Richard was an over-thinker, that’s why his boughs and branches were curled erratically and so close to his trunk: he couldn’t decide on the direction of growth. His stunted appendages, all cluttered and clustered around him, obscured his view. Thus, he only ever partially grasped the goings on of the woods, and in his half-knowledge there was a darkness: he always chose the most unhelpful and fearful point of view. It had been a long time since the people of the forest had tried to talk him down from whatever terrified drama he was riding on. They had exhausted their capacity for trying to make him see sense. Nowadays, they observed him from a distance, and resigned to accept him as chaotic and panic-ridden. There goes Richard, they’d say, talking up the devil from the deep. Richard was alone in his unhappy corner of the forest, and only the young and
Last time I wrote about people’s need for certainty during the pandemic, and how this need for certainty was driving people to try to control others. As I was writing it, I thought about my neighbour who has very serious contamination OCD which causes her pronounced mental and physical ill-health. I realised how much of my neighbour’s private behaviour is currently being publicly replicated by people’s corona-fuelled madness. I live in a flat in a house which has been split into 4 flats, which means that each resident shares a communal hallway. This is, of course, normal for the billions of people who live in flats around the world. What is not normal is that my neighbour’s need to control her environment causes her to lie about her neighbours, because our use of the communal hallway (i.e. accessing and leaving our homes) leaks into her plastic coated world. So she lies about us