On loving

I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars
 if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies

I’ve started to wonder again what it’s like to be in love. I know, I’ve spoken many times about being in love and have related it to my own experience, but now I feel like a novice again. What is it like to be in love? I mean, really in love; like the people who are so in love that they dedicate their lives to this love, to each other, and then they get married. What’s that like it? What is it like to love like that? I don’t think I know.

I imagine – and, yes, I believe imagining is not enough – that to be truly in love two people have to be really sure of themselves, of their feelings, of their partner’s character, and of their partner’s feelings. How else to do you put it all on the line like that? How do you accept such vulnerability if not by having at least a substantial amount of trust in someone else? It’s hard enough in this world to trust yourself (at least for some of us), but then to trust someone else too – Wow! That to me is what I have perhaps never experienced if I am now doubting whether I truly have known love.

The one question that niggles at the back of the mind of someone like me who has in the past believed that they were in love with someone else is ‘is it reciprocated?’ And an even worse and even more troubling question is ‘am I giving too much for what I can expect in return?’ I know, right, we all are told that biblical/romantic story that true “love is patient”, “love is kind”, “love is not selfish”, blah blah blah; so I should be feeling ashamed for having just admitted that those questions do go through the minds of so many of us, especially the majority of us who have been heartbroken in the past. But love IS selfish and unkind and impatient; I believe it has to be! For you to truly believe that the person whom you love is worthy of your love, you have to believe that they are someone special. And yet you have to convince yourself that they’re not so special so as to deserve someone better than us mere mortals with all the flaws in ourselves of which we have full comprehension. No, you have to be selfish and think, ‘yes, they’re special and deserve the best in the world, but I don’t care about that because I desire them to be mine’. There you go, that’s selfish! It’s selfish but I believe it’s necessary, and admittedly it is the same concept that brings about the impulse in us to better ourselves. We want to become that amazing person our own “special person” deserves – and there’s nothing wrong with that!

Is there something wrong with wanting or expecting someone to reciprocate our love? Oh yes, the biblical story again about giving unselfishly and without expectation of getting something is return… Well, I don’t believe it applies here. What’s the validity of loving someone if they don’t love you back? That is NOT love. That is worship or idolatry or something of that quality. It doesn’t console me to be loved by someone I don’t love in return, and it doesn’t rejoice my heart either to love someone who doesn’t love me in return (or whom I believe doesn’t). But besides wanting to be loved in return, I want to be loved equally.

Equality in love; oh gosh, I wish I could believe again that such a thing is possible. I mean, people get married all the time; it must be possible to love like that, right? Right? I’m at a loss here. I want desperately to believe it’s possible, but the evidence doesn’t convince me fully. Because I have been heartbroken in the past, maybe even too many times, I find it hard to ever imagine a time when I ask the question “am I giving too much?” and the answer is no. More interestingly is I (and perhaps others in my situation too) have never asked “am I giving too little?” I thought about this only a short time ago. I had never asked myself that question; and at the same time I was certain that almost 100% of the time I was giving too much, without a doubt. But what if I’m not? What if I am giving too little or what I give are only irrelevant things? Woah! That took some effort to overcome my ego to just write that last sentence. I often think that the things others are offering me are too little!

What would I give up for love? I’ve spoken of it; I’d give money, my career, lesser dreams than love, my religion perhaps, etc. But what won’t I give up? That is the more important question! Well, it would be hard for me to give up my family, especially my mother. It’d be hard to give up my desire to be a parent to a child during my lifetime. It would be hard for me to commit murder or break other deep-seated morals I stand against. It would be hard to give those things up for love, because it would be akin to abandoning my true self. What have I to offer anyone if I lack even my own integrity, my own character, my own self-respect? Sure, there is devotion and one can still do good even without a grain of soul left in you, but that is not living to me. Who would ask this of me? Who would expect I empty my soul in order to be with them? Well, some people would say that this is exactly what the devil does: ask for your soul even if there is nothing left in it. Could I love someone like that? Could I expect to be loved by someone like that? And it sounds dramatic when I put it in those terms, but you have to remember that the world we live in isn’t too far from my analogy. Adolf Hitler had a wife who adored him and loved him to the very last breath. Paedophiles often have wives who hide their secrets for them, who sometimes even assist their partners in their crimes.

One day I would like to be in love, truly in love. I would like to feel that my love is reciprocated, that it’s equalled, and that it is worth both my and my partner’s sacrifices.

On the greatest lessons I've learnt

Me and my primary school teacher.
She taught me my greatest lessons.

In the last week, several events close to me and others we’ve been able to witness through the media have made me think a lot about my own mortality and what things we’d like to leave those close to us. Most people assume this means monetary inheritance and other ephemeral things of that nature. In my case, I was born without these things and so they are of little importance to me. I got to thinking, however, of the legacies and the truly valuable things I have acquired that I would love to leave to my offspring, my peers, and to any and all who care to know of these things that Vanessa really cherishes. So, below, I’ve written a list of the most important things taught to me, or the greatest lessons I’ve learnt.

1. Education is the one thing that truly pits people as equals.

Why is education important to me? Because it was important to my mother, and it was important to her for her children to have it. My mother has a primary school education but was smart enough to know that what would keep her children out of these perpetual cycles of poverty that have dominated my family and ancestors – and that was/is within the reach of most people – is education. My family had always been peasants and servants, hard-working people but with little possessions to their name. Our name was nothing important; we are commoners. We didn’t have the money, the social or political connections, or much else. But my mum made sure that she worked very hard to be able to provide for her children not only food and shelter, but almost at an equal importance, also education. She taught us that we had the same potential to learn and succeed academically as any other person, even those with money or connections or whatever other perceived advantage. Then this, and not the name or money we didn’t have, would open our world up to as many opportunities as we were willing to accept and work hard for.

2. The single greatest thing you can teach a person is a hunger to know more, a lust to achieve more, and a passion for your subject matter. Passionate people don’t know satiety, and they also never learn defeat.

Great teachers aren’t the people who taught Nobel Prize winners the knowledge they used to achieve their success, but rather the ones who were able to transfer to them a passion into the field of their success. Passion, a burning insatiable desire, is the only antidote to failure.

3. “We are poor – not because of God”. No more effort is required to aim high in life, to demand prosperity and abundance, than is required to accept misery and poverty.

Two Napoleon Hill quotes. Why are they important to me? Well, the first I’ve discussed previously so I won’t go into it again, but the second took me a while to get my head around. It’s hard to be poor or to not attain your dreams, right? But it’s really really hard work to get what you want too. If you work hard, and I mean passionately and relentlessly hard, you probably can become a famous movie actor, a celebrated artist, a professional in a field with strict entry criteria and few spots for newcomers. It’s going to take a lot of very very hard work! But what’s the alternative? The alternative is actually equally hard. This is what blew my mind. It takes a lot out of you feeling crushed every day because you’re not working the job you’re really keen for. If you’re poor, it is really really hard to do physical labour to get just the bare minimum to feed yourself and go to bed hungry and know that you have to wake up tomorrow to do the same thing again so you can go to bed with a half-empty stomach the following night. It’s really very hard to be poor. So if both roads are hard, and I am suggesting here that they are equally hard, why not risk your pride and show some faith, and follow the path of your dreams? I mean, the alternative is just as hard.

4. You don’t fail until you give up. Failure is experienced only by those who when they experience defeat, stop trying. The only thing that separates success and failure is the number of attempts.

5. Improbable does not mean impossible.

6. You miss every shot you don’t take.

7. Be willing to risk failure in order to succeed.

8. Every soldier dies a hero.

I believe the thing that holds human beings back more than fear is pride. I will consider the last five points together as I believe they are intrinsically linked. Often people list a dim statistic for success as an excuse for not trying or for not going for the thing they really want. I always ask these people, “So? Someone has to get it, so why can’t that someone be you?” Oh yes, they tried that one time and they failed. Or they would try, but it’s just going to be a waste of time and effort as they will most likely not succeed. You know, because somehow these people believe they are fortune tellers too! The one 100% fool-proof method to guarantee failure is not to try. I mean, you can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket, right? So, as small and as uncontrollable the probability of attaining your goal on the next attempt is, it’s still greater than zero if you at least attempt it. So what if you don’t succeed? You’re only one attempt closer if you’re courageous enough to keep trying and don’t let that stupid pride convince you that lack of success in an attempt means failure forever.

That last statement came to me rather unexpectedly one day when I happened to be listening to the radio in my car to some news about a soldier’s death. Some days you have to contemplate that you will die, and you may die soon without warning. What if you died and you still had not achieved that one goal you had dedicated your life to? Does that mean you’re a failure? Does that mean you’re a loser? Well, think about soldiers. They literally risk their lives in order to achieve an outcome: to defend from the enemy and to destroy an attacking enemy. But sometimes soldiers die in battle, and when they die in this way you could say they have failed in their goal. Now, do we consider these soldiers who died in the line of fire as failures? No! We call them brave and courageous and war heroes. Yes, they didn’t succeed in what they were trying to achieve, but they weren’t failures because they died trying to achieve that outcome. I believe that similarly, in civilian life, we don’t die as failures if we died trying to achieve that one thing we really wanted.

9. Anger and hatred are the most successful ways to waste energy and to keep our enemies in power. People may hurt you in the present by some wrong action, but the anger and hatred we pay them well into the future is how we continue to hurt ourselves on their behalf.

This is one I learnt from experience when I was about 20 years old. I was getting so run down, so upset all the time, feeling so much anger and (I’m ashamed to admit it now) hatred towards one person. Now, this person had stopped tormenting me years ago and yet I kept feeling all these negative things towards them; they had probably forgotten I existed, and yet I kept hating them. It really takes so much energy to remain angry and sad! One day I realised this, that I must have been barely a speck of this person’s world and that was so long ago, and I still kept dedicating so much of my life to them, feeling for them, even if was hatred and anger. And I came to realise that I had given them enough of my life. I closed my eyes one day and said a prayer. I told them in my prayer that I forgive them, that I forgive myself, and that I wanted to forget the whole experience and become me again without traces or stains of their existence in my life. You know what? It was the best thing I could have done for ME to make my life about myself and not the people that have hurt me.

10. Money is the world’s most renewable resource. There’s no glory in being the richest man in the graveyard.

Mark Bouris once said that in business you don’t want to hire a man who has always produced a positive result, who has always managed to make his company profit. You want to hire the man who has had nothing, possibly being bankrupt due to his own mistakes – but that has managed to build himself back up. Money has a way of always renewing itself, so it’s not worth all the effort and value we place on losing it. Personally, I think we risk far too many valuable things like relationships, health, and true happiness to attain or maintain money. Eventually we will all die, and our deathbed it will probably be more comforting to have your loved ones by your side rather than the knowledge that in a bank somewhere there sits a big dollar figure associated with your name.

11. Do unto others as you would like have done unto you.

Every religion and most human philosophies will rephrase this in different words and attribute this concept to one of millions of God-like figures. That’s irrelevant, but the concept is more about the preservation of humankind, of our humanity, and of our own self-esteem. It actually comes naturally to most human beings from a very young age, but later it becomes a conscious choice of our own integrity. Mark de Moss defines integrity as, “Integrity is not what we do when it serves us. It is who we are in the dark and how we treat people when it makes no difference to us”. That’s one thing that would benefit anyone (and everyone) to learn, I think.

12. To be a man is to be responsible; to be ashamed of miseries you did not cause; to be proud of your comrade’s victories; to be aware, when setting one stone, that you are building a world.

Somewhere in the past century we all got so caught up in the various human rights movements that a corrupted self-entitled attitude came to develop from it and a lot of us came to forget about responsibility.

13. You have to tolerate the caterpillars if you want to see the butterflies.

Another Antoine de Saint-Exupery quote. Life isn’t always easy and it’s unreasonable to expect it to always be. Sometimes you just have to stay focused on what’s coming or what you want to come next.

14. Let every occasion be a great occasion.

Yes, a lot of the things I’m sharing above are of course not mine but things I’ve learnt from others. Some things I’ve learnt from experience; most are out of a book called ‘Success through a Positive Mental Attitude’, co-written by Napoleon Hill; some from my theological study; and some are probably from Oprah or the Dr. Phil show! There’s no shame in how you came to learn a thing, only that it is valuable to your own life somehow.

On levels of evidence

A patient asked me the other day if I thought she was a crazy person for telling me she was going to disregard my advice on managing her high cholesterol and high blood pressure and go have a chat to her naturopath instead. I said no, that doesn’t offend me at all. Actually, it has nothing to do with me. I had explained to her the risks of untreated hypertension and hyperlipidemia and about how medications can help those, etc. etc. I had disclosed sufficient information for her to make an informed decision on her own health. She has a right to refuse treatment just as I had a duty to provide that information to her as her treating doctor. Medico-legally, I was in a defensible/safe area. Aside from that, though, did I think she was crazy for refusing well-advised medical opinion? Well, no. And this is what I told her.

You know, I believe in God. I believe in the Judeo-Christian version of God and in creationism. I’m comfortable in believing these stories that if you applied the scientific level of “proof” are actually quite laughable. So how do I get around holding such preposterous beliefs and still having some sort of pride in calling myself both a Christian and a scientist? I don’t apply the same level of proof or set of rules to all my beliefs. And yet, why do I believe the Christian and not the Islamic or Mosaic or Taoist or any other version of life philosophy? A whole heap of reasons! Probably because the country I grew up in had 99% of its population listed as catholic. Probably because my family is Christian. Probably because Christianity was all around me and the stories were told to me since I was very young. I was told from very early on also that the people who lived in my house were my siblings, my mum, etc. and I believed it. Even now I do not see the need to demand DNA-evidence to “prove” the story that these people are related to me. Similarly, I was told stories about God and Jesus and prophets, etc., and I am happy still to believe them. But what has all this got to do with my initial story about the lady who wanted to see the naturopath?

I’ve been trained in Western Medicine. I have a system in my mind with which I approach illness and human functioning. Briefly, I studied anatomy and physiology and pathophysiology so I believe 1) The body has these organ systems working together to make the body function in the environment, 2) The body is trying to stay “alive” and function properly as it’s default, 3) When the body is failing at functioning, it is because of an illness, 5) Illness is brought about by microscopic processes, be it errors in naturally-occurring processes or external microscopic organisms bringing about this change. That’s it. That’s essentially the Western Medicine model of disease. When we approach illness, we are trying to restore the body’s function to its default. We give medications or we perform surgery to try to restore this balance somehow. We may also advise modifications in diet, physical activities, exposure to the external environment, etc. The “treatments” we recommend are based on scientific evidence that they have some effect on illness.

I am comfortable with the model of medicine I have been trained in. I am comfortable with the level of scientific evidence it demands. Because I’m both comfortable in this system and believe in the scientific method and the stringency demanded of the “treatments” in Western Medicine, I find it hard to accept other models of medicine. Is that a bad thing? That is akin to asking ‘Is it bad that I’m a Christian and not a Jew?’ No; it isn’t a bad thing. It’s what I’m comfortable with, what I know and understand, and the alternative is unknown to me. Alternative models of medicine are to me as foreign as Zoroastrianism. Because these things are largely unknown to me, I lack knowledge and exposure to them, and –importantly– I lack belief in them, it’s better that I stick to the kind of medicine and the kind of religion I know and believe.

Now, back to the point of scientific evidence. The model of medicine I practice in, Western Medicine, what I simply call medicine, has a few postulates that to me are important. For example, it demands that the positive effect of treatments be reproducible, that side-effects are minimal and predictable, that treatment is better than no treatment (and by a significant margin), and that the treatment has been tested many times over for safety. The treatments supported by other models of medicine may lack some of these stringent criteria in favour for other priorities (e.g. that it is derived from ‘natural’ products, etc.). As I said, to me (and for the majority of my patients), the level of scientific evidence that Western Medicine demands is all-important. But if others are happy with an alternative model of medicine and alternative levels of evidence that they demand of their treatment, then I can only respect that in the same way I see it as my duty to respect other people’s religious, cultural, and other beliefs.

For example, I have patients who tell me, against widely-accepted scientific evidence, that they don’t believe that smoking is bad because their relative smoked until the age of 100 and died of causes unrelated to smoking. This person requires a study of only one person who is significant to them to make their conclusions. Or they may tell me that their friend down the road told them that sunscreen causes skin cancer, and that is why they refuse to wear it. This person, again, requires only anecdotal “evidence”. Or they may tell me that blood-pressure-lowering or cholesterol-lowering drugs cause more harm than good, but the arsenic-containing but “natural” compound sold by their naturopath is the best thing for it. This person believes that a product being “natural” means it’s automatically safer and more beneficial than one that has been rigorously scientifically tested. What can I say to these people? Well, usually nothing that will change their minds if they don’t believe in the model of medicine I have been instructed in. But what I usually do is explain to them in Western Medicine and scientific terms why I believe the treatment Western Medicine suggests is appropriate, what the risks are of not treating it this way, and then ask them what else they wish to know about this particular treatment. After that, it’s up to the individual patient to make their own choices. And no, I don’t think of them as crazy for ignoring my advice :)

On "the disabled", and on limitations

In Spanish they changed the common usage of the term inválido (invalid) to the term minusválido (less-valid, or less-abled). This came about as politically-correct gesture to acknowledge that people with physical/intellectual/mental disabilities aren’t completely invalid –or useless– human beings; they simply are lacking of some standard human abilities. Of course, an aside issue that I won’t be going into is what is “standard” in humans. We all know of the concept of normality but none of us have run into a guy called Normal who has perfect stature, weight, skin tone, intelligence, emotional sensitivity, body symmetry, etc. etc. But back to the point about the change in terminology for certain people with markedly different limitations in their day-to-day functioning. An unexpected result of the lifting of labels off people is the new empowerment given back to them.

There are two stories that come to mind when I think of limitations. The first story is about 100 meter sprinters around 1968. See, prior to this year, everybody believed that no human being could run 100m in less than 10 seconds. I know I mention this now and we can chuckle or laugh at this as we’re all familiar with many athletes who have achieved this. In fact, running 100m in 10 seconds or just a few milliseconds over that in an international competition these days is almost considered a failure; but not so prior to 1968. Prior to then, humanity had come to believe –and accept– that no person could possibly ever run 100m in under 10 seconds. It was impossible! Right? God must have built into human beings an inability to run faster than this. Who questions God? Who would challenge this? No one did. Nobody could even pinpoint whether it was God’s law that no person should run faster than this or whether it was some athletics coach that decided this. Then one day one man decided he wanted to try. 

Jim Hines decided he didn’t care why somebody had said a person can’t run faster than 100m in 10 seconds; he wanted to do it. The first person he had to beat in competition was himself: his previous beliefs and his previous “personal best” (since that would have been over 10 seconds). Well, he must have tried over and over again (because no one is born at their peak ability) and he must have “failed” at his goal (running 100m in less than 10 seconds) many times. I guess he kept trying, though. Jim Hines proved God, someone, and everyone wrong at the 1968 summer Olympics when he ran 100m in 9.9 seconds. But more amazing than that feat was that Jim Hines didn’t just break a world record in running, but he busted a myth because of his refusal to believe it. And what was even more surprising and a feat more worthy than a simple gold medal was that Jim Hines’ achievement empowered others around him. That same night that Jim Hines broke the 10 second barrier in the 100m sprint, that feat that changed what we believed about human ability, that history-changing night, two other men were suddenly liberated from that limitation that somebody had said about human beings. Ronnie Ray Smith and Charles Greene ran the 100m in under 10 seconds that same night! How quickly can we change history, human ability, and overcome limitations once we allow ourselves to believe that we can rise above it.

The second story I think of regarding human limitations is about Dr. Temple Grandin, who I have spoken about in my blog before. Dr. Grandin was diagnosed with autism at age 2, this means it would have been in 1949. In 1949 society, children like Temple Grandin were thought of as mentally retarded and with little potential to be a useful or even meaningful part of society. Most “disabled” children would have been put in an institution with other children like her and left there for the remainder of their lives. No one would have tried to educate them or teach them any skills needed for daily living. Dr. Grandin’s parents were a bit different, though. Temple Grandin herself, if you had evaluated her back in 1949 and the early 1950s, would not have convinced you she had any particular potential that other children diagnosed with autism didn't have: she had a severe speech delay and she did not interact with others as a “normal” human being should have. But unlike the parents of other children with autism, Dr. Grandin’s parents didn’t believe Temple had yet reached her full potential, and they wanted to push her to it. I guess they wanted to believe that their girl was different, that she could be as close to normal despite this label of autism. So instead of accepting that Temple Grandin couldn’t talk, they sent her for hours and hours of intense speech therapy. They forced her to interact with other children and to learn what came “naturally” (or you could say easier) to other children: how to take turns, how to share, how to pick up on the emotional/non-verbal content of speech, what to say when others’ faces appear sad, how to control and self-regulate her behaviour when upset, angry, happy, etc. And you know what happened to Temple Grandin? You probably do; a lot of people do. She went on to graduate high school, she has a university bachelor’s degree in psychology, and she then went on to get a masters and then a doctoral degree in animal science. She runs her own business and designs large farm-scale machinery. She writes books and has had both books and films written about her. I suspect none of us would ever have heard of her story or that she would have even had the same successful story had her parents not refused to believe that a child with autism is an invalid human being, one without potential, and one that is unteachable.

Are there “invalids” in this life, though? Or should we push all people with physical and/or intellectual disabilities more so they can learn and change and be more like “normal”? The first question, I believe, is perhaps easier to answer. Are there people in this planet who have no benefit to themselves or to anyone in existing? I believe there aren’t. Don’t get me wrong, in our world there probably are people who exist only so their paid carers can claim a wage. Even they aren’t useless in this life; they aren’t invalids – their lives do have validity (even if only for this monetary reason). Of course, I’m talking about a worst case scenario here; the usual scenario is that people with physical and/or emotional disabilities have people around them that love them and care about them. Yet in this world the worst case scenario is not that uncommon either. We have terms like “wrongful birth”, and the termination of pregnancies due to social and medical reasons are seen as equally valid. I’m not trying to make a political or ethical point here, I’m simply pointing out that we all recognize that raising or living with a person with a physical/intellectual handicap is going to be more challenging, and not everyone wants to voluntarily submit to that challenge if there is a way to avoid it. The truth is that we as human beings have created a world that is easiest to interact with if you have an IQ of over 70, if you can walk with your own two feet, if you can use both of your upper limbs to interact with objects, if you can use your voice for verbal communication, if you can use both your eyes to orientate yourself visually in our environment, if you can perceive verbal communication and sounds through your own two ears, if you can control both bladder and bowels voluntarily, and the whole gamut of activities of daily living we associate with fully-abled human beings. So what if we want to avoid disability? There’s nothing wrong with that.

So should we be trying to make all “the disabled” into “normal people”? How many Temple Grandins can we create? Is it ethical? Is it doable? There’s a Spanish movie called Mar Adentro, about the life of Ramón Sampedro, a man who became quadriplegic from a spinal cord injury when he was young. Ramón Sampedro was a right-to-die activist who wanted nothing more than to be allowed to die because he considered his quadriplegic state, and what it turned him into, unworthy of living with. This statement caused an uproar, especially amongst other people who were paraplegic. Are the paraplegic unworthy of life?! Really? No, no; that is not what Mr. Sampedro was saying. He wasn’t making a statement about paraplegics; he was making a statement about himself. And that’s the point I’m trying to get at with this story, it is up to each human being to decide what we are willing to accept about ourselves as human beings and about our own limitations. The labels we adopt should be those we give ourselves. The abilities and limitations we set for ourselves should be those we decide. We may not all be able to learn to run 100m in under 10 seconds, and perhaps not every person diagnosed with autism will become like Dr. Grandin, but if we perhaps stop blaming the labels others have given us for our difficulties, we can start advancing.