Denial is the dark mirror of acceptance. In its darkness it offers a more comfortable state to live in; its attraction is undeniable. It’s a lot like sleep — a pleasant warm bubble suspended from laws of space and time — only you are awake.
I confess to denial — the very act of writing this piece has been pushed back, poked and prodded like a cat with a half dead mouse. But this time I will finish the writing and let you consume it — maybe…
Have you ever tried to observe yourself falling asleep? The veil between consciousness and the unconscious is surprisingly thin. It’s near impossible to catch the very moment when you slip from consciousness. You might perhaps catch yourself falling asleep as your soft palate collapses against the back of your throat and you let out a short snorting grunt but for the most part, we all disappear silently into that dark night again and again.
We are continuously caught in the space between waking and dreaming, uptime downtime and screen time cycle. The longer the illusion extends itself, the greater the delusion and the greater the denial.
The thing about denial is that its power is its negativity — to deny everything, even in the light of the facts and replace it with a form of magical thinking. It’s Donald Trump and 70 plus million supporters denying an undisputable electoral loss, it’s anti-vaxxers denying science and themselves and it’s people getting in cars and on planes again and again denying their participation in climate change.
George Packer, in an article from the Atlantic entitled ‘A Political Obituary for Donald Trump’ concluded rather pointedly that: ‘America under Trump became less free, less equal, more divided, more alone, deeper in debt, swampier, dirtier, meaner, sicker, and deader. It also became more delusional.’
I wonder how the numbers of the 300 000 plus dead in the US break down between collateral victims and willful suicides in denial about a disease that just doesn’t do denial. The same rules apply of course, on a longer scale to climate change — but it could only be a matter of years before we all suffer the same privations.
You could put all those symptoms under the broader disease of delusion that Packer concludes with. It points in so many ways to an unwillingness to engage with reality and to put in its place a more palatable version (usually from a rose-tinted past) — one that fits your tribal identity, core values and comfort zone parameters.
But if you reframe that denial and delusion as a symptom of grief it offers new insights. Now clearly, Elizabeth Kübler Ross’s 1969 definition of the cycle of grief has been questioned and discredited, but as a close observation of the behaviours of terminally ill patients in her care, it reveals an underlying factor in all facing death — denial.
Death in all its finality is non-negotiable but what about when you are still alive dealing with the myriad other deaths we all can experience — slowly dissolving marriages, broken career paths and aspirations, social isolation, loss of loved ones, chemical dependencies and chronic illnesses — all part of life’s rich palette (albeit unwished for)?
In the context of grief and dying, denial makes a lot more sense because it’s a safety mechanism against our greatest existential fear — that of not being at all. But all these other scenarios of living death flow like rivers into the same sea on that journey, if only we recognize it.
We sense and welcome the numbness of denial, albeit unconsciously, retreat into ourselves and fall into other realities and deep examinations of past events over which we have no influence. These processes take time to percolate and temporarily shift the sense of time.
Time slows down in the same manner as it does in lockdowns where you are forced to restrict your social liberties; when there is a threat, perceived or otherwise, of mortal loss or loss of income and status.
It’s a useful buffer against overwhelming things which is where, I believe it gains the upper hand on it. It is only ever meant to act as a mechanism for change but over time, it becomes the default, entrenched and immovable. Over time we can lose all agency to it, lost to the slow drip of the hours and continuous background anxiety.
Right now, humanity is experiencing a massive’ denial of service attack’ and the competing nature of its collective mind leans this way and that in how to live best through it. A single RNA-based virus has unraveled the fabric of givens — things like a sense of security, human touch, a future you could believe in, rather than one to fear. If you are of a conspiratorial frame of mind, you could imagine your government fanning the waves of paranoia like some enormous thought experiment.
Tragically, as a result of the present pandemic, the asymmetries of our western civilization have only been made deeper — some, like information workers enjoy greater freedoms while others who work in service industries have lost liberties which may never be returned. Of course, all this could change in one year with vaccinations, but herd immunity is still a far off prospect — even in 2021.
If you believe the cycle, we still have a lot of uncomfortable phases to go through before we can get to a place where the healing process begins — when all those suppressed feelings and denial float to the surface, into the light. The descent into anger is building and like most clean up operations, the bargaining and reconciliation phase will take years.
And then still, the long slow climb through depression to a place where the doors of perception are cleansed and everything, as the mystic Romantic poet Blake predicts, appears to man as it is: Infinite.
It’s a kind of psychic slingshot and the bands are winding tighter and tighter. Humanity may be lost in the process or found, but I have a strong suspicion that whatever the result, there are major societal and technological shifts ahead, and in near time too.
2020 was the tumultuous start to a tumultuous decade. People will look back on this year and frame it as such — in acceptance or denial of the facts. Happy new year everyone.
