First, you may not be interested in knowing that I just put a couple eggs in a pot of boiling water, but I’m going to tell you anyway. We will check on them in a bit.
The United States has always been a culture firmly built upon a more-than-healthy dose of fear. Fear that is brought to the forefront by a mass shooting, a terrorist incident, or a police brutality issue. This week is one of those weeks, with the terrible synagogue attack in Pittsburgh and the letter bombs across the country.
That is not the news story that really compels me to write today, as bad as it is. There is also a right wing populist president newly elected this week in Brazil. That’s not what compels me either.
Puvirnituq, Nunavik
There have been a wave of suicides in Puvirnituq, Nunavik (shown in the photo), and it is a crisis that may not be over. It is news that quickly cycles down and then off the bottom of the news feed. For those of you in ‘the South’, Nunavik is the largely Inuit part of northern Quebec (it’s different from Nunavut). (If you don’t live in one of the three territories or the northern reaches of a non-maritime province, you live in ‘the South’ from our perspective. Yes Toronto, even north of Barrie is part of southern Canada. In fact, Thunder Bay is southern Canada. It is really close to the US border. That’s the South. Deal with it! We in the north are allowed to have a perspective too.)
As of the time of writing this, there have been 11 suicides in Puvirnituq (Pu-VERN-it-ook is close) this year. In a town of 1800, that is almost 1% of the population of the town. Since the suicides are mostly young people, imagine a school with a suicide in every class. Imagine the impact that has on their families and on the rest of the young people. Imagine the hurt, imagine the confusion, imagine the mixture of resolution and hopelessness.
It is more than ‘some place way up north’. Yes, there are other communities in Nunavik that have had suicides, and it is right to talk about the wider issue, but I want you to know Puvirnituq by name. It is a little act of respect, that is all. I want you to say it. Puvirnituq. It is a token act of superficial connection, I know. So why say it? There are people hurting like that all across the country and in your neighbourhood, perhaps your home. You might have trouble imagining that, but you can imagine the hurt and the fear for the future felt in a place with a suicide for every class. Those are the people of Puvirnituq right now, so please do imagine it. We need to imagine because people’s problems are often invisible until it is too late.
Fear
In Pittsburg, throughout the voting publics of the United States and Brazil, and in suicide-ravaged communities there are feelings of resentment, of isolation, of unfairness, of hurt, of confusion, and generally of fear. I’m going to guess that inside most of us there are these hidden negative emotional cocktails swirling – at least in a corner, at least some of the time. That is what Halloween is about, isn’t it? To jeer at our fear in order to conquer it? Let’s take a minute in this Halloween week to look fear in the eye more seriously.
We are physically safer, on the most part, than ever in history. Is that how you feel? Does sharing that stat make you feel safer? For many people the answers are no. Let’s skip the ‘why’ for today, and look at this from a different angle.
What are your fears? For me, I fear my wife going down in a plane when she travels for work (I fear this yet I don’t fear flying – or rather crashing when I’m flying – because I know flying is a very safe form of travel). I fear for the social influences on my kids as they grow up. I fear sudden and unexpected bad health for me or my family. Having said all that, I am not a fearful person I am actually very happy – but that’s something I fear losing.
You didn’t know that about me. Even if you know me, you wouldn’t know that about me – and those are mundane inner feelings. How much did others know about the inner state of the perpetrator in the Pittsburgh attack? Of the voters in Brazil? How much did friends and family know about the inner state of those that took their lives in Puvirnituq? Most importantly for the future, how much do we know about the inner state of the friends and family of victims left dealing with hurt, loss, and too many questions?
Inner Lives
We often work very hard to protect our inner lives. We want to protect them from others, and in Canadian society we very much want to protect others from our feelings too. In the end we usually end up wanting to deny they exist since we can’t see that they exist for each other. There is a silent social norming that says to go stuff your inner self. That is the problem right there.
What do I mean by ‘inner life’? I’m not even sure what I mean. I’m not a psychiatrist. I’m not qualified to say. That’s the problem. Most of us don’t know enough. For most of us, our inner life is a mish-mash of beliefs, recurring emotional states, and ingrained logics, I suppose. I could call it mental health, I could call it Ego and Id and whatever, but I don’t want anyone to mistake me for someone who knows what I’m talking about. So I’m going to stick with ‘inner life’.
People are sometimes like eggs. An inner life with a hard shell. You can’t tell by looking at them if they have this amazing little wonderful life growing that is waiting for the chance to emerge and transform the egg into something more. You can’t tell if it is a standard store-bought healthy but squishy and delicate egg. You can’t tell if it is hard-boiled. And if it is hard boiled, you can’t tell if it is so hot inside it is about to crack. When people crack it comes in many different ways. Some crack quietly, some hurt themselves, some hurt those that love them, and occasionally they hurt many. Despite the boiling pot they are cooking in, most eggs still don’t crack until they get jostled around and bump into each other. That’s when they crack.
To Those Touched by Suicide
There is much to say about the tragedy of suicide in northern Canada, and if you want to know more, see what Mary Simon has to say.
Suicide in our northern communities is contagious. Right now it is Puvirnituq, but I have seen it sweep through communities in Nunavut too. Suicide doesn’t touch people, it knocks them down. It is right of course to mourn the loss of those that took their lives – those that needed help and didn’t get it, or didn’t get enough. Emotions are complex things, though, and to those that were close to them, to their families and friends and classmates and coworkers I say it is okay to feel hurt by them, by your loss of them. It is okay to feel so hurt that maybe you feel mad at them for hurting you like that. Give yourself permission to feel those feelings in the hope that you can some day let go of some of that pain.
And to the rest of society, give these communities permission to be hurt, to be damaged, to need time and help. Not that they need your permission, but by permission I mean silent support, and if you have the opportunity, I mean political support, mental health infrastructure support, I mean verbal support, and I mean an absence of impatience for ‘another broken northern and indigenous community’, as it may look to you. Then give yourself permission to need help, too.
Inner Life Care
There is a concerted effort in recent years to make talking about mental illness acceptable, and it should be. We also need to work towards the next step. Let’s make an awareness of inner lives, of what they do, of how they work, and of how to care for them a contender for the next great societal awareness project.
That doesn’t even have to cost that much. Yes, we need inner life medical care (also known as mental health), and we need approaches to healing and these costs money. That does need to be a priority. But it is also about what society values, how we feel we are expected to interact with each other, and how society has tipped the balance away from supporting healthy inner lives towards feeding people’s inner fears. The inside of the egg is way bigger than the shell.
We live in an era of the visible – of concern about economic prosperity, of costs of things, of the building and acquisition of things, of mass but brief written communication, of ‘having’ and of ‘experiencing’ as individuals. I just went to look at my eggs. They look the same as they did before, even though they are totally changed on the inside. Skin is thin. It only seems thick because we can’t see through it.
Skin is thin. It only seems thick because we can’t see through it.
People are being bumped into more than ever before – because we are being bumped by news from all over the world, because more of us live jammed into precarious cities (or so they look to me), because our lives are more and more intertwined with globalization and transportation and telecommunication, and because we spread our connections more and more thinly across more and more people in more and more low-context ways (what’s your text-to-talk ratio?).
It is time to let the pendulum swing back, to work towards building strong interpersonal connections. To find a way to pick up and dust off our respect for the invisible. People need support when their insides start to boil. Yes, that can be psychiatrists and psychologists, but it can also be a deep and strong supportive connection that an individual has with others. Psychiatrists aren’t always around.
What I want to say, though, is that we need more than that. We aren’t going to give up the mobility, all the opportunities and the conveniences that we have access to now. We learned once upon a time to brush our teeth – to be aware of how to care for them. We need to do the same thing for inner lives.
We learned to brush our teeth – to be aware of how to care for them. We need to do the same thing for inner lives.
Inner lives are real lives. They don’t need to be laid bare, but they do need to be acknowledged and cared for – by individuals, and as a society. As individuals we need to learn to understand and talk about inner lives as a thing, as a part of us. We need to know they exist in others. I’m not asking you to tell me about your deepest feelings while I’m standing in line to buy a bagel. As a society we need to promote awareness and understanding. We have changed the way society thinks before – about recycling, about women, about homosexuality, about smoking. We can do it again. Of course, it starts in schools and it starts in homes.
With good inner life self-awareness, social discourse about inner life management and access to support, we might have less people boiling inside. We might have less people spreading that boiling to the inner lives of others they bump into – directly in tragedy and across the news. It might even improve politics.
If you can think about your own hurts and fears – small or large as they may be – think about what would happen if we were raised to understand and deal with it like we learn first aid. Think about what would happen if all of society had access to supports when we needed it, and a culture of using them. That’s the future to hope for, and hope is good. Please think also of all the people out there right now that are full of fear and hurt and in desperate need of hope. There is a whole community of them in Puvirnituq.
