Too Receptive, Too Good

I woke up to a blast of sirens, turned up from 4 to a hundred, speeding down the streets of Brooklyn in a rage. I thought the helicopters were bad. One thing about being in the city I could never get used to was the sensory overload. I'm extremely responsive to any kind of stimulus, so a simple walk down the street is sometimes overwhelming. I made the choice to be this way, however. I never wanted to lose that trick; being able to tap in to everything unseen that I could, because it's a great survival tactic. If you can read patterns, body language, habits, tones & feelings, you can usually read a person's intentions in under five seconds. I'd rather feel the onslaught of intrusive sounds and anxieties than to be oblivious to one of the most telling languages.  

I learned to hate riding the subways though, because everyone's pheromones get trapped and bounced back and forth in there. There are hundreds and hundreds of people, scratching by and overextending themselves every day. The stress hormones released in a packed subway car is brutal. They stick to everything. You can feel a hundred people stuck to your body when you exit the stairwell. It's insane. At least that overwhelming street walk has air.

It's just kind of sad how after too long of a stint in an overcrowded place, a person has to tune out to it in order to keep moving through the race. I was in a government social agency not too long ago, listening to a young woman on her cellphone while in the waiting area. The conversation I overheard made me terribly depressed. The girl was indirectly begging for financial assistance from someone on that line, and answering the most humiliating and personal questions. She seemed very proud to be overextending herself with two jobs and night classes. Her life sounded terrible, and her response to it all was that it was normal. It's not normal. None of this is normal. The most depressing thing about this is that everyone seems to think this kind of life is okay. 

When I leave NY at the end of the month, I'm going to be taking some serious life lessons with me.