I didn’t want to wish anyone on Twitter Happy Christmas (or
happy holidays) this year. I had to force myself.
It’ s not that I don’t want them to be cheery. It’s just not how I’m feeling, politically speaking any way.
Christmas is always a strange time for the sanest of us, let alone those with an anxiety disorder or other condition.
It’ s not that I don’t want them to be cheery. It’s just not how I’m feeling, politically speaking any way.
Christmas is always a strange time for the sanest of us, let alone those with an anxiety disorder or other condition.
As my doppelganger FCM I’ve had a Twitter account for a few months now. It consists mainly of links to articles about the terrible things going on in the world, with some interesting literary snippets thrown in.
In the lead-up to Christmas this year I felt such a strong
need to stop the political hectoring, the calling out of bad behaviour, the
keeping up to date with it all. Such an overwhelming desire to withdraw and to
give in to the madness of Christmas.
Yet the world didn’t stop being messy and tragic. New
tragedies kept happening. Some were human made, others less obviously so.
The
unpredictably bizarre injustices of the Abbott government have had an effect on
so many Australians this year. No-one likes Tony Abbott much, not even Liberal
voters, and these days his Treasurer, Joe Hockey, is just as reviled.
On 22 December, just days before Christmas, Abbott announced that Scott Morrison, who as immigration minister removed
the obligation that Australia follow the refugee convention, and set off a
scale of death, torture and misery in the gulags detention camps that put Australia to shame,
will now be our Minister for Social Services.
To paranoid lefties like me this seemed a cruel joke, both
in its substance and its timing.
Tragedy continued internationally. In Missouri yet another
black teenager was shot
by police. Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated from their homes,
and at least 24 killed, following massive
flooding in Malaysia. A plane carrying 162 passengers from Indonesia to
Singapore went missing mid-flight, and the wreckage has since been found with
all passengers presumed dead. The international community has continued to
ignore the plight of the more than 1 million refugees fleeing the conflict in
Syria.
Yet the need to withdraw from the fray, at least partially, has
continued. My Christmas depression this year was partly just a response to
the hullabaloo of Christmas itself, which seems to be a little more
disconnected from reality, a little more surreal, every year.
There is such a yawning gulf between the hectoring
cheerfulness of the relentless carols and the mad spending of the crowds on the
one hand and my own state of mind on the other that it produces an odd lurch
into alienation.
But like birthday depression, I suspect much of what passes
for Christmas depression is unacknowledged grief, which is rampant in our
society. In A Life at Work, Thomas
Moore talks about the difference between the human soul and the human spirit. The
soul seeks the past, the familiar, and is rooted in the earth. The spirit seeks
out the new, the unknown, creativity and challenge.
Christmas is a time in which the soul demands to be heard
above the din. At Christmas, even more so than at birthdays in my experience,
the soul longs for the certainties of the past. Over the last few weeks I’ve found
myself driving past my old place, which I moved out of in May, several times. I
realised that it was the first Christmas I’d spent away from the place for ten years,
and my first Christmas at my current flat. My soul was yearning for that
connection with past Christmases.
But perhaps notions of unacknowledged grief are just
scratching the surface when it comes to the kinds of funk people experience on holidays,
birthdays and anniversaries. I’m reading Horse Boy, an inspiring
book about how an autistic boy was healed of many of his worst behaviours by a
combination of horse riding and a series of gruelling healing rituals by
Mongolian shamans.
This book has made me wonder whether my understanding of
spirituality and its repression in the West has been incredibly shallow. The
spirituality of the Mongolian shamans seems to allow them to harness powerful
forces for healing that put our Western alternative healers to shame. The scale
of what we have lost in modern life suddenly seems so much larger, and is
perhaps the reason for all the mental illness we are experiencing.
Yet there’s no need to ditch the scientific method that has
created such leaps and bounds. If science had an open enough mind to explore
what was going on when the shamans healed Rowan Isaacson, whole new areas of
study could be established.
They might include an expansion of human psychology.
Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs was an important milestone but perhaps it
should also include the need to connect with the forces of the Earth and to
balance them within ourselves. No wonder even the sanest of us goes a bit mad
at Christmas. (In fact there have been studies
of shamanism in relation to Western notions of mental illness. However, my
sense is that interest in shamanism is still considered flaky within the
mainstream psychiatric community.)
But as usual I’m getting ahead of myself. My challenge for
Christmas this year was just to let go. Not try to change my rellies, or escape
the boring bits, or get angry because our family never – I repeat never – gets
around to eating lunch before 3 pm by which time my blood sugar is lower than
Scott Morrison’s ethical standards. What else was there to do but play that
daggy Christmas carols CD, break open the Christmas crackers, put on the tissue-paper
hat that never fits properly and read out the dumb joke? I just let the whole circus
roll.
Okay, so there was one conflict towards the end of the night
but it arose from another family member’s angst, not mine. I’m not wearing it!
Happy new year to everyone out there in blog land.
