I know the world is already full of problems, but in my case, I think it’s a factory defect. My emotional antennas are so powerful, they pick up everything – starting from global warming, which warms my morning tea by 0.001 degrees, to the fly fluttering lonely in my room, which, I’m sure, is having an existential crisis and wondering why it was born a fly and not, for example, a rhinoceros.
Seriously. I can’t just watch the news. I live in that news. When they say the Amazon forests are burning, I feel the smell of smoke in my lungs. When a politician blurts out another stupid thing, my brain physically hurts from their helplessness. I sit and experience all the planet’s pain, hunger, injustice. It’s as if my nervous system is plugged directly into CNN’s server.
The global scale is one thing… But everyday life is a whole separate psychedelic trip. When I walk down the street, I don’t just see passersby. I see stories, traces. Like that couple, sitting on the bench… a woman and a man, probably in their 50s. They aren’t looking at each other, just staring straight ahead, but there’s an invisible, almost painful thread connecting them. Maybe they lived separate lives for twenty years – in different families, different cities, different disappointments. Maybe they were in love as students, but didn’t dare, or life pulled them apart. Now, after all these years, they found each other again. And in their silence, you can hear not just today’s happiness, but the sadness of all those lost years. The missed morning coffees, the movies not watched together, the fairy tales not told to their children… I can’t just walk past them. I feel the weight of their history. This isn’t just sadness, it’s the weight of time, the realization that some things will never come back. And I return home burdened by the feeling of lost time, as if the weight of all humanity’s missed chances is on my soul.
And then there’s that fly. It’s not just an insect. It’s a symbol. A symbol of loneliness, aimlessness, vanity. It flies around my room, looking for an exit, hits the glass, gets tangled in the curtains, tries again… and I see myself in it. I wonder, should I kill it and free it from this suffering? Or open the window and give it a chance to find its “fly happiness” in the big world outside? But isn’t there more danger outside? Birds, cars, other, more aggressive flies… I sit for 10 minutes writing a script for the life of one little fly. In the end, I found its corpse on the windowsill. It probably died of boredom.
This sensitivity is both my superpower and my undoing. It allows me to see beauty where others don’t. To feel music down to my bones. To love as if the world revolves around that love. But at the same time, it consumes me. It forces me to experience every pain, every injustice, every lost hope.
This is probably the “artist’s curse.” To be like an open wound, where all the world’s sorrows and joys penetrate at the same time. I don’t know, I don’t know. Sometimes I laugh at the stupid things I think about. My filter function is completely broken. Or maybe, there was never a filter in my source code to begin with.
In short… I need a psychologist. Make that two. So they can comfort each other after every session…
