When Life Makes More Cents Than Sense

(I originally wrote this in 2019 but still relevant to existence…)

The film JOKER showed the slow but steady unraveling of a man who never seemed to have felt any semblance of sanity’s warmth. If you were to ask me what I got from the film, this is the quick answer. The longer answer has to do with being able to relate to one specific line in the movie towards the end. After confessing to Murray (Robert De Niro’s character) and the rest of the audience listening and watching that he (Joker) murdered the three men on the subway, he maniacally yells out, “WHAT DO YOU GET WHEN YOU CROSS A MENTALLY ILL LONER WITH A SOCIETY THAT ABANDONS HIM AND TREATS HIM LIKE TRASH? YOU GET WHAT YOU FUCKIN’ DESERVE!”

Yes, it seems as though he’s blaming society for his plight in life and it being the catalyst for what would come next… behavior that’s grossly inappropriate and harmful. While I can’t tell you what finally deciding to jump off the bridge of sanity feels like (because I’m still hanging on by the skin of my teeth), I CAN tell you what declining mental health can do to you. I can tell you this from experience. I can also tell you that attempting to explain this to anyone other than another person who is teetering on a similar edge, is tantamount to screaming HELP from the bottom of the ocean. I can tell you that talking to a licensed mental professional of any kind isn’t an automatic win either.

The mounting tragedies, pains, and roadblocks of life can cause anyone to snap who doesn’t have the help, time and/or space to tend to what needs to be healed. It’s HOW we snap that makes everyone else who didn’t think it was all that serious, immediately pay attention. When someone takes their life or the lives of others, we hear the typical song and dance of, “why didn’t they tell anyone how they felt”, “I should have spent more time with them”, “I wish they would have reached out to me” and the biggest attention grabbers of them all:

“I was JUST talking to them” and/or “I was JUST with them the other day,'' usually followed up with, “and they seemed fine.”

The difference with Joker is that he never seemed. Festering darkness was his default but he often presented as cowardly, reserved, and intentionally isolated from the rest of the world. So outside of the portrayal Joaquin Phoenix gives us of declining mental health, how much of this do we see around us in real life and ignore? How often do we tune into someone who seems to be distancing themselves from others, beyond the robotic pleasantry of “how are you doing?” I’d venture to say that most of us don’t care enough to even listen to someone tell us EXACTLY how they’re doing.

This is how we, as a society, fail one another.

I thought about how many times I’ve said, “I need sleep” and how often it was brushed off as a typical utterance. It sounds like a simple fix but in my case, it isn’t. I don’t live in a neighborhood or apartment building that allows me to get any more than 4 hrs of sleep a night. If it isn’t someone busting donuts at the end of the block, it’s some guys sitting outside with their music blaringly loud for hours at a time. If it isn’t my neighbors next door (on my left and my right) and across the street playing their music through concert speakers until 2 and 3 in the morning, it’s my alcoholic neighbor downstairs fighting with her adult son between the hours of 12a and 3a. Now, factor in nerve damage that causes incessant pain but the medication makes me drowsy so I can only take it at night… when I’m not able to fall asleep and stay asleep anyway.

Nothing about this makes sense but it’s consistently been my life since August of 2018. How am I surviving on 2-4 hours of sleep a night? I don’t have the slightest clue but I know it’s taking its toll on my body. So when I say “I need sleep”, it isn’t some typical statement like “I’m tired.” I also have a chronic illness that requires I get rest but since I don’t, my health is declining. My immune system not being able to recharge is causing other weird things to happen in my body. There’s been blood tests run but it seems because of the constant weakening of my immune system, I’m developing another chronic illness. More tests are required to give a full-blown diagnosis but I’ve been informed what it more than likely is… and it’s something else that requires me to get rest if I’m going to survive.

So when we see Joker’s journal writings that he hopes his death makes more cents than his life, I understand. I know my life will be worth far more when I die than it appears to be now because the general public (see: society) doesn’t give a flying rat's ass about another person's declining health of any kind. Well, that is until it starts to somehow affect them and THEN, something MUST be done.

A lot of the sentiments Joker wrote in his journal or voiced out loud aren’t things we haven’t heard before. Especially not, “I used to think that my life was a tragedy. But now I realize, it’s a comedy.” How can you not laugh at the irony of life? We “matter” more when we’re dead than while we’re living and yes, while that might be a dark and cynical view of life, it’s a reality for far more people than we’ll ever honestly acknowledge.

So while some people were bored by watching a pitiful, woe is me, White man descending into the insanity that we love to see Batman battle, I saw what we often dismiss. One movie isn’t going to make anyone pay attention but when we get what we deserve, well? By then, it’s always too late. So… pay attention and do something now.

I think we can all agree it’s nothing to joke about….