Georgina Paez
Personal Narrative Essay

Shirley Jackson’s “Colloquy” tells the story of a woman, Mrs. Arnold, who visits a doctor for the sole purpose of discussing her husband’s mental health. She tells the doctor about an incident where her husband became very upset and started talking to himself, after not being able to purchase a copy of the Times paper at his usual dealer. This incident made Mrs. Arnold, concerned for her husband’s mental health, forcing her to question “how do people tell if they’re going crazy. ?” (Pg. 1) She expressed confusion in the understanding of mental illnesses, as she asked the doctor about medical terms, such as psychosomatic medicine. The doctor, who sees Mrs. Arnold’s confusion, responds back in a dismissive and ignorant way. He uses even more puzzling terms like, “deflationary inflation.” The doctor clearly does this to ignore Mrs. Arnold’s situation and try diagnosing her instead. This leads Mrs. Arnold into quickly exiting the doctor’s office feeling more hysterical and perplexed than before. The main themes depicted in this story are the ways environmental factors play significant roles within mental health and how often neglectful people tend to be of others’ feelings. I feel personally connected to the themes in the story because it reminds me of a movie I watched, as well as my own life experiences.

Last year, in 2019, I watched a movie called “The joker”, which was about the becoming of the joker (a very well known comic villain in the D.C. Universe). In the movie, the Joker’s real name is Arthur Fleck, a 32 year old man with a condition that causes him to uncontrollably laugh, also known as Pseudobulbar Affect. The movie portrays how the struggles of Arthur’s everyday lifestyle slowly begin to change his mental state. Arthur falls under the lower class, as he lives in an impoverished apartment where he takes care of his mother who’s mentally unstable and struggles with poverty. He works as a party clown and aspires to be a stand up comedian. Besides his terrible living conditions, everyone he comes across treats him miserably. People outside give him weird looks and stay away from him, due to his laughing condition. His co workers constantly make fun of him, as they ridicule his dreams and goals of becoming a stand up comedian. In a specific scene, Arthur takes the train late at night after getting fired from his job. The train is empty except for Arthur and three drunk men. Arthur’s condition gets triggered in this moment causing him to start laughing out of control. The three men begin picking on him and as Arthur tries to pull out a card explaining his condition, they start jumping him. This causes Arthur to panic, pull out a gun and shoot all three men. Here is when we begin to see Arthur’s mental health decline.

Moreover, as Arthur’s life continues to worsen he continues doing more bad things, until he develops and accepts his persona of the joker. He then gets invited to a late night talk show by the famous host, Murray, who Arthur has always looked up to. Arthur realizes Murray only invited him to his show, to humiliate him for one of his stand up comedies that went viral after nobody laughed. Arthur goes dressed up as the Joker and after getting ridiculed by Murray, reveals how he killed the three men on the train. Murray asks why and the joker responds with, “I killed those guys because they were awful. Everybody’s awful these days. It’s enough to make anyone crazy… Why is everybody so upset about these guys? If it was me dying on the sidewalk you’d walk right over me, i’d pass you everyday and you don’t notice me…Have you seen what it’s like out there, Murray? Do you ever actually leave the studio? Everybody just yells and screams at each other. Nobody’s civil anymore. Nobody thinks what it’s like to be the other guy. You think men… men at ease, ever think what it’s like to be a guy like me? To be anybody but themselves.” This was a powerful moment in the movie, similar to when Mrs. Arnold starts crying and chooses to leave the doctor’s room. They highlight moments in both stories where we can clearly see the way the harsh treatments these characters have received have taken a huge toll on their mental state.

Furthermore, both Arthur’s and Mrs. Arnold’s stories made me realize how much of an impact a toxic environment can truly be for us. I can relate their stories to my experiences going to school. As a child I was always cheerful and excited about everything. I was never insecure or felt anxious when it came to being myself. It was like this up until middle school and high school. I was verbally bullied and teased by a variety of people for no specific reason. I was told many cruel things, things you should never tell someone. This took a toll on my mental state for a very long time. Being bullied made me grow heavily depressed. I didn’t feel like going to school, or eating, or living, and developed social anxiety where I feared that everyone was always judging me. This experience gave me a lot of trauma. It took me a long time to find self love and happiness within myself. Today, I still have social anxiety because of this, even though I do a pretty good job at concealing it. I still find myself remembering that experience like it happened yesterday and I don’t think I will ever forget those terrible moments I experienced in school. I thank the people around me for being there for me throughout those tough times, if it wasn’t for them I don’t think I would’ve pushed through. I can honestly say, those who bullied me were at fault for my horrible mental state. The truth is that society as a whole is filled with toxicity and because of this it tends to be the cause of mental illnesses in many cases, like mine. We live in a society full of people who lack kindness, are quick to judge and only care about themselves. I believe that if people were to be nicer and more welcoming towards one another, more people would open up and have healthier mindsets.

I think we all play a bigger role in each others’ mental health than we are aware of. All it takes is one person to either be kind enough to spark faith in someone, or cruel enough to push someone of the edge. People should start being nicer, as we never know what others are going through in their own lives. In Jackson’s “Colloquy”, It was the doctor’s fault that Mrs. Arnold became mentally unstable at the end of the story, he could have kindly explained the terms to her without the unnecessary use of complex words. Like Mrs. Arnold, what set Arthur off and made him go mad was how insignificantly he was treated, he was hardly ever shown any kindness which led him to ultimately stop caring. When I watched “The Joker” I couldn’t stop thinking about how much of a point Arthur made when he stated that the awful way people are is enough to make anyone crazy. This made me realize how truly important it is to take a step back from society and our environments. In a society that is so complicated and corrupt it is very easy to become so involved that you end up corrupting yourself, as well as your own state of mind.