Suzanne Harrington: Get out of your head, be a radical do-gooder

We are probably all in agreement that so far 2020 has been the temporal equivalent of that party when your acid trip went wrong and you ended up crouched in a corner fending off the giant carnivorous bats that nobody else could see, except in 2020, everyone can see them, because they are real, and coming for us all. 

No amount of banana bread can fend them off. Watching horror movies has been usurped by 2am doom scrolling. If 2020 were a dog, we’d have shot it by April. 

This is when some eejit steps in wafting guff about self care, scented candles, and gratitude lists – but the thing with self care, scented candles, and gratitude lists, even if it’s a Jo Malone Pomegranate Noir that cost more than the week’s food shopping, is that it still focuses entirely on the self. 

And six months into a pandemic that has decimated our social lives, we are all sick to death of the self.

Luckily there lies a solution to this self-sickness that’s less fattening than banana bread, far cheaper than fancy candles, and almost idiotically simple: getting out of self. 

It’s what addicts are told to do when their heads are spiralling – and right now we probably all qualify, as we stagger between Pomegranate Noir and Pinot Noir (or wish we could, if we weren’t all so skint – although it’s important to differentiate between getting out of self and getting off your head. The latter, while fun, is generally unsustainable). 

Nor does getting out of self mean immersing yourself head first in the drama of others - that’s co-dependency, which is only slightly less enjoyable than hallucinating giant, flesh-eating bats.

Getting out of self is when you make a decision to stop drowning in your own hellscape and focus on someone else who is drowning in theirs; the great thing about hellscapes is that there is always somebody in a far worse one than you. 

Like the 13,000 people without shelter since the hellishly overcrowded Moria refugee camp burned to the ground on Lesbos in early September. They need a lot more than banana bread.

After heavy rain today, tents in the 'new' #Moria camp on #Lesvos are flooded. Some are now totally unlivable.

Rather than providing safe, humane and dignified accomodation, the EU has condemned thousands of people to continue suffering in these camps with no end in sight. pic.twitter.com/IiyFxY5oOc

— Choose Love (@chooselove) October 8, 2020

No, they need banana boxes, neatly stacked in hired vans organised by www.helprefugees.org, packed with nappies, baby milk, toothpaste, soap, hand sanitiser; just as the people living rough on wastelands around Calais still need tents, sleeping bags, dry socks, warm jumpers, hot food. 

The needs of the world’s most catastrophically displaced people have not receded – their situation has worsened during the pandemic, but because we have all been so (understandably) freaked out ourselves, we have turned inward.

This winter, maybe we could get out of self by literally and metaphorically sharing our surplus banana bread. We could aspire to be what the current UK Home Secretary witheringly describes as “do-gooders”. Not only is being a do-gooder considerably more radical these days than being a do-badder, but it is also the quickest and most direct route out of self. 

Apart from acid, obviously.