Staying Connected and Sitting with the Fucking Fear

I don't know about you, but I'm struggling

Content warning: Femicide

Everyone I know is struggling right now (okay, every Millenial and Zoomer and Gen-Xer… some of the Boomers seem to be doing alright).

Friends in hospital or signed off work with stress; family members dying; cancers and long-term illnesses; divorces and marriage counselling; unemployment and serious money troubles…

As a Millenial who graduated university straight into the Great Recession of 2008, I suspect the trajectory of my sense of the fucked up-ness of the later-capitalist industrial weltgeist has been generic and emblematic [for a white middle-class-ish person in the West]:

• 1987–2000: Largely unaware of world events, with occasional atrocities (the Rwandan genocide) and tragedies (the death of Princess Diana) peeping through. A lot of chest and ear infections and diagnosed with OCD, but also a lot of videogames and The Simpsons in its Golden Age. The first two Portishead albums.

• 2001–2007: Kid’s television programming interrupted by news of the World Trade Centre bombing, but New Labour still seem optimistic about an unprecedented percentage of my generation going to university, which we do. The wars in Iraqi and Afghanistan seem like bad ideas and me and my friends listen to Greenday’s American Idiot to signal our distate for President Bush. The Wii is a strange, vaporwavey disappointment after the N64 and Gamecube. The traditional point ‘n’ click adventure game genre is in its fallow period. The Simpsons is no longer good, but The Simpsons Movie is okay. I receive a lot of CBT and feel wrapped in cotton wool by my SSRIs, which have become the “go to” class of drug for anyone struggling with their mental health. My childhood friend Sarah dies. I spend a year-and-a-hald sincerely convinced I am suffering from a brain tumour, which turns out to be an impacted wisdom tooth. I discover the cinema of David Lynch and watch a lot of Chris Morris. Beth Gibbons releases Out of Season with Rustin Man, but I fail to listen to it.

• 2008: The bottom drops out of the economy. I graduate from university and go through a series of zero-hour and short-term contract jobs. I make a series of bad, seriously regrettable decisions. Portishead releases Third, which is one of the greatest albums of all time, but it too unsparingly (and despairingly) captures the spirit of the times and the civilisation’s direction of travel for most people to listen to it more than once, much less use it as background music at dinner parties.

• 2009–2016: Several relationships and several jobs, but it all blurs weirdly together. Things feel better and more progressive on the surface (Obama’s speeches) but more dystopian and rotten under the surface (drone strikes). I’m doing post-grad studies and the years they seem to fly by. Overall, I’m not doing terribly, but I’m not doing too well either. Chugging along through austerity. My life feels delayed at a stage in my life where, my contrast, my parents had bought a house and were having, and then raising, me and my siblings. My grandparents die. I start watching Adam Curtis documentaries. Portishead release a very muted cover of ABBA’s ‘SOS’.

• 2017–2022. The weirdening. Reality starts to feel a bit mad and untethered. A former reality TV star becomes Presidents of the US. A pandemic sweeps the earth and I stay inside playing Sonic Spinball and trying to home school the step-son I am now suddenly living with (having step-kids being the best aspect of this period for me by a country mile). My step-son watches every episode of The Simpsons to date and neither recognises or accepts any decline in quality across its seasons. David Lynch returns to Twin Peaks and it is saturated with an aura of wrongness that seems entirely matched to the times. I struggle during lockdown and several very bad and horrible, unexpected things happen in my person life, which I will go into in more detail below. I am simultaneously at my most politically engaged and at my most alienated. I check myself into a mental health ward and my OCD medication is changed from an SSRI to a tri-cyclic. Portishead do not release anything. Beth Gibbons performs Gorecki’s gravely devestating 3rd Symphony with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.

• 2023–???? The wheels really start to fall off this reality thing. Australia burns and Israel escalates its occupation of Gaza into a full-on genocide with little-to-no global resistance. Trump is reelected. Labour get into power in the UK and are somehow worse than the exiting Conservative Party, doubling down on censorship and anti-protest laws. I find my best friend dead in his flat. My favourite cousin, who I loved as a child, gets an aggressive form of breast cancer. I donate a kidney to one of my students, but she dies anyway. My friends in America are scared and hopeless, but I fear that despite any counter-organising, Farage and his Reform Party will win the next UK election and, downriver of the US, we will have violence on the streets of London, the most vulnerable and marginalised targetted by the press and violent state forces. It seems as though all of my friends are either struggling with personal loss or are debilitated and ill. Beth Gibbons releases her debut studio album Lives Outgrown, which she states was written from experiencing “what life was like with no hope”.

So, those horrible, unexpected experiences of 2017–2022. Originally I called them “weird”, but that felt like it could sound glib or disrespectful, though I did experience them as weird on a deep level because they were so outside of experiences I expected to have in my life.

One, was interceding in a violent domestic dispute between a couple who lived across from me, my then partner and her children. From the top-storey window, the woman screamed for help, “He’s going to stab me”. My partner didn’t want me to intervene and phoned the police, but I was worried that any response would be too late so I rushed across, though I can’t remember if I hammered on the door or if it was just unlocked. The man who greated me had a bandaged hand and was holding a knife. The front room looked ransacked, trashed, with furniture on its side, crap piled up against one wall. The woman called down from upstairs that the man was going to stab her; he, indignant, replied: “You stabbed me through the hand!” “That was a week ago!” she shouted in explanation.

This troubling exchange is why I am a little hesitant to immediately ascribe abuser/abused labels, but I believe the man was eventually arrested, with a restraining order held against him.

In the moment my main concern was stopping him from stabbing his partner and, indeed, myself. Once as a student I spent a night on the street in the company of a paranoid schizophrenic homeless man. The first thing he said to me when we met was “Don’t worry, I’m not going to stab you in the face”. He told me that earlier he had mugged a couple, holding a knife to their faces, but that he liked my energy and so definitely wouldn’t do that. It likely provides a deep insight into my character that I found his straightforward disclaimer reassuring rather than terrifying. I wish the man in the house could have promised me the same.

In any case, I used my deescalation training from Extinction Rebellion and talked him down until the police arrived. I wasn’t too keen on the police being there, but they were at least several in number.

Elsewhere, encouraged by XR’s culture of being arrestable, I was arrested for trespassing during a protest in which we blocked a Shell petrol station. The arrest itself was not new to me, but not weird per se, until the discombobulating experience of being at the police station, with the police saying all sorts of odd little things that kicked the footing from out under me. For instance, the desk sergeant told me when I arrived that he used to spit in the food of protestors, but that they weren’t allowed to do things like that anymore… Having OCD, obviously I planned to refuse any meals, but none were offered to me anyway. I struggled having someone watch me pee, but more disconcerting was the solitary white arrow stenciled on the ceiling of the cell. I was eventually questioned at two in the morning, questions about events that simply has not happened: “How did you feel when the fire engine arrived?” There was no fire engine. I then was made to explain the foundational principles of Unitarianism (“Uni-whatnow?”) in case it was a terrorist ideology.

However, most horrible and wretched of all during those strange few years was the fact that the only friend I had yet to make while working at the university of Suffolk, murdered his wife and then killed himself. While the A&E crisis team deserve some of the blame for what he did, apparently turning him away during a psychotic episode and then mocking his insecurities, according to a triage nurse, I feel pity rather than sympathy for my late friend. His wife devoted a lot of time and energy to his mental health and, though culpability is complicated by mental health issues (with free will sticky at the best of times) he hideously failed her. After a friend, neighbour or acquaintance is revealed to be a murderer, interviewees on television often say “He seemed like the least likely person to do something like that” and “He was always very quiet”. I always used to roll my eyes sceptically at such people, judging them for not doing anything about conscience-nudging doubts and suspicions, but after my friend killed his wife, I thought almost precisely the same things. I had considered him nice, if not a little boring. I had only known him for some half-a-year and the only thing I remember causing me concern is that he referred to his wife as “wifey” in conversation, simultaneously talking disparagingly about old male friends who used to sexually harass girls in clubs when younger, while positioning himself as a “nice guy” who was very protective of his wifey, who he has saved – in his telling – from an abusive ex-boyfriend. Maybe I saw something of myself in such a self-characterisation. We often cringe or recoil at things in others we recognise in ourselves.

He stabbed Katherine many, many times and then threw himself from the window of their flat. I have been over there just a week-and-a-half before and noticed that part of the kitchen worktable didn’t line-up perfectly. I remember thinking that I was glad that my friend was able to sit with such minor imperfections in a way I wasn’t. The university, unsurprisingly, quietly clamped down on talk about the murder-suicide, only referring to his suicide in their statement, not Katherine’s murder. It was exactly the same, a couple of years later, when my colleague Dr Antonella Castelvedere, was murdered by her husband, another lecturer at the university.

So, several of the horrible things I experienced during lock-down, did not really happen to me, but to women at the hands of their partners. Indeed, even my arrest at a protest was not really a case of me suffering, so much as a deflection from the suffering caused by Shell, such as the murder of indigenous activists.

With my kidney recipient having died, I am (sorry to say) having to resist indulging in glum self-pity about how the good and helpful things that I try to do never seem to work out. But it is not my tragedy. It is her tragedy and her parents’. Likewise, I did not die during lock-down and the aftermath, but people I knew, liked and cared about.

At the moment I am struggling because I see good, kind people struggling. For me to suffer alongside them is not noble or necessarily useful, but it is human. In his brilliant article ‘Eliminating the Protectors’, Jim Stewartson makes the point that the Trump administration seem intent on eliminating compassion; killing people that care; scaring people into accepting that the only acceptable doctrine is one of capitalistic greed and naked, nativist self-interest.

Eliminating the Protectors

Similarly, last year, Nathan Robinson wrote an article on how the Right’s latest culture war is against empathy. Admittedly empathy can be difficult, uncomfortable and even potentially problematic. My reluctance of feeling empathy for my late friend who murdered his wife is probably due to not wanting to recognise any of myself in him. But I think it is important to keep our hearts open when powerful bastards (rather than mentally-ill wretches – and I do think there is a distinction; it is instructive that a wretch is both a despicable or contemptible person and an unfortunate or unhappy person) are trying to force our hearts closed. Fear is the mind killer.

One of my favourite Boomers, David Lynch, died last year. Twin Peaks: The Return is the piece of media that resonates the most strongly with me and the tragedy of Dale Cooper is one that I need to learn and learn again. In being fixated on rescuing Laura, in trying to prove his own goodness in the wake of shame and regret, Dale dehumanises her, turning her into a tragic myth rather than recognising her everyday humanity. By the end of the series, he has become completely lost in disillution.

I went to the cinema at the weekend to rewatch Mulholland Drive, accompanying a friend whose housemate has just died. It was a much sadder film than I remember. Ultimately it seemed like a tragedy of refusing to sit with the fear, that Naomi Watts became lost because she couldn’t face the darkness inside herself.

We are in dark, dark times. I don’t know if the US would be a happier, healthier place if more white folks had faced up to the horrors beneath its founding myths. The UK has certainly never faced up to the horrors of empire. We still don’t teach children about British actions during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya or our concentration camps in South Africa. Facing up to the darkness is tough, but else it will eat you/us alive.