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.