I am a logically and emotionally neutral human being. If you were to talk to me, you would notice that it is hard to distinguish a charge one way or another. It doesn't seem as if I am negative at all, but it doesn't seem as if I'm all that positive, either. If I see a group of people being positive or negative, I have no desire to join them. I am not a killjoy, but I sure am not on anyone's invite list as being the life of a party. I would much rather sit behind a window, observing a party rather than being in the midst of it. I have spent my entire life diving into the depths of humanity wondering why this is, and most often come up empty. By reading newspapers, going to church on Sunday, listening to people tell tales of their misery and success, I get the impression I have misunderstood some fundamental element of what it means to be human.
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I get the impression that I should have a charge, that this is the purpose of life—to enjoy and feel, or to hate and calculate. But so far, my hands and heart have turned up empty.
Consider, for instance, the moment when I was held up at gunpoint. I felt the metal barrel against the back of my head which felt quite similar to a prodding finger, and I heard a woman telling me to empty my pockets. Instead of voiding my bowels or something similar, I thought to myself, “It’s probably not a good idea that there is a gun pointing at the back of my head, and I don’t want to injure her because she’s a woman.” So I reached up and grabbed the barrel, pointing it away from me. When I realized what I had done, I briefly considered what the reaction would be . I could have quite easily grabbed the gun out of the woman’s hands and shot her with however many bullets were inside of the chamber, but instead, I just let go of it, allowing her to return it to the way in which it was pointing. It was a disconnected action, as if I wasn’t truly there, as if I were nothing more than a witness as opposed to an active participant. I, strangely, was neutral.
I can sense this in others who seem to shrug off their own neutrality and just fake it, as if they are plastic models in a store window and are merely running around pretending to be alive. Many teenagers sense this quite easily in people, but after a time, the sense of plasticity fades, probably more so as a result of people feeling guilty for their own lack of a charge and fail to notice it any longer in others. Some people come to the conclusion that this is how life must be—an act. The actors seem to get it, but I do not get it at all. I’ve tried.
When I was in high school, for instance, I had a sociology class where we had to write down an observation every single day and turn it in to the teacher who would use it to determine our grade at the end of the semester. I decided to use this as an excuse to try to convince myself of something so I could emotionally charge myself up and get involved in a political movement when I graduated which would convince me to slop war paint on my face and scream through a few bullhorns at windows of a government building. As if the windows can respond. Every day during this time, I would take a subject from the newspaper and determine if it was a problem or not, and how I would go about solving this problem. I would choose abortion, child abuse, alcohol, math, sports, medical care, aging, religion—it didn’t matter to me; the objective was merely to see if I could convince myself to maintain a charge on one of these subjects. I would write a five paragraph essay each day, highlighting my three reasons for the main point I made in the first paragraph, and summarize my argument at the bottom of the essay and turn it in for a grade. What made this exercise interesting was that I tested myself constantly—on Monday I would write an essay, highlighting why abortion was the bane of mankind. I would force myself into a state—fake it — to make it a much more affective. On Tuesday I would write the same paper but take the opposite point of view.