On happiness (again)

I just found this quote again from The Zahir, one of my favourite books by Paulo Coelho: "No one should ever ask themselves that: why am I unhappy? The question carries within it the virus that will destroy everything. If we ask that question, it means we want to find out what makes us happy. If what makes us happy is different from what we have now, then we must either change once and for all or stay as we are, feeling even more unhappy."

I haven't been happy lately. I mean, I don't even know if I'm unhappy, miserable, or just expectant. And I thought to try to solve my question of whether I am happy or depressed or what by asking myself this: what would it take for me to be happy? Well, I always thought that I'd like to have a family unit of my own, to provide a house for them, to provide for my family, to work a job I don't hate, and to raise a child and be a good mother. But lately it's becoming tiresome having to get up in the morning and go to work. I want my work day to go quickly. I want tomorrow to take it's time getting here. I want the weekends to last forever. I want to stay in bed longer, to eat more, and more time to sit and not interact with anyone.

I figure I'm not depressed as at least I still want something, even if they are avoidant things. I remember a time when I was depressed and I just wanted nothing at all, when nothing mattered at all. So at least I do want things now. But am I happy? Will I ever be happy? I think I want to be. Yet I remember another quote, another favourite of mine, and I remember why at the same time I want never to be fully happy. I've also quoted this, by Charles Becker, before: “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”.

Is that why I'm unhappy? Is it because I do always want to be progressive, someone who is always active and contributing? Or am I just depressed? Lately I've been thinking about the very real probability that I may actually have the chance to start my own family soon, and I am so wanting it, so contemplating it as a reality I want, that it's making the rest of my life seem tedious and just like a filler in time. And, oh God, the possibility of not having a family and a providing for them - that is pure misery! The thought of it can put me in tears and despair. Am I unhappy? Is this vision of "happiness" unattained slowly killing my spirit? Or is it something else? Sometimes I think the best way out of all the uncertainty that is weighing me down is to just ignore the questions and simply move forward.

And maybe it's not even forward that I need to go, but backward. That is to say that sometimes I think it's best I go back to simpler times; like the time I first learnt about positive and negative contingencies. Recently my pet rabbit became ill and I hadn't felt that miserable in such a long time. I was petrified she may die and was suffering. I wanted her so badly to be well again. She needed surgery and was at the vet hospital three nights. I worried endlessly about her. I thought that if she dies, my life will lose its centre of balance and I would be immensely sad. I cried at the thought of it. When I finally got to bring her home, she was still quite fragile and I was still worried, though not as much as previously. Then I remembered to set myself a positive contingency: as soon as she's eating, drinking, and pooing normally again, I will be happy as I will know she has recuperated. That happened a few days after she came home! And even though I was upset from other events in my life, I actually felt happiness again in my heart to see my little rabbit eating away at some food. Yes, such little things can make me happy if I allow them too. And it is also true, of course, that also little things can make me very unhappy if I allow them too. But for now, my rabbit is eating her hay, hopping around, and I am a happy woman again, moving forward :)

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 "the Jews"

I'm on holidays at the moment so here's just a few lines on things I've been thinking about recently.

I just finished reading a book called "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell, which I at first thought was about the absolute opposite of what my core beliefs about success are: that everyone has the same innate capacity. And, yes, at first glance it appears to be saying that you can expect to be in low-skill service jobs if you're Latino, you can expect to be good at maths if you're Asian, and you'll probably be a doctor or a lawyer if you're Jewish. And if you're of African descent you'll probably want to kill and physically hurt others for minor slights. Generalizations? Stereotypes? Actually, it deals more on examining the roots of why people turn out to be the way they are based on specific things that happened to the ancestors of their culture, and that for the most part continue to imprint on their futures. An interesting note was made of New York's Jewish community.

In the last week I made my mum visit the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York with me. Now, she's a very humble woman with a primary school education who can barely pick out the location of countries on a map of the world (e.g. not long ago she was surprised to find out that Spain is in Europe and not in South America like she assumed for a long time). You get my point: she's a humble woman with not a lot of knowledge of what is not essential to her survival. At the Jewish museum while we were looking at concentration camp uniforms and learning about the disgusting things that happened to so many people during WW2, mum asked me, "why did all this happen to the Jews?" I thought it was an excellent question! There's probably no single answer why that did, and there's definitely nothing in this universe to justify it.

What I find even more fascinating, though, is how a great majority of the Jewish community post-WW2 became so prosperous. They were always an oppressed and abused people. They were workers and they had to learn skills. Since thousands of years they've been working (even under slavery conditions) - they had to learn! So the theory goes that around the time of WW2 when dislike of the Jews was quite overt and common, even in the new lands they settled in they were discriminated against for many reasons. So to escape this oppressive environment, Jews after some time used the skills hey had learnt previously, textile and garment industry, for example, and started up their own operations. They hired other Jews. They taught their children the importance of work to better yourself and aiming to equalize opportunity (I maintain that this is the true value of education). The story goes that the children of garment workers went on to become lawyers and doctors and business people at the insistence of their parents - but after they became lawyers (for example) their gentile counterparts still discriminated against them. They ended up working the legal cases nobody wanted, working the medical fields nobody else considered worthy at the time (things like psychiatry and neuroscience, for example). And then, something happened: the Jews had created niches of industry for themselves - which as fate or history would have it, soon became the most sought out niches in industry.

Why did the holocaust happen? I guess there's no valid or all-exhaustive answer to that. But you know what, I believe the best thing the Jewish people ever did was 1) acknowledge their position as others viewed them, and 2) used it not as an excuse to become victims of oppression but to motivate forward action. They were people who once they left the concentration camps, they left the concentration camps. They didn't sit down and feel sorry for themselves for their dreadful pasts and suffering. They began to build instead their prosperous futures. Can't we all learn from that? Once the suffering is done with, let's stop suffering and start building a future we desire.

On job satisfaction

Just in the last week I’ve had a few people tell me about how dissatisfied they are because they’re working in a big corporation and a few others have told me that they are dissatisfied because they’re working in a small business. There are plenty of things that can make you dissatisfied at work or about work, but it got me thinking a bit about whether the size of a company really does influence our general satisfaction levels and mood. Industrial and organizational psychologists will tell us that, yes, it can and there are some people who will thrive in one industry model and others in an alternative one. Anecdotally, I can attest to that statement based on the people I’ve met at work either as patients or colleagues. I can also tell you my own personal experiences.

What’s the good thing about working about for a big company? As an employee, the budget seems endless. You need what you need to do your job and you can access it reasonably easy. What’s the bad thing about it? If you need things other than those that relate to your job, especially that stuff of being human (e.g. holidays, time to recuperate from illness, or even just to be given a little slack when your personal life isn’t going so well), it is hard for a corporate machine to accommodate. Most companies will have a policy, but unfortunately that policy also tends to be quite strict. For example, bereavement leave may be just 2 days and turns out you may not be a human being that can get back to being your old productive self after the death of your parent after just 2 days. Then there’s also usually a hierarchy and a certain type of anonymity amongst very many employees. Yet both of those things can be positives: the hierarchy can give you motivation to progress; and the anonymity can afford you the space to work with less interruption. On the other hand, the hierarchy can lead to frustration when someone very distant from the sphere you work in makes decisions that affect you at your level without the direct knowledge of what things are like there. There is no perfect big company, and most try very hard to be, but there’s no escaping the fact that we are all human first and workers second.

Is small business, then, the answer to overcoming that barrier between being a worker and also being human? I don’t believe so either. The positives boasted about it are a much smaller hierarchy, often having direct communication with the big-decision makers, and much greater flexibility in work because you can discuss it directly with another human being. Then what’s so bad about it? Been wary of the much smaller budget at all times, and more human-human interaction and therefore greater possibility for human conflict with other workers.

Is there a perfect system? No, and there probably never will be a model that is right for everyone. As an employee all you can do is try to find that model that is best suited to your interpersonal and working style (and tools like the Myers-Briggs questionnaire can help).

In the last few months I’ve come to realize certain things about myself, and certain things about industry - and yet this is unfortunately knowledge that I have only gained through experience. I’ve noted that the greatest teams, the most successful companies, the greatest productivity out of a group of people is achieved when every member of that team feels useful, appreciated, and proud of achieving. In a working environment the reward for achievement is money: our salaries. Even a person who is not someone you’d call material and superficial engages in paid employment for exactly the reason of getting paid; after all, money pays for our daily necessities of life. One thing I’ve noted is that the more a person is paid, the more aware they become of the emphasis his company has for his role – in turn he becomes aware of his responsibility to represent his company in the best light he can. Pride. Pride in our work and feeling useful: tick. And if you feel a person does a good job, isn’t paying them their worth a good way to show your appreciation? I’ve also noted that when an employee stops feeling appreciated in his workplace, despite acknowledging his usefulness, he cannot maintain his pride and enthusiasm. I’ve seen it too often. And, I have to confess, I’ve felt it too.

On making "the unhappy" happy - Part 1/2

One thing that took me a while to understand when I was younger is that “love”, or having a romantic relationship, doesn’t cure everything. In fairy tales, people fall in love and love rids you of physical “ugliness”, of having an evil heart, of disease and death, of financial poverty, of social oppression, of emotional and physical abuse, of low self-esteem, of disability, and of every negative thing that can happen to a human being. And don’t get me wrong, I like those stories as much as anyone else, and I'm also aware they are often metaphors for what love can actually achieve. Essentially love, being in love, being loved, loving, discovering love, etc. has the effect of giving human beings courage to believe in their own strength and to take risks. The greatest motivator for positive change and the strength to bring about that change is love. Love can conquer all…

The second most difficult thing for a human being to do is to bring about change in this world. The single most difficult thing in this life for us to do is to bring about change in ourselves. Love is supposed to make all things possible, right? That’s what the fairy tales tell us. That is what we have learnt personally from life. I still believe this is true. But there is one scenario unique to human beings I find particularly interesting when considering all that love can do.

Depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) result in unique states of mind where the “enemy” and the “villain” that we fight everyday lives exclusively within our hearts and minds. He may have been created by exposure to psychologically trauma or neurobiochemical imbalances or social oppression and abuse, or any of a myriad of negative human experiences. Yet the outcome of these situations are so common that someone has been able to make lists of the cognitive effects that result. They are described commonly in books and medical and scientific literature and classified into categories that receive the names of “mood disorders”. Depression, anxiety, and PTSD are very common diagnoses given to the people who suffer the effects of having these internal enemies to fight; the low mood, the lack of self-esteem, the sense of worthlessness, the compulsion to self-harm, the feelings of inability to better one’s own situation, and the inability to envision a future different to the inner world they seem trapped in.

I have seen many patients with PTSD, mainly war veterans, but all survivors of some sort of abuse or extremes of human experience. These people have lived through horrible things – and survived! If anybody can be called strong and honorable, it is them. Yet, they often are the first to believe they don’t deserve to be alive or to have good things in life. Bullets kill many soldiers in combat; depression and PTSD kills way too many survivors. People don’t choose to suffer depression, anxiety, or PTSD, the same way none of us choose to voluntarily suffer. And the worst part is that with these psychiatric complaints, you also can’t choose to “just snap out of it”. The goals of treatment in these disorders are not aimed at cure, but at managing symptoms, learning new ways to process information to help stop triggering these inner beasts, and minimizing the number of exacerbations. Of course, there are many ways we go about doing this (medication, psychotherapy, self-directed education, meditation, etc.), but generally there’s no way to completely cure these problems.

But wait, what about love? Doesn’t love “conquer ALL? Doesn’t love give you strength, courage, motivation, hope, etc. to achieve anything in life – even to change the world? The thing with depression, PTSD, and other psychiatric complaints is that the thing to conquer lies within. But love should be able to help you achieve even that, right? Isn’t love also able to change a human being? I used to believe just that.

On the Eminem thing

People think I’m trying to be purposely funny when I describe myself in the “About Me” section as being like Eminem. I’ll be the first to admit I’ve never met Marshall Mathers III, and I’ve never even had the good fortune of being to an Eminem concert. I identify a lot with most of the lyrics of Eminem’s songs, though. A lot of people must; he sells records in the millions of copies. Personally I believe he is a great expressionist, and not only that, he has a very common human story.

There is an Eminem song (Same song & dance) where he is considering different ways to tell his crush how he feels about her (he’s a shy, socially-awkward person like so many of us) and he postulates: "Should I cut off one of my ears and mail it to her? Send her pictures of my collections of skeletons? Or footage of me impaling myself on an elephant's tusk?" This kind of strategy may not occur to everyone, but it does to Eminem because he is he and he thinks the way he does… I keep a small collection of animal skeletons and to me Eminem’s proposition of sharing something dear to him does not seem strange.

I won’t go try to analyse Eminem’s lyrics for anyone, but I would like to share some of them which are the reason I identify with him so much. I guess, the way Jorge Luis Borge’s words always come to mind: ‘each man is every man’ and each man’s story is shared by every man. I have been the “dark phase” Eminem, as much as I have been the Eminem who rejoices in his blessings. We all have to different degrees, I think J

I'm not afraid /To take a stand

Everybody /Come take my hand

We'll walk this road together, through the storm

Whatever weather, cold or warm

Just lettin’ you know that you're not alone

Holla if you feel like you've been down the same road…

****

I got some skeletons in my closet /and I don't know if no one knows it /So before they thrown me inside my coffin and close it /I'm-a expose it... (Cleaning Out my Closet)

Well since age twelve, I've felt like I'm someone else /’Cause I hung my original self from the top bunk with a belt...

And by the way, when you see my dad, /Tell him that I slit his throat in this dream I had. (My Name is)

All I know is I don't want to follow in the footsteps of my dad /’cause I hate him so bad /The worst fear that I had /was growing up to be like his f*ckin’ ass /Man if you could understand /why I am the way that I am... I never dreamt I'd get to the level that I'm at /This is whack! This is more than I ever could have asked... (Saying Goodbye to Hollywood)

Yo, never was a thug, just infatuated with guns...

/I'm a soldier, these shoulders hold up so much /They won't budge, I'll never fall or fold up... (Soldier)

My thoughts are sporadic /I act like I'm an addict /I rap like I'm addicted to smack... (‘Til I Collapse)

Sometimes I feel so alone /I just don't know /feels like I been down this road before /So lonely and cold /it's like something takes over me /Soon as I go home and close the door. (Deja Vu)

I'm just so f*ckin' depressed /I just can seem to get out this slump... I think I'm starting to lose my sense of humour /Everything is so tense and gloom... (Beautiful)

Sometimes I even cut myself to see how much it bleeds /It's like adrenaline, the pain is such a sudden rush for me...

But what's this sh*t you said about you like to cut your wrists too? /I say that sh*t just clownin’, dog /C'mon, how f*cked up is you? /You got some issues, Stan. I think you need some counselling... (Stan)

If I, were to die murdered in cold blood tomorrow /Would you feel sorrow or show love, or would it matter?...

But there's way too much at stake for me to be fake /There's too much on my plate, I’ve come way /too far in this game to turn and walk away...

The only way I'm leavin’ this bitch is suicide... I'm not what ya think /I appear to be f*cked up, mentally endangered /I can't stay away from a razor...

 It hurts when you see your friends turn their back on you, dog /And you ain't got nothing’ left but your word and your balls /And you're stressed from the calls of your new friends /Begging with their hands out...

Death itself can hurt me /Just the thought of dyin’ alone that really irks me (When the Music Stops)

Sometimes I think, there's nothing to live for /I almost break down and cry /Sometimes I think I'm crazy; I'm crazy, oh so crazy! /Why am I here? Am I just wastin’ my time?..

People make jokes, cos they don't understand me /They just don't see my real side /I act like shit don't phase me /Inside it drives me crazy /My insecurities could eat me alive... Sometimes it feels like the world's on my shoulders /Everyone's leanin’ on me /Sometimes it feels like the world's almost over... (Hailie’s Song)

I never would have dreamed in a million years I'd see /so many motherf*ckin’ people, who feel like me /Who share the same views and the same exact beliefs /It's like a f*ckin ARMY marching in back of me (White America)

Yet everybody just feels like they can relate /I guess words are a motherf*cker, they can be great /or they can degrade. Or even worse, they can teach hate /It's like these kids hang on every single statement we make /like they worship us... They say music can alter moods and talk to you /Well can it load a gun up for you and cock it too?... That's why we sing for these kids who don't have a thing /except for a dream and a f*ckin’ rap magazine /Who post pin-up pictures on they walls all day long /Idolize they favourite rappers and know all they songs /Or for anyone who's ever been through sh*t in they lives /'Til they sit and they cry at night wishin’ they'd die /'Til they throw on a rap record and they sit and they vibe /We're nothin to you - but we're the f*ckin’ sh*t in they eyes /That's why we seize the moment, try to freeze it and own it /Squeeze it and hold it, cause we consider these minutes golden /And maybe they'll admit it when we're gone, just let our spirits live on /through our lyrics that you hear in our songs... (Sing For the Moment)

(If it looks like you’ve seen this before, I have posted most of it on my facebook notes before.)

On me... and turning 30

It’s funny, if you ask some people who have really gotten to know me intimately they’ll tell you that I have several different personalities. These people have at times asked me who is the “real” Vanessa. I can tell you straight out that ALL of them are. If you’d met me some years ago and asked me to list the things that to me are the most important in life I would have told you: family, love, expression, enjoyment, spirituality, and work. If you met me at another point in my life I would have answered exactly the same thing – but in a different order! That is where my “inconsistencies” lie, but actually I am just very average J

The self-hating years

The single most hurtful thing ever said to me was “you’ve had a perfect life”. Yeah, it was hurtful because it was said by someone close to me who obviously didn’t know me much at all. I don’t believe there are such things as perfect lives or perfect childhoods, everyone does the best with what they’re given. I don’t know if I am (or was?) autistic to a degree, but I never really connected with anyone as a child. And it didn’t bother me to have no friends; I was quite happy in my own inner world, my make-believe play, and reading books to learn something that interested me. At age 10 I was faced with circumstances that are actually very common in most cultures but that I would never wish upon anyone. As a result of this I lost the ability to trust, to believe, to feel safe and worthwhile. From then on I started hating more than just my own physical self, but also my future self, believing that I deserved nothing good to ever come to me in my life. It was very draining, and my inner world grew increasingly darker and I became more and more self-deprecating.

At about the age of 20, after I had finished my undergraduate degree in science, the self-loathing and self-denial of my own need to be human finally climaxed. I started psychotherapy for the first time then. What came of it? My single greatest victory was to forgive those that had hurt me and to forgive myself for being hurt. It seems so miniscule and meaningless that I can summarise it in one sentence, but the amount of healing the simple act of swapping the words “sorry” for “thank you” is hardly able to be explained. I finally stopped apologising for being Vanessa, for allowing myself as a child to be hurt, and I stopped apologising for the simple fact of being alive. Instead I started to be grateful to be alive and I allowed myself to have (and not feel guilty about having) human needs of personal fulfilment and achievement. It was a very slow process to accept myself, to disrobe myself of the self-loathing, to finally become and be comfortable in being Vanessa in all my forms.

At 24 my curiosity and interest in spiritual matters brought me to commit to Christianity after having studied several theological and philosophical systems for many years. What lead me to finally make this commitment was that I came to understand that it’s ok to not be perfect, it’s human nature, and that the ability to feel connection to God is not barred to me or anyone else regardless of their past, present, or future. That was spiritual commitment and to some extent also fulfilment. During and after this time I also gradually learnt to not hate or feel ashamed of my physical appearance, of my lack of social skills, of my naivety, and of all these things I had for which I felt I couldn’t be like “normal” people. I guess in all this I may have eventually overshot the mark  :P

The self-loving years

I was around 26 before I could bear the thought of being ok with being seeing as me, as a complete and separate person of my own. I guess by that stage I had allowed people to get to know me, all aspects of me, and to become my friends who I could trust and expect some trust and caring in return. I grew more confident in many things also. I finally was not afraid or concerned to be seen for me. I was nearly 27 before I finally allowed myself to remove my clothes off in front of another human being – someone of my choosing and with my full consent. This part was the hardest step for me, the rest was quite easy. And in fact it probably got to be a bit too easy J

My mistake was that after I learnt to love myself, I probably started to love only myself. I started to consider romantic partners as purely things to increase my own enjoyment and happiness. They say that people with histories of abuse most often become either one of two things in their future relationships: the abuser or the abused. I had decided from when I was 20 and started therapy, that I would never again be a victim of abuse. And so here I was, playing out another role. I had never had a time in my life when I didn’t feel guilty about being alive, but maybe at times it would have been good to at least feel pity for others. Needless to say, several  partners later, I still wasn’t a winner. Despite me finally being able to love myself and form sort of bonds with others, I still hadn’t learnt what it was like to love others. I mean, of course, what it was like to be in love.

The loving years

Wait, having sex and making love aren’t the same things?... No. I eventually learnt that too. June 2010, or sometime after that, I fell in love for the first time in my life! How did I know it was different? Because I found myself missing someone else, wanting someone else’s approval, feeling safe and confident to be associated with someone, feeling a part of something very special. It didn’t last long and I was a different kind of sad to what I’d previously known when it ended. But you know what bothered me most about it ending? Because after all those years it had taken me to convince myself that I was a worthy human being, the overwhelming message I was getting was that I wasn’t worthy of another being’s sacrifice to be with me. My partner wouldn’t sacrifice any of the things I would have sacrificed in a heartbeat to be with them. And that hurt me so much. It was like being told all over again that I wasn’t a worthy human being. But this time I didn’t believe it for long, because sometimes all you can do is let go and remember that regardless of what someone may think of me, I am still Vanessa.

And then the unthinkable happened and I fell in love for the second time in my life. Wow! What a blessing it was. It was beyond what I had ever imagined;  my new love met and exceeded every standard I ever had. This was truly the love of my life, the one person you could have sworn was fabricated purely using every guideline for a good person I had in my mind. Words can’t do this story justice. Of course, I was in love with this person so you’d be right in saying I am biased, but I didn’t care what anyone had to say. The only approval I needed in this world was from this one person . Truly, never have I felt so secure, so safe, so myself, so part of something greater than special, than when I was part of this partnership. Then the worst thing happened! The worst thing to have happened to me at this moment in time after what I’ve been through, I mean. There were reasons for it, but I was left alone again. I only wish I had been given a chance to correct my flaws, that whatever good was at first seen in me (what I think I see in myself too) would have been worthy of another chance, of a sacrifice. Or am I really not as worthy as I think I am?

The years of being loved

I hope in future to be loved, but it’s not enough just to be loved here and now. I hope to have someone fall in love with me truly, to want me, to wish to be with me, and that this wish is enough to motivate the things every successful relationship needs: compromise and self-sacrifice. I am worth it, right? I think I am. It’s been 30 years, and I’m ready to be loved the way I eventually learnt to love too. I am ready for so many things. But I am ready mostly to say that only God can judge me for my life.

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 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