At the end of their first encounter, she asks him “Are you happy?” and then runs off to her house. Montag laughs it off, but as he walks into his hosue he realizes “No, I’m not happy,” A moment later he catches a glimpse of an empty bottle of sleeping pills on the floor and his wife, pale and unconscious on their bed. He calls 911 and they send out two workers to pump her stomach and filter the drugs out of her blood. Montag thinks to himself as he is watching:

Did it drink of the darkness? Did it suck out all the poisons accumulated with the years? …The entire operation was not unlike the digging of a trench in one’s yard.

And then afterwards:

The bloodstream in this woman was new…someone else’s blood there. If only someone else’s flesh and brain and memory. If only they could have taken her mind along to the dry cleaner’s and emptied the pockets and steamed and cleansed it and reblocked it and brought it back in the morning. If only…

The pain in their marriage is so heavy from the very beginning. You can tell that he really hates the way that their marriage is and really wants to change it, but Mildred (his wife) is very shallow and seems incapable of engaging about anything painful. The next morning he tries to talk to her about the incident.

“You took all the pills in your bottle last night.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” she said, surprised.
“The bottle was empty.”
“I wouldn’t’ do a thing like that. Why would I do a thing like that?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said.
She was quite obviously waiting for him to go. “I didn’t do that,” she said. “Never in a billion years.”

I know I've said this before, but I am so prone to shutting down when things get tough. Just the other day I was on the phone with Clint and he brought up a touchy subject from back when we started dating- totally not a big deal anymore, water under the bridge – and I got pissed and shut the conversation down. I hung up the phone and sat there for the next ten minutes trying to figure out what in the hell was my problem. And then it hit me: I didn’t want to be reminded of a time that I was in the wrong. I didn’t want to think about how amazingly ugly I had been. I had totally erased the painful memory from my mind and having it brought up made me go into a sort-of denial. It was like: if we don’t talk about this, then it never really happened…

I was talking to some friends last night about a girlfriend of mine that couldn’t be in my wedding because she checked herself into an eating disorder clinic. When I asked her why she abused herself so, her answer was all at once clear and surprising. She said that she had been in a terrible car accident years ago in which her little brother died, her sister was paralyzed for life, and her mother suffered a shattered jaw and she was miraculously untouched. She said she had so much guilt and no way to get it out that she started starving herself, or purging, or exercising impulsively to feel like she had any kind of control. A month after she had been in the clinic and had managed to combat her eating disorder, she confessed that she had taken up cutting herself because she felt so out of control. She had never gone through the painful process of dealing with her past, instead she denied that she needed help carrying her burden and took to hurting herself to get out the emotions instead.

What I want to know is: how is it that we can be a culture that can endure pain for all manner of cosmetic/esthetic/purging purposes (did you read that they re-approved silicone breast implants this past week?) and yet when it comes to emotional pain, we avoid it by any means? I was reading in the NY Times today about a man who started taking Wellbutrin (mild anti-depressant or SSRI) years ago to quit smoking and continues to take it to this day because “it makes him feel good”. The man has never actually suffered from depression. How is it that we can get botox, piercings, tattoos, plastic surgery all damn day long, we will starve ourselves to death , we will take drugs but when it comes to willingly entering into emotional circumstances that could benefit ourselves or our relationships with others- we opt out. We have grown up in a culture that tells us to bury our feelings deep inside, to take a pill, and that denial is survival. But what so many of us find out sooner or later is that there is no burying, and everything comes out in time. It’s up to us how we deal with it when it comes to the surface- whether we’ll push it back down for a few more years until it becomes insurmountable or deal with it now while we still have our health, our wits, our sanity.

I read this on the Psychology Today website and was really struck by what it said.

"Viewing marriage as a process that unfolds in stages … gives couples cause for hope even in the midst of misery, relieves some of the anxiety that they are not happy now, and gives them an agenda for working out their problems. In addition, it affords couples a realistic perspective of duration—that relationships don't happen overnight but take time. And it helps people abandon the idea of instant gratification. It clues them that you need to go through life making changes."

We're just ordinary people

We don't know which way to go

Cause we're ordinary people

Maybe we should take it slow

Ordinary People- John Legend