Perspective
My son is a bit of a scaredy-cat. I don't mean this as an insult in the least, because, primarily, it's my wife's and my own fault that he is this way. We're not ones for horror movies, I don't do well with jump scares, and as a result we typically avoid that kind of entertainment.
So naturally, after watching something child-appropriate, but still “child-scary” before bed last night, he ended up a bit frightened. (Quick aside, he suffers from a seizure disorder that tends to be worse during the transitions between wakefulness and sleep – and vice-versa – so we lay with him as he falls asleep just to make sure he gets there without any complications.) We use a lot of conscious language in our home. So it's not uncommon, when as he's struggling to get to sleep, he'll say something to one of us like, “I'm having bad thoughts,” which is his language for “I can't get something bad out of my head.” Last night, it was “bad thoughts” prompted by the thing he watched before bed.
Knowing it was a scary movie that was giving him those bad thoughts, I decided I'd try to break down how the movie made him feel that fear. Knowledge of the how giving him control over his emotions, or something I guess. I talked about the nature of storytelling, about how the movie set up the final, climactic, frightening scene by preceding it with a scene that was lighter in tone – explaining rising and falling tension in the process. The idea that by resetting you to an “unfrightened” state, it makes the tension of the next scene feel even more heightened. How over time, people have learned how to tell stories in way that cause a very specific emotional response from their audiences, and that for me, knowing that I was “tricked” into feeling a way helps me understand that there's nothing actually happening to me that is truly making me feel that way. It helps me to take my feelings apart, to look at them objectively, and then I can control how I really want to feel. By changing my perspective on my feelings, I can change how I feel about them. Not always, but sometimes.
Shockingly, that made sense to him, somehow. He fell asleep pretty quickly after that discussion. But it got me thinking bigger. About how the news, how social media, how governments and the people in those governments manipulate our emotions to provoke the response they want out of us. It was another shift in perspective – by taking the off-the-cuff explanation I'd given my son to help him fall asleep and applying it to myself – it gave me the perspective to realize that the sadness I'd been feeling at the barrage of garbage that was assaulting my senses from the political sphere was designed to make me feel that way. Just like it was designed to embolden MAGA, it was specifically crafted to make me feel helpless and small.
So, I took my own advice. I looked at my feeling objectively, deconstructed them, put them back together in a way that made me feel, maybe not better, but differently. If I can remember that I'm supposed to feel beaten down by the glut of Bad Things, I can step outside those feelings next time and know that the source of the Bad Things failed in eliciting the response they wanted from me. Instead of fear, they get certainty and conviction. It's a little victory, but it's a personal victory all the same.
Little victories add up over time.