Daily Prompt

Fear of Success

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The term schadenfreude literally means damage-joy. When one enjoys the news that a rival is encountering trouble, one is experiencing a sense of schadenfreude. Most of us have experienced this feeling at some point in our lives, but most of us also have been jerks at some point in our lives, and the two sometimes come at the same time.

There is no real-world term for its opposite, so some people have begun to use a made-up word, freudenschade, to describe the distress one feels when a friend or rival is doing well or has had a success.

And then there are some people, I am thinking of the late Gore Vidal here, who appear to take pleasure at others’ distress at one’s success. Vidal confessed to feelings of schadenfreude over other writers’ freudenschade. (That is as hard to type as it is to say.)
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Upside Down

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

For a year I lived with a diagnosis of Friedreich’s ataxia, a genetic, neuromuscular disease whose symptoms are quite close to mine.

My symptoms: Since 2005 I have been aware, at first dimly, of a mobility disorder developing in me; today, in 2015, I walk with a cane or impressive walking stick, stiffly, like I am wearing very tight jeans; I have little sensation in my lower legs and even have moments of “body confusion” in which I think I am moving my right leg but my left leg moves. I sway when I stand and fall/walk into walls and my sense of not knowing where I am in the world contributes moments of comedy to my day. I was in my mid-30s when the symptoms began to attract my attention, which means the symptoms began to appear several years earlier.

Instead, it is very likely that I have a disease called spinal muscular atrophy, but I am grateful for that year in which I thought I had Friedreich’s ataxia. This is because all that I knew upon learning my diagnosis was my diagnosis—Dr. M, my neurologst, did not even hand me a tri-fold pamphlet, “So You Have a Potentially Life-Shortening Condition,” if such an item is even available—but there were online groups ready to embrace someone like me.
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Love in the Parts & Service Department

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

[This was originally posted in November 2013.]

Today at a car dealer I saw the sharpest and softest demonstration of love.

My friend, L——, and I were waiting for her car to be serviced, so we sat in the waiting room to discuss the things good friends discuss in waiting rooms.
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