I Want To Be Sick

Sometimes I hate trying to use words to express my feelings because they never capture the full scope of what I'm attempting to describe. Think about if for a minute. When you tell someone you love them, you are conveying many multi layered and complex emotions and inferences. However, when you enslave that word to a pad and some ink, it comes out: L-O-V-E. For me, arbitrary letters just don't cut it.  Other times its fun to look at the composition of words (be patient, I swear I'm going somewhere with this) and how they can be combined to create a new word with a different meaning. 

For example, many of our residents are uneasy. They live in a near-constant state of dis-ease. Life's circumstances have brought them to Samaritan House for numerous reasons and many of them dwell in various states of antagonism, hope, despair, longing, and happiness. Emotions are fluid and, like everyone, our residents are forced to deal and interact with their situation. A significant difference, however, is that many of the homeless are operating from a base level of dis-ease... or dis/ease... or disease.

Consider, for a moment, this word and how you feel when you are physically ill. Sickness causes feelings of uncomfortableness; when your body is literally not at ease it is diseased. By this rationale, can I write that homelessness is a disease? Here is where my earlier conundrum enters the picture because I can type whatever words I want but the gravity of the situation will never hit you like the reality. You can read these words: 1 out of every 5 children live in poverty. It makes you uncomfortable but the dis/ease you feel is incomparable to the actual disease of going to bed and waking up hungry.

I was watching the news last night and I felt an indescribable disconnect from what I saw. Tornadoes in the Midwest, a school shooting in Ohio, more conflict in combustible parts of the world. The list goes on for as long as it takes to change the channel. Its apparent this planet is sick and I'm not sure if there is a remedy that is going to evaporate out of thin air anytime soon. So until that happens (who knows, maybe the Mayans will be right?) what can we do to break free form the 'gawking-theorizing-making excuses while empathizing-back to ignoring the problem' cycle that has lulled us into a comfortable numbness?

Sometimes I wonder if we have self-medicated our emotions into an antidote that is immune to the disease around us. Maybe a little sickness, in this instance, is good for the soul?