On my dad

My father’s name is José René Armando Salazar Borja. I often tell people that I don’t know whether he is alive or dead and most people think I’m joking. I’m so not. I prefer to think of him as dead not because I am a spiteful person but because I assumed he was dead from about the time I was 19. The thing is that if I found out now that he is in fact alive but sick or dying -and then he died- then I’d have to mourn him twice. I mourned him once; that should be enough for one lifetime. If he was alive he would most likely be very old and sick because he was much much older than my mum – and last we heard of him he was sick already.

My father was a carpenter and I’m lead to believe he has the father to another 14 children, two of which I’ve met. In his time he was also an avid baseball player and liked the drink. My mum has told me this and I have no reason to doubt her. My favourite story that my mum tells me of my father is the way he confessed to her that he used to be an alcoholic. Apparently he used to be an alcoholic of the type that is homeless, lives on the street, eats, drinks, and pees where he sleeps and is completely dissociated from his whole world. I don’t know how long he was like this, but I think he must have been lonely and feeling defeated. I have felt lonely and defeated at times and I don’t wish that upon anyone. However, this story makes me very strangely proud of my father. I’ve always believed that the hardest thing to do is not to say “no” to drugs, but leaving a vice that has become so ingrained in you that leaving it is comparable to tearing your skin off and dressing yourself in a new cloak. I have incredible respect for the people who can do this. To me it seems so heroic, despite the fact that these battles are usually fought in gutters rather than on stages. That is my favourite story about my dad, and that happened before he even met my mum. This story is probably also the real reason why I have never been keen to drink alcohol.

My father was a good carpenter, too. He was a cabinetmaker, and a very creative and productive one at that. Apart from his work, he made me and my siblings multiple things throughout my childhood. When I was in high school, I really absolutely loved woodwork (and metalwork), but especially the sensation of making things, the smell of the timber, and the way it can be so delicate and yet sturdy. I really liked art too, but my mum would not hear of that. At one point I considered doing cabinetmaking as a career (and probably the only other career besides medicine that I contemplated for more than a few minutes), but I knew I couldn’t face living in the shadow of my father. He was very skilled, how good could I possibly ever be? I would always be the carpenter’s daughter, and I couldn’t face that. I admit it was also my pride in not wanting mum’s family to associate me with his family more than her’s that discouraged me. In the end my family has always known that the dream of working with timber is always on the back of my mind as something that I might get to at some stage of my life.

My father was married and had a wife with four children when he met my mother, of course he didn’t tell her this until after she told him she was pregnant with me. My mum had four children of her own at that stage and widowed; she was 27. Apparently my dad wanted to leave his wife but my mum knew how hard it is to raise four children as a single mother in a third-world country so she couldn’t do that to another woman. The arrangement was that mum would care for me and my dad would visit periodically. Both lived up to their ends of the bargain and I resent neither of them for this.

The last time I saw my father was in August 1990 on the day before we moved to Australia. I spent the day mostly with two of his daughters (which to this day I struggle to call sisters because we’re still strangers) and I saw him a few times that day. Then mum came and picked me up and we went back home. It wasn’t like saying goodbye to family at all; to me at that age (about 9) he was more an acquaintance of mum’s that I had to call “papi”. Only in retrospect have I started to think of what being a father actually means.

Through the years I have met many people my age who come from traditional families who speak of their fathers as they do of their mothers. To me this is one of this universe’s most difficult things to understand. I think I came close one day to understanding quantum physics, relativity, thermodynamics, organic chemistry, and advanced calculus, but this concept of a male parent has had me beat. It is such a foreign concept to me; it’s like you’re trying to explain to me a colour that I’ve never seen on this planet. But I listen and I try my hardest to understand, but a male parent that you could compare to your mother? I find it so beyond my ability to reason that it’s actually a little embarrassing. I don’t know that I will ever understand; my mum to me is unique and no-one, no matter how good or loving or constantly present they are, could ever compare to what she means to me.

After my family and I left El Salvador, my mum and dad would write letters to each other about me, how I was doing, etc. For reasons I won’t go into, when I was about 15, my father chose to disassociate from my family, which I guess as a kid meant from me. So someone I barely knew decided to not know me at all; at least that’s how I reasoned it at that stage. I wasn’t bothered by it. To me he was always the equivalent of a sperm donor to my mum and had contributed to me after that only a last name. I wasn’t resentful, but I also didn’t actually take the time to care. Through the years I tried to care, I tried to convince myself it should mean something to me, but mostly I could only form theories of how I should feel but I admit I didn’t actually feel them. I imagined I should have felt rejected, unappreciated, anger towards him, spite, etc. I didn’t. A stranger I barely knew and was barely in my life had chosen to no longer be in my life altogether. How could I care?

So what in conclusion do I feel about my father? I acknowledge him. I wear his last name and will do so until the day I die, same as I do mum’s. I feel no resentment towards him. I feel no love for him except that which we owe all human beings. Mum attributes my enthusiasm for creative expression and art to him (she hates art), and if it’s true, I thank him for those genes. I admire his genius and talent at carpentry. I am grateful for the fact his alcoholism story has put me off alcohol my whole life. And I am incredibly happy that in his absence I was able to develop such a great relationship with my mum and the three brothers and sister that have always been in my life.

R.I.P. José René Armando Salazar Borja

...Or good health to you if you’re still alive, old man :)

On relationships

One of the worst realizations you can make when you're in love is that the person who you fell in love with is not who you think they were. Everything falls apart after that. But the greatest feat of romantic relationships has to be realizing that the person you fell in love with is not you. Think of all the times you've fought with your partner for being insensitive, unthoughtful, dismissive, dejecting, or for disappointing you. That would probably be the majority of times you've fought or disagreed, right? What's the real issue here? Well, it's that your partner is not you, doesn't reason like you do, isn't sensitive to the same things as you, and doesn't like or do all the same things you do. Every relationship that involves more than one human being is bound to have difficulties. Nobody’s experiences are the same, and nobody responds to even the same experiences the same way. They say that you need to love yourself before you can learn to love others, but I think that for most people these days we probably need to first overcome our love of ourselves and our ways before we can truly love someone else.

The second greatest feat of relationships is admitting that your way isn't always the right way, the best way, or the way that things have to be done all the time. Growing up I remember mum saying to me and my siblings, by way of example, that in our hand we have five fingers but all of them are different, and yet we need all of them to be complete because they each have a function. She would tell us this when we’d fight or whinge about why does this one person have to be this way or another has to be another way and none of them do things our way. Of course often we’d all be arguing the same thing but with different points of view. For example an argument would be that this toy belongs to this person because they’re the youngest. Another argues, no, it belongs to someone else because they’re the oldest and will look after it better. Another argues, no, it belongs to someone else because they hardly ever get anything. And the other might say, no, it belongs to someone else because they want it the most and she deserves it more than the others because of whatever reason. Which one is right? Probably all and none of them. Often it’s not a matter of who’s right, but whose turn it is to be “right”. Parents can probably attest to this theory. When you’re trying to maintain the harmony in a group of individuals you can’t let there be some that are more frequently favoured or some that more frequently deprived. Parenting and romantic relationships thrive on diplomacy. One way to kill a relationship is to insist that your way is always the right way. If you do this, one day your way may be the only way left, after your partner has gone.

On ‘childish’ people and abuse

I met a lady in Chile who asked me if I knew why some people are just so childish. She was talking about members of her own family, and I guess she asked me because she thought I might have learnt something about this in my psychology classes. I didn’t. I had read a little about post-abuse syndromes, though (e.g. the child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome). Now, an example of the “childish” behaviour she was talking about is two adult siblings bickering and maybe even physically confronting each other, divulging each other’s secrets in order to offend or hurt the other, pitting other family members against each other, etc. Immature behaviour? Yes. Childish? Maybe not the best word to use; children often lack the noxious intent adults seem to use. There are many adults, though, who having the skills and abilities of an adult, behave (and usually also think) as children.

I don’t mean adults acting like children in a derogatory way. I mean adults acting in “immature” ways, as in the mature versus immature coping mechanisms psychology tells us about. For example, say someone cuts you off in traffic. The mature thing to do is acknowledge you’ve been wronged, but given that the situation is fleeting and didn’t result in greater harm, you acknowledge your emotion (anger, sadness, etc.) and move on. The immature thing to do is to scream your head off at the other driver, maybe tailgate him, maybe become physically abusive if you get the chance to. The reason it would be an immature thing to do is because the reaction is disproportionate to the slight – and because you didn’t exercise self-control in response to the emotion you felt. OK, so there are immature and mature behaviours or responses that are designated as such by social norms, moral and psychosocial values, prevalence rates, etc. Now, the very same things that determine whether a behaviour is a mature or an immature response usually have to be learnt – and often in childhood. You can see this way that if you didn’t learn these things in childhood, how to behave “maturely”, the only way you know to respond is in a child-like manner: instinct and survival based, with immediacy, and without regulation of affect.

One of the things I remember reading about children who are abused (whether emotionally, physically, sexually, or whatever other horrible way we have to inflict suffering) is that their emotional development is gravely stunted. These children will have normal psychosocial and cognitive development until the point where they encounter the abuse, then will often remain in that stage of psychocognitive development until adulthood. You can see, therefore, how it follows that individuals that behave childishly are doing so because that is all they know. They react and act like a child because they haven’t learnt any other way to be. Of course, on the receiving end of it, when you as an adult encounter these people who are also physically adult like yourself, you expect them to act like you would and when they don’t we label them as childish.

So that is what I told my friend in Chile, that that at least was my understanding of how some people act the way they do. But in telling this story, you also must think about the people that have the background of childhood abuse and who have learnt to behave more maturely than a child would.

Abuse tends to rid us of many choices, of many liberties and human rights, and especially in childhood can be absolutely shattering to a person. But for those that are fortunate enough, to have escaped childhood abuse and reached a plateau into adult life, there is one choice, one moment of insight, that is all-empowering: making the choice of continuing to be the abused child of the past or becoming the adult that takes responsibility for his/her future experiences. Of course, I am trivializing a lot of things, and sorting through the behaviours and thought patterns of previous abuse victims, identifying the cognitive errors that have been laid down over repeated exposure to abuse, and eventually changing these behaviours, can take years (if ever achieved). The hardest thing to do isn’t doing all the cognitive work, however, it is that first step: believing that you, even you as a victim of abuse, now have power to decide to change things. To me, the difference between two people who have suffered childhood abuse, one who is mature and one who is immature in his interrelational style is that one of them had a moment of insight when he finally understood the words:

“You’re not powerless. You are not sick. You did not deserve what you got, but things can be better.”

Now, my friend in Chile is a very mature, very humble, and very loving person. When I told her about how some of these ‘childish’ people possibly had a troubled childhood, and are possibly cognitively and emotionally stuck there through little fault of their own, she bowed her head down as if remembering some distant memory only she knows about and told me how she really did feel sorry for her family members, even if they did act so negatively and immaturely towards others. And I guess that’s the other point I wanted to make, that perhaps instead of been irritated by these “childish” people, we take a moment to reflect on how sad their lives have probably been.

On propaganda

I was watching these Youtube videos on North Korea, which somehow led me to watching videos of Cuba and Soviet Russia. I’m very nerdy so I find watching documentaries fascinating. So after watching some of these videos and seeing them diss on the propaganda styles used by socialist countries, “communist propaganda”, I started to think that the videos themselves seemed like anti-communist propaganda. Now, I don’t know much about politics or governmental styles nor do I have any opinion on what’s good and what isn’t, but I found that it’s almost impossible to present a topic that is so fraught with emotive images and stories and not be biased. Because it is the mainstream media, the bias is usually pro-capitalist and anti-communist. Like I said, I don’t favour one way or the other.

One of the comments often made about these “communist” countries is their use of propaganda to idealize their nation’s system of government and also demonize that of capitalist/imperialist nations. Well, the videos and media most westerners have easy access to do the same thing in reverse direction: demonizing communism and glorifying capitalism. So I guess that’s just how the world works, to prove ourselves right and just we often attribute to others injustice and wrong.

The other comment often made about countries like North Korea and Cuba are their censorship or restriction of access to foreign media. This is proclaimed as an injustice because people only have access to biased information, skewed towards that of the current system of governance. They’re also denied access to what else is going on in the world, and –critically – to how much “better” than themselves capitalist countries are. Again, this is seen as bad by the leaders of countries like the U.S. because people should have the freedom to choose what to watch, hear, and believe. The so-called communist leaders give it a different spin: they believe they are protecting their people from materialism, from self-centeredness, and from greed. So on the one hand the argument is that some people are being denied their freedom, and on the other hand is the counter-argument that these same people are being protected from greater evils. What evils?

I remember reading once about methods of persuasion. One group of people really interested in methods of persuasion are commercial enterprises, and by inference also advertisers. Another very interested group are politicians. What both these parties do in order to achieve success (whether that be votes or money) is use propaganda to persuade others (consumers or voters or subjects) to buy their product, ideal, philosophy, etc. Of course, there are many different methods of persuasion or propaganda styles. You could, for example, reward a person for supporting your “product” (ideology, philosophy, or physical item) or punish them for using that of a competitor. Most nations use a system of governance that uses this method of “persuasion” to some degree in the form of legal systems and prisons. Another method, especially used by health promotion teams, is to demonize something, to make the consumer fear/dislike it in order to abhor a behaviour or consumption of a product. Politicians of communist countries are often noted to use this method, blaming all of a country’s woes on the enemy state and demonizing their way of living to ensure their voters/subjects are alternatively loyal to their own nation. In capitalist countries one of the major methods used by commercial companies to sell a product or a service is to first convince a person that they are lacking something or that their method of doing things is outdated before showing them a new product that will make their life so much better. Non-capitalist estates abhor this, calling this one of the greatest evils of capitalism because it is seen as a method by which a person is first sold dissatisfaction (usually towards their own person or their family or some other entity) before being offered a “solution”, the product being advertised.

Some time ago I read some criticism about the rising use of antidepressants in medicine. The story goes that going back some decades ago, rates of depression were much lower than they are today. The change can be attributed to a number of things: smaller family sizes, greater awareness about depressive states and suicide, more time dedicated to the workplace, breakdown in family structure, greater use of chemicals in the environment, pretty much anything that has changed in the past several decades. But is there one causative factor or is it a multifactorial phenomenon? The answer is almost always “multifactorial”. However, one thing about the increased awareness of depressive illnesses that is particularly interesting, is that the groups that were “raising awareness” about depression consisted mainly of pharmaceutical companies that had themselves developed the antidepressant medication to treat it. Some of the early public service announcements (advertisements?) about depression would go through a list of “symptoms” that if you identified with you should ‘talk to your doctor about’ to be prescribed treatment to ease you of your illness. Now, this is an extreme example were commercial companies are accused of selling you dissatisfaction, in this case it’s purported they convince you to believe you’re “sick”, so they can sell you their solution: a pill. Similarly, people are convinced their lives are somehow lacking if they don’t buy a certain drink, wear certain clothing, eat at a certain restaurant, drive a certain car, travel to a certain place, etc.

Now, my point is not to argue whether depression is a real or a commercially-created diagnosis, nor whether communist or capitalist systems of governance are better; my point is to remind us that we are human beings and not just consumers or voters or subjects or victims. Who was it that said that once you understand a thing you can’t be used by it? I don’t know, but he had a point. The one liberty no government or person or amount of persuasion can take away from us is the innate human ability to reason for ourselves.

On serial killers

I’ve been reading about Jeffrey Dahmer, a reformed Christian. They analysed, or at least reported, on his childhood – it was ok! (That’s not surprise; it’s sarcasm.) He grew up and turns out he liked sex, kinky stuff, and saw nothing troublesome about consuming human flesh. The bad part is his partners, even if they had consented to the sex games, it’s believed that they didn’t consent to dying or being eaten. That’s assumed because at least one guy tried to make an escape, and most, it is believed, were drugged before being killed.

I’ve recently bought a book about male serial killers, and the grouping seems rather arbitrary. What exactly, then, is a serial killer? A person who acts or reacts with intentional killing of another human being. But that’s about where commonality ends. Motives are mostly different, as are tactics, intent, and “victims”. Do I sympathise? And if I did? What I mean to say is that I can’t and won’t judge those who aren’t me or share what is in me. People ask ‘are these serial killers evil or are they mad?’ Are there no other options?

There are a lot of people who like kinky sex. Problem? Not in this society. There are a lot of people who will consume whatever as food, regardless of other’s opinion of its taste or other aspect of its nature. Whales, snakes, endangered animals, insects, gastropods, pork, and human flesh have all been fair game (think of the Uruguayan rugby team in the Andes, as an example). Problem? No. Different cultures, different tastes, different times and circumstances. There’s a lot of people who kill – even in masses. Soldiers, victims of violence, governments, for example. Problem? People may cringe, and maybe rightly so, but history tells us that killing, if not wrong, is at the very least not uncommon human behaviour.

So is Jeffrey Dahmer so far from “normal” humans? I’d argue that he’s not all that far removed from common.

On "coming out"

One of my favourite quotes in the world is one by Gore Vidal that says “There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses, if not practices”. He also said, “Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people”. Okay, so some of this argument is about semantics, but it is also about labels.

If you know me, you would know that I have a hatred of labels— and so comes this ambivalence about the whole concept of “coming out”. I do understand that the whole movement started as a way to counter discrimination against certain people because of their sexual practices, to claim back the respect and human rights owed to every human being. I understand how it is empowering, especially to individuals who have been oppressed, to claim with pride the person they are and their right to be. I understand that identifying with a group, coming together for camaraderie, is a very human thing and it is often the only way to bring about societal change. I understand how it came about, what I don’t like, however, is the expectation that is now placed on many people to “come out”, to label oneself as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or ‘questioning’.

One reason I don’t like the concept of “coming out” is that I find it biased that a person who has sex with a same-sex individual has to tell people about it, yet there is no expectation that a person who only engages in heterosexual acts do so. There are things about the sexual practices of my friends, my family, acquaintances, celebrities, politicians, and many other people that I don’t know about – and quite frankly couldn’t care less about. How old where they when they first had intercourse? What is their favourite sexual position? Are they multi-orgasmic? Do they prefer shaven or hairy genitals on their partner? Do they use toys? These are extremely personal and intimate questions about a person’s sexuality and we rarely are even bothered to know these things about people, so why should we care to know other intimate things like whether they have sex with men, women, or both. Does it change anything? No, it shouldn’t, especially if they’re your friends or family. Seriously, who would like to know all the sexual details of their friends or family? Not me. So why does there need to be this expectation that if you have sex with someone of your same gender that you have to tell the whole world about it? Quite frankly I have friends who are probably virgins, others that may or may not have had same-sex intercourse before, but I just really don’t care to hear about their sexual exploits one way or another. Sexual expression is a very intimate thing, usually only between two people, and that’s the way I am happy for it to stay.

And the other reason I am passionately against declaring your sexual preference is because of my hatred of labels. See, because once you tell the world you’re “gay” or “bisexual” that is all the world tends to see. You in fact lose a lot of your identity and become just a label, often described by a multitude of stereotypes. You may have sex with same-sex persons, but it’s probably not all you do. Maybe you have a job you’re very good at, maybe you follow a certain spiritual belief system, maybe you play an instrument or have a large family; but the moment you label yourself, that to me is like the death of the rest of you. And imagine being known for and described in terms of the things you like to do sexually! We would meet a lot of people, some of them our friends and family members, that were known as masturbators, others dildo-lovers, others anal-lovers, etc. But this is what some of our friends do and yet we think of them as friends, not as “straight” friends or “dildo-loving” friends, just our friends. The things our friends do and enjoy sexually is a personal matter for them and they aren’t and shouldn’t be expected to tell everyone about it, to “come out” as a dildo-lover or anal-bead enthusiast... So to “coming out” as gay or bisexual or transsexual, I say no (unless you consciencelessly choose to label yourself for whatever reason, for whatever secondary gain). To me, labelling isn’t creating equality. Labelling, putting up a division between “us” and “them”, isn’t creating equality between “us” and “them”, it just perpetuates the myth that people who have sex with same-sex individuals are purely defined by the sexual things they do. For me, to say a person is gay is a denial of everything else they are – and they may just be the best human being I know.

On the consumer instinct

I used to be whatever the opposite of materialistic is. I would never buy things I didn’t “need” and I considered everything but food and basic clothes an extravagant luxury. Incidentally, at the time, I was also a poor student and had no choice but to adopt this lifestyle whether I chose it or not. For the majority of my student life, I had also made this choice. Once I started on a rural medicine rotation, this began to change.

I guess it was back in 2007 when I first consciously noticed the change in me. I was in Gladstone at the time, which is hardly a rural town, but still a small enough place to lack the “variety” and “choice” we have become so accustomed to. In your average city, and in your average suburb really, you have, for example, a store that sells books (many different types of books). But you don’t have just one bookstore, you might have 2 or 3 or 4, etc. bookstores that sell the same books, at usually similar prices. In your average rural/regional town, maybe there is only one bookstore with a sample selection of books. They don’t have the big multi-level bookstore, let alone two. But the town survives; the people eat, drink, and live.

Now, when I was in Gladstone, all I could think about was finding a bookstore so I could read something to kill some time (instead of studying like I should have been doing). I couldn’t find any bookstores (or at least one that didn’t have only boating books), so eventually I resorted to the internet to calm my angst. I bought one book, two, three, some perfume, something else, something else still, and then some more. Back at home I hardly ever bought anything online, let alone what I once considered non-essentials. Back at home I was hardly ever this bored.

I started thinking then about what had brought on my newfound habit of senseless spending. There were several things that for me differed from living at home (in the city) to living in a semi-rural setting. Firstly, I had a lot more spare/free time in Gladstone because I didn’t have my friends or family to hang out with, there was less variety of movies for me to see at the cinema, and I wasted less time driving to places. Secondly, lacking all these things that usually consumed my time (friends, family, and leisure activities), I actually was feeling emotionally disconnected, isolated, bored, lonely even. And I think it is this great void, this being consumed with nothingness, this empty space, that leaves us feeling desiring of something, anything. Unfortunately, when people feel alone or isolated or depressed, they often seek to fill an emotional void with material or physical things.

To me this experience made me think of a few things. Firstly, I started to wonder if in fact this –feeling emotionally unfulfilled – is the reason that people adopt such a consumerist attitude, always wanting to buy more, and not just wanting to but feeling they need to. I mean it’s not rurality that does it to you, there are people living in these rural towns who go about their everyday life, working, etc. without being overwhelmed by some desire to buy, buy, buy. They feel as I feel when I’m at home with my family and friends: content. Me, I wanted to buy things to fill my time, to kill the time I had to be alone and contemplating my loneliness and isolation. I wondered also if that is what other people who are long-term materially-focused feel. If you fill up your time with material possessions, striving to have them, dreaming of more, then you don’t leave time to think about the things that make life really worthwhile, but which we may lack. The physical things can’t fill the emotional voids, though, and eventually some people may adopt their desire to possess more as their substitute for the human lust for life, experience, love, interaction, play, and generally just living.

If there’s one thing that my experience in “the bush” has taught me, is that human needs don’t change whether you’re in one place or in another. Everyone needs love, affection, interaction, social engagement, respect, entertainment, self-efficacy, and health care.

On labels and self-esteem

I was discussing with a friend of mine one day on how sometimes the worst thing we can do is label ourselves. See, ever since I met my friend she told me she’s a very shy girl – and I guess she is, but it’s not all she is.

Now, the issue of shyness is very close to my heart because I was painfully shy up until the time I started high school. And when I say ‘painfully’, I mean it really did cause me a lot of psychological stress. A lot of people who’ve met me in the last few years would find it hard to believe that I was once a shy person, but anyone from my family could confirm to you how true this is. When I was in primary school (both in Australia and in El Salvador), through every year I progressed, my teachers would speak to my mum to ask why I didn’t interact with any of the other children. I guess the concern was that I was autistic or had some sort of sensory deficit. My mum would explain to them, year after year, that I didn’t have a speech impediment, that I really both understood and spoke the language, and that I could communicate verbally. Academically, I scored at least average grades in classes so at least they didn’t believe I was intellectually impaired, but was always just “something” about me. I knew there was something too, but I knew it was from my extreme shyness. Whenever I did speak, I whispered so that no-one but myself could hear me speak. I was at the same time embarrassed to express myself and embarrassed to be so socially awkward. The solution to this problem was to continue silent.

As I grew older and started high-school I suddenly felt almost compelled to express myself – and in many forms. Some of my classmates whom I’d been to primary school with were absolutely shocked to see me for the first time speak, joke around, and finally have something to contribute verbally. Of course, although it did seem like a magical change in me, I guess I had also just been through puberty and the adolescent psychosocial needs of expression and personal identity were also taking over. I also did not improve in all arenas suddenly, and there are some social spheres I still struggle with, but becoming more self-aware of the problem also enabled me to seek help to improve. As with anyone who speaks of self-improvement will tell you, first you have to believe that you can change (and have the right motivation, and the desire to change, etc. etc.). But therein lies the problem of labelling yourself, because once you label yourself, you adopt the role and you forget that you can change if you’re motivated enough.

We often say "I'm shy" or "I'm depressed" and it's a much heavier statement than saying "I feel anxious in some social situations" or "sometimes I feel very down". The difficulty is that once we label ourselves it becomes a shield to hide behind (and not usually on purpose), that keeps us stagnant. If I start believing that I'm shy (or depressed) and I start describing myself as such, I will start acting like that at all times because that's what I've come to accept is my personality. It's very debilitating to label yourself long-term as anything because it limits your ability to grow. Whereas I could say, “I'm feeling sad right now”, if I say “I'm a depressed person” then I'm not describing a feeling but myself - and human beings don't find it easy to change what is essentially a part of themselves. I think of it as the equivalent as describing your skin colour; that's what our personalities can become if we describe ourselves by our character traits. It becomes as inescapable as our own skin. You soon can't get rid of your "shyness" or your "depression" the same way you can't change your skin. And what's worse is that one day it'll stop bothering us and we'll simply say "I can't and won't be happy because I'm a depressed person" or "I won't meet anyone new because I'm a shy person"...

There’s a speech by Margaret Cho, comedienne, that I’ve included below that describes much better than I ever could the negative consequences of lacking self-esteem, which I guess a big part of shyness is (at least in my experience).

From ‘The Notorious C.H.O.’
I have self-esteem, which is pretty amazing because I am probably someone who wouldn’t necessarily have a lot of self-esteem as I am considered a minority.

And if you are a woman, if you are a person of colour, if you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender; if you are a person of size, if you are person of intelligence, if you are a person of integrity – then you are considered a minority in this world! And it's going to be really hard for us to find messages of self-love and support anywhere, especially women’s and gay men’s culture. It’s all about how you have to look a certain way, or else you're worthless. You know, when you look in the mirror and you think, "Ugh, I'm so fat, I'm so old, I’m so ugly"? Don't you know that's not your authentic self? But that is billions upon billions of dollars of advertising. Magazines, movies, billboards, all geared to make you feel shitty about yourself, so that you will take your hard earned money and spend it at the mall on some turn-around cream that doesn't turn around shit.

When you don’t have self-esteem, you will hesitate before you do anything in your life. You will hesitate to go for the job you really want to go for. You will hesitate to ask for a raise. You will hesitate to call yourself an American. You will hesitate to report a rape. You will hesitate to defend yourself when you are discriminated against because of your race, your sexuality, your size, your gender. You will hesitate to vote. You will hesitate to dream.

For us to have self-esteem is truly an act of revolution, and our revolution is long overdue.

On work and life

A few days ago I spoke with a friend who wants to study medicine. He has a good job that pays more than he would earn as a junior doctor, but what he wants to do is medicine. I’ve always encouraged him because if there’s one thing I’ve always believed is that the only thing that helps you achieve what you want isn’t who you know or how smart, rich, or “lucky” you are, but how badly you want it. Now if my friend is prepared to sacrifice his good salary to go back to being a full-time student for four years and then getting paid less than he is earning now, then I guess he must really want it.

Eventually my friend got accepted into medical school. I say eventually because in the meantime it’s taken him a few attempts at a silly entrance exam, he’s spent money on further study, and his wife has given birth to their first child. It’s taken him some time but now he is actually able to proceed onto the job he really wants – but he hesitates. Why? Why would someone spend so much time and effort striving to achieve this thing that he’s wanted for so long and then hesitate? He told me “once you have a kid, that’s all you can think about”. He told me how he’s also made these other sacrifices in the meantime. He’s changed jobs to accept one where he makes less money than he was before but that allows him to be home more often. His wife has ceased to work to stay home and care for their child. And he is now hesitating on accepting what once seemed like his dream job. But he told me he himself had trouble understanding why he came to do all these things, but all he could think to say was that his child was his life.

I felt such great admiration for him because he had realised that the greatest job he’ll ever do is that of being a parent. That the one job that he is not dispensable or replaceable at is that of being himself: his daughter’s father, his wife’s husband, and his friends’ friend. At the end of the day our jobs pay the bills, and we aim to be satisfied with what we do so it doesn’t hurt us more than we benefit from it. One thing I realised some time ago also is that your job doesn’t keep you warm at night, it doesn’t cry when you’re away from it, and it definitely will never love you back no matter how much you may love it.

On the human factor... and the risks of work

As anyone who has ever done a job that involves interacting with another human being will tell you, it's often the human factor that ruins most things. In fact it can ruin it so much you can start to lose your will to live. Let me describe one scenario that is all too familiar for anyone who’s ever worked a junior doctor job in a hospital:

Say the procedure is: patient is 1 year old and has a tumour, patient needs pre-op MRI, patient needs surgery, patient then needs post-op MRI. The actual procedure becomes: need to talk to the patient’s parents about the surgery, risks, etc. You then have to organise the pre-op MRI, which is absolutely necessary for surgical planning – and everyone knows this – but either way someone will have a go at you about because you’re requesting it be done today or tomorrow because the surgery is to be done tomorrow and the boss only told you about it today and the patient did not ask for their tumour to be diagnosed only yesterday. Then you have to discuss the case with the anaesthetist who tells you that you need to put an IV cannula in this child before he gets to theatre, although you tell him that the only accessible vein in this child is in his neck and it took another consultant anaesthetist 2 hours to get a cannula in him last time. Somehow, he tells you, the patient’s poor venous access is your fault and you’re incompetent for not being able to cannulate the child. Eventually the kid gets the surgery (after the 2 hours it took the anaesthetist to find a vein in the child) and you have to talk to the parents again because they're worried something went wrong, they think someone somewhere stuffed up and it's someone's fault, and they get all unpleasant towards you even though you're trying to explain to them that their child is just post-op and they'll improve or that it was a risk you had discussed with them previously, etc. Then you try to organise a post-op MRI and the radiologist decides to pick this occasion to tell you how surgical teams do too many scans, that they don't plan them right, that they order unnecessary investigations, that you personally are a crap clinician, that you don't understand how the MRI machine works, that you are wrong and your patient doesn't need the scan... but they'll do it anyway. So by this stage everything that needs getting done IS getting done BUT all these people have in the meantime made you feel so negative about yourself that you start to wonder if it was all worth it. Like, really, why must it be you that cops the abuse? Your role could easily be filled by someone else who knows how to fill in the forms and talk to people (aka the majority of the tasks the junior doctor job actually involves). So why must it be you? Why? Seriously. Hopefully the kid gets better, and maybe you had something to do with it, but you'll never think of it that way, and the family or the patient will never thank you, so all you remember from the interaction is the abuse everyone laid on you and how small you felt afterwards. Was it worth it? Was removing that child's tumour worth you self-esteem? Was it worth losing your self-worth? Was it worth losing your passion for your job, the big picture? And maybe, just in some, the question becomes ‘was it worth losing your will to live’?

Okay, so maybe the final statement was a bit of an exaggeration but it is not describing a new phenomenon. I always remember that story from ‘House of God’ about the medical intern that suicides and how every year a certain percentage of doctors do. But the phenomenon, of course, isn’t limited to health professionals. Cliff Baxter, one of the executives of Enron Corporation (the U.S. energy company that went bust in 2001), suicided after he was indicted to court for his role in the Enron bankruptcy case. In his suicide letter he wrote, “where there was once great pride, now it’s gone”. As an executive of a corporation like Enron was, Cliff Baxter wasn’t a weak or stupid man, but to me at least, his story warns about the risk of defining yourself by your job. I find it sad to think that having a wife and children, he saw his life as not worth living because he could no longer live with pride for his work. What about living for his wife or his child? What about living because there are other things in life besides work? I can’t help but feel that if you have to rely on your job to make you feel satisfied, to make your life feel like it is worth living, to make you happy, then you’re probably lacking something very important and beautiful in your life.

They say that doctors are especially prone to what is commonly called “burnout”, in general, for the same reasons that they have chosen to become doctors: they are often perfectionists and have a high sense of responsibility. In the workplace these are exactly the things patients and their relatives appreciate and expect. Other co-workers also expect the same thing from them. And what’s more, eventually the doctor comes to expect this of himself. So then he starts going home late to make sure everything is OK (a.k.a. “stable”) before he leaves. He’ll work all the ridiculous shifts and hours he is told to because he’s expected to and no-one before him has been able to change the system so he just has to submit. Of course, with all the time (and let’s not forget effort) dedicated to work and career progression, he spends less and less time with family, socializing, relaxing, and essentially doing all those things that truly enrich human life. It’s then easy to imagine how with work consuming so much of your life, a person could come to define themselves solely by their work. You start to associate success exclusively with occupational achievements and less with the attainment of personal, family, or social goals. Proverbially, you come to ‘live to work’ not ‘work to live’. And once you come to do that, it is not so far-fetched to imagine guys like Cliff Baxter who, having lost his ability to work, come to believe that he has also lost the ability to live.

On priorities

There’s this incident from when I was in medical school that always stuck in my mind. It’s about this patient I saw in a breast screening clinic who wanted to die, and she wanted to die before she even knew that she had breast cancer and could possibly die. It stuck in my mind because it resonated with something I had experienced personally – and something that I am only now beginning to understand.

In the movie (and book) ‘Fight Club’ the main character has terrible insomnia, works a mundane job he doesn’t find motivating but keeps him busy, and leads a fairly lonely life with little friends or satisfaction. To break up his day he starts wishing for something to happen, anything. He wishes his plane would crash, the world would end, anything to end the routine of his unsatisfying life. Of course, he could do something about changing his life (couldn’t we all?), but it’s all so ego-dystonic that many of us would rather wish that things would just change.

Lately I’ve been thinking about this incongruence we have with acknowledging that we are dissatisfied and acting in accordance to enhance our satisfaction. I think one of our main problems is prioritising.

I am someone who is very prone to becoming overwhelmed. As with many people, when I become overwhelmed I often enter this phase of what others might call depression. Sometimes people who find themselves in this state start to wish things would change, for better or for worse but just change. Recently I noticed how I had all these deadlines, things to do, money to pay, people to please, and I started to feel so low. Physiologically there was probably little wrong with me, but I started feeling so down. And so I started to wish again that something would happen. And I wanted something to happen so I wouldn’t have to deal with all these things I had pending. I’d heard Tony Robbins (the motivational speaker) before refer to this persistently low mood as overwhelment rather than depression – and I start to see now how true this may be. But what exactly about wishing for negative outcomes is it that seems so appealing when you’re feeling overwhelmed? I think it has something to do with putting things back in perspective.

Say something bad happens, maybe you’re in a serious car accident or a family member becomes really sick. Suddenly you notice that you can (and should) take the day off work, that that document can be handed in late, that that person won’t hate you forever if you fail to make the party, and that if all these things that were overwhelming you don’t get fulfilled the world won’t end. That’s right, these things aren’t essential! It’s incredibly liberating to realise this. And you realise that all these things have been prioritised incorrectly – or not at all. At the end of the day, the things that keep us alive and satisfied are always the really basic things, things that rarely have deadlines, people who won’t judge you, and things that you probably already have. When life forces us into a place that perhaps physically impedes you from completing the tasks of life that were overwhelming you, only then do we start seeing what our priorities really need to be.

The Story About The Breast Clinic

Yesterday I saw a woman at the breast screening clinic who had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. She seemed like the kind of person you’d usually expect to be the one cheering up other people. Yesterday, though, she was just human like the rest of us. The thing that stuck with me most is that she said she was actually happy (even though she was crying profusely) that she was going to die. In her mind she’d already made up her mind that cancer equals death, no other alternative but death. And she was happy that she was going to die because she had wanted to die for some time, before the breast scan had ever been an issue. She wanted to die because her life, she felt, was out of control and she wanted an escape or a change.

Gosh, gosh, gosh. I remember having felt like this before. My life felt remote from what I felt I had been—and I felt powerless, cowardly, and like my life was out of control and without a purpose. And because I wanted to die and at the same time too weak and cowardly to do it, I just wanted something, anything, to happen to me. I fantasized about road accidents, strokes, cancer—anything fatal. At one point I didn’t even mind if it happened to me or to someone else, just something needed to happen to change the direction of my life because I had no direction or purpose to my life. And I felt too weak to bring about change myself. I was so low.

This, I imagine, is how this woman at the breast clinic had been feeling, and how unfortunate that something like this did happen for her. I’m not even sure that it is also what happened to me (or similar) or if it is the opposite.
— 5/05/2007

On Madrid... and on prostitution

I passed through Madrid last summer, 2009. I’d gone there for a religious conference and also to start a tour to Southern and Central Spain. I really liked Madrid. I went to the Prado, the Reina Sofia, El Parque del Buen Retiro, the Thyssen-Bornemisza, and a few other spots. We weren’t there very long, but I really came to like it. It felt like a city I could very definitely live in. I was almost used to it already and we were only there for a short while.


In the main mall, in one of the streets that comes off the Plaza del Sol, there was a long stretch of shops and restaurants. Every city has that, even where I live. Every few metres the mall is decorated with small trees to both sides of a very wide footpath. Common, I know, my city has that too. Beside every one of these trees and just about every few metres of the mall, though, there were these girls. Girls, young girls, and older women dressed as girls. Most of them looked of Central or Southern American appearance. And there they were in little tight clothing, others in full tracksuit pants, just hanging about. Prostitutes. Everyone walked by them, around them, near them, just the same way you walk past the trees, the benches, the lightposts, the shops. Amongst them walked the shoppers, police officers from the nearby police station, and all of us tourists seeking the next tourist attraction. What the girls were seeking was business, same as you and me: a meal to eat. They looked so glamorous, so fit, so ready to take on the world. But what do you eat from when you have no job, possibly no legal immigrant status, and little workplace skills? It broke my heart, and I found it so hard to pinpoint the emotion. Any of those girls could have easily have been me.

Literally, there were all types of women there, some white, most moreno, some black, some malnourished skinny, some very chubby, some old, some very young-looking, some very femininely-dressed, others very boyish, and some probably were boys. Which one would I be? Would I be there? Where had they come from? South America, Slovenia, Russia, Africa, Spain? What had they done? Did they think moving to another country illegally would be easier? Would it get easier? What of the local girls, maybe they couldn’t finish high-school for whatever reason? What role did drugs play? Where did these girls really want to be? Could I be as brave as they if I had to be? And where were the pimps? It was all too organized, the girls well-placed equal distances apart, never offering to be selling or doing anything, they just stood there. It’s an ancient profession, it rarely needs to be advertised, but it just seemed like everyone knew what they were there for and who they were and no-one was bothered by it, not even the cops.

Sometimes some men in fancy designer clothes would stop and talk to the girls, you’d see them haggle for a few seconds, then they either walked away together or the men would walk away alone, a little further up the mall. As I watched this scenario, I came to really wish that more men would stop and talk to them and then walk away with them. I don’t know why I wished this, I couldn’t understand it then, but I guess it’s the same way you watch a starving child and hope that someone will have the will and power to feed him. I knew how these girls would get their next meal, and regardless of the same Christian feeling that had brought me to Madrid, I could not judge these girls as less than human. What broke my heart further is when the men would haggle with them and eventually walk away, leaving a very unhappy-looking girl to continue standing there. He’d walk to the next girl and have the same conversation. That stuff would really break my heart. Imagine having your own product judged, devalued, and then rejected – to leave you to starve another day.

There are people who see prostitution as an easy way out, but truth is most things seem easy when your belly is full, you’re warm, and there’s a shelter over your head. I don’t see a prostitute; I see a human trying to survive. Maybe it is partly because my mum had taught me as a child that every job is a dignified job, unless you’re stealing or taking advantage of your fellow man. These girls weren’t stealing from me, when I guess they really could have. They both inspired me and filled me with gratitude to my God.

Madrid was a truly spiritual experience. I really loved Madrid.
_______________________________________________
The Two Madonnas

Luisa was troubled by the story of Pilar and her companion, let’s call him Paulo.

Luisa was a lot like Pilar. Pilar wondered, “Why can’t I love? Why can’t I be loved?” Luisa knew what this felt like, and she had her theories. ‘Is it because I love too readily, too hastily? Is it because I hold back so much? Is it my unwillingness to believe, to succumb, to trust? Is it my self-doubt; because these things preoccupy me? Is it because I am spiritual? Is it because I am sexual? Is it because I’m all these things at the same time? Is it because I’m nothing and no-one and too easily defeated by my own self doubt?’ Pilar wondered if Paulo thought her too profane or too holy. Either way, why was she so untouchable to him? What did Paulo see? What was he failing to see?

Before Paulo and before Pilar, a man had told Luisa that she was too pure (meaning too spiritual) for him to concede to love her (and waste her). Before him, another man had told Luisa that she was too dirty for him to believe that she could honestly and sincerely pray before God. Luisa knew they were both wrong and right in a way neither of them were worthy of.

Madonna thought herself unworthy of her calling. Luisa liked to think of Madonna. Madonna, as Roman Christians called the mother of Christ; she of ultimate faith who was given the privilege and challenge to bear Our Saviour and all that came with it, and accepted. The one woman of ultimate faith and spirituality was chosen. She is Madonna.

Luisa knew a song by one Madonna called ‘Like a virgin’. This Madonna represented all that is sexuality. Sexuality because we are sexual beings and one cannot talk of humanity without talking about sexuality. Denying it would be denying our being and existence. No matter how spiritual, we are ultimately sexual.

Luisa held a certain respect for religious figures who in sacrifice, sacrificed their sexual nature. Luisa admired them in the same way she admired prostitutes who sacrificed, killed, and numbed their humanity minutes at a time to exist purely as sexual beings devoid of spirit. She admired them as she admired former alcoholics and junkies and all other addicts because they sacrificed things that were of real value to them. Luisa knew that there was no glory in surrendering what you never had, knew, or even loved. Sacrifice, if it is the physical proof of our faith, must be of something worthwhile, and in our case, also human. Sexuality and spirituality are both human. One cannot say human without saying both spirit and sex. One cannot speak of God without conjuring up man who was created in his image. Luisa respected the two Madonnas for reminding her of both sides of what it is to be human and God-like.

Luisa thought, “This is exactly why I can’t be loved”. This is what the two men before Paulo and Pilar had said. The thought enlightened her but she still lay cold and alone as every other night, reading about Pilar and her companion.

On work

When I was a little kid I said “I want to be a doctor” the same way a lot of children say it. Now, I was at the time living in a third world country in the middle of a civil war and I came from a very large and poor family, so saying that was the equivalent to saying I wanted to be an oil magnate or something highly improbable like that. A few things happened to me, though, that don’t usually happen to most other people in my situation. Firstly, I was always incredibly stubborn so even a decision I made when I was six years old, was to me a life decision, a plan. Secondly, I had a family that didn’t shut my dreams down with the reality that kids from poor families in El Salvador don’t make it to university to study. The one thing that really drastically improved the chances of my childhood wish becoming a reality, though, was moving to Australia when I was nine.

Now, I went through my schooling in Australia fairly seamlessly. There was a period in year 11 when I lost interest in school because I found out that not a lot of other people thought like me, and I found it hard to understand how people can just claim authority over someone else and expect obedience from them. At the end of that year, though, I realised that I should obey silly things like going to my allocated class and not just doing the assessment if I was to make it into university. From the end of high school the plan was pretty straight forward: get an undergraduate degree in something I was good at (science) and then medical school, etc.

Everything went as planned until I finished my science degree because I didn’t make it into medical school straight away. I went for an interview at an interstate university and was so incredibly sick the day before I thought I was going to die. I even called my brother to tell him that if I died he could have my things, but in the end I didn’t have the courage to tell him that. The interview went horribly and I was left with a science degree I could do little with except post-graduate study in something boring and uninspiring.
I enrolled for post-graduate study in science and even managed to score myself a scholarship for that year.

My research project used a mice model so it involved a lot of time in a lab doing very fine and repetitive tasks. The lab I was working in was on top of this hill, on the top floor of the research building, and had a large clear window at the back from which I could see the world passing me by. I used to look out of the window all the time, feeling ashamed that I was there locked up in such a sterile environment wishing I was dead while the sun shone so brightly outside and everything outside of that place seemed to actually be alive. I grew increasingly more dark working in that place, dreading every day and its boredom, it’s repetitiveness, it’s staleness. I became quite sick and one day I decided, against everyone’s advice, that I wanted to re-learn what it was to be alive. Everyone told me that I may as well finish the year off, to not waste the last six or so months of my life. I told them that I had just wasted those months of my life and didn’t wasn’t to waste another three months feeling like I was dead inside. I had wanted to convince myself that perhaps medical research could work for me as a profession, but I found out the hard way that I couldn’t stand it.

That year again I tried and failed to gain entry to medical school, so after I quit my post-grad course, I decided to dedicate my time to learn to live again, to learn how to be Vanessa. That’s when I started writing again. It helped me sort out a lot of things inside me, to learn more from nature and about myself. The following year, I decided to go back to uni to do something fun and that met my interests, so I did a one-year course in my one true passion: creative writing. It was so much fun and really suited my needs. That year I applied and got an interview for medical school and was finally accepted into the course.

Medical school I soon learnt was a lot like high-school except for the teaching methods. It was largely uneventful until my third year when I had to do a rural placement outside of Brisbane. It was the first time I had been away from home and I’d just done a rotation I didn’t enjoy and was very badly treated by a member of the hospital and teaching staff. I was already struggling with feelings of low mood and motivation by the time my placement started, which were only exacerbated by the isolation. I tried my best to stay focused on just doing the work, being a machine that just does its work and then switches off until the next day. The only problem was that I can’t do that, I’m too sentient, and at that time I had very few mature coping strategies. Again I started to feel as I had when I was doing the post-grad science studies: dead and waiting only to die physically. I persisted for a few weeks by numbing myself out, but one day I remembered what it was like to enjoy living ,so I then realized I needed to regain that before I could go on with my studies. I withdrew from my course, returning home midway through my placement. What was strange to see then was the number of people (family, friends, and colleagues) who so quickly dismissed me as a dropout, lacking ambition, lacking passion for medicine, just severely lacking. I never once floundered in my desire, though, I wanted to work in medicine but I knew that was not the right time for me.

During my time away, I just continued writing, going for long walks, meeting a lot of new interesting people, and working to save up for a holiday I had planned for the following year. One of the key questions I wanted to answer for myself during my break was ‘why am I doing med?’ My fear had always been that it was just something I had said as a kid and was encouraged too forcefully by my family. If I had said I wanted to be a drug dealer, for example, I may have wanted it as stubbornly but my family would never had encouraged it. I started working a job in retail for some money, and looked at what other professions were around. Eventually I realised that med was the only job I could imagine doing, the only work I wanted to do if we as humans must work for survival, the only job in which I could see myself not hating my own existence every day. But I was never naive as to what a medical job actually was and so I knew that if I was going to continue with it, I had to acknowledge that it is just that: a job. A very privileged job, at that, in that it gives you the opportunity to help unrelated others to continue on with their lives with the burden of their physical troubles eased, but still just a job. And a job is just that; it’s not your reason for living, it’s not what keeps you warm at night, not what embraces you when you’re exhausted. I want my work not to be my place of solace; that’s what I want my home to be. I want to go home at the end of my work day and feel at peace. I want to look forward to going home at the end of the day, to have something truly special there to go home to, to someone that will hold me.

When I was much much younger I considered doing foreign aid work in medicine to help those in need. I considered it for the same altruistic reasons most people do (whatever that means). As I got older, though, I started reflecting on my own life and decided that it wasn’t for me. I have seen enough poverty, conflict, and war in my life. And maybe I should be returning a favour, but quite frankly I am satisfied with my life as it now and I don’t owe anyone but God anything. I commend those who do aid work, it is truly a great act, but I know it’s not for me.

In 2007 I returned to medical school to finish off both my rural placement and also the rest of med school. The rest of it was uneventful, except for meeting some very rare people who I found to be very decent human beings. I also took the time to learn a lot more, not so much about the medicine as I should have been doing, but rather about the organisational psychology of the industry. I learnt a lot. I got to know a lot of people, to observe countless interactions between what in any other place are just human beings but in that sphere are doctors, nurses, pharmacists, physiotherapists, wardsmen, administration officers, etc. and are governed by this artificial and impalpable law of hierarchy. I learnt the rules of the game. I learnt a lot about governance and of how humanity is so often absent from the human professions. Oh well, I learnt a lot and I never entered the workforce naive to these things.

And so here I am, doing the only job I have ever wanted to do. And here I am, loving not my job but the place I return to after work is finished. And life is exactly how I wanted it to be.

On happiness

In the movie Donnie Darko, Donnie disses a class exercise that aims to describe human behaviour as either love or fear related. Donnie’s argument is you can’t just lump things into two broad categories given the whole spectrum of human emotion.

One of the questions that first preoccupied me when I was a child (in fact it was probably around the time that I was learning English) was: what is the opposite of happiness? Well, there’s unhappiness, but there’s also sadness. Which of these is the true answer, if there can be an answer that can be said to be “true”? Sadness is absence of happiness, right? But unhappiness encapsulates everything outside of happiness, including sadness. And then what about anger? I’m not happy when I’m angry. And then all these other things would occur to me: what about remorse, regret, bitterness, discontent, content, dissatisfaction, satisfaction, nonchalance... For just an example, if I am content or satisfied with something, I am not ecstatic about it, I am just not dissatisfied about it. Argh, human emotion is so hard to explain!

Recently my life has taken quite a turn – for the best! – and I am often (and I mean often) asked whether I’m happy? Well, the truth is yes, as a broad category I am a happy person, but no, as in not every minute of my day can I describe my mood or emotional state as “happy”. But how can you tell someone you care about that you’re not “happy” and have them not also believe that you’re an “unhappy” person or that you’re upset or bothered or annoyed, etc. (what most people associate with an emotion that isn’t happiness)? Aside from the fact that some would say I’m cyclothymic, even normal human emotion varies throughout the day, commonly even through the course of a conversation. A friend might play a trick on you and you’re surprised, then you realise it’s a joke and you laugh, then you want revenge so you play punch them (behaviour of aggression, intent of camaraderie), eventually you’re serious again and you discuss work. I was happy when I was laughing, but I am not “unhappy” as a negative emotion towards him by the time we get around to discuss work.

Personally, I have always found the concept of happiness so limiting. If all I ever got out of life was happiness, if it was all I strived for every second of every day, I would probably be a very miserable person. Maybe it is better to say at the end of a day that I lived, not just strived for an impossible dream. But I am happy about where my life is now (broadly, think season and not weather).

A quote:

“I would urge that you be dissatisfied. Not dissatisfied in the sense of disgruntlement, but dissatisfied in the sense of that ‘divine discontent’ which throughout the history of the world has produced all real progress and reform.
I hope you will never be satisfied. I hope you will constantly feel the urge to improve and perfect not only yourself, but also the world around you.” – Charles Becker

On being a foreigner

I once walked into an exam room and the first question I was asked was how I ended up with an Australian accent and a last name like mine. Common question; I don’t mind it all, it’s a great conversation starter. But when I was asked if I ever wanted to go home, I didn’t know what to answer. My home across the river? Yes… but that wasn’t the question.

Milan Kundera wrote a book called ‘Ignorance’ about a girl born in the Czech Republic who moves to France and lives there for about 20 years. Here’s a quote about her experiences as an émigré:

“Oh, the French, you know – they have no need for experience. With them, judgments precede experience. When we got there, they didn’t need any information from us. They were already thoroughly informed that Stalinism is an evil and emigration is a tragedy. They weren’t interested in what we thought, they were interested in us as living proof of what they thought. So they were generous to us and proud of it. When Communism collapsed all of a sudden, they looked hard at me, an investigator’s look. And after that, something soured. I didn’t behave the way they expected…. They had done a lot for me. They saw me as the embodiment of an émigré’s suffering. Then the time came for me to confirm that suffering by my joyous return to the homeland. And that confirmation didn’t happen. They felt duped. And so did I, because up till then I’d thought they loved me not for my suffering but for myself.”

‘Ignorance’ talks about nostalgia. At different times in my life, in particularly the last few years, I have been asked whether I have ever considered returning home. Home? I am home! Home is where my mum is. I guess I’m a foreigner and nothing can change that, not even time. Does it bother me, the expectation that I should long for a place I actually feel no connection to? Yes, the expectation bothers me. My discord comes from not being about to understand why I should not consider this — Australia — my home? Because others were born here and I wasn’t? Home is where I raise up my tent, the place I long for when I’m away. The place I long for is the one that inhabits the people I love, my family. That home is not in Central America; what is there is a memory, not my present or the future I choose. But people have this expectation that is separate to my desires, and this expectation renders me a traitor – a traitor for betraying an ideal that is not my own!

Sometimes people ask me if I remember much about El Salvador since when I left I was around 9 years old. I remember, of course; children remember by the time they’re nine. I remember the things that are of value to me, the good or bad things that shaped me. Some memories are still like photographs and seem distant; some more vivid and play over and over. But yes, I remember. It wasn’t all bad. War was almost always background for us (my family). Family, Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s books, school, and Mexican soap operas on TV were in the foreground (for me, at least). It wasn’t all rosy, either, as some people choose to believe, landscapes which they imagine are irreproducible. And although the war was real, it was something you get around by living your everyday life. People do that, we weren’t the only ones. We weren’t specially apt or adaptable; we were common people living in a place where a lot of common people also lived. Sometimes when there’s a big crack in the ground, people learn to walk around it and pretty soon it’s accepted as part of the landscape which isn’t questioned and you can’t suffer over it. Romanticism is for the memories of the past, you can’t suffer from it in the moment.

Yes, I remember El Salvador, certain places and certain people. Why do people doubt that I would remember? Because they (both “romantics” from my country and people born here who insist my home is elsewhere) don’t understand how I could remember El Salvador and yet not long for it again. Memory is not the same as nostalgia. Patriotism doesn’t and shouldn’t rule memory.

Maybe it’s time I write my own version of my story:
I was born in El Salvador, lived there until I was nine. There was a civil war; I was a kid, I didn’t know the reasons for it and I didn’t have a view either way. My uncle was killed by a land mine and my best friend was killed by a bomb; our family was one of the least affected by the war. We immigrated to Australia with all my family. All of it: mum, grandmother, brothers, sister, cousins and aunts. I didn’t know my father very well, I still don’t. If he is still alive, it is highly probable he is still living in El Salvador. My whole family and my whole life, most of my friends, and my ambitions live in Australia. I am Salvadorian; I live in Australia. I am at home.

On "becoming" beautiful

I recently bought a new camera and I’ve just been taking photos of all sorts of random things and people. One of the things most people will often say to me when I ask to take their photo, though, is “not now, I look horrible”... Now, to myself I think “but this is how these people have chosen to present themselves today, why would that be ‘horrible’?” As I was thinking this, it reminded me of something I noticed a while ago – and maybe it has something to do with self-identity or the human concept of “beauty”. At the same time, I don’t want to be a hypocrite, and I’ll admit I once thought like those people.

Beauty is a very difficult to define concept, of course. You could say a rose is beautiful and say a woman’s face is beautiful, and not mean that the woman’s face looks like a rose. Also, one man’s wife may be beautiful to him but another man who has just met her may think nothing of her. There’s subjectivity involved, history and knowledge of a thing’s other than physical attributes involved, circumstance, and relativity of one thing to another of its kind.

I’ve always liked to take photos of things – just for fun. When I was younger I started to notice how some of the best photos to take are of children. Not all children, but children who are young enough to recognize themselves in a mirror, but not so young as to be too easily distractible when they’re awake. And when I say “the best photos”, I mean those that are most close to reality, the one’s that replicate a moment in time a little closer to the truth. I took so many photos of one of my nieces at one stage because with this childhood innocence came this absolute sincerity that even a camera (in my unskilled hands) could capture. Now, this little girl was just being herself and making it so easy for me to capture that “self”, so I took so many photos because I knew that the day would come where she would ask me if she looked ‘good’ in a photo. In fact what happened was that she then went to school and was taught to smile whenever a camera was in front of her. Don’t get me wrong, she was still beautiful, her appearance evolving with age (as it never ceases to do during our lifespan), but she had lost that sincerity that once came so naturally to her – and all because someone taught her that an attractive – and so photo-worthy face – must have a smile on it. A smile can make any face beautiful, that’s true, but that was probably first said about sincere smiles.

Before this period, though, my niece went through a stage where she figured out that the thing looking back at her in the mirror was herself. She had learnt before that what the general concept of a human face was: two eyes, nose, two nostrils, ears, mouth, hair, and attached to the rest of a body with arms, legs, etc. We first learn by stereotype, it’s essential; the world is just too difficult to comprehend otherwise. The fun times were standing in front of the mirror, her and me, pointing at this little person in the mirror and she realising it was herself because she is standing next to a person that looks exactly like me. Then she would laugh for ages. Most children will do that. They don’t notice that their clothes are all stained from when they spilt food on themselves, that there is things in their hair that came from the grass in the backyard. All these things are inconsequential details, the reality is that there in the mirror are two human beings, one which is herself, and one someone other than herself. This is self-awareness.

To return to photos, though. What is the first thing you notice when you look back at old photos? Yourself! Inevitably that is what you notice, it’s probably instinctual. You disregard the surroundings and the other people in the photo, and it’s not vanity, it’s just constancy to recognize yourself as you once were (because all moments are always in the past). Everybody has a self-image, a physical image and also a cognitive one that would recognize your own style of reasoning or speaking, for example. So the next thing we do with photos is to compare the image in the photo with our internal self-image, but also to this other image about “beautiful” human beings we have been conditioned to believe. So, often the internal thought process goes “does this look like me? does it look like me at my best physical appearance? and, does it look like those models in magazines and film actors?” When we were children the thought process was, “what is it? is it human?” and “who is it?”. Things were much simpler then. So, I won’t go on about how this “beautiful human being” mental image came to be formed because most people can probably guess it already.

My niece grew up, and she still likes photos; she even knows how to pose now. The skill difference between professional models and the rest of us is that the pros know how to look natural in a completely staged environment. That “natural” look and certain biometric features that some scientists with lack of better things to study have found is what we usually define as beauty. But my niece is beautiful too. She is beautiful because she’s my little girl, because she is a child, because there’s this sincerity about her, and because I love her. I’ve said nothing of her appearance, but you get the concept of a beautiful child like the hundreds we’ve all seen before. She is confident in herself and of her appearance. She’ll always let you take her photo, as long as you know she will always smile on cue for you.

But now, as adults, a lot of the people I come across don’t want their photo taken because they don’t look “beautiful” enough. I didn’t want a photo of a “beautiful” person, if I did I’d have cut it out of a magazine; I wanted a photo of the person who I’m asking. Has this image of un-beauty been so deeply ingrained in us or is it a universal lack of self-esteem that makes us shy away?

You know what else I’ve noticed in the last few years also? That the people that make good photos to take of are, other than children, the elderly and indigenous people with little exposure to western society. People of poor countries also have a tendency to view a request from a friend for a photo as a gesture similar to asking for a glass of water: ‘gladly, my friend, if I have enough to give’. And why do they care less than the average person about their appearance? I think because they think of a photo just as that, a thing that eventually will just come to be on a piece of paper as a representation of an event in time. But what about the elderly? Well, then I started thinking that perhaps they have had more time to have also come to this same reasoning, but also to accept their own physical appearance and it’s changing nature.

I was twenty-six by the time I finally stopped feeling ashamed of my own body. My weight has fluctuated since I was young, and since about the age of 12 I was ashamed of it. I’ve always struggled with low self-esteem despite my family thinking that I was OK because I got good grades at school, inside there was this loathing of myself from the core to my very skin. I felt ashamed of my body, to be who I was and how I was, and the last thing I wanted was to look at myself and let alone let anyone else see me. Mirrors were extremely uncomfortable places for me to stand in front of. Having to have a photo taken was almost an offensive gesture made at me. I didn’t want to look at myself. Anyhow, the whole thing made my life not very interactive and lonesome when I was young, though with study commitments I gradually expanded the number of things I became comfortable doing.

When I was 26, in my final year of med school, I finally came to the realisation that this was it, that this was my body, that this is who Vanessa was and I would just have to accept it. I finally realised that the people who spoke to me, who befriended me, or who were otherwise associated with me had chosen to do so despite of what horribleness I thought I looked like. If others could interact with me so easily, accept me as I was, then why should I not? The realisation sounds so simple now, but it had taken me 26, almost 27, years to reach. After that, it made romantic relationships easier to conceive, both in my mind and physically. I felt more at ease with being my true self. And even though 26 (or since) was probably not my best year in terms of physical appearance, I finally also accepted the changing nature of my appearance. And guess what? I finally stopped caring about what I looked like in photos.

On homosexuality, the DSM, and Pedophilia...

When I was younger people used to tell me that homosexual people were bad, that they were defective, that they were evil. These people were well-meaning religious clerics, family, family friends, school teachers, and other respectable adults. I emphasize well-meaning because their attitudes were not what we now commonly refer to as homophobic, discriminatory, judgemental, ignorant, or bigoted. Their views reflected a common majority view. They weren’t bad people saying derogatory things about a minority group of people; they were just repeating what was common thought at the time. These were good people.

Now, the common view at the time –that homosexual persons were sexual deviants, less than healthy “normal” humans- was grounded in the scientific and medical descriptions accepted until very late in human history. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) classified homosexuality as a mental disorder until as late as 1973, as did the World Health Organisation in its International Classification of Diseases (ICD). Gradually in a period since the mid 1970s the classification of mental illness was ratified with increasing knowledge of prevalence and non-observance of the common disclaimer in these classification systems: “the symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning”. If a behaviour is sufficiently common and does not cause significant negative outcomes, then it is a tough call to call it a mental disorder.

Of course, the other thing that happened since the inception of the DSM and similar classification systems and the 1970s was the so-called “sexual revolution” of the 1960s. The sexual revolution abolished many taboos (or perhaps constraints) on sexual activity. One such taboo was that of sexual activity between members of the same (phenotypic) sex. As a result of the sexual revolution a lot of people came to experiment with all different forms of sexual expression, although most commonly this was frequent non-monogamous heterosexual intercourse. So one could pose the question, did this social breakdown of a variety of sexual taboos (at the time they called it something akin to generalised immorality or looseness) lead to the increased acceptance of the people who engage in homosexual activity just because homosexual interaction happened to be one of those taboos? Perhaps, but it most likely was also (at least in addition) due to the lack of findings of “dysfunction” from medical and scientific point of views.

Recently I attended a talk on psychopathology, or, actually, the classification of mental disorders. The question was posed: what is a mental disorder? Something that is inherently bad? Something bad because some scientists and medical doctors said so? Something that makes the affected person or ones associated to him or her feel bad? Something that makes the affected person unable to function effectively or satisfactorily in his micro- or macrocosm? A behaviour that is uncommon in a particular environment or situation? A behaviour politicians and lawmakers decided is bad? A behaviour that a large proportion of the person’s peers would judge unreasonable or bad? Now, regarding homosexuality and its transition in classification systems from “bad” to “normal”, we could answer this question in many of the dimensions posed above. But my point is not to argue “homosexuality: good or bad?” but rather to provide a backdrop to one scenario posed to me, which at first sight scared me deeply, so I want to finally address it and put it to rest.

Now, to speak of the scenario posed to me (and that use to plague me), I have to first emphasize I’m playing devil’s advocate here. As I mentioned before, I grew up being told that homosexuality is bad, homosexuals are deviants, abnormal, less than, etc. Gradually that story changed and homosexual persons became persons (foremost) who happened to engage in homosexual activity. What if it were possible that this happen to other behaviours currently considered "abnormal"; that they also went from being described by others as “bad” to now being described as “normal”? And this change could come about through change in social attitude or the discovery of a high prevalence of the condition. After all, if all the people of the town are crazy and the king is sane, then for being a sane minority the king will be considered crazy by the townsfolk. The scenario posed was about pedophilia.

The DSM-IV-TR classifies pedophilia as a paraphilia in which there are “over a period of at least 6 months, recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges or behaviours involving sexual activity with a pre-pubescent child or children; and the person is at least age 16 years and at least 5 years older than the child”. Of course, it includes the common DSM disclaimer, “the fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviours cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupation, or other important areas of functioning”. Now consider a world where pedophilia occurs in every culture and ethnic group, in members of different socioeconomic classes, includes members from across all professions and trades; a world where 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 7 boys are sexually interfered with by an adult; and a world where people have become too accustomed to saying “it’s OK because everyone does it”. This is exactly the world we live in! So is it purely OK, really “normal”, if prevalence rates are high enough? (I hope not.)

In a hypothetical new and vile world, imagine seeing children talking to each other in a playground. One asks, ‘so when did your daddy devirginize you’? The other answers, ‘I was six. Hurt like hell. Now we only do it in the shed every week when mum’s not home’. A third one says, ‘you’re lucky. My mum’s friend did me when I was four – and I can’t even remember the first time’. Cut ahead to a generation from that and cutting scars on human forearms have become the norm so much that you’d think this is how we were born, with multiple lacerations tracking from our wrists to our shoulders. There’s no taboo about it. The kids go out with daddy for their fishing and “playing” trips. Mum knows, dad is not ashamed, and the children all share their common carnal knowledge amongst themselves at school. The mental disorder classification books no longer include any lifestyle choices or paraphilias anymore....

But wait, to wake yourself up from this nightmare, remember that one disclaimer in the definitions of illness: “the symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning”. Despite the unfortunately high prevalence of pedophilia in this world, the fact that it is harmful makes it not classifiable as a variant of normality we will/should all just accept. Child sexual abuse has no advantages except to the perpetrator, it’s an abuse relationship, a two-party transaction with only one person benefiting. In legal terms they would equate this to at least theft. You can’t steal from a child and say he consented because he would trade in a bar of gold for a simple candy, lacking that knowledge of how things done today can affect your whole life to come. You can’t just say homosexuality is the same as pedophilia because they are both types of sexual interactions; so is heterosexual intercourse, and why do less people compare that to pedophilia? Because there are differences!

From 2006 to 2010 there existed a political party in the Netherlands (PVND) that provided political advocacy for pedophile groups and organisations. One of their agendas was to legalize child pornography and to lower the legal age of consent to sex down to 12 years old. Commonly pedophile groups argue that children have the ability (and so the right) to enjoy sexual activity alone, with their peers, or with an older adult. Consequently, they argue, if the child consents to the sexual contact, then it should be legal for the adult/s to engage so with them. They’ll go so far as to argue that sexual contact with children is “good for them” and their development. Of course the issue that is of concern to other (non-pedophile) adults is that children’s ability to consent is limited by their experience and knowledge of consequences. A child can know that candy has a pleasant flavour, for example, and he can decide / consent to eat that given to him by his parent or friend, but the consequences of eating a piece of candy (e.g. early tooth decay, or not wanting to eat the rest of his dinner afterwards) are hardly the same as “consenting” to sexual activity. The consequences of childhood sexual abuse are commonly seen in our psychiatric wards, in the patients we all struggle to interact with: the personality disordered, the limitless cases of deliberate self-injury and drug abuse, the repeat victims of domestic abuse who go around either recreating or trying to erase their childhood experiences. This is too sad – and the worst thing we can do is blame the child, say he or she “consented”.

Pedophiles abuse people; they cause harm. This is not a time- or era-dependent opinion. It is so not the same as homosexuality or heterosexuality or any other way competently-consenting adults choose to interact sexually. And I think we have all come to that same conclusion. The only thing for us as a society still to debate about this and many other negative actions towards other human beings (e.g. murder) is whether such acts constitute criminality or mental illness, and which are the best ways to decrease our childhood sexual abuse rates.

(Sorry for the discussion on homosexuality together with pedophilia, I was obviously mainly aiming to contrast not compare.)

On Freedom (Part 2)

One day I was watching Oprah and it featured a story about Amanda Knox, a young girl who was imprisoned in Italy for allegedly killing her flatmate. She has been convicted for 25 years at her last trial. Before she allegedly killed her friend, she was in Italy for what can basically be called “cultural studies”. She studied and the rest of the time was free to be a tourist like any other North American in Italy, living a life with few intrusions and hassles. She had a good family back in the U.S. to support her, too.

Now this girl is imprisoned and she has no responsibilities whatsoever —no-one expects anything from her. She has “things” to fill in her days, weeks, months, etc. On Saturday mornings she calls her family and the family have come to make a ritual of it. The family gathers at the parents’ home, with her close friends also attending, and they have a general chat, as if she were right there. During the other 6 days, 23 hours, and 50 minutes of the week, the girl can do anything she wants. A general goal is to get herself freed, so she can devote part of her time working on her defence, reading law books, praying, and doing all the things that are permitted in Italian prisons. The rest of the time she can do whatever she likes (especially given that the general goal of freedom is also voluntary, i.e. she could choose not to appeal her sentence, as some people do). There are certain things, a lot of things, permitted in Italian (as in Australian) prisons; she could choose to read about Italian culture, the language, history, other studies, other books. She could pass the time doing things that aren’t all that different to what she was doing “on the outside”, living her generally carefree life. Now she can even afford to be more carefree: she doesn’t necessarily have to cook for herself, worry about where the money for food or shelter will come from, etc. She is a supported citizen (perhaps even better supported than some of our pensioners and elderly)—and nothing in return is expected of her. If she misbehaves, how will she be punished? She is already in prison. One day she may decide that her plight for freedom is redundant, that she has no hope, and she may give up trying. What then? Well, then off to read or study or whatever other “entertainment” activity she’s allowed.

Now, I don’t mean to romanticize prison life, I know most other co-prisoners aren’t going to be “nice”, that prison staff aren’t always pleasant to deal with (to say the least), that there are certain things mandated of all prisoners (work details, etc.), that small unchanging spaces can be nauseating, and that there can be extremely harsh punishments for acting out of line. What I mean to say is that prison life doesn’t carry with it things of social life which can be just as imprisoning, for example, the obligation to provide for your own meals and shelter, family responsibilities, fear of judgement, fear of job loss, poverty, family conflict, etc. I mean the social aspects of being human. (Similarly, I don’t aim to make any sort of comment about the Amanda Knox case or the treatment in Italian or Australian prisons. I am using that as an example, only.)

Me, if nothing were expected of me, I’d read. I’d read all day; I’d be happy to. I’d get up to eat, shower if I felt like it, then read, read, and read. Which leads me to ask myself two things: 1) Who is freer? and 2) would life in prison be that much more different or unpleasant than life as it is now? Interesting. A third question could be whether my life is actually lacking if prison life seems to be not that different to how it is now—and why.

Dr. Ted Kaczynski (aka “The Unabomber”) once said in an interview “what worries me is that I might in a sense adapt to this environment and come to be comfortable here and not resent it anymore. And I am afraid that as the years go by that I may forget, I may begin to lose my memories of the mountains and the woods—and that's what really worries me, that I might lose those memories, and lose that sense of contact with wild nature in general. But I am not afraid they are going to break my spirit”. Prison, imprisonment, the isolation, the confined spaces, aren’t what is horrible and punitive about prison, it is what it does to the human spirit, to a human spirit that has truly had better before. And the worst thing is that sometimes we don't even need the physical confinement to be imprisoned.

Another Story about Freedom

Do you know what loneliness is? It’s not a lack of friends; it’s a lack of purpose. The drugs won’t kill you. The drugs are just an escape from this emptiness that nothing can fill. Putting a man in a cage is not the punishment. Taking away his job, his people, his love of life, that’s the torture. “Why, God, must I go on living?” they say in their moments of distress.

A man can have it all: life, health, faith, company; but without love or purpose he is nothing. It’s easy to see from the outside and see a beggar dragging himself around in his rags with a bottle by his side, a syringe, some magical powder. It’s easy to hate him for his weakness. But behind that, there is a man. A man like you or me. A man who is not lacking a house or a bed or clothes. That man lacks a purpose. Where do they sell that? Where? It’s not at the bottom of any bottle, or in the embrace of one or another stranger’s body. We might search for it at the bottom of the ocean with the same luck of finding it as finding water in the Sahara. Where? Where is it?

Yet that same man would change his clothes, his city, even his life for a purpose. An embrace from someone that sees you, that loves you regardless of whatever you may be, that wants to know more—your name, at least. Sometimes we don’t ask because we think that that way we are giving others their “freedom”. Freedom from what? Nobody is freer than that beggar on the street without a purpose; and there is no-one more miserable than he. Who wants the freedom to be miserably alone? That freedom sounds mysteriously like rejection/neglect, disinterest, like the disgusting silence that follows a bomb explosion. Where is that beggar? That beggar isn’t in your way; he’s not invading your public space. That beggar is free—and there is no worse punishment than that.
—26/11/2008