We could all behave better. Tragedy shows why we must #Bekind
I didn’t know Caroline Flack. Nor had I watched Love Island but her death has affected me so much more than she did in life. And that is grim.
But there is a particular memory seared in my mind’s eye – of seeing her walking out of court to face the paparazzi, clutching the arm of a policeman to steady herself as she navigated the scrum before her.
I thought then that this was a woman on the edge. A paradoxical jumble, complex, vulnerable and yet so “out there”, and I fretted about what could come next. Who was looking out for her, advising her, supporting her, being there trying to save herself from herself? That’s the image, that pitiful pastiche outside a courthouse, that haunts me.
Being famous, rich, or powerful doesn’t mean you are immune to hurt. And being in the public eye can prove a very lonely place when it turns against you.
Ms Flack must have felt such desolation when she ended her life, and while a cloud of despair engulfed me thinking of the dark place she must have been in, my thoughts also turned to others, closer to me, known by me, who fall from a lofty height to face judgment and social opprobrium on their own.
Their pain may well be self-inflicted, and I would do nothing to minimise the alleged behaviours that led to the downfall of the likes of Ms Flack, or on home turf, of Derek Mackay, Mark Mcdonald, and what may come from the fall-out of the upcoming trial of Alex Salmond. But while we are often the architects of our own fall from grace, when you fall from on high, there is no softer landing just because of who you are and where you have been. You are very much on your own.
There has been an outpouring of grief over the tragic end to Ms Flack’s life. But it didn’t happen in a vacuum – there was a momentum that took her there. She played out much of her life on social media – a gladiatorial place that can build you up and so easily pull you down. But with so many affected by the suicide of someone they thought they knew well enough to pick apart her life and pass judgment, it’s time to hold a mirror to ourselves and reflect on the collective responsibility we have had in making that world on the web so harsh right now.
Flack said that she had been “pressing the snooze button on many stresses in my life – for my whole life”. She believed that it was just “all part of my job” to take the slings and arrows that came her way. Untrue. Becoming a victim of a social media blood sport is not in anyone’s job description.
Of course, you can “put up with it”, but it wears you down. I’ve enjoyed healthy debate all my life, but this is not where we are at right now. And while I’m not saying social media killed Caroline Flack, it has its effect.
Writing about Flack’s death, Russell Brand said the line that separates people who kill themselves from those that don’t is “vague and it is uncertain, it is a line within each of us, not between us”.
We don’t know who will or won’t be pushed over that line. We will never know whether it was meant, leaving just the questions about why, flying around an echo chamber of despair.
The truth is, there will be numerous reasons why Ms Flack ended her life, but we could all behave better by applying more liberally, what has become her very simple epitaph, #Bekind.