Dealing with Emotions.

It will probably not be the last time that I write something down about emotions. I am a child of the lost generation. And what do we do? We manage on our own. We have been doing that all our lives. Most of the time, this expresses itself in a positive way. There have been so many developments that have taken place around us, and there was no manual on how we could make those novelties our own without too many scratches and bruises. Mostly positive, then, real discoveries that made our lives more fascinating: colour TV — yes, as a child I still watched black and white! — computers, the internet, social media, streaming services, mobile phones, … you name it. But also dealing with an energy crisis, high interest rates on loans, or high unemployment when we graduated. A lot changed in the world around us, just when we were truly becoming adults and starting our own families. There was no time to worry, no time to pause for a moment, no time to allow our emotions to develop into full-fledged, processed thoughts. Expressing emotions, talking about them, that was also not at all a starting point in our upbringing. Our parents grew up in a period of financial progress and were in favour of a strict upbringing. Studying and working, that was the creed. Not stopping to reflect and allowing feelings to play a role in what we did. That is how it went for me, in any case.

This week there was a lot of media attention for the trial of the parents who had tortured their own nine-year-old child Raoul to death and dumped him in a sports bag in a lake. An indescribable story of neglect and aggression. Watching the reporting, I was overcome by emotions. How is it possible that parents do something like that to their child? I could not and cannot grasp it. At the same moment I said to myself, Zoroaster, control yourself! Do not let that wave of aggression from and against another person get to you. It was hard to keep watching. The story dominated the TV news, day after day. I watched with half an eye. It is probably not unique to our generation, becoming so torn between interest and revulsion, but what I found strange was that I began to blame myself for experiencing those mixed feelings. Something told me that I should not allow myself to be carried away like that, allow myself to become nauseous on hearing an account that had taken place so far from my own world. That it was wrong. A strange observation about myself. Not the first time. They both received thirty years’ imprisonment, those butchers of their own child.