Help! Help! My nervous system is aflame!

I read a book once about a guy who was on trial for murder and when he was asked why he did it, he told them the sun had been in his eyes at the time. This a slight undersell, book-blurb wise, and those of you who were, like me, forced to read L’Etranger by Camus in year eleven English may be leaping to Camus’ defence using phrases like ‘existential masterpiece’, but to me it was always the most relatable part of the book. I can be a quite pleasant person to be around sometimes, but if there is an ongoing sun glare or a loud noise or something is itchy? Forgedaboudit.

Public Service Announcement: sometimes it’s not existential despair. Sometimes your free will is being hijacked by your nervous system.

I did look this up, by the way, and (shocker) I’m not the first person to have emphasised the sensory elements in this very famous novel. I didn’t love the book, back in year eleven, but I must admit that over the years the idea of rocking up to a jury at your murder trial and declaring, ‘well you see, your honour, I killed this bloke on account of an accumulation of irritating experiences’ does seem more and more… relatable.

Humiliatingly, though, I find it very difficult indeed to interpret other people’s behaviour in this way. I say ‘humiliatingly’, because I thought I was empathetic or at the very least attuned to this perspective, but perhaps the entire point of that perspective is that it’s your own.

So imagine this: someone you love coming home from a huge day. You’ve been wondering how their day was. You’ve been experiencing your own day without them in it. You say hello to them - at last! An ally!  - and then you see their face and you think, ’oh’.

This is the bit where I often forget I’m not the main character in a book told by an omniscient narrator. I might say hello and ask questions and chat to try and cheer this person up, and I might be met with irritation or grumpitude. I might then think to myself, as though I’m reading the dialogue between us from an omniscient perspective, ‘How hard is it to be nice just for a few minutes?’

You know what helps, though? Pretending I’m in one of those books where each chapter is told from a different character’s perspective.

Chapter Them might read something like this. They’ve come home after a huge day of overstimulating too-manyness and too-muchery and they’re not poised to kill me by accident but there have been so many cumulative little irritations and aggravations and the sun shone in their eyes and they missed a train and the handle of the bag they’re carrying is frayed so they have to carry it in a careful way that makes them walk slightly more heavily on one side than the other so their left foot is starting to blister on one side, and they’re thirsty and they’ve had people ask them questions all day and so long as nobody asks them one more question they’ll be okay.

Public Service Announcement: imagine the other person’s chapter. Imagine the person serving you in the juice shop in the shopping mall has been there since 6:45am and the sound of the blender visits them in their dreams.

Imagine the person stopping suddenly on the footpath in front of you when you’re in a hurry thinking to themselves, ‘Oh my God I left the oven on’.

Imagine the person on the phone at the insurance company sitting at their desk with their head in their hands trying to think of a way to get a job that doesn’t involve obfuscating on behalf of a company that doesn’t pay them enough to deal with worried and angry people just as frustrated as they are with a system that favours the unreachable few at the top of the pile.

Don’t let these people walk all over you. Don’t allow the people who love you to kill you because the sun is too bright. But maybe that idea of ‘free will’ erodes a little bit when our nervous systems are on fire. Maybe we need to wait just a few seconds before we put each other on trial for things like ‘snapping at someone rudely at the juice bar in the shopping mall’. There’s a lot of too-muchery and too-manyness out there, and yes, I am disappointed to have to admit that I have learned something from studying Camus after all.