In the UK - I still find this hard to believe - a quarter of a million people are reported missing every year – and its on the increase. Around half are found within 72 hours, another 50,000 are found dead, but another 50,000 just disappear permanently. That's a good size football stadium of people every year.
We all know the story of the bloke who goes out for a packet of fags and never returns, the troubled kid who longs for the romance of the big city and leaves a despairing family in their absence.
But its still a hell of a lot of people who have either been murdered, committed suicide, died of natural causes - their bodies never having been found - and/or people violently breaking with their former identities to start a new life. If the figures are correct, then a considerable number of people must be successful at this personal revolution - at least in the short term. Or there is a terrifying amount of alien abduction and/or human culling going on!
It fascinates me how people can dispose of their families, their roots, their very names, and the intricate and vast web of connections that go with that, to become another person in what seems a very short and abrupt period of time.
It appears that now more than ever, lots of people have a compelling desire to lose all the paraphernalia of identity, to kill the themselves on one level and be reborn into a fresh new world of their own making – with all the uncertainty: physical, psychological and financial challenges that brings with it. Not to mention a fair amount of guilt in many cases no doubt.
It seems an incredibly selfish thing to do for the person who has caring friends and family – to put them through a perpetual living nightmare of unclosed suspense - but on another level it must be unimaginably liberating.
To start again, to be new born, to shed that old worn hide, tattooed with those endless labels constantly fixing you to people, time and place.
In the Independent article linked below, there are no shortage of theories as to why people disappear, most of them for very materialistic and psychological health reasons: bad relationships, financial worries, etc.
Leaving the old life in this way is akin to experimental suicide: you die in a way to yourself and loved ones, with the option of coming back if the afterlife is not to your liking – Lazarus as a control freak!
Meanwhile, you haunt those who knew you before, and are haunted by the memories of your former self.
Is there a spiritual dimension to many of these ‘vanishings’?
Like St Paul on the road to Damascus, in the violent abruptness of leaving and shedding of roots, there are the undeniable echoes of the religious conversion, reincarnation and intimidations of a very surreal immortality.
There is something incredibly brave wrapped up in all this too: the will to survive, mutate and possibly evolve, to see life as an adventure, with yourself as the main character.
Maybe its enough for most of us to blog and post ‘anonymously’ on the net, to adopt different identities for just a little while?
The digital escape valve.
Over the years though, like many people I’ve spoken too, I do find myself romanticizing about a more permanent holiday from all the documentation, people and places that make me…’ME’.
But then again, that ME is the me-for-others, the psycho-dynamic algorithm that fits in to the, family, the group, the system, the merry-go-round.
I can perfectly understand why many feel compelled to leap off the old predictable ride (the mechanical Waltzer meets the Dodgems – life), and find a new, more organic and spontaneous one of their own choosing.
Its just a question of how expensive it is for your sanity and your soul.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-missing-each-year-275000-britons-disappear-1801010.html
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