Public Relations, Memory, and the Cost of Staying Stuck By Michael P Lennon
Public Relations, Memory, and the Cost of Staying Stuck By Michael P Lennon
There’s a strange comfort in the past. It’s tidy. It’s already happened. It doesn’t argue back. But if we’re honest, living there too long is like sitting in a waiting room where your name’s never going to be called. You feel occupied, even purposeful—but nothing moves.
This isn’t a lecture. I’m not a historian, and I’m definitely not perfect. If perfection were the entry requirement, I’d still be outside looking in, knocking politely and hoping someone else answers the door. What I am is someone who has had to look backwards—properly—and then decide what, if anything, is worth carrying forward.
That’s where Life, Death and the Gap comes in. It’s not a polished memoir. It’s a raw look at the space between crisis and recovery—the bit systems often call “stabilised” and then quietly walk away from. That gap is where real life happens, and where, too often, people are left to figure it out alone.
If you trace that gap backwards, you start to see a pattern. Not a conspiracy—something more ordinary and therefore more stubborn. The idea of containment. Manage the risk. Keep things under control. Move people through a process. It shows up in old systems like the Poor Laws and places such as Holywell Hospital—not as villains in a story, but as evidence of how society once understood distress: something to be managed, separated, and, if we’re being blunt, hidden.
We like to believe we’ve moved on entirely. And to be fair, we have—in language, in standards, in rights. But habits linger. You can still see echoes of that containment mindset in modern pathways: short-term intervention, quick discharge, and a polite hope that the rest will sort itself out. It’s not malicious. It’s structural. And structures don’t change just because we feel like they should.
Public relations plays an odd role in all this. Not in the cynical sense—spin and slogans—but in the quieter business of how stories are framed. What gets highlighted, what gets softened, what gets left out. The danger isn’t that people lie; it’s that we become comfortable with partial truths. We celebrate progress (and rightly so) while sidestepping the unfinished work that doesn’t photograph well.
Here’s the practical bit: staying in the past doesn’t improve your present. It can explain it. It can contextualise it. It can even validate it. But it won’t do the work for you. That’s the uncomfortable line. At some point, the question shifts from “what happened?” to “what now?”
For me, “what now” became documentation. Not dramatic, not glamorous—just methodical. Dates, decisions, outcomes. Where systems connected, where they didn’t, and what that meant in real terms. It’s less about telling a story and more about building a record. Because records have a habit of outlasting opinions.
There’s also a discipline in not turning yourself into the hero of your own account. Tempting, of course. Everyone likes a tidy arc: fall, struggle, triumph. Reality is messier. Some days are progress. Some days are admin. Some days are just getting through without making things worse. If there’s a vision here, it’s not grand—it’s practical: take what’s useful, discard what isn’t, and keep moving.
And yes, learn from mistakes. That phrase gets thrown around like it’s obvious. It isn’t. Learning requires you to admit you misread something, trusted the wrong process, or stayed too long in a place that wasn’t helping. That’s not comfortable. It’s necessary.
So where does that leave us?
With a choice, really. We can keep revisiting the past as a fixed destination—rehearsing it, defending it, living inside it—or we can treat it as a reference point. Something to consult, not inhabit. The former feels safer. The latter is what changes outcomes.
If Mindspire does anything, it’s this: it turns experience into something usable. Not perfect, not finished, but structured enough to be shared without collapsing under its own weight. No grand claims. No polished ending. Just a clear position—acknowledge what was, document what is, and build something that works better next time.
That’s not romantic. It is, however, how progress tends to happen.
To the snobs—yes, you with the polished language and carefully curated distance from anything uncomfortable—this isn’t a performance piece for your approval. Real life doesn’t arrive edited, and recovery doesn’t wait for a boardroom consensus.
You can dress it up in policy, soften it with terminology, or file it neatly under “complex cases,” but that doesn’t change the lived reality. The truth is rarely tidy, and it doesn’t need permission to exist. If that unsettles you, good—it means you’re finally looking at something real.
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Fun facts about parrots (internal use)
Parrots are not just colourful noise-makers; they’re among the most cognitively capable birds on the planet. Many species can live for decades—some macaws and cockatoos reach 50–80 years—so owning one is closer to a long-term contract than a casual pet decision.
They’re exceptional mimics, but it’s not blind repetition. Species like the African grey can associate sounds with context, showing a level of understanding that edges into problem-solving territory. In plain terms: they’re not just copying you—they’re clocking patterns.
Parrots also have zygodactyl feet—two toes forward, two back—which lets them grip like a small set of pliers. You’ll often see them holding food in one foot while eating, which is more primate than bird in behaviour.
Diet-wise, wild parrots are opportunists: seeds, nuts, fruit, even clay (yes, clay—used to neutralise toxins in their food). In captivity, poor diet is one of the fastest ways to cause health issues. They’re robust, but not forgiving.
Socially, they’re intense. Most parrots are flock animals, wired for constant interaction. Leave them isolated and they don’t “chill out”—they deteriorate. That’s where you see feather plucking and behavioural issues. In short: high intelligence plus boredom equals chaos.
And one more that catches people off guard: parrots are loud on purpose. In the wild, that volume carries across forests to keep flocks connected. So when one screams in your living room, it’s not misbehaving—it’s doing exactly what evolution designed it to do.
Bottom line: brilliant, demanding, long-memory animals. Treat them like ornaments and you’ll regret it. Treat them like intelligent companions and they’ll outsmart you more often than not.
#MPL
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