Indifference

Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it.

The Snow Queen

We've all experienced the sting of indifference at one time or another in our lives.  The core of indifference is emotionlessness: apathy demonstrated by an absence of emotional reactions. When one is indifferent to our unique charms and personality, nothing we say or do evokes a response. The lighthearted joke is met with silence, expressions of goodwill are simply ignored or impatiently shrugged off. For me there is shame in meeting indifference. How can this person not react to my good-natured attempts at friendship and amity? What is wrong with me that this person finds nothing within my expressions worthy of a response?

Growing up with a mother whose indifference lay at the core of her being, I fumbled in her presence. She wasn't cruel in physical ways. Her cruelty shaped itself in subtle forms: the sardonic lift of an eyebrow upon hearing my enthusiastic dreams, a lack of encouragement when the least bit would have meant the world to me. Refusing to guide me through the difficulties of growing up was one such form of cruelty, for I was left adrift to figure life out for myself. Shame shot through me at every encounter with her apathy. I didn't think I was such a bad little person but if my mother thought so, well she was my mother and she must be right.

Indifference withers and curdles a child's best instincts and dreams. How does one fight it? Hatred at least has some heat to it, an honest passion. My mother couldn't drum up any kind of emotion towards me, resulting in my emotional confusion. How often I waited for her to break from her shell of indifference! Would this be the day she lashed out in anger? Would this be the last straw which caused her to erupt into foul imprecations? I watched her with wonder, trying to puzzle out this lack in her emotional make-up.

I've fought all my life to not mirror her passionless life. I don't want to be indifferent to those who come and go in my little corner of the world. I think that indifference is a kind of shutting down or freezing of one's emotions so that they can't be roused into action. My mother was most likely in deep freeze mode long before I came on the scene. She had it down to a science by the time I most needed something to rouse her fury. When the rest of my life hung in the balance and I desperately needed her to react with passion to seeing her husband fondling me, her indifference tipped the scales. She could not (or would not) come out of her deep freeze in order to protect me. Her indifference was baffling, and possibly more wounding that the sexual abuse itself.

Indifference: a means of saying you are not important, you don't matter. Indifference cancels and erases, there is nothing life-giving within its hollow grave. I realize that a quality I admire in each one of my sons and grandkids is their ability to experience, and express, human emotions. They haven't been trained otherwise. There is no shame for them in honest expressions of their feelings. I want to be like them. I want to learn how to be less repressed and more expressive. This is the work of a lifetime; I can make progress only one step at a time.