I think emotional strength is much like physical strength: much of it is trained, but a good part of it you are born with.
Obviously, if you lie around on your couch your whole life playing video games, you are not going to be strong emotionally or physically, and I think there is definitely some connection between physical vigor and emotional vigor, but some of it people just can’t help.
We all have breaking points, and they are set at different places for different people. I realized yesterday that for myself virtually every day of my life I have woken up wondering if today would be the day the weight of my unprocessed and conflicting emotions finally flattened me. And at the end of every day I sighed a breath of relief, and for many years got drunk. I have had a Matisse painting on my walls for many years, his “Thousand and One Nights”. It says, in French, “She saw the morning light begin to pierce the night. She discreetly grew silent.”
She survived every day for three years by her wits and audacious courage, then she lived out her natural years, and saved many lives in the process (although I have to wonder what marrying a mass murderer may have felt like).
I just realized why this made so much sense to me. I sort of knew, but this is much more concrete.
I may or may not have mentioned an interesting conversation I had in a bar with a former SAS soldier. In his view the capacity to endure that training was genetic, like the ability to sing. You either had enough of it or you didn’t (I will insert parenthetically that if that meeting was not purely by accident I did eventually figure out why he was here; I am very sure he thought me, correctly, a dunce at the time. I am stupid sometimes. It comes and it goes, and as I’ve noted, being smart and being unconsciously dumb generally feel exactly the same.)
But most people endure to their capacity, and then they don’t. That point varies by person and it’s not purely voluntary, any more than their scores on the SAT are. There is a range, but nothing more than a range.
I suppose I am slowly, grudgingly, working my way around to being less judgmental, in saying all this.
And obviously, unless you have walked in someone’s shoes, you don’t know what something FELT like, even if they have described it. We all have both differing levels of pain tolerance, and differing levels of sensitivity. A high pain tolerance, low sensitivity person will do well in the SAS. A low pain tolerance high sensitivity person will be miserable. That is a likely addict.
And some of us are high pain tolerance, high sensitivity. We suffer a lot, but by and large suffer productively. Such people make, I would think, good artists and writers. I style myself, in my own mind, a creative and insightful sort, and not without some good reason.