The Sounding Board Of The Universe

I sometimes wonder if they come with instructions.

Having a big-assed camera is starting to make me lazy. It's so much easier, for instance, to shoot a picture and let the image do the talking for you, particularly if said camera allows you to do fancy shwag like bokehs or zomg-freeze-in-the-air action shots.

But that's digressing. 

I've been thinking, lately, about teenagers. About how we deal with our problems. Not too long ago, just a few days after the STPM, I was sitting at McD with a friend I hadn't seen for awhile. I ordered a fish burger and we sat down and he immediately burst forth into a tirade of his college course, his problems, his idiot group members, his crazy lecturers, his even crazier year-end project, his friend who has brain-cancer-and-is-depressed-and-dresses-like-a-goth and other topics to that effect. Some things were about pretty decent stuff, but my friend had that unnatural and highly peculiar knack of making everything sound like the end of the world.^[1]

I was torn in two. Part of me wanted to empathize with him, wanted to be a good listener and to uh and ah at all the right moments, to ask questions about several semi-interesting details, to allow this friend of mine to vent through me. But the other part of me wanted to yell at him: "you're talking to somebody who's just finished the bloody STPM, one of the friggin hardest pre-U examinations in the country, who the friggin shit are you trying to kid?" It wasn't that I had no excuse not to - as far as I could remember, this particular friend had nothing but horrible things to say about most of the stuff that had happened to him. I was fed up and raw after my exams, and it really wasn't the best time for me to do listening. So I shut up and proceeded to ignore him, and I turned to the other end of the table where a whole bunch of people were making fun of McD's twister fries.

Did I do the right thing? I'm not sure. Since about age 15 there has always been a tendency for people to open up and talk to me about their problems and their feelings and whatever cool/shitty stuff they'd seen/felt/heard that week. I'm not telling you this with pride, nor am I telling you this so you can go out there and start bombarding me with trivia: it's just the truth. And I'm not the only one who's experienced this - two of my friends: Wen Qi, Paul, both tell me that they sometimes feel the same way I do: as collective sounding boards for the universe. And I'm pretty sure that there are hundreds more who feel and act the same way - who attract their problem-ridden friends like some perverse fire hydrant put down by God for people to pee on.

I have a theory for this phenomenon, and it goes something like this: the people whom act as sounding boards are most often the ones we see as secure and mature and who aren't (relatively) as self-absorbed as their peers. It's a subconscious evaluation that takes place, very subtly, in our respective social circles, and very often not even the sounding boards themselves are aware of it. And I do suppose that in some sense it's a fair deal, because these sounding boards are granted immense influence: Paul, for instance, has perfected a fine art of modifying your perspective on things without actually revealing anything about his own - something that's infinitely useful when you're dealing with difficult, treacherous people. 

But that really isn't my problem with the whole sounding board affair. My problem is that these sounding boards occasionally need sounding boards of their own. There is no such thing as a completely secure, self-possesed man, much as I'd actually like to be one. So when we stumble or fall and feel downright horrible, we often find it very hard to vent. The problem is two-fold: firstly, almost all our friends turn on rant mode the instant they sit down with us, and it's very hard for us to change what is an established, patient habit. But the second problem is that we've forgotten how to open ourselves up, how to completely trust in some other secure, mature, non-self-absorbed individual. And that is probably the most dangerous illusion a sounding board can conjure: that he or she is everyone's confidante, and he/she is above all of them. It's a hole, for sure, that I'm trying to get out of.

My friend from McD isn't really related to the sounding board problem - his is another teenaged disease, one that I suppose is unescapable for all of us. Everyone has a tendency to blow our own problems into overwhelming, mind-boggling proportions, in the hopes for attracting sympathy, or perhaps attention. But there is a paradoxical truth about popularity and attention: self-absorbed people are often the most boring people to be around with. Some can get around this by being rich or good looking, but as we grow older, and our social circles begin to settle into contented shapes, these personality attributes become obstacles rather than enablers to love and attention.^[2]

I still have to wonder, you know, if I should've faced off with my friend and told him exactly what I thought of all that complaining. But that wouldn't be empathetic, would it? And there'd also be the tricky prospect of judgement in such action - judgement being something that I'm adverse to for reasons far too academic and theological to be listed here. And if I don't empathize and I judge from an imagined high ground, would this mean that I'm a bad friend, that I suck because I'm not there for them everytime they need me? Or is there some little switch at the back of my head that's supposed to prevent me from listening whenever I'm feeling particularly vulnerable myself, and to shut myself off from being a sounding board too often to be good?

I think I should stop here, though - the bottom line is far away, and in the end we're all just kids in various stages of growth, and the fine divisions between all these evaluative thought-traps are too tricky for me to finish exploring in one piece of writing. So I'll close here, and ... (I can't help this, really) gimme a hydrant, mate, I need to pee.


^1.I recently wrote a piece, entitled Hindsight, that is guilty of the exact same whiny, complaining tone. No wonder I wasn't happy with it. ↩
^2.This might also explain why teenage suicide is so common. Though, if you really think about it, suicide is nothing more than the most selfish form of complaining ever invented by the juvenile mind. ↩