No easy answers on nurse's suicide

I was going to write a different blog post today, but this issue has been on my mind a lot in the last few days – so I’m having thinky thoughts instead about suicide, and about our communal failure to talk about the real issues.

Apology ahead of time – this is a complex issue, and my thoughts on it don’t easily fit in a small post, so this post is LONG. Possibly the longest I’ve ever written. You may disagree with some or all of the below. I don't mind and welcome comments. But please keep it respectful. :) Any comments that get personal, or focus on attacking people rather than addressing the content of the issue will be deleted.

(Possible trigger WARNING. If you are feeling depressed, please reach out! You are not alone. ♥ Lifeline: 131 114. Also, if you have had experience with a loved one committing suicide – you may want to reconsider reading the post below. Take care of yourself. My thoughts and love are with you.) 

Right now, across Twitter and in the mainstream press in the UK and elsewhere there is a lot of (I’m sure genuinely felt) disgust, vitriol, outrage, anger, and unhappiness being directed at two young disc jockeys employed at 2Day FM.

These two DJs (on instruction) made a prank call to the hospital that Kate Middleton was staying at pretending to be the Queen and Prince Charles wanting to talk to their grand/daughter-in-law. I’ve read the transcript of the prank call and it was pretty stupid and thoughtless.

Okay – right off the cuff, let me be even more specific. I think most prank calls are stupid. They are adolescent and almost never consider the mental state or wellbeing of the people being pranked. They are fun for the people conducting the prank, and perhaps for some listeners, but only in a ‘aren’t I cool’ kind of way. They are insensitive and almost always lack empathy for the people being pranked. They are also wide-spread practice on radio stations around the world and audiences love them.

Having heard the interview with the DJs on ACA last night, I was struck by their naivety and lack of forethought. They were visibly shocked and devastated. But as equally clueless about the possible emotional ramifications for the people they connected with on the other end. They expected to be hung up on. That was it. They thought they were making fools of themselves. They didn’t intend it to be a joke on the nurses. They hadn’t connected the dots on the effect being fooled would have on the nurses.

This lack of empathy and wisdom is in my opinion largely cultural – both for that radio station but also the mainstream media and society as a whole. These DJs are a product of our system.
Does this make it okay – no – but as stupid pranks go this one was as innocuous as they probably get. Put on some silly accents and ring a hospital. Guaranteed that neither DJ expected to get beyond the person who picked up the phone. It wasn’t a personal attack. It wasn’t sustained harassment. It wasn’t sexual. It wasn’t abusive. It was stupid.

Most people – including Prince Charles – were until last week either laughing about it or calling for the two nurses to lose their jobs. Yes – the biggest outrage being expressed last week was by people calling for these two innocent women who fell for a prank to be disciplined and to lose their jobs. And perhaps the UK rags were also feeling a bit put out that these two ‘colonials’ had gotten information that they hadn’t been able to get yet.

Well may you ask why we should bloody care about Kate Middleton’s pregnancy dramas, but in our celeb-worshipping culture many do. And most of them – outside of the hospital itself - last week were calling for the heads not of the pranksters but of the women who fell for it.

Jump to a week later, and one of those women has apparently committed suicide. (Not confirmed yet by the way – perhaps she took sleeping pills and accidentally overdosed? The autopsy report hasn’t been released yet. We have no idea how she died). So the outrage this week is about the DJs having ‘blood on their hands’… and calling for them to be ‘permanently unemployed’ or ‘jailed’ or ‘shot’ or ‘hung’ or ‘strung up’. People want them humiliated. The faceless jokers who call themselves ‘Anonymous’ have proclaimed themselves judge and jury and judged them guilty of murder.
I understand the outrage. It is a horrible and tragic thing. But the over-the-top reaction makes me feel lost in the face of societal anger, hatred and lack of wisdom.

If this poor woman did commit suicide, we will never fully know why. Did this prank have something to do with it – very probably. Was it the prank itself or the outraged/ incredulous reactions of the hospital or celeb-hypnotised masses that contributed to her stress? I’m going to place my vote with the latter.

But you know – the truth is – this is a complex issue and as much as we want to be able to grasp onto simple explanations and find someone to blame, that simple explanation just doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion. And no – we can’t have this conversation in 140 characters on Twitter. It takes a lot more words. And a lot more compassion. And a lot more wisdom and thought.

Which brings me to my next point. Suicide.

(If this issue is a personal one for you, I would lovingly suggest you may not want to read further).

[SPACE]

Suicide is a terrible thing. It is – in my compassionate opinion – a tragic act committed by people who are so deep in the bowels of despair and depression that they are not able to fathom the ways in which their act will hurt and devastate the ones they love. I’m not placing blame here by the way – I understand very well the depths of despair that an individual must feel to think they have no other way out. Many even believe that their loved ones will be better off. They are in a seemingly never-ending spiral of despair and unhappiness for which only one end makes sense. It is a terrible place to be in (for some it is clinical) and those people deserve our help and compassion. But that doesn’t change the devastating effect it has on family and friends. It burdens surviving loved ones with an intolerably painful legacy. All of the grief that people feel when losing a loved one is magnified and complicated when a loved one suicides. Most people feel incredibly guilty – could I have helped? Did I miss the signs? How could I not have known? What if? What if?

So yes – let’s talk about suicide. Let’s talk about both the causes of it and the repercussions. Let’s help both those who are feeling suicidal and the families and survivors of people who have committed suicide. Survivors have to deal with oceans of guilt over these very types of issues we’re grappling with here. Mostly they don’t get the easy answers. Suicide is an act of violence on the self that ripples out and hits everyone associated with that person.

But let’s not kid ourselves here – we don’t get a ‘get out of jail free card’ on an issue like this. We don’t get to blame this suicide on two clueless DJs (who cannot have conceivably imagined that this stupid prank would end in this way) and thereby avoid having to talk about all the many cultural and personal contributing factors that would lead to such an act. We bear some collective responsibility for this through our celebrity obsessions, rancid media, cultural shaming and much more besides.

Some questions we could be asking ourselves (that could help us learn and grow from this) but aren’t, include

- How and why do we as a society make it hard for people to admit they’re ‘not coping’?
- Why do we make ‘failure’ and ‘mistakes’ such a big deal?
- What is the nature of ‘shame’ and how do we unravel it?
- Why are we fixated on celebrities and royalty to the extent that this nurse would have felt her life wasn’t worth living simply because she accidentally put through a false call?
- Are our nurses, carers and those in the helping professions sufficiently supported in the very difficult and stressful jobs they face?
- Why are we so hard on each other? So mean? So judgemental? So quick to anger? What are we hiding/ running from/ projecting away onto others? What would happen if we were to face it instead?
- Why does it take a tragedy like this for people’s hearts to be opened? Why do we close our hearts for the most part? How can we support each other to be more compassionate?
- How can we better understand suicidal depression and what can we do to help those suffering from it?
- What can we do to wean ourselves off our societal addiction to drama, negativity, the 24 hour news cycle, and meaningless gossip?
- And yes, should pranks be done away with or at the very least, better regulated? What is the appropriate level of responsibility for radio station who pull pranks?

Questions. So many helpful, useful questions that we could ask.

So – lets blame the DJs instead. Better that than take communal responsibility for our general insensitivity, for our success-obsessed culture which makes failure of any sort shameful, and for our celebrity obsessions. Just last week people were pouring over every detail of Kate Middleton’s pregnancy… juicy, juicy, juicy. Kate Middleton. Royals. Ooo err. Climate change? Whatevs. Royal pregnancy and morning sickness – now there’s a story. New Ideas and Woman’s Days were flying off the shelf. Give us more. Give us more. The prank made us laugh. We re-tweeted the shit out of that sucker. Details of her morning sickness were poured over.

So what are we really horrified over? Are we horrified at the two DJs – really? They pulled a bog-standard prank – the type of prank that is conducted by radio stations the world over. They asked the questions that every media outlet would have given their teeth to get the answers to, to satisfy a hungry horde. If the Daily Mail or the Sun or any of the other sanctimonious British tabloids making money out of leading the ‘outraged’ charge against the Aussie DJs could have gotten access to those answers from Kate’s nurses, they would have printed them in a blind second.

Or are we really horrified instead at our own societal psychopathy – a psychopathy that places importance on unimportant things and then laments when someone falls under the wheels of it. A psychopathy that enjoys the pranks and making fun of people and public humiliation, until something goes horribly wrong. Didn’t many people laugh at this prank last week? Didn’t many think it was a bit of harmless fun? Didn’t it go viral? Don’t many of us eat up that New Idea/ Woman’s Day garbage about Kate Middleton’s pregnancy, and how fat Kirstie Alley is now, and whether Rihanna will go back to her abusive ex-boyfriend?

Think about what this hard-working nurse potentially killed herself over. A prank that led to some information being released about some lady’s morning sickness. Is it just me or does this seem shamefully meaningless? Doesn’t it make you want to weep?

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that out of everything that could have contributed to this poor woman’s state of mind – the prank call itself was not the worst or even probably the biggest contributing factor. Yes, had it never happened – she could possibly still be here. But here’s another ‘IF’… if we didn’t care as much about royalty or celebrities, if the press didn’t make as big a deal out of the whole thing, if the press hadn’t hounded her, if she personally hadn’t felt humiliated over it and instead had been able to laugh it off, if the hospital had supported them unconditionally and gotten them the emotional support they needed, hell – if the hospital had even put in place the proper and obvious protocols around answering calls to do with the Duchess … if, if, if… she would also possibly still be here.

(You know what IS foreseeable? Prank calls to get information on royal pregnancies.)

If we’re talking contributing factors to scapegoat – there’s a hell of a lot of room there to share the ‘blame’… if blame is the game you want to play with this. And I guess my point here is I don’t think we should.

Let me be even more specific here – someone else, someone who wasn’t Jacintha Saldahna, may not have committed suicide over this. After all – the nurse who gave away the information, and easily made the bigger mistake, has as far as I know not harmed herself as a result. So there was something personal for Jacintha that caused this ‘humiliation’ to feel so extreme and so terrible that she could see no other way out for herself. Her personal head-space and the cultural meaning she associated to the act was as much if not more of a contributing factor to her suicide than anything else. Can we take communal responsibility for that? Should we take communal responsibility for that? A bit. A lot. I don’t have any easy answers. (Also my point).

The two DJs and their radio station ARE guilty – they’re guilty of failure to imagine that the person on the other side of the line has a different emotional reality, set of values, set of stressers, physical preconditions, and whole life going on. But that’s hardly unique. In fact, I’d say it’s at fucking epidemic levels. It is a problem that is wide-spread and largely facilitated, supported and tolerated by the masses. (And being demonstrated so aptly at the moment by the ‘outrage’ brigade).

Where does scapegoating end and communal or even personal responsibility begin? What do we learn by projecting our societal madness onto two people? And what is the logical end-point of seeking to find someone to blame, thereby avoiding the complexity of the issue?

The media collectively shamed this poor woman because we the people think Kate Middleton’s pregnancy is so bloody important in the scheme of things happening in the world today that it was nigh on horrific that her privacy had been breached – and that was a story that would sell. We also possibly humiliated her by going on about how ‘unbelievable’ it was that she fell for it and by shaming her for being so ‘stupid’ and making the mistake. And then when she apparently commits suicide from despair and humiliation (again – not certain, only postulated), we can’t cope with what that says about us as a society – so instead of having the conversation we could be having, we project our collective guilt onto the two people instead. Much easier. And mostly missing the irony of being abusive and horrible to two strangers for something we considered abusive and horrible.

Today a family is grieving and asking themselves ‘what if’ and ‘why’. They may never have the answers. We certainly never will. In the manner of many suicides, we probably won’t ever know what was going on in the mind of someone who felt so at the end of their tether that ending their pain was the only thing they could think about. Beyond family and loved ones. Beyond anything.

Our focus should be on doing whatever it takes to make her family’s journey easier. Not on spewing out even more negativity, hatred and vitriol. Lending the inner blackness of our rampant human and societal egos to an ever dissolving public discourse.

A tragedy happened here. Let’s treat it with the reverence, wisdom and compassion it deserves.

Just a thought.

PS. So much more to say… so much already said. I may also do a blog post some time about the phenomena of projecting personal grief onto a stranger’s death. But that’ll do for now. If you’re after a good read on this issue, Bernard Keane breaks it down well in Crikey:
http://www.crikey.com.au/2012/12/10/resisting-the-witch-hunt-on-the-royal-prank-call/

A Thank You For Strong Women

As a little girl, I wanted to do something important with my life. In stories and movies, I always associated with the hero (usually a male). I was always opinionated and passionate. I always cared very deeply. I wanted to do something extraordinary – something that would shine and inspire others. Something that would change the world for the better. I wanted to climb mountains. Scale battlements. Inspire the masses. Storm the castle. Give me golden armour and a sword; and maybe a gypsy earring. Let me dance by the open fire in a forest. Let me howl at the moon with the wolves. Let me paint, act, sing, dance, tell stories. Let me suck the marrow out of life. 

As a little girl, this all seemed possible to me. I refused to believe people when they told me life wasn’t like that. I refused to listen to those who told me to be more ‘realistic’. I had no concept, as a little girl, that there were different rules for women than for men. I had no idea of it. Despite my dad being quite a traditionalist in his personal life and relationship with my mum – with his daughters he tread a more liberal, progressive, and enabling line. We were to get an education and be able to take care of ourselves. While he didn’t believe that I could quite do anything I wanted to (starting with being an actress, astronaut or archaeologist), he did believe I should have a career. Marriage was less important.

As a little girl, I believed I should be able to do anything and I fought against anyone who tried to tell me differently. My mum had always told me I could. There was no reason to think otherwise.

It took some time, an introduction to some very conservative views in the Greek-Australian community at University, and the slow dawning of the mainstream media on my consciousness to realise that a lot of the rest of the world didn’t agree with me.

I didn’t realise it was more important to the mainstream community that I be lady-like or ‘feminine’ than that I have opinions about the world. It dawned on me quite late, that getting married was a very important sign of ‘desirability’ and acceptableness in the world. When an ex-boyfriend of mine at university angrily opined that he wished I’d stop hanging around with the guys talking politics, and go talk to the ’girls’ about ‘girl stuff’ (e.g. shoes) instead, I gaped at him like he’d grown two horns on his head and pooped out an elephant.

But the more I saw of this stuff, the more I realised I didn’t fit in. Only in later life did I realise how many damaging things I’d internalised over the years. And the beliefs were pretty insidious:  

• Strong women aren’t loveable, men find them too intimidating and frightening. I was a strong woman so I must be unloveable.
• ‘Feminism’ is dirty, dirty word. I’d have to let go of that if I was ever to find love. If only I could let go of this idea of ‘feminism’ I’d be able to twist a man around my little finger. But ‘feminism’? A man’s ego wouldn’t allow it.
•  I had a chip on my shoulder. I was too angry.
•  I wasn’t lady-like enough. I was too opinionated. I didn’t care enough about how I looked.
• Dreams were a waste of time. The world was run by money and self-interest, and I’d need to lose my idealism if I wanted to get by. My dreams would die under the harsh light of the ‘real world’.
• Expressing myself authentically makes other people uncomfortable. I should try for less of that, and more of getting along well with others. Then I’d get whatever I wanted, but first I needed to learn how to ‘play the game’. My straight forward manner was problematic. I was problematic.

I don’t particularly blame anyone for these opinions by the way – it is just the stuff out there in the mainstream narrative that I internalised without realising how deeply those beliefs stood in my way. And society doesn’t mean it to be damaging. Even your parents – when they tell you these things – are only trying to protect you and keep you safe. Most of the time people want what’s best for you. Everyone is doing their best. Many people are themselves living in the shadow and limitations of these beliefs.

I can’t quite put into words what this is like though, when you feel the pressure of this narrative on one side and the siren call of your own soul on the other. I’ll only say that it creates a dichotomy – a splitting on a deep soul level – between who you feel yourself to authentically be and who you end up trying to become in order to please the world and ‘fit in’. In order to make people less uncomfortable. For many years, I tried to squeeze the complexity of myself into a box labelled ‘acceptable’. Of course, it made me miserable and I was never very good at it.

Anyone who has ever felt out of step with mainstream values and societal norms will know the loneliness and often the sense of helplessness this can engender. It is lonely to feel yourself at the fringe of society and to not see yourself reflected in the world around you. 

I only decided to take the long journey into reclaiming my essential self after my second serious relationship broke down. It was only then – at about age 26 – that I started to question everything about who I was, where I was going, who I’d allowed myself to be, what was true for me and what was not. The next decade was about this slow, crucial reclaiming of myself – culminating in finding impro in my late 30’s and returning to my most authentic self. And still, there have been demons to fight, personal dragons to slay, and childhood traumas to heal. The process isn’t over yet. It probably will never be over.

So I am extremely grateful today to reflect on all of this and realise – looking around me – that I am suddenly surrounded by strong, capable, confident, talented, spiritual and connected women, who model for me both on stage and in their own lives the kind of woman I love and have always hoped to be. And they are incredible. They challenge everyone around them (men and women alike) to rise to their level – rather than forcing themselves to sink down into the box society calls ‘acceptable’. They shine brightly, and unapologetically, and in so doing inspire all around them to shine too.

So to those women I today give heartfelt thanks – you know who you are. You rock my world. Thanks for existing and for being in my life, so that I can now look back at little Vicki and tell her there’s absolutely nothing wrong with her. That she is perfect just as she is.

And somewhere in the deep past, a five year old girl looks up and gives me a bright, world-changing, wolf-howling, loving grin.  “Head up, kid. You’re not alone.”

No Alan Jones. I am not a cyber-bully.

Thinky thoughts today about Alan Jones and the furore that has erupted both over his comments and the unprecedented social media campaign around them.

People have many different opinions about this and it’s not all straight forward lefties on one side and righties on the other.

But there is an argument out there that the social media campaign that has sprung up targeting Jones’s sponsors is threatening our freedom of speech (and perhaps association). Jones and 2GB themselves have railed today against this ‘cyber-bullying’ and how this is putting innocent people out of work and damaging business.

Allow me to vehemently and completely disagree.

We live in a world where much of our public policy is affected by private money and corporate influence. Where radio personalities like Alan Jones can and have wielded out-of-proportion influence to the audiences they represent. And where this does and has had a very, very real impact on our world, on what we’ve been able to achieve and on how we’ve been able to tackle very important and challenging societal problems.

The all-powerful narrative of the buck and the market means that everything these days must be reduced to a dollar figure to be understood and valued. We are treated by both politicians and the market as consumers first, and human beings very much later.

This reality has meant that people like Jones, and the big corporates have been able to ride democracy their own way for a very long time. They have big pulpits  bought with big money and with big microphones that they use to push their own (mostly conservative) agendas, often at the expense of the facts and the best interest of the rest of the community. The rest of the community – numbering in our millions – have had no real voice at all outside of the voting booth and our ability to band together over common interest.

Jones in particular has used his big microphone to sprout religious intolerance, racial vilification, sexism, and the most vile abuse towards a Prime Minister I’ve witnessed since I can remember being old enough to be politically aware.

And up until now he has done it with complete immunity and without the consequences that most of the rest of the world would have to wear for disgracing themselves and their employers.

Let’s face it – Jones has had a pretty sweet (and free) ride – up to now.

Social media changes things. It gives everyone a voice. Anyone with access to the internet can post a comment, send an email, tweet or facebook their thoughts. We can blog – and many bloggers have bigger audiences these days than traditional media personalities. It’s the way of the new world. It poses incredible challenges (such as how rife actual cyber-bullying and trolling is). But it also poses incredible opportunities for free speech such as we’ve never seen before. Now anyone who can write can have as big a microphone as Jones has enjoyed for years.

So colour me unimpressed that Alan now feels he’s being cyber-bullied.  No Alan – you’re not. You’ve mistaken my right to do business with whom I choose with bullying. Real cyber-bullying is very different.

Here it is in a sentence– after decades of turning us all into consumers and using that power to make over our society in the corporate image and damage those things that many of us hold dear, no one now has the right to turn around and claim I’m bullying them by exercising my right as a consumer to do business with whom I want.

You cannot make me into a ‘consumer’ and then cry foul when I use my ‘consumer’ influence to stand for what is important to me. You don’t get to be that much of a hypocrite.

I’m sure it must get up their noses. I’m sure it must really make them mad – this idea that we ‘consumers’ have found a way through all this corporate bile to utilise the system to stand up for a more decent and respectful societal discourse. They built a cross for their own backs, and now they don’t want to carry it?

That’s the power of social media.

Let me make it clear – I don’t deny Alan Jones his right to say whatever he wants. But by God – I claim my right to use the methods at my disposal (social media and the power of my dollar) to talk as loudly as he does. And to stand, finally, against the religious intolerance, science-denialism, anti-environmentalism, sexism and hateful rhetoric that he sprouts on a daily basis. If that has the follow-on effect of losing Jones and 2GB money and perhaps even shutting his show down, then he and his corporate mates own responsibility for that. Not me or those like me who are merely standing for what we believe in. He has the option after all of expressing his different opinions in a more respectful, polite and non-sexist way. I have a right to not do business with companies who support him while he chooses disrespectful and damaging rhetoric.

That doesn’t make me a cyber-bully.
Nor does it make me a danger to freedom of speech.

In fact it makes me a champion of free speech.

And actually that’s not just a thought.

Over and out.

We Fucked UP! Hooray!

Thinky thoughts today about joy – about how we wait for it. About how elusive it sometimes seems. And about negativity. About the way our thoughts get mistaken for reality.

Nothing new here in these thoughts. But occasionally in life you have the moments when things coalesce for you a bit. When life seems to sing out a song of ‘you’re onto something’. 

Today is one of those days. Okay I admit – it helps that it’s a beautiful sunny day and there’s probably something in that which has affected the chemical mix in my brain and organised things internally so that some thoughts come more quickly to the surface than others.

I’ve never been one to dwell too much into the depths of the genetic and chemical makeup of the human being. That’s for others. For me, reducing everything to mere physics and biology doesn’t help to navigate the practicalities of the world. My ocean is one of emotions, thoughts, spirituality, essence.

So today I want to talk about joy.

I’m a big one for creating our own realities. I think that what we believe becomes thought and what we think dictates action and how we act pulls things in towards us or repels them away. So you can really want to be very rich but if you hold problematic beliefs about the nature of money, then you will probably find yourself unable to manifest it for yourself or hold onto it for very long.

Similarly for love and almost any human endeavour.

This isn’t about sugary positive affirmations to cover things up – this is more a genuine, conscious relationship with your own inner world to learn how your beliefs affect what you’re experiencing in the world. No number of positive affirmations in my opinion can disguise what you really think and feel.
But that way of being in the world relies on always driving the creation of things in your life. And sometimes driving them very hard.

And today I’ve been thinking about joy. Which seems to me to be less about driving and more about being. Less about actively creating our lives but of about enjoying them. And it seems to me that joy also comes with acceptance and an openness to something other than what you think you need in life at any given moment. 

If we’re driving really hard to Point A we may miss that Point B is infinitely more interesting. If we think what we really need is to be X, we may miss the joy that comes with being Y.

We’re a bundle of contradicting cultural and social pressures, us humans, mixed in with genetics and parenting styles. In amongst all that, joy can seem utterly elusive. Look outside of yourself for one moment and you’re bound to be assailed by countless different perspectives and many of them will tell you what’s completely and utterly wrong with you and the world we live in.
You’re bad because you’re single. You’re bad because you’re a woman. You’re bad because you don’t have a kid. You’re bad if you’re a man and you cry. You’re bad if you’re too thin. You’re bad if you’re too heavy. You’re bad if you buy this t-shirt. You’re bad if you don’t. You’re bad if you’re this sort of artist. You’re bad if you’re that sort. You’re just bad.

Don’t paint your toe-nails? Bad.
Paint them? How superficial are you.
Didn’t finish that bit of work you had to do? Lazy.
Work too hard? Work-a-holic loser. Life is about spontenaity.

Yes, it is pretty much guaranteed that in this emotionally and psychologically damaged cultural collective that you will find someone who can pinpoint twenty reasons in five minutes why you should be really down on yourself. They’ll also probably tell you how to fix it. Now do you have a bunch of stuff you could be doing better and more effectively? Probably. We all do.

I, for instance, am probably the single most disorganised person I know. I can’t organise my way out of a bucket. It’s problematic because I have so much I want to achieve but I’m just goddam lazy sometimes and other times I genuinely don’t think of things ahead of time. Things sneak up on me and suddenly, as much as I think I’ve got things sorted, there’s twenty things I need to do and I needed to do them yesterday. 

Fines collect up on my desk because I forget to pay them. I have a jacket in my cupboard which has needed to be taken to the dry-cleaner for about twelve months. I’ve got shoes I don’t wear because I haven’t gotten around to fixing them. Yup, I’m my parent’s most disorganised child and a cause of much exasperation.

And yes, there are emotional issues I should be well on top of at this point. Well on top of. I mean how old am I? Five? 
But you know what – I’m pretty freaking awesome anyway. 

So are you – whoever you are reading this right now, no matter what’s going on in your life, with all your ‘problems’ and challenges and fuck-ups and failures – you’re pretty freaking awesome. Hey – as we say in the impro world – we fucked up! Hooray!!! Maybe that’s joy.

You know what else is joy? Being easy on each other. Not telling ourselves or each other off for shortcomings. Allowing someone else to fuck up without making it important that they did. Letting someone be human. Letting someone be imperfect. Loving them anyway. Letting ourselves make mistakes and loving ourselves anyway. Doing the wrong thing and forgiving yourself. Allowing yourself to forgive someone else too. Yeh, that’s definitely joy.

And I reckon what we create from that space is infinitely better for us and our community. 

Lets free ourselves from this misery of having to be anything other than exactly who we are. Lets just be joy.

Just a thought.

Is Anybody Listening?

Thinky thoughts today about communication (and about how greed has poisoned our world and could prove to be the most deadly of the seven deadly sins – but let’s leave greed to another thinky thought, shall we). 

First about communication. This thing that is called exchanging information.

It’s brought home to me daily, by virtue of what I do, that communication is at the centre of much of our dis

tress as a human race. The way we speak and write. The things we say. The things we mean. The things we don’t mean. The things we do mean but pretend we didn’t say. The things we want to mean but don’t want to come outright and say or take ownership of. All of the above in one big cesspool of miscommunication. 

Or we could just call it a missed chance at communication. 

It was brought home to me today again because of some copy I’ve been editing. Several pages of very important information from one of our scientific programs here at MSI. Scientists have this fabulous way of writing that makes everything as clear as mud. Because nothing in science can be definitively stated, everything must be qualified. So in the end you end up not really saying what it is you really want to say but trying to say it anyway and trying to sound sort of definitive about that even though you really can’t be definitive at all.

You got that? 
Yeh, me neither.

It does drive home for me though how incredibly important it is – this communication thing – and how very often we take the process for granted. Too often we think that the important part of communication is that we have said what we’ve wanted to say – even if that saying is illegible to someone else or no-one’s listening. Whereas the important part of it – the most important part actually – is that the recipient of that communication has understood us.

There’s a few things that I say to my peeps over here at MSI about communication, and have said throughout my career as a Paid Communicator cum PR person, that it occurs to me apply deeply to our personal lives. 

The first of these is that – when instigating this process of communication - you should probably make sure that the person or people you are talking to want to listen or have any vested interest in listening to you at all. All too often we make the mistake I think of assuming that because we’re talking, someone owes it to us to listen. Nothing could be further from the truth. And even if you have somehow managed to shanghai someone into ‘listening’ to you, there’s no real guarantee that they are actually ‘listening’ to you at all. In fact, according to the International Listening Association (www.listen.org), most of us are distracted, preoccupied or forgetful about 75% of the time that we pretend we are listening and immediately after we listen to someone, we only recall about 50% of what they said. 

(Have you ever continued to talk at someone even after you’ve become peripherally aware that they’re no longer really listening but are just being polite? I have.)

The second thing that I often tell my peeps over here is that if you are going to communicate something, and you’ve scored the bonus of having someone who wants to listen and they are doing a half-way reasonable job at it, then you ought probably to try to say this thing of yours in a way that makes sense to them or approximates as closely as possible what you actually ‘mean’. By which I mean that just because you said it and they heard it, doesn’t mean they heard what you said.

(Have you ever talked to someone using your own ‘metaphor-rich-language’ only to watch people’s eyes glaze over as they struggle to understand the intricacies of what you mean? I have.)

It strikes me that both of these things are super-applicable to our lives. It starts by acknowledging that we all have an individual language that we all speak… that we all use words in a way that makes perfect sense to us and carries with it a lot of inherent and implied meaning that we forget to double-check the other person has understood. 

I constantly forget to check that what I’m saying has been understood by the person I’m saying it to. I also make the mistake in reverse of assuming that someone meant what I think they meant without checking. It’s gotten me into trouble in love and life.
How many times have you had a conversation and ‘agreed’ on something with a loved one, co-worker or friend only to find that actually you both had a very different memory of what that agreement was – sometimes a diametrically opposite understanding.

How is that possible? And yet it happens so often. What might you currently even be thinking you understand about what someone has recently said to you that is completely wrong? Ever been insulted, only to find out that the person in question hadn’t intended to be insulting? Where does the insult lie then – does it lie with the person, who didn’t mean it, or with you who carries around embedded meaning in your psyche that makes that thing insulting? Or somewhere in between? And when we feel insulted, what is it that hurts us? (Ouch, my poor head.) 

It’s on a continuum of course and depending on what example just sprung into your head, you may think you know the answer to that question one way or another. 

But let’s expand this out to broader conversations – national conversations. Jesus – are we even having one? Suddenly, the disaster that is our politics comes into clearer focus. What are we yelling at each other? And when I yell, is the other side even listening? If they’re listening, what are they hearing? And so, why do we yell? The speed with which we all take offence and fumigate and posture makes even less sense when seen through this prism. I mean, what are we trying to achieve? Who’s winning here? Can we all just stop yelling now? 

And even more questions zooming around in my head today about this: What have I assumed I’ve understood about what I’ve heard or read today? What am I actually reacting to? Is it what someone has written or said or is it what I think they’ve written or said and the implications of that given my values and the meaning I construct in the world? 

Most importantly - have I made any important decisions about someone or something based on what I think I’ve understood? Have I checked this understanding? If not, why not? Crikey – I bet I ought to check that understanding before I get pissed off at that person or people.

It’s a bottomless pit this communication and language thing I tell you. Once you jump into it, you’ll not quickly jump out. 

I mean do you even know what you’ve just been reading? Maybe I don’t even mean what you think I mean at all. 

Just a thought. 
;)

No More Mr Nice Guy

Thinky thoughts today about boundaries and the ‘nice guys finish last’ trope that have come together in a sort of ‘schmooshing’ of ideas. It got me thinking about responsibility – how difficult it is to take it, how our perspectives colour our view of the world and the people around us, and how in our society we’re not taught to see ourselves as the authors of our own reality. Bear with me here. 

I think there’s a point in all of this. It’s one I’ve made before, but I can’t help but come back to it. It seems so pertinent to me in all areas of life. 

Today on his Facebook page, George Takei posted a comic-strip of a couple cuddling in bed. There are some panels of them canoodling and the gal telling the guy how nice he is to her, how well he treats her, what a nice guy he is. The joke is on the final panel when she says: “I feel bad for you though… It’s gonna hurt like a sonofabitch when I decide to leave you for some manipulative bad-boy.”

Let’s leave the douche-baggery of the typical woman-hating comments that comic prompted aside for a moment. I want to focus on those comments that were mainly along these lines:

“It has happened to me about…. 3 times or so.”

“uh HUH! Yup! Exactly. This is exactly what will happen to all the overly-emotional, spineless dudes out there who think that that’s the way to a woman’s heart.”

“I had a girlfriend exactly like this. So typical.”

“Story of my life!”

“If it didn’t happen all the time, this wouldn’t even exist! Sure not all women are this way, but an overwhelming majority seem to not care about what the guy is like as much as how much swag he has.”

“I thought as myself as the nice guy b4. Felt hurt all the time. But now I’m like “F**k It!!””

“Sounds about right!”

“This happened to me. The girl even said she knew the guy is going to beat her. And he did. I was lucky to get rid of that idiot.”

“Nice guys finish last. I don’t understand why woman likes guys that treat them like shit?!!!!!”
You get the picture.

Can you see the common thread? And no it’s not the generally tendency to hate on women, although there is A LOT of that on the wider thread.

The commonality is that none of these comments, or the thousands of similar comments posted, reflect any self-awareness at all about their experiences. None of these people seem to take responsibility for themselves.

Now granted, a small comment is not enough room to make that judgement definitively. So I use them only as examples of a broader topic. That is the generally tendency we have to need to believe that it is something else other than us that is to blame for our unhappiness – and most of the time in love, we’ll blame it on the gender. As if there is a biological imperative that makes members of the sex we find attractive singularly unable to appreciate us. Which of course masks a much deeper malaise – the idea that actually, if I drill down too deep, I’ll discover that it’s not them that’s a ‘stupid, idiotic, worthless piece of shit’, but actually it’s me.

You can apply this to any issue in life – love, work, friendship, whether you’ve met your potential in life. These are all things that come down to a series of choices we make, but that we generally make unconsciously. And it’s not easy man – it’s fucking hard really – to look at yourself and take responsibility for all of that.

So I don’t say this to shame them. Unfortunately we’ve not been taught to view ourselves as the authors of our own experiences or given the tools to lovingly nurture this part of ourselves into health. We are taught to victimise ourselves twice-over by projecting our hurt or bad experiences onto someone else - anything else – as long as we don’t have to look too closely at ourselves. 

I’ve been guilty of it myself. 

In love, it goes something like this: Person X treated me badly. They didn’t treat me the way I deserved. They used me and abused me. Or they took what they needed and then they left me. I was so good to them. I loved them so much. I gave them so much. And what they gave me in return was a pile of shit. 

Then Person Y came along. He/ she was no better. They didn’t treat me the way I deserved. They used me and abused me. I loved them so much. I gave them so much. And what they gave me in return was a pile of shit.

Then Person Z came along. They didn’t treat me the way I deserved…. etc etc. Why are all men/ women losers? I hate them! I’m going to treat the next person who comes along mean in return because clearly they are biologically incapable of being loving.

Confession: at one point in my life, this was me. Okay – not the ‘treating the next person mean’ bit. I’ve never actually been capable of that. But at one point I was sure – deep in my bones – that all men were hurtful and I suspected that they were simply incapable of being giving and loving in the way that women were. True story. You may not think it to look at me now, but the people closest to me know the long battle I waged against those demons. Old grizzly demons with big teeth.

There comes a point though, after the third or fourth such experience, when you really ought to look at yourself and go – what’s the common thread here. Is it everybody else? Or could it actually be… me? 

These questions help: how are am I turning up in life and love? Am I giving people the permission to treat me badly by not standing up for myself? Do I speak up for myself? Did I speak my truth? Do I recognise good behaviour when I see it? Can I distinguish between someone who is worth my time and effort and someone who is not? What are my deal breakers? Did I stick by them? Did I follow my intuition? Did I ignore the red-flags? Can I stand by my behaviour? Did I play the victim? Did I give over all my power? 

The point of these questions then in my mind, isn’t for us to victimise ourselves thrice-over by blaming ourselves for everything. It is merely to reclaim our power – to recognise that we are the authors of our lives. That we give permission in often subtle ways for people to devalue us and treat us less well than we deserve. And we can choose to be constant victims – and blame our misfortune in life and love on biology, fate and the pure mean-spiritedness of others, or the general crappiness of the world. Or we can choose to reclaim our power, learn from our experiences, set better boundaries and expectations and open ourselves up to greater and bigger love as a result.

Someone wise said to me the other day that being in love and receiving someone else's love comes with great responsibility. And I believe this to be powerfully true. We need to be responsible to each other but also to ourselves and for ourselves.

No more victimisation. No more buying into the idea of ‘Mr Nice Guy Who Perpetually Loses At Love’. 

Better to be a genuinely Great Person, with lots of genuine love for yourself and everyone around you and with the responsibility to be accountable to yourself and for yourself. Then you’ll never lose. You’ll only ever win.

Just a thought. 

21 December 2012 - End of the World?

Thinky thoughts today about 21 December 2012 – the end of the Mayan calendar. And thinking about something my dad said when I was over visiting him in Adelaide this weekend. He said to me during one of our many philosophical conversations: “I think there’s something in it. People all over the world are boiling over at the injustices. You can’t have 5% of the people in the world owning 90% of the world’s limited resources, while everyone else goes hungry. Things just can’t go on like this much longer.”  I paraphrase very slightly, but that’s the gist of it.

I’d never heard my dad talk like this before – of change in the wind, of injustice and people the world over being ready to address it. I’d never heard him talk about positive change. Mostly my dad has been a ‘the world sucks and that’s just the way it is’ type of guy. Mostly what I’d heard as a kid consisted of ‘it’s each man to himself…  money makes the world go around…. don’t be idealistic’. So to hear him talk about it in this way – only days after another friend of mine and I had a similar conversation, which was only days after my hairdresser started talking to me about related issues quite unprompted by me – got me to thinking.

There’s change in the wind. There’s no doubt in my mind.
Everywhere I go I have conversations with people that point to an awakening.

This may seem counterintuitive because everywhere I look I can also see people yelling at each other, talking past each other, being angrier than they’ve ever been, abusing each other, nay-saying, fearing, dismissing, being generally unhappy about things and also being sure that it’s completely someone else’s fault.

So how to account for those conversations. Conversations of empathy, of seeing that something is very wrong (or perhaps finally very right for change), of noticing that something’s got to give. Conversations of people finding their own path and figuring out how they can make a difference in the world. Conversations that point to a desire to create a better future, and not just that, but the certainty that the better future is within reach and in some ways utterly inevitable.

I could point to lots of ‘evidence’ and eloquent articles about how our current paradigm – the way we’ve structured things – is in the middle of a serious decline and disolution.
Articles like this one:  http://paulgilding.com/discussion-papers/scream-crash-boom-2

But for me what’s most ironic is that it is being enabled by the very thing that is now in the process of forming into something new – the principles that led to the industrial revolution which saw the emergence of widespread public education. The industrial revolution is in many ways I think partly responsible for the social revolution that has followed in its wake. A social movement that has seen many people rise out of poverty, women’s suffrage and the right to an education and a vote, a civil rights movement, the formation of unions and worker’s rights, the rise of the secular state, the rights of the child and banning of child labour, international bodies of cooperation like the UN, the banning and dismantling of slavery in Britain and the US, human rights charters, the incredible rise of environmentalism, LGBT rights, the Arab spring, corporate accountability, and the rise of a generation of people who are not religious but who are defining their own personal spirituality based on empathy and civic responsibility. Even Pussy Riot – a group of young feminists taking it to one of the most patriarchal societies in the world – and the outrage in the US over the GOP’s misogynistic platform points to a much-needed re-emergence of feminist thinking.

If you picture this all as a big bang, with its germination in the incredible intellectual progress and in many ways spiritual crises of the late 1800’s, we are only now starting to see how it is reframing and redesigning our world; and how it is beginning to impact even the most conservative countries and cultures. By anyone’s definition, the last 150 years have been privy to the most incredible social revolution and evolution of human consciousness that the world has ever seen.

Sometimes we get lost in the microscopic view of what is happening right now, and of the short-term rises and falls on a longer path. But pull out a bit and suddenly the bigger picture comes into view. You start to see that the change that began with the rise of the unions and the vote for women is still ongoing and that we are the generation stuck between what was and what will be.
That we are the generation  that gets to decide where to from here.

Yet how do we account for all the negativity. How do we account for Syria, and Putin, and the industrial-military complex, for the Tea Party and the rise of the extreme right. How to account for the corporate criminals and Wall Street greed, for the Andrew Bolts, Alan Jones’s and Tony Abbott’s of the world who feed and live off people’s fear of the unknown… who sow the seeds of division. How do we account for the two world wars, for Vietnam and Korea, and Afghanistan and Iraq, for 911.  For Israel and Palestine. In many ways this warfare and greed is not new – it’s just the same stuff of centuries past, repackaged into a convenient 24 hour news cycle.

(Although did you know, we are the most peaceful generation of humans in the history of our species: http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html)  

In any case, to understand this on an archetypal and meta level, I look to Jung and his description of the Shadow. When talking about the Shadow, Jung wrote: "Everyone carries a shadow… and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”

According to Jung (and Wikipedia) the shadow is instinctive and irrational and prone to projection. (That is it is good at turning a personal moral deficiency and inferiority and reflecting onto someone else).

But Jung also believed that while the shadow might be the dark and sinister part of a human being, it was also the seat of creativity and represented “the true spirit of life”.

For Jung the only way to deal with the shadow was to first see it and accept it in its entirety. That is to bring it out into the light for examination. In fact, he considered encountering the shadow as crucial to evolving consciousness and the breakdown of the constructed ‘persona’.

Putting it into my own words then, it seems to me that on any journey to become a more conscious, aware and empathetic person, we must first look at our shadow side – that part of us that we project onto others because it is too painful to admit it in ourselves.

Look at the way conversations between right-wing and left-wing people run in the online world and you will find ample evidence of projection. Both accuse each other of moral deficiency. Both accuse each other of intellectual-inferiority. Both accuse each other of hypocrisy. That is no accident to my way of thinking. We are mirroring each other… which is shadow-projection in practice.

I think that what is happening culturally now on a super-narrative level is the bringing of the shadow into our conscious awareness. If we are seeing an explosion of light and awareness and empathy, we are also seeing an explosion of fear and negativity. And it is no coincidence in my mind that we are seeing both at the same time.

Rather I think it is evidence that the old structures and belief systems around us are starting to finally dissolve and as they do human fear and negativity is hitting a high. It is everywhere to be seen and everyone can see it. People are finally starting to ask the question – why are we so afraid… and they are discovering that the answers lie often with ourselves, our belief systems, and the stories we are telling ourselves.

The only question then remains for me, what beliefs, stories and structures are we going to replace them with, and that in my mind is far from decided.  We are still writing that part. That is still vague and shrouded in future mist.

Martin Luther King once said: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”

I would say that maybe we are on the far-end of that arc now – a moment of technological, social and spiritual revolution. A time where the old structures are finally coming down. That what looks like destruction, is actually the communal shadow being integrated and bringing with it a moment of genuine creative potential.

I think that’s something worth celebrating.

Just a thought.