I scrolled by these shoes today and felt their sadness.
They’re trying hard to look gay and festive and boho, but you can see right through that shaky facade. They are about to cry.
I don’t know about you, but I can see sadness everywhere. It’s either a gift or a pathology, depending on your value system.
I read a good thesis on empathy as a spectrum, with autistic indifference on one end and a kind of hysterical hyper-compassion on the other end. Neither extreme is any good.
A high degree of empathy isn’t the same as being depressed, although I’m depressed too. It’s just an involuntary response in the right supramarginal gyrus (part of the cerebral cortex.)
I don’t know why an abundance of empathy seems to result in an acute sense of the tragic rather than an overload of joy. It just doesn’t seem to work that way. Certainly not unless you’re stoned.
When poor Hillary Clinton spoke at the Commander in Chief forum last week, she was criticized for not smiling enough, and even worse, for appearing “joyless.”
Imagine being graded on how much “joy” you appear to exude!
Life would be even harder for those of us who feel the sadness of shoes.
When I was getting to know my husband, he complained once that I was not more “celebratory.” I remember feeling wounded but also furious. I think I screamed something like, “Celebratory isn’t even a fucking word!” I figured he was comparing me to his ex, who literally wore party hats.
Maybe there’s a spectrum for celebratoryness, which totally isn’t a word, with me at one extreme and the ex at the other?
Here’s one thing I learned recently and I wish I’d understood it forty years ago, before having my first child: There is a spectrum of human sensitivity, and is apparent in early childhood. Some kids are more like dandelions and can thrive anywhere, while others are more like orchids – highly sensitive and more permeable.
With intervention, highly sensitive children can learn to process their environment in ways that make life less traumatic for them
If you’re always accused of being “too sensitive” or you suspect that your kid is anxious or depressed, read this.
But first, look at this Fendi sneaker:
It’s like an animal or bird crashed into it and died, but it won’t fall off. This shoe is not only sad, but embarrassed. It wears its shame wherever it goes. And so can you for twelve hundred bucks.
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