Suicides Are Cowards...and Other Lies
In the wake of the suicide of Robin Williams reams are being written and pundits are pundit-ing in an orgy of opinion that is largely derived from religious taboos that have become deeply embedded in Western culture. How many times must we flush before the cliches like "Suicides are cowards" and "Suicides are selfish people" go away? It's time to put aside "received wisdom" if for no other reason than that there is no such thing. Wisdom is very much an individual achievement. It results from thinking deeply about our own perceptions and experiences - our own, not the regurgitated bromides of the unthinking. Death happens to us all and yet no two deaths are the same, ever. Because each of us has a unique set of experiences that make up a life. The same event can happen to millions of people but their experience of that event is as individual as her DNA. Thus, many people suffer from Depression but no two cases are ever identical and no two people will have exactly the same experience of this painful state because it results from a combination of our unique neurochemistry and our particular sensibility.
Suicides Are Tragic, Not Cowardly
When we see the manic brilliance of a Robin Williams riffing onstage totally off script we are delighted by the spontaneous outpouring of comedic genius. We overflow with a pleasure-love cocktail of endorphins and oxytocin that releases tension in our muscles whilst providing us with an opportunity to express a public affection that is usually reserved for intimate moments. But, as thousands of people have said over the past few days, we also recognise the deflation that comes after the manic performance. The performer, too, has been bathed in hormones but they are of a different sort: an adrenaline high brought on by the compulsion to express a hidden rage against the pillars of conventionality between which we are all chained in childhood before we have the means to express our knowledge that people are hiding their real feelings from us. Their real selves hide behind a set of expected behaviours that prevent any deep experience in the moment in favour of "putting the best possible face on it". That is conventional wisdom in action and we have all been programmed to accept and participate in it. All of us except those who have kept faith with the child inside who continued to see the disconnect between uncomfortable reality and the"scripted" responses we see in those around us.
We all have a choice to make in this regard: be loyal to our real and honest feelings about experience or betray ourselves through dis-loyalty to the Self and become self-loathing game players who "go along to get along".
Unfortunately, 'going along" means abandoning our originality and our creativity in order to play a part in a drama not of our making. Self-loathing expresses itself in many ways from self-neglect and self-destructive behaviours addictions to blaming others for the pain we create for ourselves. This latter "coping mechanism" leads to the endless violence and blood-shed that makes up what we are taught to see as "the real world". We recognise violence and destruction are a form of insanity but what we fail to see is the insanity of "normality" that causes the introversion of a rage so deep we dare not acknowledge its presence. But those who are still in conflict with the controls imposed on them childhood - usually arbitrarily and unthinkingly by parents who are also hiding their pain as they were taught to do - act out the unacknowledged rage around them by turning it against the world.
Comedy and Violence
The irony is that both the comedic genius and the violent miscreant have a great deal in common. Hugely talented people like Robin Williams act out the insanity of our cultural conditioning by making us see the absurdities we are taught are "normal" or "real". For a brief moment, the child inside Robin pops out and like a precocious five-year old expresses deep truths that we recognise at the same time as we join him in rejecting and skewering them within the safety of a darkened theatre. That is why we flock to see people like Robin and Whoopie, Billy Crystal and Dan Ackroyd, and performances like those of the Ballet Trocodero de Monte Carlo. They take our social shibboleths and turn them upside-down and shake them to reveal the absurdity inside and do it in a way that lets us know we are not alone in perceiving the insanity that passes for normality. But that gift comes at a price and for some performers, the cost is their own emotional balance. When someone we associate with high humour retreats from us into his or her private world of unresolved psychic pain, we nod our heads in recognition of the darkness we always perceived beneath the mask of manic wit. Suicides do not want to die; they want to end the chronic pain of struggling to live in a mad world. Suicides are not cowards; they are mortally wounded combatants in a war they cannot stop and cannot seem to escape in any other way. Thank them for their gifts to us whilst they were here and think of them with compassion now that they are gone.
© Delia O' Riordan 2014
http://www.psychic-delia.com
