Life is a crapshoot. Often enough it’s just crap. If it wasn’t for the kindness of friends and family there’s no telling where I would be at this moment. Nothing can prepare you for many of the low points in life and when disappointment comes at you, one heartbreaking reality after another, it’s hard to continually, daily, hourly, fend off the feelings of hopelessness and self pity.
No one likes self-pity and it’s a great device for all kinds of humor. We love to mock each other when we get into our little “pity parties,” and usually it’s a good-natured reminder it ain’t nearly as bad as we make it seem, whatever “it” is.
But something that affects the entirety of your life for days and weeks and months at a time can transcend the average moments of doubt and self-pity. We have these mantras we can recite, like “I’m powerless over people, places and things” and “I’m right where I’m supposed to be” and the Serenity Prayer, but sometimes they just aren’t enough. In fact, to have any of that suggested feels like an insult.
So, instead of talking to friends who themselves are tired of hearing about our troubles and are most likely to recite some bromide that, in less troubling times is comforting or gives us a kick in the ass, we retreat and isolate.
There’s a lot to be said for isolating. You can retreat into your own little world, a fantasy even, and script every scene to fit your mood. You can tell people off, have arguments with your friends that pointedly prove you are the victim; you can have arguments with government bureaucracies that, once again, prove you’re the victim. You can look at pictures and videos of hot, nude women and make them your willing and enthusiastic sexual playthings. And you can kill the people who really, truly have hurt you. All without leaving the comfort of your easy chair.
Ever see someone carrying on conversations with themselves? One day while traveling through Pacific Beach on Garnet, there was a White man with long, unkempt hair and slight beard. He actually could have cleaned up and been a chick magnet.
Obviously homeless, the man was ferociously guarding a shopping cart filled with all his belongings. But he was also, it seemed, screaming at two Black men in an SUV. This was all taking place at one of the gas station/convenience stores that dot Garnet Avenue. The two men with the SUV looked befuddled, the other guy enraged. So, I stopped to listen.
The White man guarding his shopping cart was yelling obscenities at someone, but from his words, which escape me at the moment, it was evident the two men with the SUV were not the target. I noticed that when the yelling man was staring in the direction of the SUV guys, he wasn’t actually focused on them, instead looking off into the distance. And he would walk back and forth on the sidewalk, turning around to yell in the direction.
At some point the SUV guys figured out they were really not part of this man’s conversation and went about their business. After they left, the yelling man continued railing at his adversaries, as imaginary as they must have been for years. I mentioned the race of these three people because at first I thought it might be a race-related incident. Of course it wasn’t so once again there was a lesson that there is more to what meets the eye.
Here’s the creepy part: I understood exactly where the yelling man was in life. I could relate. Instead of isolating in a room with a computer to vent his frustration and fear, he was living out on the street, his schizophrenia on display for all the passersby.
Years ago while waiting for a bus on a Downtown street corner, a woman I had known from a few years previously, walked by talking to herself. She looked like she had been living on the street, not the bright-eyed woman I had been hanging out with for a few months. I tried to make contact but she walked by without a glance. She was too deep in her own world to notice anyone or anything in this world.
It is sad and it isn’t just the vagaries and disappointments of life affecting these two people. Obviously the yelling man and my friend suffer from deeper mental illness that when left untreated leaves them helpless in this world and vulnerable to the horrors of their own minds. But really, from talking to my friend, the system did her no favors; the system in fact pushes those of us on the edge over the edge often enough.
People like this are often punished for their troubles, with disability requirements that can be daunting, like having to reconfirm diagnosis and reapply, right down to the amount of compensation which barely allows one to live in squalor. There’s such a stigma attached to mental illness we won’t even allow these people to live comfortably. And of course as individuals we want little to do with these people. Hell, we don’t even want to take care of the elderly: there are politicians who want to end Social Security and Medicare!
The system fails these people because some of us who pay for it don’t believe we should be paying to support the ill in our society at all, which is the height of arrogance and selfishness. We only give those on disability enough to subsist on, just enough to keep them struggling from one check to the next, reminding them that they are just another drag on society, if we decide they qualify for assistance.
After a while all this punishment takes its toll and the punished snap. They go off the deep end and start walking up and down the streets talking and yelling to people who aren’t there. And maybe they act out in ways that cause harm to themselves and others. Then we notice — and wonder, “What went wrong?”
All of that is understandable to me. Something happens and becomes the last straw. Although we may be powerless over people, places or things, for some of us our lives are, at times, dependent upon other people, places or things and when they get it wrong, or one person in that chain of people, places and things drags their feet on something that has a heavy, debilitating impact on our lives, what else can you do? Recite some bromide you might have heard at church or in a Twelve Step Program meeting?
No. I want to scream, “FUCK YOU!” And then start punching and breaking things, going to wherever the problem rests and repeating said procedure. And you know, from this vantage point, getting arrested and going to jail seems worth the effort.
But then there’s that other little part of the brain that believes such behavior is unacceptable and counter-productive, that it will lead to even more problems. So, instead, we just sit in silence, isolating from everything and everyone around us.
At some point we just can’t take it anymore. Even George Clooney said he contemplated suicide just a few years ago. For entirely different reasons, but I understand his misery. So I’ll recite one of those bromides, give it a couple more days and see what happens.
TheForkesReport