Glorifying the Tortured Soul

                                                        

Anxiety, Head of a Girl
Jean- Baptiste Greuse (1725-1805)
Photo Credit: Victoria Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND]  

Anguish equals cool ...

It's not just uncool to be cheerful, it's a bit, well ... common. Misery is rarefied, elite, special. It singles you out. Once, inertia and ennui were indulgences of the relatively leisured classes and something of that sheen of moneyed dysfunction remains. Rolling your sleeves up, getting the job done, good humour, hard graft and grit all sound suspiciously like the qualities you find on the factory floor, down the mines or in the pub. Introspection, brooding and fleeting flashes of genius have a more "intellectual" ring. High brows are furrowed in thought, while low brows crease in laughter at the cheap joke...

We have become too hooked on the troubled past and the agonised present. From celebrity interviews to election hustings, we seem to prize sensitivity above common sense, suffering over resilience, complaint over a plan to put things right. ...

I'm talking about perception and language and the uncomfortable sense that being damaged somehow has more cachet than being whole and hale and hearty. On Instagram, it has become a sort of boast to say you are "broken" by work, by commuting, by sleepless nights with a baby. Battered, sure, but not, I hope, actually, irreparably, broken.

Looking back on my twenties I wish I'd read a bit less Woolf and a bit more Barbara Pym, with her persevering women of sound middle age facing life's trials with quiet fortitude and only the occasional sob over a lone boiled egg. I wish that coping had been marketed half so effectively and seductively as being a hot mess in a white vest.

I wish, in public life, we valued the battle-hardened a bit more and the walking wounded, hearts still copiously bleeding, a lot less.

(Laura Freeman, The Times, 2024)

Anguish - severe mental or physical pain or suffering.

Cool - fashionable and attractive.

Are you really trying to tell me that anguish equals cool,? That to be uncool is a bit common?

That misery is elite and special? That suffering is prized over resilience? That being damaged somehow has more cachet than being whole and hale and hearty? 

Please don't use the word "we" when you actually mean "I" as in "We have become too hooked on the troubled past and the agonised present. From celebrity interviews to election hustings, we seem to prize sensitivity above common sense, suffering over resilience, complaint over a plan to put things right." 

Laura - have you had enough sleep recently?