End of the world
‘Going mental’, as someone called it in the pub recently, can have a kind of finality about it. Losing my naivety about how great life is, thinking I (in my new role as God) literally had to organise the end of the world and then almost dying from the resultant guilt and self-hatred induced paracetamol overdose meant the universe almost blinked out in several ways. Not to mention other people’s inference that your brain’s working days are done. Then there is the reality that people and events may never seem the same again. But there is life after the paranormal. Without wishing to sound trite, I had to rethink my whole life – my career choices, my friends, leisure activities and my approach to relationships. I like to think it has worked out ok but I’ll have to let you know, I’m still on the journey. I cleaned out some of the rubbish that was bringing me down and took the ‘this isn’t a dress rehearsal’ motto about life to heart and worked really hard at university. Blah blah blah it was the making of me, retch…I actually think that my indignance at other people daring to try and write me off reinforced some values around equality and humanity that I’d never been brave enough to rock out in public. But once you’ve been laughed out of a flat full of petty criminals for divulging to them that you psychically run the mafia you get less stuck to servicing other people’s opinions of you. So when the world ended for me, I remade it, just on a smaller scale than that I thought I was doing – which made it much more achievable and far less condescending. As a career development manual popular in the 1990s advocated, when the plane’s engines fail and you’re jumping out of the sky, there’s time to marvel at the colour of your parachute.
Epistemology
I just put this in as I want to come back to someone I was talking to at a party. It was only 5 years ago, it’s still a warm retort. So – discussing studying psychology and I accidentally dropped the phrase ‘as a scientist I…’ to be interrupted by the conversational partner correcting me to ‘pseudo scientist’. I actually said I … er… drink? What I should have said was ‘one has to be fully aware of the remit of positivism in order to soundly reject it for the more nourishing epistemology of social constructivism’. What an arsehole – it took me ages to get the wording right (double arsehole!). I meant life makes more sense and is easier for me if I assume that we all have different ways of looking at it and none is right (we each construct our perspective). Though for others, a central measurable truth for all (positivism) is an easier and less anxiety provoking point of view. Of course the social constructivists win as we all think differently. Though is that the central truth? Is it starting to unravel..?
Equality
I started off assuming this was the natural state of affairs in the world – everyone has won and we shall all have prizes. Then reality bit and as a teenager loads of ‘reasons’ for discrimination and inequality surfaced and were accepted as meaningful, even necessary. A tide of rascism and sexist assumptions washed over me, courtesy of my new peers after moving house to a new socio economic constituency. As a lone voice piping up about the inequality I was expected to accept was normal, I was drowned out and looked faintly ridiculous – like some deluded female wannabe King Canute figure convinced of a belief about power so fantastical it was impossible. So I now carry around the weight of a middle class guilt complex about not being able to stem the flow of fetid comments and attitudes that made me squirm. And of course they are now reconstituted in every encounter with elements of difference or diversity. In my twenties I genuinely thought I could start to change the way people with mental health needs were perceived (usually as so deviant they aren’t in one’s own social circle / intellectual bracket). The longer I kept swigging on life the more I realised how little I really knew. To a former narcissist focusing on the previously unthought known that I am ineffectual (unequal as I can’t rebalance inequality or communicate a solid position I take on anything in case it offends) my quest to reduce inequality has massively flopped.
I see so many people biting down on the shit end of the stick because life hates them and grants no respite from bad luck. I want to ‘help’ but people like me have often contributed to the judgements that add to the struggle and ‘helping’ becomes a futile or patronising aim. In my view social class divisions are directly responsible for a lot of emotional anguish. I thought I was being compassionate by noticing invisible differences like glass ceilings or sticky floors at work, and purposefully trying to smooth the friction implied in difference. The psychological heritage I was endowed with (assumptions and expectations I took on board without noticing from my parents) collided with my consciously adopted view that difference is not a value judgement. I thought I railed against marginalising the minority but did not even recognise the hundreds of assumptions that formed the bedrock of my perspective on the world. As a teenager that never belonged in either of the class groups I encountered, I found I could not forge a personal way through territory so colonised by my parents’ views on society and my position within it. Or maybe that’s my view because I am weak. Because I am mad. Because I am weak. Because I am different. The sad finality of the assumptions made about class, race, religion, disability, sexuality, gender was neatly summed up by an item of graffiti on a club wall in a deprived area of London, where racism and other crimes are just part of the daily grind. The idiosyncratic assumption I make here, I own, is that graffiti, in the form of tagging is emblematic of social decay. Though I also own that I enjoy a lot of artistic street art. Like the grimmest self fulfilling prophecy stamped on a wall, redolent of the frustration and anger that drives a devalued group to try and recalibrate the oppressive majority, it simply reads ‘its because I’m black’.
Existence
Why does it happen? Can I bring myself to keep on doing it? What is it? How did I manage to bring the whole of it about before I was even born? These are questions that have perturbed me in many ways at various points in my longer-than-it-was-going-to-be life. I never used to question the sort of things whose relevance is not immediately obvious. It seems a bit indulgent – I’m a me so I must do. Then I went to university and read about the Cogito which suggested that doubting whether you exist is the foundation of knowledge. ‘I’ll have some of that’ I thought, certain knowledge in a world that was becoming increasingly unreliable was a lifeline. So I applied systematic doubt – nihilistically doubting everything I could not be sure of – my eyesight, other senses and eventually my own existence. Resources I look at now call it methodic doubt but I’m sure I was taught it was systematic. Or was it? Can I be sure about something that is not true? Note to self to write something about epistemology.
Anyhow. It is an interesting thought experiment to consider doubting things that seem quite concrete. But thinking about what proves you exist when that existence has got pretty grimy lets something loose that is hard to put back in the box. And when thinking is somewhat intensified by emotion, chemical influences and nasty feedback from furtive social interactions you start to be concerned that not all is what it may at first seem. Finally when, inexplicably, Bad Stuff starts happening, you can very easily disappear into your own navel in a puff of logic. For me I became scared of life, the gap between what it was like and what it had been supposed to be like. I had no template for dealing with life going down the drain. So I tried to follow it by chasing paracetamol (more about suicide attempts later – joy!). But when I opted out of that at the last moment, I had to find something to stuff in the hole in my identity. So tiny bits of data from different experiences and encounters were kind of mechanically recovered in my brain and I started to surf the non-existent wave. Total saturation in the belief that the lanky, anxious and creepy girl I saw in the mirror was a front that had been intricately woven to protect the truth – that within was the embodiment of <cringe> God!
What a relief! I didn’t have to sweat the social rejection, academic failure and disappointment I saw knocking on the door as such concepts were unimportant to my true mission. I didn’t think much about who might have concocted this facade, or why I only became aware of it when I was 18. I scratched around for a bit trying to unite people in their diversity and planning doomsday. Then after about 3 months, the impossibility of reconciling these two tasks and some other niggling doubts nudged me to topple this whopper of a misapprehension of the truth. Not before some very embarrassing public displays of course. But existence should be colourful, and as work experience, it was – let’s say a useful overview.
PsychCoblog 