Do you ever get the feeling you’re losing the plot?
As I get older, I feel normal society and my ability to fit in to it appears to retreat from me like the tide on a deserted beach.
I sometimes feel like one of those Anthony Gormley figures, silently rusting in the cold salt air, anchored forever to a certain spot, just watching the rhythm of nature sweep in and out…there, but not quite all ‘there’ if you know what I mean.
I believe the technical word for this is ‘petrification’ in the psychoanalytic jargon – a turning to stone, becoming an object, a mere thing. Okay, I’m exaggerating a little bit, its not THAT bad, not yet anyway. And besides, I have the psychological tools and experiences to adapt and roll with the transitional punches.
I had a similar experience to this many years ago, far more traumatic and abrupt, but ultimately beneficial and life enhancing.
The psychoanalyst Carl Jung, thought that middle age was an important stage in adult development, a time when hidden or repressed aspects of the self were often brought to consciousness for the first time; there’s a looking back, a re-evaluation of the past, an attempt to reinterpret events and integrate them into the psyche.
This is more popularly (hysterically) known as the mid-life crisis. I prefer the ‘mid-life transition’ much better.
I think I’ve been doing this sort of thing in my blogs: looking back and attempting to re-evaluate all that stuff, my heroic attempt to reach ‘transcendental wholeness’ as that old fart CJ would say (Not that annoying tit off ‘Eggheads’).
These transitions though, can of course be chaotic. We can be propelled down many bizarre and strange paths, left drifting in our fragile boats in the dark night voyage of the soul.
I’ve suffered with depression on and off since my teens, but in the late 80’s I had a particularly severe ‘episode’, which is the closest I have ever come to ‘madness’ in the classical sense.
Isolated, unemployed and very skint, I felt like I was constantly pushing through a thick grey membrane, constantly attacked by odd impulses, paranoia, suspicion. I hardly slept, the cloudless summer sky appeared dulled, in fact everything was blunted and muted. The only things that appeared to puncture this fugue were the little significances, synchronicity's, omens and symbols that seemed to briefly ignite and unite the befuddled areas of my mind – like brief windows of order/sense in the ocean of turbulence.
I realised later, that this ‘break down’ had been caused by not being true to myself for many years. I’d felt like I had to conform and perform for other people. I was stuck in a place I hated and nullified the frustration and lack of opportunity by getting drunk and hanging around with the very ‘wrongest’ of people.
I had been a psychic drifter, too lazy to face up to change and confronting myself.
So I believe my psyche took over the reins for while all those years ago, and said yoohoo! Here’s a few ideas, see what you can do with these, this is your last chance. Change or die.
What I found most remarkable or ‘mad’ about my madness was the fact that it often had a definite cold, hard, lunatic logic.
For example, my mind seemed to have an uncanny ability to latch onto statistical facts: 1 in 3 people are likely to die of cancer, your chances of being hit by a bus when crossing the road…the number of children that die in third world countries everyday etc.
I’d known all of this on some level before of course, but all of a sudden it penetrated my very soul, because I realised for the first time that I was just…a person, like everybody else. The narcissism and indestructibility of youth was crumbling away and I was forcibly being confronted with my own psychic and physical mortality.
I found that I had been saddled with an unbearable heaviness of being. I was crushed by the gravity of worldly enlightenment, scared to move, scared to sleep, scared to speak less big bad Reality slapped me for my insolence.
I began searching for answers in literature, poetry, I took up painting again and, I know this sounds strange and obvious, but I began to see behind the scene’s of everything. I couldn’t watch a movie or look at a painting or read a book without seeing the conceit, the fabrication, construction and artfulness behind the image.
But this experience didn’t make me cynical or sneering at all, it was more like I was being made aware or educated in the grammar of a new language. The absurdity of life had a childish logic and a surreal beauty. My psyche was forcing me to go back to school and learn my very personal survival skill.
My dark night of the soul had imbued me with a will to truth, and I found out I could cope with the truth, even enjoy it by articulating and assimilating it into my psyche through the medium of the arts.
I do wonder though, how different my life would have turned out if I’d taken medication or had some kind of therapy? No doubt I wouldn’t have suffered for as long and as harshly as I did, but would I have just carried on being the same old repressed me, until the next breakdown and the next pill/therapy course ad infinitum. Or suicide.
I know I was lucky, my previous interest in the arts and books laid a ground of symbols for my psyche to explore, before chaos totally swept me away into suicide or permanent insanity.
But how many never survive the catharsis? Never learn the new grammar? Never even get to the threshold? Because as long as the means are there they can drown its first intimations in drink and drugs.
How many are locked away and forcibly medicated by (understandably) concerned families and a medical establishment that has a nice pejorative label for any behaviour that is outside the very limited behavioural criteria of your average 1940’s Middleclass bourgeoisie.
Don’t get me wrong, no doubt many lives have been saved by medical interventions both forced and voluntary, not all cases of ‘mental distress’ can be allowed to ‘play themselves out’ in the hope of positive catharsis.
Sometimes people have to be protected from themselves and we from them.
I just wonder if our society was more organic, less fractured, alienated and competitive, and we weren’t reduced to worker machines that need to be kept running on a diet of legal and illegal drugs, the psychic transitions that need to occur throughout our life, may not have to entail the possible cataclysmic breakdowns, permanent insanity and suicide that pervades the current one.
Your soul shouldn’t have to shout and scream, it should just whisper like an old friend.
In more shamanistic familial cultures, these transitions are often welcomed, seen as important and essential death and rebirth initiation ordeals for the development of the psyche.
But then again, they don’t have to be up in the morning to go to the office, or worry about their mortgage being paid at the end of the month.
Not much room for existential resurrection is there in the kingdom of the great god Prozac.
Time to regenerate Doctor?
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