I wanted to talk first about those folks who come to Jared Padalecki and spill their guts to him. Jared is the actor who plays Sam Winchester on Supernatural. He lives with depression, and he created the Always Keep Fighting organization in order to help bring awareness to mental health issues and end the stigma on people who live with them.
These folks who tell their sad stories to Jared come in two classes. Some of them mean well but are very desperate and don’t have very good social skills. They tell Jared how much the AKF campaign means to them and tell him an awful and depressing story. This is inappropriate on their part, but they aren’t trying to be bad.
It makes me sad when I read things about how “pathetic” these people are, because I used to be one of those people. I still have the tendency when I get really depressed and am having high suicide ideation. I just try to confine it to dark and miserable posts rather than spilling it out on someone like Jared.
I would never go to a convention or meet and greet and try to tell the person or people I was meeting my life story at this juncture. I did send a brief bio to Jared for one of those mass emails for his birthday or such. I kept the gory details about my previous self-harm, which did leave scars, or my fight against my tendency to self-harm out of it. Reading such things would only make him feel sad and helpless. It wouldn’t do any good.
There is another class of people who want to spill their guts to anyone who will listen. These people are walking wounded too, but they aren’t the sort of sad souls I mention above who are simply desperate to be cared about but are severely socially impaired.
This class of people are sociopaths. The focus isn’t on their feelings of connection with someone like Jared. Their focus is literally “look at me!”
I’m not saying these people aren’t damaged. They are. However, they do not feel emotion in the same way a person who is not a sociopath does. A sociopath does not feel empathy. When a sociopath says they love someone, what they mean is that they are obsessed with that person. In truth, the person means no more to them than any other possession.
These people are good at pulling the “poor me” card to get attention. Where the first class of people would be saddened to have hurt Jared, the second class of people wouldn’t care that they did, so long as they get the attention they seek.
I dealt with such a person during the past two years. This person attacked me by going to various Tumblrs and leaving nasty replies to threads I’d commented on regarding things I’d written on my own Tumblr. It took a while to figure out that all the attacks were coming from the same individual using several sock puppet accounts, but when I did, I was not surprised at who was behind the curtain.
The reason for these attacks was because this individual, whom we’ll call Victoria, felt threatened by my expressions of sympathy towards the object of her obsession. We’ll call him Mitch.
When this individual discovered that Mitch was terminally ill, she went on and on about how terribly devastating this was to her. It was so awful that she had to stay home from school and nurse her wounded feels. There was a red flag in all this. Not once did she say anything about how sad this situation was for those people who were actually close to Mitch, such as his children and grandchildren, or his brother Mac, who is not only his business partner but his platonic soul mate.
Victoria had a plan to get backstage when Mitch and Mac’s band came to town so she could give Mac a long letter she’d penned about her miserable existence and how the only thing that saved her was being so deeply in love with Mitch. Her plan, which I seriously hope she was never able to implement, gave no thought to how tremendously uncomfortable such an action would surely make Mac feel.
Victoria was not planning this ill-conceived plot because she is overly emotional and misguided. I have actually had occasion to converse with her online, where of course she pretended to be friendly to me. I can assure you that she is emotionally cold. She does not care about Mitch, she cares about having other people praise her for her devotion to him. She said to me “I haven’t thought about what I’ll do when he dies, but I’m sure I’ll be okay.” That sort of statement is the hallmark of a sociopath.
Let’s look at this from Mac’s point of view. His brother, the other half of his soul, is critically ill and there’s nothing he can do about it. Along comes this young woman, young enough to be his grand niece or even great grand niece, telling him that she is in love with his dying older brother and she wants to give him a letter all about how much Mitch means to her.
Mac is a polite person. He would probably force a smile and thank her for her thoughts, all the while feeling like ice was climbing up his spine. If he read the letter rather than tossing it in the trash the moment she left, it would not make him feel good. It might just make him sick, or it might make him angry that this self-centered person felt the need to dump her problems on him without regard for the fact that he is constantly grieving for the loss of his best friend. He might feel conflicted, telling himself that he shouldn’t be angry at such an obviously sad and pathetic person.
In other words, spilling your guts in this fashion to people who are themselves struggling is an erroneous act at best and a cruel one at worst. Some people who do it are misguided. Others are malevolent.
When I had the opportunity to attend a meet and greet with Chris Isaak, one of my longtime musical heroes, there were so many things I wanted to tell him. However, I knew his time was limited. If I were ever lucky enough to be able to spend any significant amount of time with Chris, I would go into detail about why his music meant so much to me. I confined my revelations to telling him that Blue Hotel was the first of his songs that I heard, and when I introduced my son I said “Ian here was born in 1990, so he’s been listening to your songs since before he was born.”
Chris told me that his father had made the guitar case that he’s carrying in the picture that I had him sign. I said that was wonderful. I knew his father was a very important person in his life. If I’d had time, I would have told him that my father suffered a major stroke too. If there had been time, we probably would have bonded over talking about such things and maybe even developed a real friendship. Unfortunately there wasn’t time, so I respected his time.
Folks, what this boils down to is the fact that these people who mean so much to you have problems of their own. They have limited time and their emotional resources have limits as well. I have no doubt that Jared would love to help each and every one of you personally. I know he feels sad because he can’t.
For the people who actually care about Jared but may have dumped your problems on him, don’t beat yourself up. You will know better in the future.
There’s nothing I can do to change the actions of those who don’t care how their actions affect other people for the simple reason that they don’t care.
~The Cheese Hath Grated It~
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