Miranda Hart - British comedian

I didn't take this as implying failure on anyone's part but about acceptance and being ok with not being complete and 'sorted'.

I hope Miranda focuses more on the acceptance aspect rather than the pseudoscience stuff (which often dresses itself up as acceptance but underneath is the opposite).

 

Beautiful and important words, as always from @Naomi10

 

Goodness, what a mess. Seriously amazing she said all that out loud and on social media. She sounds confused and let down whilst trying to not be. Alex Howard has done a real number on her. She still thinks she's post illness but still obviously struggling and symptomatic. They've put in a get out clause that setbacks are 'normal'. No, it's called PEM from over exhaustion. What an earth was she told, that she was better and she'd be able to work and be fine?!

The poor woman, it sounds like she's been launched into this vast publicity machine without having worked for a decade. She has agency here but it also sounds like she's been taken in. She's very vulnerable and been jumped on by the publishing industry as a cash cow and Howard as a wonderkind. Just awful.

If she ever really realises what happened here it's going to be devastating.

 

I think it’s important to remember when you hear eg music artists talking about their experiences it makes you realise they are seen as one bit by the machine.

I don’t know how much agency and compromising and being reworded or pushed into saying things a certain way or only one side of a sentence getting heard goes on for each different type of artist on each different medium.

but it does seem old hat yet still ‘the way it is’ and only known about really because I guess social media exists so anyone has a voice that isn’t through gatekeepers etc

I’m trying to think whether I’m just being biased in memory but over the years there have definitely been some truly eccentric mind type things being welcomed from various celebrities onto eg tv programmes like spoon bending

but rarely I don’t think I’ve heard the straightforward ‘aftermath’ of ‘no I don’t do those things anymore’ or even I’m curious are there celebs who’ve managed to talk about other illnesses or disabilities in quite a straight way without unwritten rules of having to crack a joke self-deprecate or say it’s not that bad like we all get made to do by the pressure of the silence (go on now say it)

 

I’m not yet sure whether I think she’s being exploited or she is doing the exploiting.
If the 10 treasures are so great that she wants people to know about them in case it helps someone, then she could just tweet them for free, rather than put them in a pricey book. Couldn’t she?

 

Indeed. The irony is that whichever one at the start it seems impossible for it not to get dragged into being ‘both’ exploited and exploiting and the more ill you are the more vulnerable to being a vessel or whatever the phrase is because you’re exhausted and we know the tricks that deliberately get played on us - which is how we know certain personalities actually understand our illness perfectly well despite fibbing they think it’s improved by nonsense


‘Oh we just changed your script a bit of course if you don’t like it’ , but then your brain can’t see wood for trees anymore there are knocks on the door etc

or getting a leading question thrown at them just as we do in questionnaires by laypersons who try and make us say things they want to hear etc

whatever needle you wanted to thread without some serious protections we aren’t afforded and without some miracle strong team who would provide those and be tough no one can ‘keep control’ because we attract an onslaught from a certain type who smells blood of watching us exhausted and then wrong-footed

and then once you’ve done it wrong once you are into failure demand of how do you correct that whilst the work in front of you is piling up

 

It does look like both. She is being used but she's also only interested in talking about this all in the media to sell her book. If she hasnt worked for a decade then maybe the bank balance is low and this seemed like a way to launch her comeback.

I don't really trust any celeb who is interested in connecting and talking about illness when they have something to sell. Especially with a publicist on their back.

 

I was just looking at amazon reviews of the book to see how it was being received (mostly good, 64% 5*). One review gives this quote from the book:

“if we're constantly repeating a story like “I'm so exhausted’ our physiology will respond and it will affect our mood and disorder. MIND BLOWING. The number of times I would say things like, “it's like wading through treacle,” or “ its such a battles. Now, phrases like that make me feel instantly weak…Eventually I stopped saying Lyme or any of the other diagnostic words…to reduce its power.”

I'm sure Miranda has literally been using the phrase 'wading through treacle' in recent TV interviews to describe how she felt when she was at her most ill. So will she now be thinking that her current symptoms are due to talking about being ill? I can imagine Alex Howard giving this explanation. Handy for him how his theory has an answer for all the problems it creates. It's such a mind scrambler.

I hope Miranda's able to reflect and move forwards with the positive parts of what she's been taught and leave the dangerous parts behind. And I hope she continues to speak out honestly as she does so.

 

Or to look at another way - what has been going on in the minds of these people -Miranda, Garner that they think themselves ill and then think themselves out of it?

 

I was referring to the "Life is living in acceptance of all the mess and vulnerability and illness and tiredness and confusion" bit mostly. I’m quite ‘sorted’ actually.

I had just read the really good article, "Dear Miranda", by Long Covid Advocacy (https://www.longcovidadvoc.com/post/dear-miranda) and I was as mad as hell about the unstoppable crap that just keeps coming. I have no idea who Miranda Hart is, apart from being a tv celeb, and my comment about feeling a failure and diminished by her were meant to sound facetious and silly to the audience here. I apologise for not being clear about that.

 

It’s very exhausting (not a metaphor) having to filter out all the harmful garbage that comes at us. Living in a world where the default is just not who we are, or can be.

edit-spelling

 

This is why the model for this is a completely generic "life events". It can be literally anything. It can be a big thing. It can be a thing that happened to you many times, and this last one was just the last straw. Or whatever. It can be the sum of many small things. It can be no things at all, all subconsciously. It can just "be", just happen. Which makes it easy that literally anything can break it. The only way to move a mass of empty air is to replace it with another volume of empty air.

This is what led to the "chemical imbalance" model of depression, a psychosocial model which many people objected to because they were actually very happy at the time and had never faced significant hardship. There is no inconsistency with such a model that can't be fixed with a good old Deus Ex Machina. This allows some random "bio" element to be glued at the right spot. No need to think any further. It all makes sense if you don't think about it.

The model requires no explanation and it can't ever explain anything. It just does what it needs to do, which is to convert something into another thing. All spontaneous in a completely black box process. Medicine's philosopher's stone, which having failed to find it, simply pretended that they did.

I posted a video in the "Bias in academic research" thread from a disgruntled physics academic who talks about the fundamental problems in theoretical physics, and how one of those is that with most of the falsifiable models having been falsified, all that's left is unfalsifiable models. They can't ever be proven definitely wrong. So they can be "worked on" indefinitely.

Like looping around the same area of space looking for a teapot orbiting the Sun. You can never be sure it's never in that specific area. So you can look at that specific area endlessly, since the teapot orbits around and it could be there now. Or now. Or now! Have you checked if it's there now? It could be there right now and you just missed it! Never stop staring at this one spot of space. Also you've already found evidence of that teapot, you just can't really show it because it's all complex and mysterious and so on. You just need a better picture than the blurry mass thing that could be the neck of some giant beast, or possibly a log. No way to know for sure. But you can say it for sure anyway, no one can prove otherwise.

 

Miranda looked exhausted on "Strictly" and couldn't even stand up for parts of it. It wasn't convincing of someone who was really recovering from a major illness.

As the years go on with no end to 'recovery' and these stumbling attempts to appear normal the disappointment could be very painful.

Especially when it is being done in public.

 

Yes, that is my worry for her.