It's easier to sympathise with it from the inside, or from a great distance. For the other person in the room, emotional problems like this can be extremely hard to live with, and I had the same problem Joel does -- your insecurities make it impossible for you to be reassured, you become very distrustful of other people and therefore very harsh on them, and no one wants to tell you how you're behaving because they don't want to make it worse or confirm your suspicions. Everything on the inside is negative and everything on the outside is positive, and that's just untenable.
It's hard to figure out what's intentional and what's just the illness talking, and the obsession with "knowing what people think of me" is another way of trying to draw that line between the real and the delusional. I think that's what makes Joel sympathetic -- he's trying to get to the truth and find some way of understanding himself, and his manipulation and judging are mostly unintentional.
Anyway, that fits in with the larger motif of whether we're guilty for things we didn't mean to do.
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Date: 2005-09-30 08:54 pm (UTC)It's hard to figure out what's intentional and what's just the illness talking, and the obsession with "knowing what people think of me" is another way of trying to draw that line between the real and the delusional. I think that's what makes Joel sympathetic -- he's trying to get to the truth and find some way of understanding himself, and his manipulation and judging are mostly unintentional.
Anyway, that fits in with the larger motif of whether we're guilty for things we didn't mean to do.