Behind the masks...

This week I have been in various groups where I have heard of the struggles in people's lives.  This reflection is a response to that.
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I stood in the crowds rushing around the shops, I felt like my life was falling apart, the world had drastically changed, so how could everyone wander round as normal?

Then a messenger stopped and stood by my side, she began to point people out –

She is grateful for the winter, no-one questions the long sleeves that cover the bruises, and the bruises of the mind are invisible – but he is always apologetic…..

The man stopping to chat to everyone with a cheery smile is on his only trip out of the week, at home he cares for his mother who needs help 24/7 and in confusion doesn’t know him and gets frightened and angry.

That young woman is picking her way through the crowd carefully, she is terrified of talking to anyone – she feels she is barely holding her mind together, and feels overwhelmed by the most basic of things.

The messenger got quicker –

His every step is agony of pain; she is worried sick about her son; she dreads Christmas since her husband died, and the children live so far away; he lost his job in the cuts this year and the mortgage is behind; and so it went on.

The messenger turned to me and said, ‘This is the normal each one wanders around with, just as you do, and each one looks at the others in awe of how normal they all are and feeling they are alone in the crowd carrying their weight’

I wept seeing the pain hiding under every normal face and action, and for my own pain too.

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Violence and insanity

On the news yesterday there were two contrasting items that referred to violence and questions of (in)sanity. In Norway the man who planted a bomb in Oslo and then shot down as many as he could at a political youth camp was declared sane and sentenced to prison. The trial was not about guilt - but focussed at the end on whether he was insane and therefore to go to a secure psychiatric unit, or sane and sent to general prison.

Meanwhile in Jersey a man being tried for killing of family and friends was cleared of murder and convicted of manslaughter, diminished responsibility due to depression deteriotaing into psychosis.

Without getting into either case in detail, it set me thinking about how we as society react to issues of overwhelming violence.

Whilst some may see a sentence based on 'diminished responsibility' as an easier ride, a get out clause, finding excuses, on the other hand there can be an undercurrent of wanting insanity to be part of the reason.

When something really horrific happens it can be easy to put it down to stress, pressure, insanity or even simply the heat of the moment.  It removes it from the category of things a 'normal' person might do. 'She heard voices that made her do it', is reassuring because it means that all those who don't 'hear voices' aren't likely to do anything like that.

It makes all the horror part of 'something other', just as people think that bad things happen in other places.  Especially the wishful thinking of rural life or nice surburbia - bad things don't happen in Ambridge, violence, murder, that is for Eastenders not The Archers. Even the recent ripples of complaints about the lastest rural plotlines show the tension between having a story to follow and the inherent heresy of challenging our idylls.

I have seen it in people's lives, when something happens to them instead of some statistical someone else suddenly the belief about our safety and security is torn to shreds. If A can happen to our family, then so could B, C, D...etc.

Living with that fear is emotionally exhausting - ask anyone who has extreme anxiety conditions. For society to continue to function, for any of us to dare to cross the road or catch a plane we need that belief that 'things happen to other people'.

And so being able to dismiss horrors as due to something that makes the killer less responsible, less human maybe, makes it easier to get through life - that normal person in the supermarket queue won't do that kind of thing. Of course that depends on our subconscious belief that we would somehow be able to tell who is a danger and who is normal - and that's a whole other blog.