My mom thinks I'm desensitized to violence just because I don't get scared of, or repulsed by, fake violence or bloodshed on TV or in movies. Of course, what I always point out to her is that it's fake, so there's no reason I should mind it. Hell, even real violence doesn't bother me that much, as long as it's sufficiently awesome (in case you're confused, martial arts = ALWAYS AWESOME). But in spite of all that, there is some stuff that I have a hard time dealing with, because it makes my foot hurt.

The first time my foot hurt was when I was in grade school. Back then, Jack Palance was the host of Ripley's Believe It Or Not!, and when his raspy voice concluded each segment by hissing, "BeLEEEVE it ... or NAAAHT!", it sounded like Satan had crawled out of Hell on his hands and knees to curl up beside you in bed at night and whisper directly into your ear.

And yet, that wasn't what bugged me. What bugged me was one segment, in one episode, that was actually intended to be life-affirming and inspiring and upbeat, but which wound up fucking me up for the rest of my life. It was the story of the one-legged ... ballerina? Ice-skater? One of the two. Anyway, it was a teenage girl who was performing some athletic feat that, by all the laws of reason and nature, really should have required that she have two legs to accomplish it, except she only had one, and it hadn't slowed her down one bit.

No, that's not the part that I had a problem with. Jesus Christ, I'm not Gregory House, people. No, what really got under my skin, and into my leg, was the part about HOW she became a one-legged ... well, whatever. LAWNMOWER accident. It left her minus one foot and lower leg, and while there were no Dramatic Reenactments, they ran B-roll closeup footage of a lawnmower's spinning blades over the voiceover narration telling this girl's tale of woe.

And that was it. No blood, no gore, not even any truly explicit descriptions ... just the power of suggestion, inviting me to use my imagination, which was always infinitely worse than any onscreen splatter or violence could ever be. I actually began to imagine what it would FEEL like, to have a lawnmower chop off my foot, not all at once in a clean incision amputation, but just a little bit at a time, slowly reducing the flesh and muscle and bone to ground-up hamburger meat ...

And that was the first time my foot hurt.

So, what does it feel like? Well, you know how your foot feels after you've been sitting wrong for a couple of hours, and your leg is absolutely DEAD asleep, and then, you have to try and stand up and shake it off? You know how, once your leg finally starts to wake up again, you're experiencing two completely different types of sensation in your foot at once, one of them being that oddly pleasant tingle, dancing over a layer of comfortable numbness, and the OTHER sensation being OH MY FUCK PAIN HURT BAD THIS SHIT FUCKING KILLS? Yeah? Well, it's like that SECOND part.

And yes, as I mentioned above, it's weirdly specific. I'm not going to feel anything if I'm watching violence or bloodshed that's either highly stylized or wildly over-the-top - a good shorthand is, if it's something that I could see happening to a character played by Bruce Willis or Sylvester Stallone, it's not going to faze me at all, even if it IS real, because shit like that doesn't FEEL real to me - but if it's more toned-down, personal or intimate, THAT'S when it stands a better-than-even chance of tripping my triggers. Factory mishaps? Threshing accidents? Even accounts from self-injurers? If I know it's real, or based on reality, there are cases when even READING about that shit will make my foot ache, if it's described vividly enough.

I can't remember if it's ever affected more than just one of my feet, but as an adult, every time I've had it, it's been in my left foot. Maybe that was the foot that the one-legged ballerina ice-skater lost. I don't even remember anymore. And yes, for the record, I know that it's a purely phantom pain, a psychosomatic condition, a symptom of my own mind fucking with itself, but knowing that doesn't change anything, because as long as I can vividly imagine those specific types of injury, it's still going to make my foot hurt.

In a way, I suppose it's one of the few traits left to remind me of how much of an overly sensitive child I used to be, so in that sense, I'm not entirely sure that I'd ever want to be cured of it. It really is a part of who I am by now, and it hasn't stopped me from doing anything, because if I see or read something that makes my foot hurt, I either take a quick break before returning to it, or else I just press on and keep watching or reading whatever it was. I'm not afraid of it, after all; it's just a pain, quite literally.

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