The invisible prison

• 14 December, 2021
• culture
• perspective
• trauma

..erm politics. Sorry I get the two terms capitalism and politics mixed up, because from my perspective they resemble one and the same thing.

People with disabilities rarely if ever feature in the media - mainstream or alternative - and are usually not included in anyone's virtue signalling group, i.e. the groups we support to feel better about ourselves. Even stray dogs and cats come before people with disabilities. Due to their lack of visibility and social inclusion most of the experiences we able bodied people take for granted - such as going to work, going shopping, even walking down the street and going to the shops - usually require complex and detailed planning if you're someone with a disability.

I still can't get over the lifestyle of a woman I accompanied to her Tribunal for disability support from the Government a couple of years ago. She was wheelchair bound. She lived in a first floor apartment in London - no lift - just 16 or so stairs. She had no support and had to rely on passers by in the street. She lived on a diet of breakfast cereal and dates. She had been fighting the Government for 12 years as the Government refused to accept that she had a disability. What struck me was the cheerfulness and aplomb with which she handled what was going on in her life.

Now I want you to think about that. I'm here in London, the United Kingdom. This isn't a Third World country by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, in terms of infrastructure we're even better off than the United States. Nobody goes bankrupt for seeing a doctor or spending time in hospital. We've even got a very rough, primitive universal basic income in the form of Universal Credit. Yet we also put people with disabilities and mental health issues through an appeals process which is far more complicated and gruelling than even the lengthy and costly appeals process that Death Row prisoners have to go through to avoid execution.

Trust me. I know what I'm writing about here. If you're on Death Row in the States you get a 5th circuit appeal, post conviction relief, and habeus corpus, and that's it. From trial court you've got the state court of appeals and then it's down to the US Supreme Court.

If you're someone with a disability or mental health issue in the UK you've got the initial Mandatory Reconsideration. Then you've got two appeals. Finally you've got a Tribunal. At each step the Government will fight you, and fight you hard, all the way. All over a £100 or so a month. This is something that goes on all the time, every day, and something the vast majority of us accept tacitly. This is despite the fact that people die, and commit suicide, quite often needlessly and unnecessarily. You might want to reflect on what kind of statement that makes about us as a nation of people.

I think before we go any further I feel I need to establish some fundamental aspects of life in prison. If you're in prison your identity doesn't matter because you're essentially state property. You're just a number, part of a system, a system you've got to work with to survive. Everything you do is watched, observed, noted and recorded. Some of you might have more privileges and even a considerable amount of freedom. Some of you won't have any freedom at all. Some of you are in solitary and have been for years. I'm hoping that you now get the gist of why I came up with this analogy.

There are some differences - as this is, after all, an analogy - between a real prison, and the invisible prison which exists in your mind in which you are serving out your sentence. Some of these differences are obvious. For example you are not in any physical prison. You have not been convicted of any crime. You have a certain amount of leeway to get away with things which you would not have in a real prison, where generally, you get away with nothing. But there are less obvious differences too. For example generally in a real prison, unless you're sentenced to death or life without parole, as what happens in other countries, notably the United States, you serve a sentence over a specified amount of time, which you can appeal and 'win' early release through parole and remission for good behaviour.

In the invisible prison in your mind there is no definite sentence. All sentences are indefinite. You can only escape from the invisible prison in your mind.

The fundamental key to being able to escape from your invisible prison, just like escaping from a real prison, is to understand that you are, in fact, actually in prison. The vast majority of people are in varying degrees of denial of this fundamental and basic fact. Sure you might think you're free just because you can walk up and down the landing. You can slop out. You can walk around the pod and sit at the table with other prisoners. You can go to work and earn your pittance. You can buy stuff from what Americans call the commissary. You can even go out into the exercise yard and play ball with the other prisoners. Make friends with the guards. But it still doesn't change the fact that you're in prison.

In fact the only freedom you have in your invisible prison is to deny the fact that you are, in fact in an invisible prison and confuse your individual reality and individual truth with your Ego. Nothing to stop you doing this and probably nobody also is going to object to you doing this either. But you do realize that just coasting through life in your invisible prison, pretending that your Ego is the same as who you are in reality, comes with an awful lots of belief attachments, authority figures and little or no freedom or autonomy over your life. The consequences of course are a persistent polarity between fear and desire, the constant vulnerability of being hurt, being rejected, being exploited, being abused, and then there's that deep and profound sense of alienation, isolation, vulnerability and loneliness which never goes away.

This is what lies beneath your constant and continuous preoccupation with Self and your self-hood.

You can dream and talk of unity all you like, but for as long as you are imprisoned in your invisible prison, enslaved to your Ego, enslaved to ideology and the right doctrines, and hoping that someone comes and gives you that 'goodie' you've been expecting, unity is always going to be a distant dream and just talk, nothing more.

Now you might think you're not really affected as long as you stay within your comfort zone and live within the rules but this is actually costing you, and other people, far more than you think it is. What you need to keep in mind, always, is that your Ego isn't real and has got very little, or anything to do with who you really are.

Your Ego is just a concept, an image, nothing more than this. It's a social construct which exists for the convenience, comfort and financial profit of others - the Government, institutions, organizations, multinational corporations, and anyone else who asks you a set of security questions or now requires a two step login from you.

This includes social media, such as Facebook and Twitter.

Are you a mere concept? A social construct? Nothing more than an image or opinion? Think about it.

Further reading

Two of my e-books go much deeper into the issues and conflicts we all experience due to this conflict between external authority and the Ego. 'The Invisible Prison' is about the issues with creating authority and external authority. 'The Tears of a Clown' is about the Ego.

'The Invisible Prison' e-book intro 'The Tears of a Clown' e-book intro