WESTMINSTER — When I was young, I used to play with balance. I started with railroad tracks, and moved on to fences and other objects: anything I could do to stabilize myself on a thin, small surface was fun to me. I even would walk on top of guardrail fences on cliff edges. I was that confident about it - not that I would never fall, but that if I did fall, I could control the direction of the fall.
And I was really good at falling.
There's a metaphor I like to use when I discuss mental illness with my students to try to get them a better sense of what mental illness is and how it works.
Imagine that everyone's relative state of mind exists on a plateau: the stronger, more solid the plateau, the more robust our mental state and the more able we are to cope with change.
The plateau has ladders and ropes hanging from it. Even when we're buffeted and accosted enough to get thrown, we have ways of climbing back up and maintaining stability again.
But not everyone has the same quality of ladders and ropes. Some people have ladders which are weaker. Rungs may snap off if grabbed too quickly.
Some people have a solid, level surface on top. Others have slants and crags, ready to trip them up in emergencies. A lot of times, those cracks grow deeper when things go badly.
Different events and circumstances in our lives make things better or worse. Strong personal ties? Friendships? Those can be part of the ladder or make it more resilient. Being bullied or emotionally dismantled? Those do harm, make the mountaintop harder to navigate.
For some of us, it's all about order: if you can plan your moves, think about them, and work them through, you can get through anything, but introduce noise, distraction, frustration? That makes everything more complicated.
For most of us, this isn't about illness as much as it is about stress and responding to it. But for the ones that fall, and fall hard, some of them don't know how to find their way back up. They don't even know which direction “up” is.
Some of them get help, and learn how to find it. Some figure it out on their own, eventually. Others just fall from the gentle graces of sanity and never find their way back.
Different factors affect how this works. For some of us, falling and climbing make us better climbers and make us better at finding our way back to ourselves. For others, it gets more difficult with every fall.
Some of us have platforms that seem as solid as a rock but one major stress factor takes them off, and the platforms shatter and burst.
Others seem completely unstable their whole lives, but manage to live comfortably throughout it all, never really falling or even being in danger of it, as though their proximity to the fall is what keeps them from falling.
This metaphor only goes so far - there are so many kinds of mental illness out there. Some fit this framing better than others and some don't fall into it at all, but it's a start.
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I mention all this because sometimes it feels as though, as a culture, we've gone off the rails.
The frequency of public commentary which is tainted with violence imagery or suggestions of harm? That's a problem. It may or may not trigger people who are mentally ill to do horrendous acts. But it adds stress. It buffets us.
I mentioned before that I was good at falling. In the metaphorical sense, I've fallen a lot of times in my life, and I've always climbed out again. I think it's made me stronger, and I think it's made me saner to be so close to the edges from time to time that I can see the abyss and know what it is and choose not to dwell on it. I still know how to walk with balance, and I still know how to fall with grace.
With the shootings in Tucson, my world changed ever so much. I think for anyone who's paying any sort of attention, it had to have. Even people who would deny it do so primarily out of fear. For some people it changed in much more direct, drastic ways.
There's a young man in jail right now who, for whatever reason, doesn't know what up is, does not know how to fall, and has managed to swan dive off that platform and leave a body count behind.
I will not recount the factors that led to this. I'm talked to death about all of it. I will, however, just note in passing that without such easy access to automatic weapons, that body count might not have been so bad.
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As a culture and as a society, our language matters, not in the sense that anyone using eliminationism (the tactic of outright silencing political opposition) is necessarily directly responsible when the mentally unstable who experience auditory hallucinations can't tell the difference between the voices in their own heads and the voices in the media. But it sure as hell doesn't help matters when that's the case.
Right now, as a country, we're on the balance. We've just seen into that abyss and where it can lead - we've got people trying to find someone to blame for it all, and we've got people lashing out because they feel partially responsible.
And right here, right now, we have a choice: do we step back from that cliff side? Do we choose to continue in the direction we've been going?
Do we embrace more rhetoric, more talk of violence, more talk of the “bullseye” painted on politicians? Or do we say “enough” and give ourselves a little room to recover from this tragedy, to use it as an opportunity to change our world for the better?
I count myself among the lucky ones that I can think clearly about this sort of thing without losing my anger over what happened, without feeling bitter. I can feel sad about it without falling into depression, and I can be enraged over it without considering violence as a serious option. I know others who do not do so so easily.
I don't have a clear lesson to take from all of what's happened except to say that there are a series of stories that came out of this event - some tragic and heartbreaking and others inspiring and wonderful.
I'm making a choice to learn from all of it, and to take the best I can from it and to try to find a better world tomorrow.