Pandora

I think if I had been in Pandora's place, I would have opened the box too. I just don't know what's good for me. I have to know, even if by knowing, I'll be worse off. I just don't understand how people who see horrible things every day can handle it. I've only had a taste of that, from everything I've been reading over the last few months, and especially the past few days, and it's screwing me up. Just reading about these things makes me sick, how do people stand seeing them and experiencing them? I honestly don't understand it. The worst (or maybe the best, I'm not really sure) part is that no one is forcing me to know these things; I'm doing it to myself. I have this desire to know. To know things that aren't pleasant, because for other people that is their reality. And I feel some sort of weird misplaced, I don't know if duty is the right word, but it's the one that comes to mind, duty to know. Like if by knowing I'm somehow making it better, or at least validating their suffering; that at least it's not alone and unknown. Am I making any sense with this? I've had my perfect little life in small-town midwestern America, raised staunchly middle-class with aspirations toward upper-middle-class, parents who provided everything I needed or wanted, no abuse, no poverty, no hunger, just an average all-American life. I've never wanted for anything or had to face the ugly side of life. So now I'm making myself face it, maybe as a sort of penance? I don't know. Does that make me an "elitist liberal"? Maybe. But that's the way I feel. That I should know these things, even if it makes me miserable, because other people are living through it and therefore much more miserable than I can even imagine. Which brings me back to Pandora. Supposedly, it was her curiosity that prompted her to open the box, which clearly does play a role with me. I'm too curious for my own good. But the rest of it? You know the saying, "curiosity killed the cat"? Well, I think it's true, only "destroyed" might be a better word. Because all this stuff I'm learning, it's on its' way to destroying me, mostly because knowing it's happening and not being able to do anything about it is eating me up inside.