silence

I would like to begin with a question. I don't actually want to answer the question here or now, but I would like to think about it throughout the course of discussion. Is it worse (more taboo) to talk/write about your child with animosity or without feeling? To feel is to be human, so any emotion seems it would be better than no emotion. Just something to be thinking about.

"and the moment he was in my arms I felt... nothing" (Savage 191).

I have to say that feeling nothing is one of the most terrifying emotions anyone could ever have, or not have as the case may be. Absence of emotion, lack of feeling is indescribable to someone who has not experienced it. It is simply nothing. There is no emotion and there is no thought other than "What the hell is wrong with me?" (Savage 191). You watch others experiencing emotion and you wonder what is going on and it simply strengthens your inability to feel. Why can I talk about this? Because I myself have felt this way. At my grandfather's funeral I stood there feeling nothing. I looked around saw others crying, saw my mother holding on to my father for support and all the while I stood there like a rock not feeling. I wondered what could possibly be wrong? Did I not love my grandfather? Shouldn't I be sad? But nothing... complete numbness, and with each question I asked myself the more the numbness spread. So why? Why can Savage and I not feel? Are we not human? No! We simply have thicker walls, emotion takes longer to reach the surface. It is a mechanism of defense.

Savage speaks about not wanting to buy any tchotchkes for fear of jinxing everything. He denies himself hope for fear of being hurt later. Dan Savage is a gay man in a straight world. He knows the meaning of pain, he knows what it is to be outcast; so why open himself up to such pain unnecessarily. Savage writes and I assume lives this very sarcastic life style, is that because he is cold-hearted or simply because he has to. At the first sign of trouble Savage throws up this wall of anger and sarcasm to defend himself. He does it with Terry in the car always complaining about the music, he does it with the baby, he does it with the nurse who tells them that Melissa has to the pass the afterbirth "and if she flunks it?" (Savage 190). He doesn't ever know how to initially respond. He assumes that every action every glance is against him, but who can blame him in this world where he is looked down on.

I am sure that I sound just as cold-hearted in all of this as Dan Savage did in his book, but I have just one last thing to add from personal experience. It is possible to mistake an overload of emotion as not feeling anything. Not understanding the emotions, feeling too many things at once can often feel the same as not feeling at all.