The New Normal

Are you ready to face tragedies in life without losing your dignity?
What does it take to be a true survivor? 
Collins J Peter of II BA English Copy Editor 
shares his views on the topic.

                                                                     

Recently I read a book  titled  Touched By Suicide by Michael F. Myers and Carla Fine. The book deals with real life cases of suicidal trauma, but I tried to glean something else from it.  Among the series of events described in the book, a father’s plight caught my notice.  

‘A father who had returned from work found his daughter hanging from a back yard tree’  - this was the incident that caught my attention. This was cited as an illustration for a particular topic.  Later, through the course of reading,  I realized that this incident was narrated by the same father who had witnessed that traumatic scene.  What made him live after this ? How had he coped? ... Optimism ?  Hope?

The very evolutionary trait of homo sapiens equip them to cope with or adapt to the cosmos and its variations. When technology helps us transcend our physical limitations, we achieve a great deal of progress.  Then, what is our coping strategy towards social issues when we are on the verge of complete deterioration of social  rapport?

Nobody wants to be confined within a particular social institution such as family, or religion.  ‘Leaving home' is the norm of today’s social world.  The fact is that, as distance advances between the individual and social institutions, there is more chance of being entrapped in various ‘anti’ behaviours.  Perhaps this idea is closely related to the views of the humanist scholars of the 15^th  century:  ‘Man makes a constant attempt to strive for good but often finds himself caught in a trap of evil.  At a time he is caught between the desire for immortality and of earthly fame’ (quoted from Shapers of Destiny by Susan Varghese).

The realisation that one is far away from home often leads to ‘self-disintegration’ which may manifest in the form of suicides, now mostly among those in the per-adolescent age.  The trouble- shooting ability of our younger generation has been lost in the ‘e-world’ which caters them a virtual environment for anything and everything.  The risk factor is when ‘e-world’ depicts the life on a screen where problems could be solved with a single click, it is not at all possible once the system is shut down. 

The reason for the girl’s suicide in the incident, at the beginning of  this essay, is not mentioned in that particular book.  Later, her father begins to reach out to others who undergo a similar trauma in their life.  He is now adapted to a life without his daughter.  You might have noticed that your pain or  a mental anguish gradually tends to cease as time moves on.  At first with minutes,  then  hours, then days and as this goes on, your worries dwindle to nothing.  When the year draws to an end,  a few  wish for a normal, better start. All we need is a ‘brand new normal’, more than a normal, where we study to live along with the past trash and future surprises.  May be, that desolated father had learned this very tactic of life at the end.

Reference

Varghese, Susan. Shapers of Destiny. Print. Trichur: Current Books, 

     2010

Myers, Michael F and Carla Fine. Touched By Suicide. Print. Gotham 

     Books, 2006