Our Need For Connection: Disappointed Souls

OUR NEED FOR CONNECTION WITH DISAPPOINTED SOULS

One of the cruelest aspects of mental disease is that it strips us of any ability to believe that people could be suffering within the way we are. We aren’t being willfully egocentric or arrogant; we are condemned by our illness to a sense that we are uniquely pitiful, uniquely unacceptable, and uniquely awful. The central legacy of mental disease, and a serious contributor to our suicidal impulses, may be a feeling of exceptionalism. We start to run far away from people. Gatherings become impossible – for we grow preemptively scared of the presumed invulnerability and judgmentalness of these we’d meet. We can’t possibly make chitchat or consider what somebody else is saying when our heads are crammed with catastrophic scenarios and an intrusive voice is telling us that we should always die. There seem no compact or acceptable thanks to share with old friends what we’ve been going through: they knew us as chatty and optimistic. What would they create of the tortured characters we’ve become? We start to assume that nobody on earth could possibly know – including accepts – what it are wish to be us. This is often especially tragic because the central cure for mental disease is corporate. Our disease denies us access to exactly what we most need so as to urge better. In 1891, Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler exhibited The Disappointed Souls. Five figures are pictured in varied states of dejection. We don’t know quite what has gone wrong in their lives, but Hodler’s talent invites us to imagine possibilities: a wedding here, a social disgrace there, a depression, a sense of overwhelming anxiety. However awful the individual stories could be, truth horror of the painting emerges from the way each crisis is unfolding in complete isolation from its neighbors.

The disconsolate figures are only millimeters faraway from each other, but they could also be in other countries. It should be very easy to succeed in out, to share the burden, to lend a comforting hand, to swap stories – and it might be so life-giving. But no fellowship seems possible during this insular hell. Sadness has wrapped each sufferer up during a pitiless sense of their own singularity. Ferdinand Hodler, The Disappointed Souls, 1891 Hodler wasn’t painting anybody scene, he intended his work as an allegory of recent society as an entire , with its absence of community, it’s lonely cities and its alienating technologies. But during this very depiction lies the likelihood of redemption. We’ll start to heal once we realize that we are actually always extremely on the brink of someone who is as wretched as we are. We should always hence be ready to reach bent a similarly broken neighbor and lament in unison. We should always learn to return together for a really particular quite affair whose whole focus would be an exchange of notes on the misery and lacerations of existence. In a perfect gathering of the unwell, during a comfortable safe room, we might take it in turns to divulge to each other the torments in our minds. Each folks would detail the newest challenges. We’d hear of how others were browsing sleepless nights, were unable to eat, were too terrified to travel outside, were hearing voices and had to fight against constant impulses to kill themselves.

The fabric would be dark little question, but to listen to it might be a balm for our stricken lonely souls. Ideally, we might keep meeting an equivalent people, week after week. In order that our lives would grow entwined with theirs and that we could exchange mutual support as we travelled through the valleys of sickness. We might know who difficulty, which needed tenderness was especially and who might enjoy an ordinary-sounding chat about the garden or the weather. It isn’t possible that we are as alone as we currently feel. Biology doesn’t produce complete one-offs. There are fellow creatures among the seven billion of our species. They’re there – but we’ve lost all confidence in our right to seek out them. We feel isolated not because we are so but because we are unwell. We should always dare to believe that a fellow disappointed soul is true now sitting next to us on the bench, expecting us to form a symbol.

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