Oversaturation: True-Crime Fatigue and Searching for That Spark

I didn’t think it was possible for me to reach true-crime fatigue, but I think it’s happened. (Note that this hasn’t stopped me from listening to true crime podcasts or watching true crime shows on YouTube in the slightest; I just do so half-heartedly, my attention wandering as if a fly keeps buzzing around the room.)

I’ve even lost interest in watching the newly-released reruns of my favorite show of all time: Unsolved Mysteries, hosted by Robert Stack. (To be fair, I watched at least the first six seasons before I became distracted and lost interest.)

Not that I’m worried, per se; mine is a mind that obsesses long and deep about something — the Beatles, the Kennedys, Beck, golf, baseball, Christine Chubbuck, British history — for a sustained period and then drops it, sometimes for a while, sometimes forever. Even this blog: I’m excited when I feel I have something to say . . . until I don’t. And as someone who taught writing at both high-school and university level, I’m not used to musings without a point.

If there’s a point here, it’s one of over-saturation and the difficulty of digging yourself out of that deep, obsessive hole. I’m ready to be obsessed with something again; in fact, just a few weeks ago, it was the Kennedys, thanks to an amazing biography of Bobby Kennedy, Larry Tye’s Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon. I even checked out the 2003 JFK biography by Robert Dallek, mostly because I was interested in the historian’s take on JFK’s medical records; as someone who’s had a chronic illness since 10, I’m always interested in how people manage chronic pain and illness, and handsome Jack Kennedy had more of his share and almost medieval medical treatment, given their poor understanding of drug side effects and his ailments.

Yet, that biography sits on my bathroom sink, and I’m stuck less than halfway through.

I want a spark, something to light my fire again in that way my friends talk about: the way in which I can get buried so deep that my passion for a subject sweeps people along like a flood. My flint is damp, though, and unresponsive. Yet, I keep half-listening to true crime podcasts (my current one is Unresolved, even though I’ve heard over half the cases the host covers), half-looking for “you know, that — that thing.” At least I’ll know it when it comes.

Originally posted on November 4th, 2017.

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Hello, I’m Sara!

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