Every minute of every day, the dog is asking questions. Are you going to give me food? Are you going to play with me? Are you going to take me for a walk? She’s pretty needy, and to anthropomorphise further, gives the impression of someone living on her nerves. At times, she seems overwhelmed by her own emotions.
What we tell ourselves is: she’s still a puppy. Over time she’ll calm down and learn to entertain herself. She’ll grow up. She’ll become more mature.
But just as with people, maturity is a concept defined more by what it is not than what it is. Yes, we have a rather woolly concept of the mature person as being in control of their feelings, of being able to take a rounded view of any given situation. A person who acts appropriately and responsibly. Yet these are societal norms we are expected to conform to rather than a psychological level most of us naturally achieve. Much easier to point out how you shouldn’t act: don’t get angry or burst into tears at work. Don’t tell childish jokes. Don’t suck your thumb in public.
We must fulfil the societal expectation to act like grown-ups, which invariably means stuffing down other feelings: feelings that all too often wriggle their way back to the surface
There was a piece in the Guardian the other week by an American psychotherapist called Clay Cockrell. Clay doesn't like to watch the TV show Succession because, for him, it's too much like work. For some years he's been a therapist to stinking rich people: the sorts who run large corporations, who are required to make calm, rational business decisions. To be mature.
‘If you have to hide a cash incentive inside a food, it’s almost certainly not worth eating’
Daniel O’Donnell at 60: ‘I could have made a lot more money if I was more ruthless’
Emer McLysaght: I am never more of a Complete Aisling than when I’m on holidays
Escape to the Chateau, and the glamour of the airport without the bother of flying
Yet the maturity is, to a certain extent, an act. Just behind it is a boiling stew of fear, loneliness and paranoia. They, and usually their families, are screwed up by all that money and privilege; and further screwed up by having to daily pretend to others that those emotions don’t exist. And when, inevitably, those emotions leech into their professional decisions, they have to invent grown-up justifications for what they have done.
This isn’t about being sorry for sad billionaires: more that most of us, all of us, are conflicted in the same way. We must fulfil the societal expectation to act like grown-ups, which invariably means stuffing down other feelings: feelings that all too often wriggle their way back to the surface.
Listen to any politician being interviewed and they all have the same schtick: unflappable, emotionless, mature. Read any book about life in Leinster House and it's the opposite: anger, jealousy, love, even boredom. A State of Emergency, Richard Chambers' book about the handling of the pandemic relates, among many other things, the emotional dynamics at play: Paul Reid and Tony Holohan don't get on. Tony Holohan doesn't suffer fools. Back bench TDs resented Nphet. Civil servants think Stephen Donnelly isn't as clever as he thinks he is. At various turns, people have felt betrayed or needlessly attacked and reacted in kind.
I don't want the people I need to be grown up to start acting like the dog, spewing their feelings in all directions
This is not to reduce the Government’s handling of the pandemic to a series of soapy intrigues. For the most part, everyone tried their best in an extraordinarily pressurised, ever-changing situation; one that is far from over. Yet they are human beings with all the messiness that entails. Like the rest of us, they must have days when they are just acting like grown-ups: inside they feel like going home and watching cartoons.
But here’s the human, contradictory bit. While we might accept this messiness within ourselves, we don’t necessarily want to see evidence of it in others. I don’t want the people I need to be grown up to start acting like the dog, spewing their feelings in all directions. I need my doctor to be completely doctory: to let me imagine they are like that all the time. I don’t want to read that Stephen Donnelly needs duvet days or see Tony Holohan crying on the telly. I need a mature person to say: don’t worry. I got this. Even if they don’t entirely mean it.