I’ve heard that there are two main ways kids play with Barbies—one group goes in for dress-up, the other for catastrophes. I was never huge on Barbies, but I’m realizing that I spent an alarming amount of my childhood dreaming up disasters.
I was reminded of this last night when I ran across an old article that describes death by hypothermia. It’s 4,000 words of grisly details written in the second person, and I read it in one gulp. Part of me wanted to run away to Hawaii. But I found another part latching onto every gory detail, and I briefly remembered being nine years old.
We moved to North Carolina that year, and I read everything I could find about epidemics. It was a weird obsession, one that my parents never understood (although, in fairness to me, not everyone’s mother has quite that many books about the Black Death laying around). But according to the friends to whom I’ve mentioned it today, a lot of other kids were up to the same grim thing.
To a few of those I’ve asked, this kind of morbid fascination was entirely unfamiliar. From others, it drew relieved recognition. Many seemed comforted to realize that they weren’t the only ones who spent 1998 checking out every book the public library had on Ebola. The same tropes came up for almost everyone—disease, natural disasters, biological warfare. The Hindenburg. The Titanic. Jonestown. At ten, I read self-diagnostic books front-to-back. I could tell you the symptoms of everything from meningitis to typhus to scarlet fever. Most of us also noted the remedies, but the point was never to protect ourselves—if anything, we were after the opposite. For me and for most of the people with whom I’ve spoken, this was a phenomenon that took place between that ages of eight and 11—after the solidification of reading skills but before reading became more than an uncritical drinking in.
The phase ended, in every case, quietly and undramatically. The research component faded in the same way that many prepubescent interests fade, subsumed during middle school by growing loads of homework and a newly turbulent social scene. And it is impossible, even a few years after the age window closes, to examine tragic things without an adult awareness of others’ pain. I began to recognize that my interest in a moldy catastrophe was the same impulse that drives paparazzi toward mourners, and I was repulsed. That horrified curiosity is an ugly part of human nature. I didn’t want it inside of me anymore.
Most importantly, maybe, even a tiny bit of experience pulls us irrevocably inside of what it means to be in pain. There is a power to death that attracted us and still does, but back then there was also a vague feeling that such power could spread to those who touched it. In the moment between childhood and adolescence, there’s a sense that power and adventure and everything adult are just out of reach. In times of horror, children acquire agency, which looks like power to those of us who had never been alone and scared. For everyone, there is a moment at which death becomes a real-life presence, an unglamorous stealer of precious things. With the realization that there is nothing to be taken in return, the fascination is changed forever.
The author is a Columbia College sophomore. She is the co-editor of the Commentariat, the official blog of Spectator Opinion.