The black hole of perfectionism & its impact on mental health.
- Josh Jones
- Jun 10, 2022
- 27 min read
Deeper and darker than all of outer space & can engulf us all.
Self-harm – a term I struggle mightily with for its inaccuracy. This is not just my issue, for it encompasses our entire society – the pursuit of perfection, creates vacuums and pressure that cannot be properly vented until all the life is sucked out of a future star. When a star explodes or implodes, that’s called a supernova. And we are seeing them light up our attention left and right. So common today, we almost don’t realize how we are choked by skewed information overload, which leads us to create false and unattainable standards or goals that only lead to disappointment and contribute to the mental health load so many are carrying around. Some say that real perfection is awareness, perhaps that is true (read The Greatest Secret). But the chase of perfection is rarely seeking awareness from what I can tell, we are running around in circles chasing our tails and ghosts. And that creates a difficult load, an unbearable weight that eventually pulls you down to the ocean floor like a thousand pound anchor – we are seeing it in so many cases, where the inability to manage the pressures, the noise, the influences, the expectations and speed of it all leads to self-harm in places we would never expect – the Miss USA pageant, Stanford University, the Mayor’s office in Hyattsville Md., the softball college world series dugout, at the home of a successful college basketball coach’s house, the home of a country music hall of famer and countless other horribly unexpected places. And what is worse, the worst-form of self-harm, taking one’s own life and committing suicide, is so improperly termed as the harm done to the self is nothing compared to the subsequent harm done to so many around that person – the family, friends, teammates, colleagues, the many others that looked up to this person in one way or another – their community or circle. The self-harm is actually a full-blown communal harm that never retreats.
Mayor Kevin Ward, that one is sure to have a sharp communal sting, on many levels – his physical community of Hyattsville MD, the black community, the LGBTQ+ community, the political community, the community of this country. It hurts me and also leaves me with a few questions as to why this one was so quiet, we didn’t hear much about what may be a far greater story beyond the tragedy and lessons of Kevin’s life and death. I see the word apparently and suspected in too many articles and the fact that he was found in Fort Marcy, a park in McLean Va (the same park where police found the body of former Clinton White House counsel Vince Foster, who died by apparent suicide in July of 1993). And a member of Ward’s extended family remarked that they didn’t believe Kevin would kill himself “Please, they need to look into this. [Mayor Kevin] would not have committed suicide. This could be a murder,” Well I love conspiracy theories and X-Files and all that jazz, but we will come back to this angle at a later date. Kevin was found 21 miles away from his home in Hyattsville, on the other side of Washington DC, at a park close to the Potomac River on a Tuesday morning, none of that makes sense to me (but mental health rarely does).
Kevin Ward was 44 years old when he took his own life, found in that infamous public park with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The news shattered his husband and their two sons along with the small, tightknit community of Hyattsville, where Kevin made history as the city’s second Black and first openly gay mayor. He was truly blazing a trail, until the fire engulfed him on January 25th.
This statement from Kevin is a tough one for me to swallow my words minced and gone: I am not one to mince words or tell people what they want to hear. I believe in doing the work. I believe that if I can help someone, then I can change her or his life.”
Referring to his beloved Hyattsville community, another unfortunately grim quote:
“We must not look outside for the answers because I know where the answers are,” he said. “What we need to do is bring ourselves together. What we need to do is remember that we are repairers of the breach.”
Something interesting about Kevin that I identify with – the shoes and hoarding, collecting things in the hope of finding fulfillment, only to find issues with storing and they end up causing you more pain than joy.
After not being able to get a pair of Air Jordans as a kid, he began collecting sneakers as an adult, wearing them even with formal outfits and keeping more than 800 in a storage locker that he would regularly visit.
I fear so much for our younger generation, that they are not being given a fair shake in the information they receive, all with targeted messages to infiltrate and manipulate, that the reality in their heads is so far from the truth and they are unable to properly defend what gets into their minds. Then they build off and act on this warped, mixed-messaging and whispers that continue to echo endlessly in their head, drowning out so many other thoughts and experiences. Then we really have problems, they start to tell themselves things that are so far from what they should be, began looking up to and calculating their path from the wrong Polaris or north star. And then they get turned around, slip down the slope and into the abyss or black hole, forever gone. All that remains is their battered community, with broken hearts, harmed to their core. WE need information shields, for the movie Inception was not all fiction, it teaches us that any idea is capable of becoming not only believed as truth, but can overtake your mind fully, engulf your soul like a black hole. I am very interplanetary of late, the stars, the moon, the night sky are my friend and teacher. All the stars and the night sky look so perfect from afar, but we know so little.
The price of perfect – when enough is not enough
In moderation, perfectionism can be a useful, motivating trait. Carried to the extreme, it can lead to depression and suicide, studies have found.
Not only have multiple studies found this to be true, but we are seeing direct evidence over and over and over. Well, the evidence is present daily, as 5 suicides occur in the US every hour of every day, and so many are happening to our youth, to seemingly stable, capable and able people. Attention to the issue is waxing, our collective spotlight appears to be picking up on this trend more and more where nary a day goes by without another tragedy – the loss of a can’t miss college kid or young professional, a star imploding into a supernova, or a star being consumed by a black hole. Our biggest threats will always come from within, our greatest foe is inside all of us – this is especially true for the achievers, the winners, the smart ones who seem to have it all figured out. We have to watch them and support them just as well.
I can’t help but think about the ping pong prodigy I met when my Prius nearly blew up on the side of the highway after work a month back – he is at risk of a pressure-driven, similar self-harming implosive fate. All indications are that he is of sound mind and body, able to navigate the many pitfalls of growing up with a true talent, modern society’s expectations, the sports world, the probability of failing when you seek goals that are statistically improbable. When you set out to be #1 in the world, there are 9 billion reasons why you won’t succeed.
Enrique Yezue Rios the 13-year-old top-ranked table tennis talent from Puerto Rico. And for all his table tennis talent, he is a better human being with such a balanced and old-soul disposition about him. He will be at the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028, he will take an el Churry Boriqua bite out of a gold medal, you can just see it so clearly. Enrique is such an inspiring person to just sit down and talk to over a bite to eat. He makes you better, simply put. His father makes you better too, by the way Edgar - thanks for saving me on the side of the road when the Prius imploded my friend!
Here is a picture that I truly cherish from when Enrique, his father Edgar and I had dinner and discussed Enrique’s approach, training, dreams:
VEGA ALTA – Enrique Yezue Ríos Torres is one of those young promises of Puerto Rican and Latin American table tennis that appears once or twice every 100 years. A diamond in the rough – as was Adriana Díaz – who continues to polish her skills and abilities – at just 11 years old – together with her coach, the former player of the national team, Héctor Berríos.
For Enrique, the 100-year talent, I hope and theoretically pray (I don’t pray but if I did, he would be on my short list) he is strong of mind, that he will be on the right side of perfectionism. Everything I have seen and heard so far tells me so, but how many would have said the same thing about Tyler Hilinski, Katie Meyer, Sarah Shulze, Jayden Hill, Arlana Miller, Morgan Rogers, Robert Martin, Lauren Bernett, Aiden Kaminska, Jayda Grant and countless others who we recently lost (all college-aged, students and student-athletes). And the pressure of perfection and being a trailblazer, doing ground-breaking things is not just about athletes, mayor Kevin Ward, who at 44 broke political barriers that seemed insurmountable, Cheslie Kryst a former Miss USA, lawyer, actress, multi-talented shining star, Anthony Bourdain, one of the most recognized public chefs and travel aficionados in the world, Naomi Judd who was to-be-enshrined into the Country Music Hall of Fame in just days. Robin Williams, again - acting and comedic genius who for decades made millions smile and laugh, warmed us all. Well he made us all cold, dark and cry at the end also. Why couldn’t the genius of improvisation do just that in his weakest moment. Why couldn’t Cheslie look in the mirror and see her beaming beauty and strength inside and out, why couldn’t these college athletes see the positive side of their own drive and focus that their teammates were inspired by? Why couldn’t Kevin believe in himself as the mensch of his community the way that thousands resolutely demonstrated when they elected him as their leader for change in Hyattsville, MD? Why – the most important question in the world as Cheslie Kryst put it so bluntly and apropos (correct at just the right time), we will never know that answer for these supernovas, but we can use their example to avoid future whys with no answer.
This is a common quote I see with each of our losses, again, there is nothing accurate to say self- when we say self-harm:
“My heart is forever broken.” Aiden Kaminska’s mother Lydia wrote on facebook after his unexpected death
"The last couple days are like a parent’s worst nightmare and you don’t wake up from it. So it’s just horrific." "I don’t even think it’s hit us yet," she continued. "We’re still in shock. But we had no red flags." Katie Meyer’s parents after her suicide
“I have never known a pain as deep as this. I am forever changed,” Cheslie Kryst’s mother after the loss of her daughter
“Sarah was a gentle and kind soul, a loving daughter, sister, friend and human who will be dearly missed by those who knew her and loved her." Sarah Shulze’s high school track coach
“We all have to watch out for each other and take care of each other and love each other and tell us how they are doing,” she said. “We are all grappling with it. We are all devastated. We are going to carry his vision forward.” A colleague referring to Kevin Ward’s suicide
In each case, the loss and the toll shows that the harm done spans far beyond self.
And in each case the self-harming act, was a way to escape and rest, to stop hiding from an illusion created by the complex mind.
You could clearly see the pain in the Judd family’s eyes and hearts on multiple occasions at the Country Music Hall of Fame ceremony and subsequent interviews. So self-harm again becomes family and communal harm, everyone hurt.
“Our mother couldn’t hang on to be recognized by her peers. That is the level of catastrophe of what was going on inside of her,” she said. “Because the barrier between the regard in which they held her couldn’t penetrate into her heart and the lie the disease told her was so convincing.”
The lie, she explained, was her mother’s thoughts “that you’re not enough, that you’re not loved, that you’re not worthy.”
“Her brain hurt. It physically hurt,” she said.
According to Simpkins, her daughter began “taking all the right steps” for her mental health after attempting suicide in her early twenties. Beforehand, Simpkins said she had noticed her daughter's "smiles were a little forced."
“Cheslie led both a public and a private life. In her private life, she was dealing with high-functioning depression which she hid from everyone — including me, her closest confidant — until very shortly before her death.”
"One never knows the pain and anguish a smile can mask. One never knows the face of suicide until it’s too late. In life always take the time to listen to one who wishes to talk, your attention to what another has to say, may save a life," In reference to Mayor Kevin Ward’s suicide
Many foundations and programs to help change the sport of mental health are forming, maybe these are small starts, maybe they will have a great impact – only time will tell:
I love the Katie’s Save mission – to incorporate mental health services into colleges to help students, student-athletes manage the many pulls on their time, the many pressures, the black hole of perfection and external pressures and expectations. Hilinski’s Hope is doing the same, and this is a good direction and game plan https://www.hilinskishope.org/bring-h3h-to-campus and Prevention strategies LLC. But I say we must start earlier, go further down the educational ladder all the way to elementary and middle school. We likely don’t have a budget to tackle this the way we need to – we have to put resources to work and build new sustaining programs in our educational system. I also remember taking elective classes in college – really not helpful, but if one of my electives was focused on managing emotions, feelings, psychology and mental health, that would have been work the credit hours and made me a better person much earlier, perhaps, if I didn’t ditch class and just ace the exams.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has a secret weapon in their athletic department: UNC’s dog Remington is a mental health savior like my beautiful moon sata Luna Mar
Meet Remington, the first athletic training room assistance dog for not just UNC but also the Atlantic Coast Conference. The golden retriever’s official position is as a psychiatric medical alert facility rehabilitation service dog, working alongside the baseball team’s head athletic trainer, Terri Jo Rucinski.
I have always been a fan of Carolina blue, and now an even greater fan!
Any time I think of suicide and the hiding behind a mask or irony of being the light of the room when your internal power is clearly out, I think of Robin Wiliams. He was brilliantly funny, he was shockingly disturbed, he was many things. His friends called him a mensch, his ability to make anyone laugh on command seemed supernatural. I also think of our COVID reality, we may never take those masks off just like our mental health masks.
After Steve Martin tweeted his reaction to Williams’ death—“I could not be more stunned by the loss of Robin Williams, mensch, great talent, acting partner, genuine soul.”—mensch became the fifth most searched word on Google.
Robin Williams was a mannish mensch – he helped us shine light on difficult realities with laughter – for there is always some truth in jokes, the funniest of jokes possessing the heaviest truth in many cases. Unfortunately he couldn’t successfully shine light on his own darkness.
In Old English, being “mannish” meant one was of mankind, exhibiting humanity itself and human nature. And being mannish is at the heart of comedy, the quality of unspoken truths Williams’ indirectly told his audiences about, and made them laugh about, through his jokes and voices. You know, it’s funny because it’s true.
Robin Williams was also called a sad clown – with a ridiculous costume and external make-up necessary to hide inner turmoil and darkness. How appropriate it is. We truly are surrounded by sad clowns, when will we acknowledge this as the first step to changing this? 20 Clowns cramming into a VW bug of false happiness and stumbling through, just as they did at the circus of Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey – putting a smile on so many sad clown faces. In Europe’s Romantic days, the notion of a sad clown—the type of character whose costume romantically masks inner turmoil—became popular. Part of this comes from the Italian Commedia dell’Arte theater that relied on certain stock characters that cropped up again and again. One of them was a bumpkin that actors began playing as a melancholy clown. Literary types were drawn to the sad clown as a character who was a creative master unappreciated by the public (no doubt because some of them felt that way themselves).
Inner turmoil cropping up again and again, it is very tough to process all of this. We have to do something. I can see Robin Williams saying after we finally figure out the depths of mental illness and drive change, effortless, glowing ear-to-ear smile on his face “Don’t menschion it”
As I said earlier, these days I’m gazing up at the stars and the moon quite often, the waxing gibbous moon tonight is beyond spectacular. And when I look up into that abyss I feel as if I am looking into my head through a tiny peephole of my tinnitously ringing ear. My conclusion over the last few weeks and months is that mental illness is the black hole of our societal conscience, and that vast collective, emotive space is just like a universe full of galaxies and planets and stars and moons and suns, asteroids and meteor showers and shooting stars. Some of those things we can scientifically explain and know, along with millions or billions more things we don’t fully understand, present mysteries and places we are yet to reach, encounters familiar and foreign. Weightlessness, immense gravitational pull. Endless circular orbits. Light and darkness, intense heat and inescapable cold. Being consumed by a black hole is inevitable if we don’t change our trajectory. And we are just starting to see this, our first views of black holes and breaking the stigma hiding our clear view of mental illness.
Maybe there are two relatable entities in a similar orbit – inside each of our heads is a vast galaxy of thoughts, emotions, feelings and experiences; and I correlate this to the universe and galaxies, planets and stars. Our universe is believed to consist of 200 billion trillion stars (200 sextillion), with 100 billion galaxies in the universe and 200 billion stars each galaxy, our milky way being just one of them.
Humankind is roughly 9 billion heads at the moment, with each human mind consisting of 10 trillion synapses and 86 billion neurons, 100 trillion calculations per second happening in each of those noggins. The number of memories and thoughts each of our brains processes in a day is over 6000, so in a lifetime we have 164 million of them. The numbers are of just the right magnitude.
The sum of our minds and collective mental state is our universe. Each of us with a galaxy in our own head. Each neuron a star, firing like a star flashes in the night sky. And if not cared for, each neuron and its synapses becomes an internal supernova. Our feelings, thoughts and emotions represent the atmosphere, shooting stars as hopes and wishes or meteor showers peppering us to varying degrees of collision and damage. At our darkest and worst, our mind is consumed by the darkness of mental illness like a black hole, everything inevitably is pulled in and devoured. Our sun, our moon, our psyche and mood, cycling days, nights and seasons like bipoles. Look up and see a milky way, look inside and see a clear and murky way, both infinitely complex and vast.
And it’s not any easier to think of a galaxy in your head if we are on a mental health recovery journey: How to keep the traffic flowing smoothly, with billions of chemical reactions and signals that make up the dynamic system that is responsible for your mood, perceptions and how you experience life feels overly daunting to say the least. Plus, the innumerable trillions of external perceptions that are projected onto you from others and external stimuli we are faced with on a daily basis, especially in this day and age. The information flow is nearly visible its so dense, you can almost hear it buzzing too (like a corona discharge). And these chemical reactions are firing in orbit within each second and every minute of the day. Like 10 cups of sand bouncing around in your head if each grain of sand represented one of these chemical reactions and signals in each moment of life. Or each grain of sand a single star.
Perhaps we have it all wrong – we think chasing our lives in seemingly progress-less repetitive circles and monotony of repeat days is a bad thing but perhaps we are moving with perfect balance, going around in circles is by design the way we sustain our existence isn’t it. Just like that of the planets maintaining their orbit, going round and around in a circle is just the way to be, for if we deviate from our orbit and gravity is disturbed we either shoot off into the unknown outer parts of the galaxy and freeze solid, lacking the necessary energy from the sun to survive, or we dive into the middle of our milky way, consumed by the hungry black hole Sagittarius A at our center.
Back to planet us (and no I’m not high): We try to achieve too much and we end up out of orbit, we retract from our world and we enter the black hole – a life on a circus tightrope it seems, you can feel the collective gasp from the crowd at your every imperfectly questionable move.
The black hole Sagittarius A at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, engulfing stars and all in its path day after day, the black hole of disturbed thoughts, emotions and mental illness I have in my murky ways, ever presently working to engulf my life. Fighting my November-born Sagittarius waxing gibbous moon of growth and recovery, expanding and growing brighter, not to be sucked in, just like the rest of our galaxy fighting for our lives. Some days are a black hole and others I’m a shooting star, bright in my bipolar orbit. That entropy-making garbage disposal of darkness between my ears, operating just like a black hole has been winning out for so long.
It was in 2019 when we first saw an image of a black hole - in the center of the Messier 87 galaxy in the Virgo cluster, and just recently we saw the first image of the black hole Sagittarius A at the center of the Milky Way, our galaxy. Thank you to the Event Horizon telescope and science. Not to worry, the Messier 87 galaxy is some 50 million light years away and from our solar system to the center of the Milky Way where Sagittarius A lurks, that is 25,800 light years away – so we have eons of time to enjoy and live. As we move at a snails pace of 510,000 mph we won’t be eaten up by either for at least a few thousands of years. I also have plenty of time to enjoy and live, we have plenty of time, but we shouldn’t delay change any longer.
Looking up into the sky and stars is a unique feeling, one of wonderment and appreciation of our insignificance. Yet we see our place and order within the unknown, earth and our solar system are in a much bigger existence – are we unique, are we alone, are we just one of many others just like us out in that endless sky of the universe, beyond what we can see or imagine. We are visionaries, yearning to go deeper and find what is missing, whether it be on a new planet or the moon, new energy sources, or to escape our mistakes - leave our wreckage in the form of earth behind. Yet we are struggling to truly articulate who or what we really want to reach or communicate with - that galaxy for me is our modern day society. The galaxy is vast and complex, beautiful and dynamic, but lurking at the edge is a machine that will engulf and destroy all of us if we don’t act – the default is to be consumed, the gravitational pull we don’t even feel takes us closer to the black hole every day, and we must impart effort and tools to not be slowly sucked in and gobbled up. That machine, that black hole is mental health.
I am even reading now that the black hole at the center of the galaxy, Perseus, is giving off sounds and pressure waves to let us know how things are going. Black hole tinnitus. Murmurs not intelligible without translation, sonification is the method by which the black hole’s screams and whispers in the form of pressure waves are changed into sounds. Reminds me of whales underwater a bit. And the visuals and sounds are stunning to say the least. Society is giving off unintelligible sounds and signs in the mental health arena far too often as well.
But lets start with some of the basics – what is a black hole? Something larger than our imagination, with a gravitational pull so great that we cannot escape it. Light is extinguished, life is digested.
A black hole is an astronomical object with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape it. A black hole’s “surface,” called its event horizon, defines the boundary where the velocity needed to escape exceeds the speed of light, which is the speed limit of the cosmos. Matter and radiation fall in, but they can’t get out.
When will we discover that the mental health pandemic is growing more rapidly than we can manage? Why are we able to find out about rapidly-growing black holes millions of light years away, but we can’t see what is right in front of our faces. They say this was all in plain sight and we just needed to connect the dots. Unfortunately, that word potential is glaring again, signaling doubt. Lets see what we can learn about GNz7q and starburst galaxies here.
Will we find our quasar? Will a brilliant source of enlightenment around the criticality of change in the mental health world finally illuminate us all before its too late? Will we incorporate mental health into our education system, and early and often into our education system (you know when our brains can actually learn something efficiently, when we are just creating all those pathways that will help or harm us for the rest of our lives. You know, instead of the wood shop or Home Economics classes that serve no purpose, or cut down on geography and turn up the geography of our minds and our feelings and thoughts so we can manage them effectively.) And turn up the conversation in our daily dialog, will we see just as many people heading off to the mental health gym as often as we do to the superficial physical gym every day currently? Will discussing mental health be no more taboo just as talking about sex and sexuality has transformed over the last 20-30 years? Will Lululemon create a mental health line – meditation wear – that is designed without scratchy seams and instead relies upon cooling, soothing fabrics that help us find our center? Hopefully so, but prob gonna cost $250 plus.
I find it so interesting that we can develop billion-dollar technologies to study this phenomenon that is millions of light years away and we struggle to build adequate mental health ecosystem in our present day society all around us? I sense a different event horizon for all of us if we don’t change. [In black hole talk, the event horizon is the dark surface of the black hole, representing the boundary from which you can’t escape from. The Event Horizon telescope is a collective technological marvel that cost somewhere between $7 and $12 million.
Another thing catches my eye here, the Event Horizon telescope array is actually a network of smaller global radio telescopes. Here I was thinking these pictures were coming from a single ‘thing’ or object, a spectacularly complex single telescope about a hundred yards long or wide with super lenses. Wrong again. So you can only begin to observe or understand a black hole, due to its massive size, complexity and scale, with a team approach, combining many satellites from all over the globe. I find this very fitting if I consider the mental health topic a black hole and the various treatments and efforts that are necessary to observe and understand mental health (not talking about improving or solving the issue yet) as another Event Horizon. I sense a different strategy is needed in order to make progress – maybe we can learn something from the stars and apply it to what we need here on the ground and in our minds on planet earth – perhaps then may we have a positive mental health event on our horizon. Perhaps then we can defeat the constant, dark, powerful gravitational pull of mental illness.
"The Event Horizon Telescope has captured yet another remarkable image, this time of the giant black hole at the center of our own home galaxy," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "Looking more comprehensively at this black hole will help us learn more about its cosmic effects on its environment, and exemplifies the international collaboration that will carry us into the future and reveal discoveries we could never have imagined."
What I learned just here about the Event Horizon Telescope is also valuable – we have certain biases to a significantly greater degree than we realize. If we think the problem is to be able to see a black hole in outer space, we think the solution is a singular entity – a big-ass telescope like Jodie Foster utilized in the 1997 Robert Zemeckis film Contact – based on the 1985 book from Carl Sagan (his idea for Contact was conceived in 1979 – a year of great and tragic conceptions). Contact fit right in with my other supernatural, paranormal, science-fiction interests - I’m sure you remember it, the next evolution of ET, starring protagonist Dr. Ellie Arroway (sounds eerily like Dr. Array in some way). This film took us on a tour of large telescopes such as the recently destroyed, but for decades one of the technological wonders of the world, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, just down the road from where I work in Barceloneta. In Contact Dr. Arroway, who works for the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and after years of silence, the universe finally starts speaking to her. There’s a lot of stuff in between where Dr. Arroway, in search of funding to continue her mission, relocates to New Mexico from Puerto Rico, and there she stumbles upon signals that must originate from intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy. The signal which started out as a trivial repetition of prime numbers over a certain radio frequency, is studied further to uncover the opening ceremony of the 1936 Olympics being re-transmitted back to earth and an additional 63,000 pages of undecipherable data. So the iceberg example comes up yet again – the major mass of the thing lies underneath the surface, just out of sight. Then there is the problem of translating the volumes of the signal from space, the tools needed to communicate back (again think extremely complex, precise and technical which means extremely expensive – similar to coffee machines). Then in typical X-files fashion, carnage and mayhem, disguise and coverups ensue, the machine first built to communicate back into space is suicide bombed, the government steps in and constructs a top-secret shadow machine, and before we know it, Jodi Foster is shooting through a wormhole and talking to her dead father in the form of an alien on a white sandy beach in pure Hollywood fashion. And then there is the coverup, typical government espionage stuff, but it was a great flick and now it’s all coming back like a crystal-clear signal transmitted from deep space with no resistance.
Now I go down into my own wormhole thinking about the movie, the place I am in life and more reading up from Wikipedia:
Sagan and Ann Druyan (who were later married) finished their film treatment in November 1980.[5][6] Druyan explained:
Carl's and my dream was to write something that would be a fictional representation of what contact would actually be like, that would convey something of the true grandeur of the universe.
They added the science and religion analogies as a metaphor of philosophical and intellectual interest in searching for the truth of both humanity and alien contact
Perhaps the true grandeur of the universe relevant to us, of earth and our moon, sun and stars with all of us 9 billion lights bouncing around on the surface, would be understanding and caring for each other on a deeper level – based on feelings, emotions and true communication, connection, real contact vs all the material and superficial angles of our current daily life. No more shows or magic.
Prior to any final script was green-lighted for Contact, countless Hollywood writers evaluated ways to bolster the drama of the story – one angle being to incorporate the story of real-life SETI scientist Jill Tarter who led the Phoenix project. Jill served as a consultant for the film and opened up to writers about the challenges associated with being a female scientist at that time, something along the lines of a muted version of the Hidden Figures story. But the writers were more captivated by cooking up new characters and storylines like what if Jodie Foster (playing Jill Tarter in essence) were to have a baby, or if they pulled in a cameo for the New Mexico portion of the film portraying a Native American Indian park ranger who becomes an astronaut. Now that sounds like Geronimo the prequel to me, but that is a story for another day, that is a movie I want to see made but it’s quite a long story [nobody will get the fact that I have long fancied the idea of developing a screenplay for a movie named Geronimo about a Native American Indian revenge soldier who bucks the trend of another hopeless existence drowned in alcoholism, gambling in reservation casinos, petty crime, poverty and despair in his community. Here the Native American hero is able to win against all odds, bottling up and focusing his hatred and anger towards ‘Merica like the signal transmitted millions of light years from a black hole into a network of telescopes on earth, well ok that is a bit dramatic, let’s just say he puts all that energy to good use and does something about his situation, he won’t accept his fate. Jerome, the protagonist in Geronimo, takes the leap and focuses his energy on college and law school, finally becoming a lawyer and suing the American government for reparations – a take on the song ‘This Land is My Land’ as sung by the Avett Brothers playing in the background. Cliffhanger alert - But in a sobering-yet-realistic and gut-wrenching final twist, winning the case does not change the outcome for his family, friends and community, there is no magical salvation after winning the judge’s verdict in a landmark case that brings even more complexity from the present-day media. Chaos and despair ensue, leaving Geronimo’s ears ringing to the point of suicide and deep depression, inter-family strife and further suffering. There is more to the story but I will not give away the ending, and you can be sure a very pessimistic, dark person wrote this screenplay.]
Ok I really need to rewind the tape here and play it back, I jumped in and went deep down my own wormhole Geronimo style there.
So back to Contact and scraping together some deeper meaning or point to all this stargazing, finger slapping the keys and webcrawling. In Contact, a great movie from the late ‘90s, with a theme of tinnitus ringing in the universe’s head, our struggle to understand the message behind the radio-waves white noise, the desire to know what is out there (or in there when thinking of my head as another vast galaxy), there’s also the story behind the story which we so often gloss over or surf right past.
Sagan’s thoughts with Contact were not only a book and a movie spawning from this idea of extraterrestrial discovery, but also to assemble a team to determine just the story that would maximize the arc of his concept. And this took many turns over a few years, there is no ah-ha magic moment in this story as is the case in so many others. Just like the Event Horizon, just like we need to do for mental health exploration and conquest.
As all of this was developing, there were many starts and stops and timeouts under the watchful eye of Hollywood studio executive Peter Gruber. Contact evolved many times before a final screenplay was settled on. And in parallel Sagan completed and sold off the book version of the story, as things eventually took on a life of their own with respect to the paper version and big screen versions of his story. Contact was published in 1995 by Simon and Schuster. Yet the road to the big screen continued on past the horizon, the long winding road with several changes of characters, overtures by different studios and personnel moves within each studio pitstop. Some of the moves are notable on another level:
Gruber suggested that Dr. Arroway have an estranged teenage son, whom he believed would add depth to the storyline. Guber said:[2]
Here was a woman consumed with the idea that there was something out there worth listening to, but the one thing she could never make contact with was her own child. To me, that's what the film had to be about.
[I like Gruber’s idea here – looking up to the stars and throughout the galaxy for something to pay attention to, when the most important sounds and contact were right in front of Dr. Arroway, in the form of her family]
Sounds like my family and I talking about the weather at nauseum, sounds like my estranged relationship with my father, sounds like our approach and ignorance towards mental health. Feels like I took one complete orbital circle around the moon here. The things that matter most are right in front of us, in our grasp, yet we gravitate towards the far-off shiny objects.
And sure it would be good to find some far-off galaxy that offers a chance at a fresh start on another planet to correct the wrongs of how we treated mother earth, to find new frontiers, to connect with another form of life – but perhaps we need to focus on our human to human connections and the messes and opportunities right here. That would be a truly impactful sequel to Contact, one I hope we can see every day all around us, not a Hollywood science-fiction dream story. The fascination with space and the galaxy, understanding how it all started, where it’s all going, we might get passed by focusing too much on those things. We may be swallowed up by the black hole right in front of us on this planet, our lack of starting with science and a comprehensive process, incorporating technology and a diverse team and approach to the mental health supernova that is happening. There is no massive super telescope or singular truth that will explain it all. The telescope is another relevant blind spot or misconception worth talking about, at least to me there is something important symbolically here.
Ok, there I go again, perhaps my second therapist is correct in that I have more ADHD than bipolar. Smart. We were talking about black holes and lost contact. So back to the black holes - There’s been a lot of buzz around black holes, the space station, making trips to space routine, finding new planets and civilizations, etc. and the NASA geek from my childhood loves this. Science and technology are in the spotlight in this arena, progress is clearly being made, breakthroughs (no surprise, when you start with and appreciate the science, good things happen). The more powerful, illuminating telescope that unlocks a larger field of vision has been of particular interest. We have seen two massive black holes and are learning from those images. The Event Horizon captured the first image of this massive black hole at the center of our universe on May 12, 2022. M87, an even bigger black hole, was first pictured in 2019 and is 55 million light years away (1000 times the size of the sun). Black holes don’t emit any light themselves, but the mass they devour does and that is why you see the ring of light around their event horizon.
Repeating and repeating - But in reality, the act of seeing a black hole, of solving a massive problem such as collecting data from a large and complex target millions of years away, requires collaboration and a broad plan – in reality there is no single telescope to look through, no single magic pill or bullet. The many facets, the need to attack on multiple fronts is the truth behind our most complex issues, just like mental health. We have a picture of a black hole, we have a picture of mental health, but we have so far to go in order to fully understand them both.
Even black holes are related to and communicate with one another.
Perhaps Sagittarius A, the name of the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy will engulf us all, just as mental health can do. Our galaxy is our landscape here on earth, our black hole is mental health, we cannot escape unless we change.
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