The Tale of the Feather of a Bee Hummingbird and a Glacial Boulder
By Anon
During a recent phone conversation with a GP locum about my daughter’s depression, he said something bewildering:
He apologised to me about her autism.
Stephen Fry infamously said that, if offered the option of pressing a button to release his manic depression (Bipolar Disorder), he wouldn’t press it, “for all the tea in China.” This was despite his own hugely traumatic experiences.
We’re huge fans of The Matrix films in our house – eagerly awaiting the imminent fourth film.
There’s a classic scene in the original 1999 film, when Morpheus offers Neo a blue or red pill. Choose the blue pill: the story ends – wake up and believe whatever you want to believe. Choose the red pill: stay in the unsettling wonderland – see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Despite her own traumatic experiences, my Matrix-loving daughter said that she wouldn’t press a button to end her autism.
In a sense, she continues to live in a red pill universe – with her eyes wide open. Others, by comparison, seem content to dwell in a blue pill haze.
This was illustrated, after a recent school history lesson on the Middle Eastern conflict. The class learned about the 1972 Munich massacre, with the Palestinian militia group, Black September.
Reeling from the lesson, my daughter described equally, the horror of the massacre, and her disgust at classmates making jokes and not taking the lesson seriously.
She simply said, “why do people want to kill each other – and why do my classmates find that funny?”
My Matrix-loving, ignorance-hating daughter lives every day as an empath.
Friends?
During Lockdown, we worked our way through all 10 seasons of the US sitcom, Friends. During the first episode of season two (‘The one with Ross’s New Girlfriend’),
