Just a castaway

An island lost at sea

Another lonely day

With no one here but me

More loneliness

Than any man could bear

Rescue me before I fall into despair

(‘Message in a Bottle’, The Police, 1979).

 

When still a kid, one thing I always hoped would happen was that whilst at the beach, playing with my friends, a bottle with a message would wash-up on the shore. I would fantasize that the message in the bottle would lead to a treasure map or possibly the formula for eternal life or maybe a potion recipe that would transform me into a Prince! 

Naturally such concoctions pop up in the mind of a young child.

Then again for centuries people have been writing messages in bottles most likely because they wanted to pass on an intense emotion they might have experienced; perhaps two unsullied passionate lovers believing that all the world should know about their intense love; or, maybe someone who has carried so much anguish in life that writing a message, inserting it into a bottle and throwing it into the ocean becomes a process of catharsis.

Though I am no longer a youngster and my visits to the beach are pretty much rare, I am still expectant in my heart of hearts that a bottle with a message will one day wash up on the coast and provide me with the answer to all of my questions. I know this will most likely not happen even because the answers to all of our questions are really and truly bottled up in the people around us - if we only care to listen!   

We are all fragile and brittle and it is the community that has the propensity to keep us together, in sync, composed and collected - especially when we go through experiences in life that are tricky. Almost certainly, the worse part as we plod along is not sickness or ill health but going the whole hog on ‘your own’.

There are people out there who have throbbing hearts not because of the weight they carry and the bad deals they got in life but because they were dumped.

For example, that young lady I met recently who is struggling with an eating disorder, is bulimic, is overweight and has a hundred and one mental health conditions. Now whilst the problem is already complex she also carries a narrative of abuse and rejection. The significant issue she raises during our conversation is that she feels lonely. All the rest will be sorted out, she says, but being alone is the most terrible part of the dole out.     

Or, that lady who lives in a third floor flat, who is agoraphobic and has been locked in her apartment for years and depends entirely on her parents and a few others to provide for her - alone and disconnected.  She talks to me about loneliness, about the terrible anguish of not being able to connect and the pain and the atrocious soreness.

Or, the 14 year old who’s love of her life abandoned her and who was unable to cope with the dismissal and took the ill-fated untoward decision to take away her life because she felt no one was willing to love her.  She felt cut-off and yes I believe that society let her slip away.

Or, that 16 year old who was telling me some weeks back that she spent her entire fourth and fifth year at secondary education locked up in the toilet during every single school break to avoid being slapped, kicked and bullied in all sorts  of ways because her friends thought she was too beautiful.  She wanted to cut herself because she felt that the world had put a veil between her and the rest.

Or, the 22 year old I met recently. As I was speaking to him about the challenges he has to face day-in and day-out because of his drug addiction he revealed how he had started stealing from his brother, sister and parents to feed his habit.  He said that solitude was his biggest pain.

Or, the woman who spoke to me right after last week’s edition of ‘Ghandi xi Nghid’ (Radju Malta), after I had interviewed Shasha, the renowned make-up artist, who talked amongst other about domestic violence.  This woman, who called me on Messenger, sobbed, cried and went into moments of weighty silence as she told me about the pain her husband has been inflicting on her.  He beats her, she told me, and this when she had given him all the commitment and love one could warrant. 

Or, a similar situation of a woman in her 60s who saw me park the car some weeks back and came running towards me to tell me that we are not doing enough to fight domestic violence.  As she spoke, with tears in her eyes, she was watching over her shoulder all the time afraid that if her husband turns up and sees her chatting with me he would hit her. 

Shall I go on?

We all have our stories. 

We all meet people who are passing through the ‘valleys of the shadows of death’.

Mind you, I have no nostalgia for the ‘Haz-Zghir’ syndrome where the village seems to take over the identity of the individual conditioned by a couple of self-styled elders.  But I do believe that all human beings need to live in a group to be supported and protected and that if we drift away from each other it will become increasingly difficult to cope with the challenge life throws at us. That is why community is so important and that is probably why people keep planting messages of hope in bottles because people have always been driven by this need to communicate. 

So what can we do to be able to cope with a society that can be hostile and unwanting? I would probably opt for the wise words of a friend;

Firstly, we need to go back to the basics and learn to connect with our own feelings. Indulging in these emotions might make ‘you’ feel frightful pain at times but this turns us into the people we must be, people with minds to think, hearts to store love and with emotions to direct us. If we know ourselves well, it’s the first step in being able to live together. 

Secondly, this wise friend would tell me that we need to be proud of who ‘we’ are. Whilst it is virtuous to be humble, that is not good enough.  We can be unassuming but still feel good about who we are.  We need to remind ourselves what lovely things we have done for ourselves and for others and celebrate them.   We need to love ourselves.  This isn’t easy because people around us make it a point to create all sorts of sculpt into how we should be. That doesn’t mean we do not seek to improve, to become better persons, to challenge our ambitions - but we do need to learn to ‘love ourselves’. We all have our weaknesses, we are all spindly, but we are gems as well, that can help guide each other.

The common feature of the above is that we need each other, we need a community around us; neighborhood, family, social media, the Pjazza – whatever one feels comfortable with.

It is positive that Malta is gliding into a modern era, where people can think for themselves, where our faith, beliefs and values are conditioned by us and not others, where there is less of a ‘big brother’ telling us what to do and how to live our lives and we have more control over the choices we make. 

But, if I had to write my own message in a bottle, I would jot down the following;

‘…lest we forget that as individuals we need to grow alongside others. Community is a must.  People cannot and shouldn’t live on their own.’