01/19/14
Shut it; this isn’t about you. – Becca (ladyornot.com)
My Muse is very ill right now. Even though she looks great, she sounds like one of those actors on a flu-remedy commercial: hoarse, stuffy, and sneezing, with a hacking cough. Unlike those actors, she has the decency to blow her nose off-screen.
She’s one of the toughest people I know, and at the same time one of the sweetest, which is a hard balance to maintain. She’s the type who eschews sympathy, and thinks that anything less than pneumonia is no big deal. So when she posts a Facebook status admitting that she’s sick, those of us who know her take notice: her husband plans the quickest way to get to the ER, her nearby friends make sure someone will be available to drive her there, and her faraway friends, like me, calculate how much it will cost to fly out and visit her in the ICU.
Those other people – the ones who apparently don’t know her very well – feel inspired to list their own ailments in Facebook comments, a sort of crud-upmanship. Following a perfunctory “Aww”, they proceed to tell us how bad they’ve got it. After reading a couple of these, I was tempted to trump them all by posting something like: “Sorry you’re not feeling well. I’ve been terribly ill for the last 4 months, and my phlegm looks like pistachio pudding. I coughed so much that my wife left me and my bladder gave out and I peed myself and shorted out the electric blanket and burned down the house. Hope I get better soon.” Fearing I might lose both my readers, I resisted the urge.
But really, what is it that compels people to do this? Are they looking for sympathy? Are they threatened by the idea that someone may be suffering more than they are? Maybe they think they’re trying to connect or empathize, but there’s no getting around the fact that they’re talking more about themselves than the person they’re supposedly empathizing with. What they need to do is simply wish my Muse a speedy recovery, and then go write their own status.
The Rodyssey 