The Joy Of Being Helpless

Tonight, my friend told me a story. Thursday night, he claimed to have gone to bed and been unable to sleep as a result of some unnamed guilt hanging over his head. When he finally fell asleep, at some point that night, he woke up completely paralyzed. He couldn't even open his eyes to determine what was happening around him (which was absolutely nothing).

This phenomenon is known as sleep paralysis, which I haven't experienced. I don't really care about what happened to him though. He kept bringing up two things that at first seem to contradict each other:

1. He felt completely powerless - like anything could happen and he wouldn't be able to do a thing to fix it.
2. He was completely relaxed and thinking coherent, intelligent thoughts.

My thoughts on the matter are that if I were to wake up in the middle of the night completely unable to move a muscle in my body, I'd probably start panicking and tearing myself apart from the inside. That may have to do with my nature more than anything else, so I'll accept that his reaction to his situation was rational.

I normally wouldn't be the sort of douchebag philosopher to read into why someone would react that way to any given situation in which he/she has no control without some sort of prompting. However, I realized that I've actually been many of these situations, and I actually have reacted in the same way as my friend.

One situation would be my recent climactic struggle with IB English. Last year marked one of the first truly meaningful, epic failures of my lifetime, when I completely bombed the Oral Examination, as I've posted about before in "Because I'm Still In High School..." I've had meaningful failures on a small scale, and I've had epic failures with situations that are fairly trivial in hindsight, but this is, to date, the only failure that has negatively impacted my life on a tremendous scale. Just a few weeks ago, I went through the second ring of IB English HL's circus, which completely overshadows any other examination besides the test at the end of the year - the Commentary. Compared to the first Oral Exam, this one is a nightmare. Or at least it should be. Roughly four times as important on the grade-weighting scale as the first, it involves a 20-minute period for writing a 12-minute analysis of an unknown passage or poem from works we've studied. Naturally, everyone involved in the studying process was terrified of failure and studied their asses off for a good grade.

I never did. While the examination process itself was uncomfortable, it was no more so than anticipated when I learned about the assignment at the beginning of this school year in September. Why the night before was about as close to serenity as possible in my life escapes me. I don't know whether it was because I had simply become apathetic to the futile idea of passing, I was too preoccupied by other things to put forth effort, or whether I just lost interest in trying to be competitive in a class full of people who are actually generally less intelligent than myself (yes, I realized that is a totally cocky statement, but true).

I did manage to come to the conclusion, after finishing my exam with a dreadful grade and a wide grin, that it was much better to not worry about the benefits of success and the consequences of failure. But I don't think this is a good stance to take, in general. I can't just forfeit in all situations that require me to put forth lots of effort!

All this is beside the point. What really interests me is the very facet of human nature where hopelessness becomes a form of escapism - and is universal. Some people could describe it as "going with the flow," but I associate that with simply choosing not to exercise the pimp-hand and letting someone else take charge. There are probably a billion other people who've noticed this before me, but I felt the need to post it as a moment of self-discovery.