A kind of people interest me immensely. They are extremely emotional, expressive (I am not sure if they are all extroverted but they are definitely very expressive). A common pattern I have found in them is that they are highly competitive in emotions. Lemme explain that. You are not going to ever be able to establish with them that your pain, your suffering was higher.
The first time I realised something strange was when a cousin of mine said "I wouldn't wish this [her sister, who was in her late 40s, had died that day] on my worst enemy". This was about 10 to 15 years ago. What my cousin said kept playing back in my head in the days and years to come and I often wondered about her phraseology. It's the equivalent of arrogating to oneself the gold medal for having suffered.
We come to the next incident. My friend's uncle had died, around the same time as the previous incident. My friend was totally distraught and she couldn't think of anything else. It took her couple of weeks to recover, while I went about my life. In the same period, my cousin mentioned earlier had died, another cousin had had her second leg also amputated. I was at the hospital prior to the surgery. The previous night my aunt had died and had spent the previous day attending the cremation. But then my friend's pain was much more. Pain isn't like weight or height which are objective. If your height is 170cm and mine is 175cm, I can claim rightfully that I am taller than you. But with pain or any emotion there is no comparison possible. Emotions can't even be objectively measured. You get a measure of the emotion by the intensity of self declaration. For example, "I am hurting", "I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy" or beating yourself on your tummy with your palms - each of these indicate differing levels of pains.
And today I met a cousin after a long time. His wife had died last year of Covid. His father had died towards the end of 2019 out of natural causes, having been in a bad shape and in coma in the hospital for a week prior to his death. His wife had gone through terrible pain because of comorbidities before finally catching Covid. We spoke for about 20 minutes. My cousin was feeling very bad and about his wife and his father, both of whom he had lost in the last one and a half years.
And like the two women I mentioned earlier, he was expressing "my pain is too horrible". But this time around I was processing his pain in real time. And I thought of all the people i know who had suffered worse but wouldn't express as much.
I believe they are all NF (as in MBTI). They don't do it for effect. They do it naturally. Their "exaggeration of their pain" is completely natural. The only thing is when I have slotted them into this group, I become wary of their pain and almost wait for their "pain" to be expressed.
These are not one off incidents. With each of the three people mentioned I have had multiple incidents of confession of high pain.
Amazing.
It is again very interesting that emotional people judge a work based not on how effective it was but on how much pain was undergone while doing it. So if you don't express pain while or after doing a difficult job, you don't get much credit for it. Hence emotional expression is important. When your wife chides you for the lack of it, pay heed.
Additional reading
- https://vbala99.blogspot.com/2010/08/my-cousins.html
- https://vbala99.blogspot.com/2018/02/vikram-or-vetaal.html
- https://www.thelily.com/i-sacrificed-my-career-to-care-for-my-kids-in-the-pandemic-never-again/ : here is one more
