About five years ago, I was reading Night by Elie Wiesel, and I encountered a written detail so horrible it gave me nightmares. It wasn’t a major plot point. It was just a detail. Maybe a paragraph in the whole novel. Something unspeakable that a German soldier did to a Jewish infant.
I mulled it over for weeks.
Four years later, the same horrific detail occurred in real time in Gaza. This time, I did not read about it with words — it reached me by video format, in the palm of my hand.
My hands are only 37 years old, but they’ve held so much human suffering in the last few years. I imagine yours have as well. Images, news stories, reels — muted or volume on — we have all seen too much.
It is a barrage of sorrow, and the heart is a finite container. The size of a fist, really.
When it reaches max capacity,
when the amount of details becomes too infinite,
when the heart is full,
it seems it has but one choice: to harden a little, so the details can’t get in.
After all, we’ve got kids to raise who need to occupy space in the heart as well. What are we to do?
I’ve pondered — both emotionally and intellectually — this process that’s happened to me unwillingly over the last few years. In unequal measures, I’ve felt guilt and relief from the hardening. I’ve felt helpless and faithless, and emboldened and bereft. Desensitization has felt like a mini-death and a new awakening. I have conceded that I alone cannot fix the world. I have conceptualized that my vicarious suffering will not fix the world nor raise my children.
Sometimes, it’s welcome to hear another horrible detail and to be able to say, “I did not cause this. This did not happen to me. It is not my fault. While it may yet affect me in ways I don’t yet understand, I can’t let this one sink me. I am not my country. What will be will be, and I must soldier on.”
But I have to wonder: for hardening up, am I becoming part of what is broken?
Arguably, that German soldier in the 1940s who did what he did to Jewish babies must have experienced some pretty significant desensitization of his own.
At what point in this hardening process does a person become a concept, an ideology, a foe?
Today, while scrolling, I was surprised to see something that managed to pierce the heart armor I’ve been cultivating — and my reaction to it was the most surprising of all. I was horrified, for one, and then so damn grateful that there are still things in this world that horrify me. It is important for me to realize that my heart still draws hard lines in the sand. Foolishly, I hoped there were others feeling like me.
If you ever wonder what desensitization looks like, visit a comment section — any of them will do. Yes, yes, some are bots. Yes, yes. But some are not. Some are people with blood in their veins who can watch the blood of another person be spilled and say, “Well, yes, but they reaped what they sowed.”
We’ve all been served an ongoing drip of evil in the palm of our hands, and it’s hard to hold onto the parts of us that mourn with those who mourn. It’s all we’d ever do. But if we won’t let ourselves feel it, can we at least let ourselves think it? Can we think about our lines in the sand that keep us anchored to our humanity?
Can we allow there to be a few universal wrongs? Can we break party lines to say so?
I used to think — America wants the same things, but the two political parties approach these ideals differently. I miss the simplicity, the generosity, the naivety of that sentiment. Today, I’m grateful to find I am still mourning that. And if you are too, please let me know, so we can, if nothing else, mourn that together as humans with flesh and blood and heart armor.
After so much desensitization, I am reminded that mourning can also be a gift.
Because after all, we’ve got kids to raise. As much as I’d hate to raise them with a surplus of mourning, I’d also hate to raise them without any at all.