ARE YOU WITH ME?

How many of you agree with me when it comes to spouting platitudes? Do you think as I do that sometimes there is a time and a need for silence or just a comforting squeeze of the hand or a hug in place of empty trite phrases which, like insects, fly round and round and get trapped and can’t leave and just seem to stay with you, bothering you most when you have nobody with you or in the darkness of the night when there may be nobody near.

If you really want to irritate me beyond measure, all you have to do after I’ve truthfully answered the question: “How are you”? With: “Well actually something horrible happened the other day and I’m worried about it”, is for you to then say: “Be positive. It won’t be as bad as that. You’ll be fine. It’ll be fine”, etc. It isn’t that I don’t think we should be positive and anyway someone in my position has no choice if they want to function properly and manage their lives with as little help as possible but the fact is unless you have foresight and are a clairvoyant neither you nor I know whether something will be fine or we will be fine or it’ll be okay.

There is a marked difference between facing a situation with courage (being positive means being prepared to face it at all) and confusing positive thinking which will determine whether you face the situation or walk away from it if you can, with the factors often beyond your control which will determine the outcome of the situation. For example, you need to be positive when it comes to going for a job interview or deciding to take a driving course or getting on a plane to go off on holiday. If you just sit at home and say: “I won’t go in case the plane crashes” or “I won’t go for that job since someone else is bound to get it” that will mean you’re being hampered by negative thoughts and are giving up before you start. However, your positive attitude will not stop someone else actually getting the job if the potential employer chooses not to take you on and certainly it won’t prevent the air disaster you most fear if it’s meant to happen which is why, when you talk about your fears people should listen, say the right words which are: “Yes I know what you mean. The chances are that the plane probably won’t crash and you’ll have a safe journey but should the worst happen, hopefully you’ll not suffer for more than a second and you may regret it for the rest of your life if you don’t go and equally you could be killed crossing the road so that’s what you have to weigh up but it’s natural that you should feel like that since flying isn’t something you do every day is it. Have you ever flown before? If not this is why you’re frightened. It’s the unknown which is worrying you. When you come back with the photos of your trip you’ll really feel you have achieved something”. The stupid and trite phrase: “Be positive” is another way of telling the person that: “Look here! I have my own problems. Yours are trite and silly. Thousands of people fly every day. Go and bore the pants off someone else why don’t you”?

I find this phrase particularly offensive when it comes to illness and disability. I’ve heard of people with cancer being told to: “Fight the disease and be positive and you’ll beat it”. Of course they have to go into their treatment programme with the hope that it will work otherwise why bother? However the implication is that if it doesn’t they haven’t been positive enough or fought as hard as they could so the disease won. This is arrant offensive and hurtful nonsense. Nobody wants serious disability or disease but they’re facts of life which at some point and for all of us are inescapable as is death itself. What people need is for someone to sit down and listen to them express their fears that they may die or be in extreme discomfort and their anger that they may never see their loved-ones achieve what they want or that they in fact won’t do all they intended to do.

My home help soon has to go into hospital for a fairly serious operation (thankfully not for cancer) and she confided to me that she is frightened in case she dies under the anaesthetic or is made worse as a result of something going wrong. She knows why I am blind. Did I say to her: “Come on now S. Be positive. You’ll be fine. You’ll be leaping around like a two-year-old in no time”? No I did not. Instead I said: “Yes I know what you mean. Do you get most scared and anxious during the night? I bet you do. Well I can’t tell you that things will be fine because neither you or I know what the future holds and just because I’ve had the same operation it doesn’t mean you’ll be fine but then again it doesn’t mean you won’t either. The chances are that you will be because they have done loads of these before and do loads every day. If things do go wrong and you’re in worse health afterwards then somehow you will learn to cope because somehow you will find the courage to and the necessity of coping will make you do so. You’ve known me for a long time and seen how I cope and I’m no better than you are. Like me you are ordinary and human and you will find that participation is always better than anticipation and soon it’ll all be over. Whatever the outcome, I will be thinking of you and I shall do my best to find out how you are and I’ll miss you while you’re away”.

Contrast that with the stupid response I got the other week when someone who was evicted from my block of flats for bringing unsavoury people onto the premises, including drug users and for causing disturbance to others and breaking his tenancy agreement. I shouted at him and his mates for making a load of noise late at night and reported the fact that some of his pals were supposedly wanted by the police to the appropriate authorities in case he was sheltering them and putting the rest of us in danger. As a result I received a nasty letter when he left, written under a false name. It could have been from one of four people and I was very shaken by it. It blamed me for being the cause of his troubles though he’d cooked his goose long before I helped turn up the temperature of the oven, and when I mentioned it to someone, explaining why I felt so upset the day I got it, the reply was: “You shouldn’t let these things worry you. For the sake of your health you should not think about them”. Once I found out where the letter originated and who from, which I did because a friend told me he’d changed his name to that put on the letter, once I realised it wasn’t the start of what was to be an orchestrated campaign which would lead to worse, once I realised that this was from a young person as yet too immature to take responsibility for his own actions and to realise they have consequences and understood that he was born and brought up in the “blame” culture which exists in the U.K, whereby everyone seeks to find a scapegoat in order to either sue them or avoid ever having to face the consequences of what they do I laughed like a drain, partly out of relief and partly because there was nothing else to do. What I really needed though was the person I told to say: “Oh dear June, that must have been frightening. Have you got to the bottom of it and do you know who sent it? Has this happened before? Oh well now you know who sent it you’ll be able to put it behind you. I’m glad you felt you could talk to me about it. I hope you don’t have any more of them”.

Had she said that, I would have felt able to open up to her again if the need arose. As it is, when she sees me now and says: “How are you”? I just smile and say: “Okay thanks” and that’s the dangerous bit for if we can’t answer the question: “How are you”? Truthfully, especially to those whose job it is to find out because we’re under their care or because they may be the only friend we have, then vital information regarding problems we have could be missed and our long-term health will suffer, not just because we worry over trifles but because we have nobody to talk to. Even though my home help has a family of her own and work colleagues, my hope is that I made her feel better, not by dismissing her problem with: “Be positive. You’ll be fine. It’ll be fine”, but because I actually took the time to listen to and confront her fears about death and long-term disability and assure her that whatever happened, she would find a way of coping. Most of all I made her feel that she was important to me and that what she felt was important to me and that she is valued by me. I’m no saint. I won’t allow myself to be overloaded by other people’s problems and have been known to politely make my excuses when it all gets too much and leave but if I ask someone how they are, I actually want to know and am prepared to listen while they tell me and if I know I’m in the company of a professional whinger, I don’t ask but just say: “Hullo” and don’t tell them about myself either. Incidentally my home help’s response to my unpleasant letter was: “God June, that must have been frightening”. It was for a while and indeed, yes, S. I will miss you while you’re in hospital because you know what to say and what not to.