Fatigue
I hate writing on days like today.
On many occasions, I do anyway. But it wears on me. Sometimes enough wear builds up to just not write. If this is not one such occasion, it is very, very close to it.
So I’ll fall into the trap that so many social media accounts have already done and make any given tragedy about me. But at least I’ll do so in a way that may educate you about something you may not have known about or at least, knew a term for. And it’s a meta-story about journalism, so I can stuff it into the blog’s coverage area.
There are more than one reason I now longer work in journalism professionally, but one of them is the psychological toll that working in the news takes on a person with even the slightest bit of compassion. Vicarious Traumatization is a common affliction in those who work in or adjacent to tragedy. It’s not a dysfunction per se; being withered by discovering other peoples’ trauma on a daily basis indicates you’re capable of being concerned about your fellow humans for their own sake, which is vital for a functioning society. But it can be a problem because of its deleterious effects on mental health. In excess, it invites cynicism or depressed nihilism or even long-term damage to one’s ability to feel compassion.
It was an especially prevalent condition back when my job was to read every story on the wire service to decide which ones to include in the newspaper. Reading every awful thing that happened around the country and the world every day was bad enough. But also evaluating which tragedies were “important” enough for inclusion felt like an abstract form of dehumanization I was committing against the subjects of the stories left out. Sorry, but your tragedy isn’t bad enough to be of interest to our readers.
Making a career change did get me out of that hole. But sometimes it still gets me even as a mere consumer of the news. Sometimes a more limited number of things are enough awful happen that I’m right back in there. And I lose sleep, lose focus. Well, I don’t lose focus, really. I become very damn focused on the trauma and little else. I sit here, waiting for the number of child fatalities to tick up as each are brought to local clinics and hospitals that have little-to-no capacity to handle gunshot victims, and barely stringing two sentences together for the blog.
Anxiously tossing and turning all night in the face of tragedy is not productive, but I do it anyway. It serves no purpose other than to be; It certainly is no help in devising a solution to mass amounts of mass shootings, war in the East, autocratic ethnic cleansing, nuclear weapons, politicians valuing thowing blame over accomplishing something, SCOTUS that declaring open season on unenumerated rights and state officials all too happy to answer that call, states enshrining discrimination into law, housing prices causing working people in my home state to become homeless like it’s San Fransisco… and once again I’ve excluded things, even if we limit the time frame to just the past few months. And certainly not including my recent role as Cassandra for the current COVID spike both at work and in my personal life.
If you want the tl;dr on it all, I can quote Golden State Warriors Coach Steve Kerr and say, “I’m tired.” Both in that I’m sick of the unending parade of evil acts and that the act of processing them is exhausting.
Kerr also makes a call to action for universal background checks (the support isn’t quite 90%, as he said, but he’s close; It’s been consistently above 80% for more than a decade). I could not even begin to quantify how many children would still be alive today, from this and from other incidents, if universal background checks were in place. Nobody can. But I suppose the point is that those who oppose the current status quo of guns can’t even make that small step because anything and everything is beyond the red line of those who support that status quo. As such, we’ll never find out.
About The Author
Drew
Features Editor | Drew started behind the 8(bit)-ball in the video game world. He first became interested in anime by chance exposure on the Sci-Fi channel. Drew's the creative force behind blog-wide features, works the movie and food beats, and pioneered Damage Control’s entry into video, podcasts and streaming.
