I used to get that reaction sometimes about work with suicidal people, and research on suicide– “How depressing. How morbid.” The implication is sometimes that I must also be a negative, “morbid” person for having such interests.

What people don’t realize is that there’s almost always another side to it. For everyone that completes suicide, there are fifty people who find a reason to continue to live. For every moment of helpless alienation that someone feels, there is (at least most of the time) a moment of connectedness (that’s kind of the whole point of a suicide hotline). For every day that someone is totally overwhelmed by their problems, there may be a day in the future where they feel capable of making a plan to surmount those problems. And all that, in my opinion, makes the whole Crisis Center a place of greater beauty, optimism, and (is there an opposite to morbidness?) than most other places in my life.

Like with the name Voldemort (aka “He who must not be named”) in the Harry Potter books — not naming something only increases the fear of it (or, in this case, also the discomfit, disgust, misunderstanding etc)

Your entry especially reminds me of working in a nursing home. I wasn’t really encouraged to discuss it. Either my work was “too depressing” or I was ridiculing my clients. You see, there isn’t real humor in nursing homes and people who live there aren’t considered to be real.

I find that the unreality of healthcare, disease, chronic illness and ultimately, death is often perpetuated by people shoving it aside as “too depressing”, morbid. I can’t think of anything less morbid than to pretend death, disease and pain don’t really exist.

I attended a school for children with speech, language and communication difficulties; for several years after I left the school I kept in touch and had regular contact with the crafts teacher. When I was one of her pupils she seemed such a lovely woman; sunny personality, always looked for the positive in the negative and was like everyone’s favourite auntie. During the seven years that I kept in touch with this lady after leaving our school though, it became more and more apparent that she was actually a “pseudo-ally” of both the “do-gooder” and “missionary” types. She was so domineering and bossy (always giving me lengthy lectures about how I should think, feel, relate, and live my life) that I ended up feeling totally suffocated; she was also extremely patronizing and condescending – eg, on one occasion when she took me home after she “treated” me to a trip to the theatre or something, as I was getting out of her car she said, (very theatrically as it happens): “Goodbye, you intelligent, capable person!”. I remember that it took a great strength of will not to wallop her; I gave her a psychotic smile and slammed her car door very hard, instead! Elsewhere on your blog you’ve said that flattery “tastes like saccharine-coated poison” to you, this perfectly describes how I felt about this lady’s comment (and many other similar ones she made with depressing regularity); I knew that it was a symptom of what I call “Some Of My Best Friends Are Black” Syndrome in that she did not actually view me as being all that “intelligent” or “capable”…

The thing I struggled the most to cope with in my relationship with my old crafts teacher though, was her complete rejection of my feelings about having been abused as a child by various members of my family. We lived in different towns so in between meetings we would communicate by letter. If I touched on the subject of child abuse in letters to her (in ANY context; even if I said that I’d just finished reading an autobiography by an incest survivor who had turned her life around and was now devoting it to rescuing child prostitutes and aiding other sexual abuse survivors on their healing journeys, for example) she would make no response to it whatsoever. Another example of simply talking about anything to do with our problems being seen as “whingeing about” them, and so dismissed as “self indulgence”, “morbid fixation”, “narcissism” or that old chestnut, “attention seeking”.

One of the final nails in the coffin of our relationship came when I showed her a piece of artwork I was still in the middle of completing. It was a surreal, very Dali-esque pencil drawing of objects on a kitchen worktop including a mug with a disembodied hand coming out of it, grasping a thorny rose, with bare, live cables dangling just above the hand. My old teacher made a show of studying it very intently and then she said “Hmmm… I wonder what this represents? There’s a lot of PAIN in it, isn’t there?” She went on to lay into me verbally by sneering: “Woe is you, oh how you’ve suffered! Alas, you poor unfortunate, you ARE hard-done-by, aren’t you?!”, nudging me in the ribs with her elbow as she spoke.

I did not complete this particular piece of artwork and I felt so demoralised that I did not do any more art for seven years. Everyone who has seen my work recognises my talent, and I have lots of ideas for artistic projects I want to work on and hopefully make some money from. Lack of motivation to get started on this holds me back much of the time, I know this largely stems from fear that people will use the subject matter of my art as a stick to beat me with (It is not very encouraging when people insist on trying to psychoanalyse me through my artwork, especially when they use their knowledge of my issues in the process) but I’m determined to overcome this hurdle. Nowadays I just try to laugh at people who seem to think they are the reincarnation of Sigmund Freud; some people will read sexual symbolism into the most mundane, innocent things, and I think it says far more about what’s in THEIR minds than what’s in that of a particular artist/writer whose soul they are attempting to dissect.

it’s the same package viewed through different needs. or different ‘locations’ of safety and danger.