Survival Instincts

I have a friend who's 6.1 and he lives in a very different world from the world I live in. 

First, I'm never going to see the top shelf at the video shop. 

What a wonderland of opportunity taken untimely from me because of my lack of man-height and the fact that there are no video shops left. All those badly produced pornographs and sequels that I will never see eye-to-eye with. 

Second, he's much much much less likely to be charged at aggressively in the park at night by a man's penis attached to a man. He's less likely to walk around at night feeling vulnerable and worried. 

At 6 foot 1 inch, he's statistically much less likely to be attacked by a stranger and raped (unless he goes to prison because apparently rape in prison is something that happens so often it's a punchline and for some reason we're okay with as a society; 'oh, you got drunk and hot wired a car when you were nineteen, we think it's fine for part of your punishment to involve the high likelihood you will be violated by strangers', and given that high likelihood and the fact that our legal system doesn't really do anything much to prevent it, we should just acknowledge that we're okay with torturing prisoners by proxy to the point where a judge should basically hand it down as part of the sentence, 'six months of jail and a lifetime of PTSD for you, son.')

Anyway, the point is, my tall friend. 

His world has a lot fewer crazy* people in it than mine does. 

It's amazing how much quieter and more charming crazy people become when you're a tall big man. Like, there's a street-based-man who is based down the road from me. He has a specific corner that he haunts, and his office hours are 3pm to 10pm Tuesday to Saturday. His job is to sort of leap out at you and do a Jesus dance, and shout 'whore' and sometimes fling cut up pieces of used tinfoil into the air like a capering fairy, which is a bit of a shock, but sparkly, so I guess okay. I usually go round the other way, but occasionally I'll forget because it's the shortest way home, or I'll go outside office hours only to find he's decided to do a bit of flex-time and then I get Jesus-Leaped. 

There's another man in my neighbourhood whose job is to walk around in a sort of jerky puppet walk and go around on public transport wearing a green reusable shopping bag as a hat. He'll occasionally lean in and suggest he might 'snip pieces off your pussy', which I initially found quite menacing but then saw him talking calmly to a pigeon, so then it was harder to take personally. (what can I say, I'm a sucker for pigeon-man friendship)

These things happen sometimes and the feeling I feel is the sort of heart-startlement that happens when you're worried for a second that you might die at the hands of someone who was so deep in the river of an alternate universe that they might not even notice that they'd killed you. 

My point is, I was walking with my tall man friend, and I realised that we'd come up to Jesus- leaper's corner, which I'll normally avoid during his work hours, and I sort of put my hand on my friend's arm and was about to warn him so he didn't get startled when mister Jesus-Leaper engaged, (it's quite a shock the first time, because he's quick and limber for a guy who seems to be made out of old rags and spittle.) But something happened. My friend didn't get startled, because the leap was suddenly abbreviated. I got to watch it in fascination, because I had my eyes on Jesus Leaper as it played out. The little man spied me, his favourite whore friend, gathered his ropey legs for maximum leaping and began to lunge forward, and then as his little eyes clocked my big friend, he made a little sound like blep, and his legs folded back down and he muttered quietly to himself as we passed.

My friend didn't even really look. From his perspective, nothing had happened. And nothing had happened. 

That's the thing.  

I'd always assumed that Jesus-Leaper was sort of unchangeable as the ocean - that he moved in response to the tides of people walking past. It was a bit of a startling moment. Perhaps his particular work-task is only activated by young women walking past alone, but it's an interestingly fine distinction to make for someone so lost in the mists of the mind that his hair has become a single tarred mass. I hadn't realised that crazy had a survival mechanism; that despite being completely off the planet, this man had enough sense to keep his violent hassling to soft targets, and bite his tongue when he saw someone who was physically bigger than him. I hadn't thought that the number of confronting incidents I experienced from people on the outer perimeters of consensus-reality were informed by my physicality in that way. That my friend doesn't have as many crazy people in his world. That when I talk about the man on the bus in a robe who tried to kiss my ankle, or the one who does aggressive masturbating in the window of the library, he feels those stories as stories, not warnings - not information relevant to his internal map of reality. He lives in a different reality, where these people don't exist. They are invisible to him, for reasons and reasons and reasons. 

My friend lives in a safer world than I do. 

Axx

*Yes, I know i'm using loaded and potentially offensive terms. Crazy and mad. I know. I'm doing it for a reason. 

 Mental illness is a complicated issue, and we all either are people or have people close to us whose struggles with mental illness are agonising. The pain of being betrayed by your own mind is torturous. The fear of stigma and losing the respect of the people you respect is likewise real and gut-wrenching. I've felt it. The fraught nexus between identity and illness - how much of this feeling is me and how much of it is chemicals in my brain is a mind-f#ck in itself. We are all just a couple of bad weeks of glitchy brain chemistry away from being a tram-shouter or newspaper-secret-keeper. 

But for the purposes of this piece, I'm saying that the madness of strangers is often manifest in my life as a sort of incomprehensible wall - the ranting man on the corner is terrifying, and it's hard to reach for the luxury of compassion until I have enough distance (or experience with his particular brand of delusion) to feel safer again. This is a piece about survival instincts, and humanity.

When I'm safe and happy I can think of people as people, struggling with trauma and illness. I try to do that even when I'm under duress, but when a stranger is a wild ball of spitting rage flinging graphic insults and food-scraps, my more base and unpleasant categorising tends to come into play. I'm not proud of that, but feel like it would be misrepresenting the experience to polish up my reactions into inoffensive terms, as though I were such a good person that I thought in clear and compassionate phrases, rather than visceral and unpleasant ones. Maybe that's the wrong way to do it. I'm not sure if I'd be okay with someone doing the same thing with other stigmatising terms for other categories. Nonetheless, it's what I did for this piece. Open to feedback on the use I've made of the words, if you've found they stung or wounded.