F*ck, RU OK day?

So today is R U OK Day; a day in which we all tweak tweet and facebook our identities towards tolerance and understanding of people who are thinking about topping themselves and patronisingly tell them that there is plenty of help out there. We all say dumb shit like ‘it’s totally ok to talk to people’ or ‘you’re never alone’ without really realising that if someone is actually alone and/or has no one to talk to while having nasty thoughts of that kind, that would be a truly f*cked up thing to say to them.  That is the joys of social media: the ability to talk to someone without actually talking to them or being with them. We all cut and paste a link to lifeline or one of the many, many other organisations that are supposedly there to help those people. The problem that I have with this is, I doubt anyone who is promoting this nonsense  has ever come in contact with these organisations, because my thinking is that if they had, there is no way they would advertise it as a potential course of action.  

In my experience, and, having chased the matter up with a number of people since then, these organisations are beyond totally useless. In my case they made the situation considerably worse by simple incompetence. 

From talking to others, this seems to be more the norm than the exception. These organisations are useless. For a number of reasons too: the staff are poorly trained; there is no specialisation/identification with the caller and there is no ability of a telephone counsellor to treat a caller as a person rather than just a case study that they pretended to read in a psych textbook they pretend to have. 

So, as you’ve probably guessed, this is a nasty post. Not like ‘hey Michael, I don’t think Arlo Guthrie was any good’ type nasty, but, nasty none the less.

My experience is of being in a truly nasty place and talking about it with a flirty and giggly girl from lifeline and then a surly old battle axe and misogynist from Mensline, both of whom gave me appallingly bad advice. The flirty little thing from lifeline takes the cake though.  After listening to issues that I had at the time, giggling and complementing me in very personal way, she then proceeded to ask me if I was having any thoughts of killing myself. In hindsight, this is probably the stupidest thing someone could say in this situation, because my thoughts were, “well, no, I haven’t thought about that, but maybe I should.” So thanks for planting that thought in my mind dipshit (not that I did think of it that much at all – memories of teenage experiences with that stopped any serious thoughts there, it just in hindsight strikes me as a ridiculous and negligent thing to say).  

You see dear reader, a while ago, I had a breakdown, a total and complete failure to be able to deal with things.

Strange thing really if you have ever been through that sort of thing. Like one minute you’re fine and the next, your brain is offline. Like some sort of computer error message coming through

“Oops, we’re sorry, the features you’re trying to access: Rational thought; the ability to deal with heights and enclosed spaces are currently unavailable...please try again later.”

You see, I used to be one of those peeps who believed that stress was just some bullshit disease made up by vested interest industry and cured by horrid music and weird smelling bath salts. My family was falling apart, I was taking on way too much work, study and everything else, as I always have and never giving myself some slack to just take a breath and realise what was around me. The LoML was going through nasty things and her mother was adding fuel to the fire by hurling abuse at her left, right and centre. She told the LoML that she never wanted to have children. She was pregnant before she realised she was gay and owed it to her husband to give him another child. She was excited to find out she was having a daughter, but that excitement never resulted in pride in her daughter and now she is sorry she ever had one.

Pretty messed up hey? There were tonnes of messages like that one, albeit that was probably the pick of them. That was also the point where I stepped in and stopped the LoML from talking to her mother and visa versa. It wasn’t the right thing for me to do I know, but it was the lesser of two wrong things I could have done. So I took control of it all and waddled through, trying to get things back on track and as soon as they were, bang, that is when my mind decided to completely and utterly konk out.

This is not the first time I have had issues of this nature. It is the first time I have not been able to control it though. This post is probably the first time I have ever said anything of this type. If you count yourself amongst that crowd, you get treated abysmally. In fact, you get treated abysmally if you were a dog, let alone a person. Everything is your fault; you are the one that is faulty, broken; there is this thing inside you that is corrupt, broken, rotten and has to be cut out and destroyed before you as a person can be treated like a person again. Until that time (which will never come) you will be ignored and passed over by everyone who knows of this. Like you have the plague. If you’re unlucky enough to experience this as a teenager, you get to have your life destroyed by this and by medication: mind-altering, mind-numbing pills so that you barely remember watching your family and friends leave you to die.

As a result, I have always been sceptical of people who wear their mental illness as though it is a badge of honour. Depression is normal, but only during ad-breaks and only when it’s excusing horrendous behaviour, never when it is just there, never when it’s actually real. Bipolar is the new black, certainly the new excuse for doing or being the most abhorrent person you can be. At the same time, I am all for people being able to deal with these things without any shame, but get real about the whole public over-share thing. I believe that there is crazy amounts of character found in memories of holding a broken bone china vase over your wrist and praying to God for the strength to push down, but it in no way excuses behaviour toward other people.

So I think being ok is a great concept, but am not so sure on the focus on talking things through if you may not be. From someone that's been to hell and back enough times to bitch about how bad the road there is nowadays, I think ' ok' is a very good term to think about. Life too easily turns to shit without any rhyme or reason. You'll do your head in if you try and find any meaning in that, but it will swing back round again. Being ok for me means that there is something central to me that keeps me smiling. Doesn't have to be the same thing, or only one thing and it doesn't have to be explainable to others - but it's always there, the trick is to take the time to find it.
But I am not so sure about seriously talking out things - I have never been able to - things that destroyed my life have been too unbelievable and ridiculous when said out loud, so I have never been able to do that - speaking about them for me gives them more importance than they deserve and make me lay so much blame and anger on the people that are responsible for them, places someone (usually me) in a situation of being a judge over others and ties the whole thing up further in emotional distress where quazi-lethal amounts of alcohol and other substances present the only way out of a cycle of rage - and that's a very bad place to be. So , I would be very skeptical about this 'let's talk things out ' sort of thing - if it works for you - then great, but be careful. - I have always found that it's the catch cry of psychologists, wankers, priests and rich kids and focuses way too much on rationality and obvious, stateable concepts and nothing on your own understanding of the unstateable.

As Jung says 'we should not pretend to understand the world by reason alone, we know it just as much by feeling and reason should, if it be honest, come to an understanding of its own inadequacies'

So today, rather than asking someone if they’re ok, what we should do is just walk into a bar near you and say ‘you can get anything you want at Alices Restaurant’ and walk out.

And before you grammar Nazis out there go on about the ownership apostrophes again – you don’t use them ever in proper nouns ok?

This post’s lame joke:

how many Queensland public servants does it take to change a light bulb?

A lot less than it used to.

This post’s inappropriate over-share: I have been using this calorie counting thingy on my iPhone to shed some winter weight. The problem with it though is that it doesn’t have any category in the exercise area for sex, which I think is a bit weird so I have been putting in fifteen minutes of yoga and five minutes of push ups and sit ups. So now I have this thing that maybe I am cheating at this...have been trying to be a little more stretchy and flexy, but it still feels that I am cheating myself.

This post’s Michael’s pet hate: People that bitch about poor grammar skills when they themselves have a bad understanding of the Queens English. Don’t get me wrong on this, if you’re not up with grammar and speak in text talk or the like, I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the people that go out of their way to write to bloggers to criticise them on their grammar when they themselves don’t know what they are talking about – like when to use an ownership apostrophe or the difference between was and were in the subjunctive.