The Frame (edited)

I spent much of the other day refreshing the stupid news sites in the hope that a pro-torture, pro-murder politician had been sacked by a useless PM. Said politician also went on record calling the British workforce, by default the entire cohort, "lazy". A statement so egregious that it is as offensive as it is stupid. A statement that could only come from a cosy member of the ruling elite.

How do we live in this world? These people are our gods, if not by choice. Certainly by their incessant demand for fealty. The rest of them seem to have their own private foibles and scandals; whether economic or due to some weird repressive trait. When they aren't putting it away in a tax haven nowhere British, they seem to be putting it away...well you get my drift.

However, the rest of us have to slouch along only to be told we shouldn't slouch. Shoulders back stand up straight and look the world in the eye. Big boys don't cry, they just shoulder the increased burden of the master while thanking them with glass eyed innocense for any scrap from the table - ignorant of who built the table and prepared the food.

How many people in Parliament serve with mental health conditions? How many of them can honestly speak to the lived experience of such conditions? Maybe a great many; people secretly filled with self loathing desperate to stuff their conscience into a bureacratic box. In this way they become the suited and booted intellectual sausage meat that remains from the Westminster soul grinder. Puour that substance into a box marked 'political party' and let ideology do the rest. A receipe from hell for human misery and the assertion of unjustifiable authority. All dressed up in the facade of a thousand year legislature.

Everyday it's like there's a frame around my mind. A frame filled with snakes and arrows; the demons of my thoughts. They aren't so much seen as heard; a hissing noise that always sets the parameters of my mood. Sometimes the frame gets bigger, and sometimes it stays the same. Sometimes it's hard to tell the frame from reality, and those are the worst days. Listening to the monsters in Westminster reminds me how difficult life is; when people who might genuinely want to do a good thing are given no power and are shut down by those who want to keep things as they are. Yet even the status quo is a lie; things don't remain the same they seem to be getting steadily worse.

Every moment life is as good as its ever going to get because every subsequent moment things seem to get worse. I joined a Facebook group for people 'surviving' on Universal Credit; I joined because I'm likely to soon be joining them. Surviving; that's what it's come to. A fight for existence amid the jungle vines of boarded up shops and humans abandoned to sleep in their doorways on beds of anti-vagrant spikes.

The posts are a patchwork of misery and fear. This is what has become of the social safety net. Instead of a comfortable reassuring bedrock of support, it's as hard as crazy paving and just as lunatic. The bureacracy equally unyeilding, seemingly implacable in the face of an unfolding disaster. This is the new normal: this is as good as it's going to get because in the next moment you're going to be skint.

Somehow through all this fog I have to live. I don't have a navigator nor a chart. There is no map nor a compass. Whatever assistance there is, a sometime lighthouse, never seems to live up to expectations, but I cling to it because I have to. Mental health is a slippery phrase so even communicating these problems becomes difficult: what does mental health mean when really we mean mental unhealth; and what flavour of unhealth? What is the acceptable illness de jour? Is it depression? Schizophrenia? What will the papers accept today: will they be sympathetic to the former because an ex-SAS 'hero' took his own life? Or will they think "pull your socks up" while commenting from their editorial tax haven. Where do you even begin to explain a pain as old as life itself; an anguish that goes beyond words when only words will do?

Nobody who doesn't experience this can understand it; this is the curse of mental health. It is a language that cannot be learnt only experienced and if you speak it, you too are cursed. The people in power do not speak it, but they try and control it. They try to change the meaning of its words to fit their broken agenda. Then they use it against you.

This is what will happen next Thursday when I have to negotiate their world and dance at their pleasure, like a monkey selling teabags, to continue to exist, even if I am not currently existing very well. It is a grotesque truth that, despite the poor quality of the lives of the poor (fashioned by the elite), that they have to jump so many hoops just to continue to enjoy that poor quality. The alternative is so much worse.

How did it come to this? What did I do that led to this point? I do not know. You're taught to have aspirations but never how to achieve them. You aren't meant to; it is enough to have them because that is what the ruling elite believes is enough to keep you functional. Should you achieve them you would likely no longer be trapped within their system, and so you are kept compliant to the capitalist system by aspiring to be in the capitalist system but never achieving enough (by design) to succeed in the capitalist system. This is not your (or my) fault; it is by design.

I have come to realise that mental health, for some, is also a horrible legacy. We inherit a propensity or a tendency for a state of mind, just as we are also socialised to it. My parents, I believe, were sick people. They may have married in love, I will never know, but they ended in bitterness and dispute, yet never truly a resolution. A cold war fought between two damaged people, touched by neuroses and obsession. I cannot diagnose them, but on reflection I recognise behaviours. Unfortunately society around them did not. They would never agree that is what they were (are), but to me it is so clear. If there is one thing depression can provide it is a clarity about what constitutes a healthy state of mind.

So we are where we are. Broken and lost. Around us the systems that we depend on are falling to pieces, like watching scenes from an earthquake. Only this isn't some far away fault-stricken country, it's our society and it's disappearing down a very deep sinkhole. There is no money to cushion its fall, only the spectacle of the great and the good as they themselves dissemble revealing the truth of their culture and their own behaviour; a product of a world gone mad.

But don't worry, there's the Brexit soap opera to keep us all distracted!