On pride and prejudice... (not the book)

I have previously discussed aspects of the discrimination against people with mental illness. Specifically, I have spoken about it in the context of romantic relationships, how remaining together “in sickness and in health” means in health and in most other illnesses expect psychiatric ones. And of course, intimate relationships are not the only context this occurs in. Even in the health industry there is a deep-seated contempt of those coming into hospital medical departments with wounds that are related to a psychiatric disturbance. But what I find even more bizarre is how people can discriminate against themselves, often denying themselves a better existence, because of a connotation to mental illness!

In my job I meet a lot of people, people who we as medical professional often create. Almost every health professional can tell you a story about “some junkie”, a person with a substance addiction that they met along the way. But there’s a particular sort of person that we at times encounter and we don’t immediately think of as “a junkie” but we know that they’re addicted to prescription medication. In my experience, it’s usually the benzodiazepines class of drugs, the Valium-type medications. There’s a few main reasons why benzos are particularly good to get yourself hooked on: 1) they work, 2) gives you immediate ‘results’, and 3) doctors have fewer qualms about prescribing it than other dependence-forming drugs.

A scenario I see very often, and which I admit frustrates me to my core every time, is the young man coming in to see me for his repeat valium (diazepam) prescription. I ask why he’s on it. He says anxiety. I ask how long he’s been on it. He says years. I ask why. He says for anxiety; it’s really “good” at “treating” it. I ask how much he takes. He takes it “only” 2-3 times a day. I do the sums – he is taking huge amounts of it! I ask why he never had his “anxiety” treated, why he didn’t get proper treatment, why he never had counselling, why he isn’t on more appropriate medication. He says it’s because he doesn’t get “anxiety” that often or that it is not very severe; he only uses the tablets every 5 or 6 of the 7 days in a week, 2-3 times a day.

Usually at this stage my heart sinks because the next part of the conversation is also very predictable. I ask does he know it is very addictive. Yes, he knows, but he only takes it when he needs it, those 2-3 times a day on those 5-6 days a week. Again I ask why he takes it (yes, I always pray the patient will have an epiphany – and no, they never do). He takes it for anxiety, of course. I tell him that it must be pretty devastating to be feeling anxious to the point of needing external relief 2-3 times a day almost everyday; surely that would be very uncomfortable. Yes, he tells me, it is pretty unfortunate – but luckily the drugs are so good at “treating” it that as soon as he takes one, within minutes he feels better. I offer a friendly suggestion: wouldn’t it be better to be able to function without having to feel so anxious almost all the time, wouldn’t it be great to be free of the anxiety? Yes, he concedes. Good, I am relieved he agrees! I say ‘ok, let’s get rid of the anxiety then’ (usually I’ll have figured out by this stage that this guy has no time or patience for psychotherapy, he prefers a pill, even a bandaid if that would do it). I suggest this tablet, you take it only once a day, it’s safe, not addictive, and it has a longer time of action so you need only take it once and you won’t have those flare ups of anxiety at random times during the day or week. He doesn’t believe that’s possible. I assure him, it is; in fact if he takes it everyday he won’t even need the valium for those random daily attacks of anxiety because he just won’t be having them anymore!

He has a question for me now: is the medication I am talking about also called an antidepressant? I say, well, it is an SSRI medication which are classed as such, but has a mode of action that will relieve him of his symptoms. At this point he says No!.. But, but, why? He tells me the story again about his anxiety not being that bad, he doesn’t get the symptoms that often (only 3 times a day, 6 days a week), he’s not depressed, he doesn’t need an antidepressant tablet, he’s not crazy, why change what is working, etc., etc. I explain in vain that what he is taking currently, the valium, isn’t working because if it was he wouldn’t need it everyday, multiple times a day. He assures me it does work, because he takes it and he feels better… and eventually I realize that no-one has ever made a person addicted to a substance rationalise about their dependency. It’s the very nature of addiction, there are no great epiphanies – at least not about why ‘feeling good’ is bad. And it breaks my heart that this person would rather take a tablet with much less stigma amongst prescription pills, almost with the status that alcohol has compared to illegal substances, than take the one he really needs. And he makes his choice because of the association this other medication has to “bad things”: a mental illness such as depression. Apparently it’s a matter of shame to have ANY association to mental illness.

Let me now tell you of another class of patient. He also doesn’t want to be thought of as mentally ill. Luckily for him, he isn’t! He has this condition, a complex pain syndrome, a condition that is very difficult to treat. I met a man once who had been diagnosed as having fibromyalgia. The poor guy, was such a shame to see him; he was in discomfort and pain all the time. He had seen a lot of GPs, a few specialists, spent hundreds on natural remedies and iridologists, spoke to anyone that might be interested and asked for help. Eventually one medical specialist got him started on a medication he hadn’t tried before. He didn’t get his hopes up because he had tried many many medications with no relief. But, amazingly, this one worked! He was free from pain; it’d been months, maybe years since he felt so ‘normal’. And then one day he picked up his tablets from the pharmacy and started to read the consumer information page in the pack. And then he read in there that this drug was a TCA – and that the A in that means antidepressant! He was furious, disgusted, so angry at the doctor that told him to take it. It didn’t matter that the tablet alleviated his symptoms; what was intolerable about it was its name, its association. He stopped taking it immediately and attended his doctor to express his disgust.

I spoke to him a few months afterwards, his face was all cringed and he seemed in a lot of pain. He told me the story of what had happened and about how disgusted he was that the doctor had offended him by giving him an antidepressant for his fibromyalgia. He imagined that the doctor thought he was “crazy”, that he was only pretending to be in pain, etc. I let him speak and then I asked it the medication had worked, though. Yes, he said it had – but that was not the point. My heart again sank a little and I explained to him (gently, not trying to tell him what to do), that the TCA type of drugs are commonly used for some types of pain, and that they are very effective. I said they are called tricyclic antidepressants because their original purpose was to be used as an antidepressant but this new use for them had been found and it was great for pain of that particular sort. Yep, good story, Vanessa; he believed me because he knew I have a medical degree, but pride isn’t always about having rational or accurate information. Poor guy, I still see him in so much pain.

Now I’m going to deflect a little to tell you about something I initially thought about when I was at university. There was a ‘gay rights’ rally and in response to someone’s judgement that homosexuality is a disease and a social evil etc., someone had made a banner saying “homophobia is a disease”. It was like the perfect comeback. Only I’m a nerd who probably overthinks things and I was at the time studying medical microbiology and infectious diseases, so I immediately thought: cancer is a disease too. The point is no-one chooses to suddenly grow a cancer because they want to endanger their life or a limb or organ, or because they like to suffer. Most of us can at least empathize on seeing a person sick with cancer, ravaged either by disease or chemotherapy. I have never met anyone who would discriminate negatively against someone with cancer, someone with a disease they did not ask for, a disease that is beyond their control. Mental illnesses are a disease also, something no-one asks for or can internally control. Why should we accept that it is OK to discriminate against those suffering an illness? It’s sad that almost any reference to mental illness, whether people, disease processes, and even the medications used to treat it, still attract such great discrimination. Maybe the time for a new human rights movement is arriving.

On friendship / giving and receiving

You know what is a good friend? A friend that is always giving (of their time, attention, efforts, etc). You know what is a bad friend? One who always seems to be taking and taking and never giving anything (usually material things) in return. What do you call a person who sometimes gives, but just doesn’t seem to take anything at all from you? I don’t know, but they’re not usually called a friend. 

I used to wonder some time ago why I was never the kind of friend my ‘friends’ called on to help get them out of a tight spot, to lend them money, or just to vent  when everything crashed to pieces. Often I would hear through other mutual friends about how their relationships had broken up, they had won an award, or they’d been in a minor car accident, etc. I was often left with this little numb wondering of ‘why didn’t they tell me?’ or ‘why didn’t they call me?’ And I would feel a little rejected and sad to have been left out of a kind of major life event. I would recede into myself and wonder: 'am I such a bad person that they wouldn’t think to tell me?, to ask for my help?; or do they not like me?, am I considered of no use?' As you can see, I was aiming these comments toward myself mostly rather than the other person. And as I thought about these things, I began to distance myself from these ‘friends’ of mine. I questioned our whole relationship, and the feeling of rejection did not do my self-esteem any good.

Still, I could never figure out why I was never the friend people sought for when people I considered friends needed “a friend”. Until one day I figured it out: I never called any of my alleged friends when things, semi-major events, happened in my life. I either receded into myself and put up the fight (or celebration) on my own, or I spoke only to my mother about it. It wasn’t that I didn’t find my friends worthy of the knowledge or of sharing my victories or defeats, it was more to do with pride, I guess. "You want to have nothing in life that you’re proud of? Let yourself be guided by your pride." Pride is like a fear of falling, so it stops you from reaching too high. Healthy pride, good pride, is probably better called gratitude and self-efficacy. Good pride is an after-the-fact quality; that’s not what I’m talking about. I mean more the pride/fear to be seen as vulnerable, as needing, as wanting, as human. One day I read that to have good friends, you have to be a good friend. I always thought I was a good friend, willing to give to others when they were in need, listening when they needed to be heard, sharing some advice, looking out for their wellbeing, etc. But my friends were never there when I needed something not because they were bad people, but because I was too proud to let them in.

There’s a bible verse that says that there is more happiness in giving than in receiving. Sure, but we all know that there is also something very pleasant in receiving!  That’s right, there is happiness in both. And what any good relationship, any friendship or partnership, needs is both giving and receiving. Sometimes we give our friends a present, something to cheer them up or make them feel good. We feel good in return, right? A happy friend means a happy me, means a healthy relationship. But how about sometime letting our friend also share in the happiness of giving, allowing them give us a gift, being grateful for their effort, validating their efforts and gesture of camaraderie? Of course, I am not talking just about material gifts. I mean allowing ourselves to be human, to admit our need and desire of friendship, of companionship, of another human being to share our load and cheers with. Trust me, if you know anything about human pride, this is actually very hard! We become proud, stern, often as a result of being hurt in the past, or disappointed. We want to convince ourselves and others that we can’t be hurt again. We want to block out the bad – and we end up blocking out the good too. We punish ourselves and others by creating a wall of perceived invincibility. But it’s actually easier to be invincible if you have an army of comrades rather than take the world on by yourself.

So what more can I say to encourage you to be a little more vulnerable, a slightly better friend? You are human, don’t be scared to be mistaken for one. And there’s a paradoxical rule with love: it’s the only known substance that the more of it you give away, the more you end up having.

On "that" year

Kingaroy, QLD

2006. I was 24 still. I was a child still. But before I tell you about that year, I’ll give you a speedy run-down on my life until then. Age -9 months: my mummy meets my daddy. Age -6 months: my mummy finds out the father of her daughter is also father to 14 other children before her. Ages 0-9 years: growing up in El Salvador, a country with low literacy amongst those of my social class, and in a single-parent family where no-one has ever finished high school even. Age 6: I “decide” to become a doctor like the “cool” guy my mum works for as a cleaner/nurse. Ages 6-22: still stubborn about wanting to be like that cool guy. Age 23: finally start medical school. Ages 23-24: study, study, study. And then 2006 came along…

Things got tough for me in 2006 and my second so-called “depressive” episode happened. I lost the joy in everything, study was a hassle, I became morbidly preoccupied with my own mortality, a great solitude and loneliness came over me, and I wanted nothing because simply wanting anything required effort. The social withdrawal and pathological shyness again set inside me. Then I got into a situation where a false accusation was made against me. I was feeling pressure from my religious peers and my internalized God concept. In essence, I felt deficient. I felt lacking. And I felt dead inside – and then the feeling to externalize what I felt inside came over me. I lacked the motivation, the energy and willpower to do even that. Fearing my own internal monsters, I chose instead to go again in search of Vanessa.

Once I left everything, I felt both a great freedom and a complete hatred and fear of that freedom. There were no friends, no company on my journey, I had some advice but which felt more like orders. I had no allies – and I didn’t want anything or anyone even if there had been such people there. At first the numbness overwhelmed me and I was as a ghost walking around (which I recognized because this was not the first time in my life I have had these “episodes”). Gradually, over the next few weeks, reality and the mundane started to creep in. I needed to eat, pay bills, move, reply to the questions that were being asked of me. I started then to formulate my own questions. Who is Vanessa? And yet, not so much who is she but who does she want to be? Why does she want to be that? Does she really want to be that? What does being that entail, the practicality of it? And what of everything else? What is important? Who is important? Who, if anyone, is my friend? And what do I do with these things I love but won’t make me any income? And what should I do about these things that keep pestering me, these things others call conscience? You’ll often hear me diss and complain about the ‘white man’s stupid concept of “finding themselves”’, but you could say that that is what I set out to do.

Specifically I had some questions to answer and that was my quest in this time without commitment to study to answer. Formulating the questions was the easy part. Even finding the answers while on the quest wasn’t that hard. Finding what you’re looking for is easier when you know what it is you’re looking for. The hardest part was making the decision to take a break from my study, my big commitment at that time, to go on my quest. I risked a lot. I risked losing my friends, my family’s belief in me, jeopardising potentially years and years of prior education (and money), and losing my credibility. But I made the choice and I then had to go exploring my questions, myself, trying out different scenarios and risk finding out that my whole life had been a sham. But sometimes not knowing is as deleterious as finding out an unpleasant truth.

The second part of my task, after walking away from it all, was easy: I had the question that needed to be answered. Did I really want to do medicine as a career or was it a childhood dream of mine that I expressed and no-one ever had the courage to shut me down about it despite all the odds being stacked against me? I was a poor kid in a third world country where tertiary education costs more than entire families need to survive. It was a nice fantasy that they let me believe for a long time – until fate and relocation made my dream a possibility. But I was always a stubborn person, did I want to go into medicine purely as a whim? To prove people wrong and that I could do it? They were questions, and I answered them fairly quickly, actually. I think that giving yourself the space to not feel judged is very empowering. People may still be judging you, and I remember a lot of “friends” and even family members discounting me as a drop-out, as someone with no stamina, as a loser. But me, I gave myself the space I needed, I didn’t need anyone’s permission to explore my own life and motivations.

Like I said, the process of answering my questions took a remarkably quick time after I let go of the restraints I allowed to be placed on me by society, by other people’s expectations, by my own pride, and by my pessimism and distorted view of ‘reality’. And in the process, I learnt not only who I in fact was, but also to no longer despise myself for not being what was ‘expected’ of me. The answer to my questions were:  yes, medicine is what I, Vanessa, want to work in; and this will be a job like any other. I came to this conclusion by considering the things I enjoy (writing, visual arts, and film and theatre) and the things that I could bear to do for income. I could not bear to do anything other than medicine as income, and I’d perhaps do it even without income if something else where somehow feeding me. At the same time I was able to explore many aspects of the medical profession, and I had no grand illusions about it like a lot of people do, illusions of ‘saving’ people or of ‘making a difference’. I came to understand a lot of the industrial and organisational psychology of the business. And I became comfortable with what I learnt.

The rest came easy. The friends elected themselves by being the only ones standing when everyone else had gone. I bit the bullet and made a religious commitment. I got a “money” job because I was already planning for my future and my dream to see the wild condors in the Andes in South America. I in fact spent the remaining months of that year killing time by working and entertaining myself until my return to uni and getting on with my task of achieving the next task on the journey. So guess what I do now for work? Medicine. And guess what I do for passion? Write. And I can now unashamedly say that my name is Vanessa and I know exactly who Vanessa is.

Condor! Colca Canyon - Arequipa, Peru

On animals and food - Part 2

Since I was a child I always found it intriguing how human beings are just animals like the are thousands of other species, but there’s just some things about us that sets us apart. And you know what I focused on as kid on how humans differ from other creatures? Food.

As animals, we can’t photosynthesise so we consume other eukaryotic matter to obtain our nutrients. Every animal, even fungus, does it. Some animals eat grass and vegetation, some eat other animals, some eat both animals and vegetation and anything else they can extract nutrients from. We are, however, perhaps the only species that has self-determination regarding the foods we eat. A person may choose to eat only plant matter to the exclusion of everything else, for example, or plant and animal matter, or even only animal matter, or any other variation in between. As a species we are regarded as omnivores but as individuals we may choose to have diets that are vegan, vegetarian, pescerian, etc.  And what further sets us apart as a species is how we can then interrelate our choice of foods and the act of eating with spirituality.

Not everyone, but a large number of people, have formed a relationship between food and spirituality, ethics, morality, and all these words that are of relevance only to humans. Personally, as part of my religious belief-system, I have few limitations on what I can or should eat. Those I don’t eat are those that if I ate would kill me, those that I find unappetising, and those my religious-belief system prohibits. My particular belief system does not prohibit me from eating animals and has only basic clauses on to how an animal has to be prepared for human consumption. In addition to that, I do also have personal beliefs on the ‘humane’ treatment of animals for science, food, and other industries. They are personal views and unrelated to my religious beliefs.

From an early age I was taught to say a prayer before meals. As a kid I dismissed this together with a lot of “social norms” that served no real purpose but looked ‘nice’ to others. I later found out that some religious belief systems have gone further and have made food preparation and consumption a religious rite in itself. I found this fascinating! Eating was not considered just meeting a basic human need like breathing or obtaining nutrients, but instead an act of religious worship. Some religions, for example, will deem a product only suitable for consumption without violating religious law if it has been prepared a certain way (think, for example, halal and kosher foods). Later when I decided to embrace a religious system of thought and incorporated prayer into my life, I understood the desire to turn every human act a direct act of worship to God.

I found the idea of making food preparation an act of worship very fascinating, but ironically I also found it a little distancing from its purpose. The thing is often adherents to religions that follow religious customs on food preparation also aren’t the same ones that say prayer prior to their meals. What does that matter, right? Well, if you don’t believe in practicing this it makes no difference who (if anyone) says the prayer or who enacts the act of worship; it can be whomever, or it can be no-one. It mattered to me because I, like many other people, who had come to interrelate food with spirituality felt it was in fact delegating my personal worship to God to someone else. I finally understood what my mum was getting at: the prayer was meant to acknowledge my gratitude to God for providing (or not denying me) that which so many other human beings lack. It was a way also to acknowledge that another living creature was being sacrificed for my benefit and its life did not leave in vain or unappreciated. That I do consider my personal duty: that if I care about something, then I must personally support it.

There are two stories Paulo Coelho tells that I find very thought-provoking. The first is about a monk or some other spiritual leader talking to his pupil. The pupil wants to know what food he can eat so as to bring him closer to God, as he is already doing everything else that in his religious system is required to gain God’s approval. His teacher tells him to eat of some grass. The student goes enthusiastically to pick it – then he realises it is a poisonous grass! He is shocked that the teacher has indicated this deadly shrub to him and asks if he realises that if he eats it he will die. The teacher says to him ‘I know of no other way through which eating something will bring you closer to God’. The second story is about a similar man who accuses someone else of being lacking spiritually because he eats a certain food. The man considers that this food is unholy, that it tarnishes the soul, that it is an offense to God to eat it. The teacher then reprimands the student for blaspheming God, for calling one of God’s creations unholy, for assuming that God is so petty as to be offended by what a person eats or doesn’t eat. He reminds him that it is not unholy what enters the mouth, but what from it emerges.

On animals and food - Part 1

Some people say we are superior to other creatures because we are “intelligent”. The truth is this intelligence is only of value to us as humans because we possess it and we know how to use it. An elephant could equally believe he is the superior species on this planet because he has a trunk – and all the great things he can do with it! He considers every other trunkless species as inferior, lacking, because we don’t share that one thing that to him his survival is dependent on. Our “intelligence” and interaction style is dependent on the arrangement of our nervous tissue, our phenotypic appearance is genetically-determined, and our behaviour is in the broadest sense survival-driven. Now, we (all animate creates) are carbon-based constructs of eukaryotic cells incapable of photosynthesising to meet our own nutritional needs. We are amazingly adaptable and very different to other species in the way we interact with our environment, but even if we were the superior species, it does not entitle us to haphazardly proceed to abuse our environment and the creatures in it to meet our own needs.

We are truly an amazingly adaptable species. Human beings have developed ways to overcome our deficiency in obtaining and forming our own nutritional needs for survival by consuming other eukaryotic matter. We have even developed systems to make this more efficient and safe for our digestive systems. We, for example, cook our food. Simple biology classes have taught us that cooking our foods, especially those derived from other animals, has effects on the quality of food itself so as to make it suitable for the human digestive tract. Heating denatures protein, makes food stuffs generally easier to transit along the gastrointestinal tract, destroys pathogenic microbes, changes the taste of most foods, and all these other things that are limiting (and thus important) factors to our ability to live off these products. We are also incredibly adaptable on the choice of foods we can live on.

I have always had an omnivorous diet except for a few years where I was a vegetarian purely as a teenage fad. It was interesting in those few years, though, what you do learn about human beings and our need to stereotype others. I openly admit I chose to have a vegetarian diet purely as a choice, not based on my views on animals or religion or anything really.  In fact you could probably say it was almost on a whim similar to any teenager who has ever dyed their hair an “odd” colour or done anything considered outside the norm just because they could. Adolescence is a time of experimentation and trying on different identities until you find one you stick to a little more permanently. My phase was vegetarianism. What I learnt was that people do have a particular relationship to food that is not like that related to fashion or hair dyes or music preferences. People generally relate food to something more akin to spirituality. Now, of course, my choice on diet was on a whim, but it is true that a great majority of people do make their dietary choices based on these things.

I grew up with what you’ll often hear me refer to as “edible pets”. This was what I was exposed to growing up. We had pets in the form of ducks, chickens, rabbits. We raised them and fed them from young and considered them as anyone else does a pet. When they got to a particular size, my mother or grandmother (or sometimes my siblings) would kill them and prepare them as food for all of us. This we all understood as the circle of life. We cared for those animals and treated them without cruelty; in fact we would play with them and be fond of them as our pets. We did not shed tears for them when their time came, though. We had known all along what the fate of these animals were to be – and yet we did not hold back from caring them as we did. To us it seemed similar to the way people love each other, siblings, parents, children, spouses, friends, etc, and don’t hold back even though we know these people will one day sooner or later leave our lives.

Growing up, our family had at one point also a dog or two as a pet that we did not consider “edible” in our culture. We kept this animal purely for company.  And we considered it okay to keep him because we could sustain him without going out of our needs to meet his (he ate scraps, inedible leftovers, and whatever he could fend for himself). Why I mention this is because still to this day I have moments where I consider it unethical to go out of our way to provide for ‘non-edible’ animals when there are starving families in the world, when money could be diverted to help other fellow humans in need… I have those days, but I have also learnt to be a little more open-minded and understand that, particularly in western-culture, people do often equate dogs and cats and whatever other pets, to family and even to being equal to human beings. A view I understand even if I still cannot say I share it.

On adoption

A family... and not one drop of shared DNA.

As I was growing up in El Salvador the concept of “adoption” wasn’t something I’d encountered. You’d hear of certain families taking in children with no parents or parents who were not able to care for them. Occasionally you’d hear of women “selling” their children into the care of other families because they couldn’t afford to raise them or they needed the money for their own survival. And of course there was always the boogieman everyone “knew” about but no one had ever personally witnessed: the children who were snatched away to be sold to families the USA either because they were infertile couples or because their own biological children needed organ transplantations. They were the stories I grew up hearing in that third world country. My own personal experience was nothing I could call adoption, but it was what I saw.

There was a young girl in the town I grew up with that was thought of something like homeless or a ‘street kid’. Later I was told she did actually have a mother but for whatever reason, this girl was essentially fending for herself when I first came to know of her.  I was lucky enough to live with my mum and her partner, my four siblings, and at times also my grandmother, two uncles, two aunts, and a cousin. I had a family. I had a house to live in, food, and the essential things we needed to study. This girl, the ‘street kid’, had very little of what I had. At one point in my childhood I remember my mum took this poor soul into our house. I remember the first day she came my mum washed her hair to get all the head lice out because she didn’t want me and my siblings catching them. She took some cooking oil and put it through her hair and then combed it with a fine-tooth comb. The most bugs I have ever seen in my life came out of her hair, there were clumps of them with each stroke. It seems another world to think back to it now, but I guess it was a different world to the comfy life I live now. When the cleaning up was done, this girl became one of us, one of the family. She ate at our house, mum enrolled her in school and got her a uniform, she had books to read and learn. My siblings and I were old enough to know she was not one of “us” but to anyone else, it may have seemed my mum really had six children and not just five. That is the memory I have always had of what is now commonly called “adoption”, and for that reason I admired mum even further (though she would never had personally dared to call it anything akin to adoption).

Since about the age of 12 or so, I thought it’d be great to have children. It seems strange to say it because I would have been a child myself at the time. My family thought it was funny too and they’d ask me how many children I wanted to have. I’d always say 3 or 5 or 8 or 10. Yes, I thought I wanted to have ten of them and I’d buy a minibus to carry them all around in – and I’d have them all by the time I was thirty. I couldn’t wait to be eighteen, but not for the reason most adolescents do, but rather because I thought at eighteen you can marry and then start to have children. I had a maximum of 12 years in which to gather as many kids as I could, I thought. And I knew, or decided, by the time I was very young that at least some if not all my children would be adopted. I guess two things played into this: the fact it never crossed my mind to want or expect to have a husband or male partner, and the fact I admired so much the people who don’t get caught up in “genetics” and ownership and recognize that the ability to raise a child is a gift in itself – to a child and to a parent.

As I got older and older, I started to tell people (my mum and friends) that I wanted to adopt a child (or children). Ironically, my mum was not very supportive of the idea. I understand now that her reluctance is based on her not even realising the example she set for me when I was a kid in El Salvador, and the fact she thinks having a child, especially an adopted one, will interfere with what she thinks I should have: a husband and children “of our own”. I grew up without a father, I never expected to have one around for my children either. It’s not that I did or didn’t want one, I just never expected I’d have one – and this does not bother me, really! I had a family without having a male father figure, surely I can build one of my own similarly and I would never think of it as second-best, as less-than-ideal. Never.

The other (often uninvited) group of people that tried to discourage me from my idea to adopt a child were friends of my mother, an older generation of perhaps misinformed individuals.  Why is adoption bad (according to these people)? I can summarize their basic arguments as 1) ownership, and 2) tradition. Traditionally a family consists of a mother, a father, and their biological children. By extension, the tradition is that the parents remain married for life, that there is no infidelity within that married life, that the two parents are of different sexes to each other, that the children will be healthy and fully able-bodied, that the father will be in full-time employment while the mother tends to the household and the child-rearing, etc. etc. That is not the world we live in today, everything that was once tradition has changed, some things you could say changed for better and some for worse, but nevertheless human beings have proven a million times over that we are a very adaptable species.

And now about ownership. Think of yourself and ask ‘who owns you’? Most of us will probably have thought that no one owns us, or we own ourselves. Maybe if you’re an adolescent or a child, you may have said your parents own you. But who as an adult says they are owned by their parents? You have the same parents from when you were a child into adulthood, so why should ownership change? Because it actually doesn’t. The truth is any thinking parent will acknowledge that their children are not their property, you don’t own one as you own a shirt or a shoe. Parenthood is a task, a role, a responsibility; it’s not a similar thing to land- or property-ownership. You don’t ever own another human being. You can influence, shape, teach, or affect them, but you won’t forever own anyone. When children are babies until adulthood, parents are charged with the task to protect and provide for a child. As a parent of a young child that is your job, your expectation, but you couldn’t similarly say that a security guard in a jewellery store owns the expensive jewels he looks after just because it is his job to safeguard them. Do you have more right to ownership of a person because you share biological matter with them? Is it a prerequisite for something or someone to share DNA with you for you to see merit in them? Should we marry only our brothers and sisters because strangers are otherwise less-than? A person who is loving, who is a true parent, need not share anything other than love, experience, and sustenance with a child to call themselves a parent.

Throughout my life as I shared my aspirations to one day be a parent, and my dream to adopt children, I received further “advice” as to why I shouldn’t. You’d think I was proposing to become a suicide bomber or a career criminal to be so strongly opposed. People would tell me that adopted children are bad because the majority come from drug-addicted, mentally unwell, criminally insane parents with all sorts of genetic and congenitally infectious diseases. Adopted children are defective, and not only that, but they also grow up to be bad, mad, or sad people. They become drug addicts, criminals, mentally ill, and/or perpetually resentful of being adopted children. Unfortunately the one example often quoted to me as proof was an acquaintance that did not disclose to their child he was adopted until he was well into his mid-twenties. Of course he was resentful but of the deceit and non-disclosure, not of the love and opportunities he was given in his adoptive family! There was some selective filtering of the content of this adoptee’s complaint. Nevertheless, this person was someone I knew and so the example is blown up in its probability value. Maybe he was one of a minority, maybe he is quite typical, but knowing no other adopted people, he was painted as more than representative of the sampled population, but as the 100% of the population.

And then one day I met a woman who told me she was adopted. I have never once heard her refer to her parents as “adopted parents” as opposed to “REAL” parents. It was strange to hear what I suspected all this time: that not all adopted children are resentful, defective, or feel eternally unloved. It blew my mind to hear her say once that she wasn’t born to her parents, but that she was born for them. She couldn’t imagine a different life, she didn’t need to, she had a loving and supportive family as it is.

And there it is, there’s what I heard and what I think and what I’ve seen about adoption – and you know what? I am occasionally reminded by people that I have three half-brothers and a half-sister, but you know what? I only know I have three brothers and a sister, the people I grew up with, the people I share more than “half” my DNA with, the people who share in the full extent of my life. And sharing life, being a family, is more than about ownership and about biological material. Personally, after having heard it all, all the evils of non-traditional families, I’d still love the opportunity to build a family around a child that needs only my love and caring and not just my DNA to survive.

On religion and on being open-minded

A tourist attraction - or a place of worship.

One of the criticisms you’ll often here about “religious people” or of “religion” is that these are people that are not very open minded. It’s funny, in a way, to see how religion has become the new Satan, this thing to be despised, to be frowned upon, to be avoided. The other reasons you’ll here as to why religion is the devil is it brainwashes people, its leaders often abuse their power for financial and/or sexual gains, that members are forced into a particular lifestyle, and that religion is the cause of war. The same could be said of almost any social group in this world: a race, a linguistic group, a nation of people, a socioeconomic group, etc. What is the difference? That religious groups are often seen as the perpetrator of all sorts of evils; a social group with almost no positive value to the greater humanity.

But let me come back to the point of how people of religious groups are perceived as not being open-minded, often by people who claim to be open-minded themselves. Firstly, allow me to define a little further what a religious group is. Religion can be thought of a system of belief as to certain ‘spirituality-related topics’ such as the afterlife, the purpose of life, etc. As an extension of this belief system is a system of governance and justice. Often a particular religious denomination has particular rules of what is deemed right and just behaviour and also criteria for things that are considered wrong. Of course, the particulars of each denomination’s spiritual belief and justice systems are different. For example one group of people may believe God has one or another name, another may belief that there are certain foods which must not be eaten, etc. Now, why do people even join religions? Because they either identify with a particular religion’s beliefs (and don’t we all like to gather with like-minded people), or they find a particular religion’s creeds appealing (and usually strive to approximate their behaviour to that which is the groups norm).

The question asked by so many “open-minded” people is not why do people join religions, however, but rather, why are people in religions when: 1) differences in religion beliefs have led to many wars, 2) when science has “disproven” creationism, 3) when religious peoples are hypocrites who don’t practice what they teach (because we all know one or another dissident from his belief), etc. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with any of these questions, except that they are large generalizations of a group of people that are extended to the individuals who belong to this group as if they are and must be true of each and every member. This is called a stereotype. This leads to prejudice and discrimination. This leads to the concept of ‘I am right, and you are wrong’, which is the first step towards the ‘I am right and you are wrong, therefore I have a right to punish you’. This is also what gets wars started. I regret to say that this is not a statement an open-minded person would say.

But a lot, many, perhaps the majority, of wars have been fought between groups of different religions. This is a historic fact, no doubt. But is it really “religion” that is the evil factor here? You could say that, but would you also dare to say that all members of any social group are responsible for the actions of some of its members? Recently you would have heard of extremists in certain religious groups being responsible for armed attacks on members of other groups. There are extremists in every social group. There are people in any group that will convince themselves that their duty is not only to be in the right but to punish others who they believe are in the wrong. Most commonly the fundamental spiritual beliefs of the group to which these extremists belong have mandates against harm to others, etc. What am I trying to get at? Yes, many wars have been fought by people over differences in religious ideologies; but no, that doesn’t make “religion” the culprit. It reminds me of an argument that was common in the early 1980s when AIDS was first documented. Yes, homosexual men were most often affected, but it didn’t mean that “homosexuality” per se was responsible for the disease. Certain beliefs and actions put us at greater risk of being involved in a negative thing (e.g. war or disease), but each individual is only “good” or “bad” based on their individual actions not those of a correlation with the group to which one belongs.

Another reason religion is often frowned upon by the non-religious is because it is perceived to be a belief system formulated by desperate, “empty” people who want to find reason to justify their existence. Or they believe it is outdated as science or some other philosophy has already answered the questions religion was previously thought to answer. There is no scientific evidence to particular religious beliefs or creationism, they’ll tell you. Now, religious people may believe that their purpose on Earth is to please some invisible god and do things so as to please him because gaining his favour will lead to further good things in this lifetime and in the afterlife. What do the rest of us believe is the purpose of human existence? Aren’t they also arbitrary things like creating a better environment for our descendants, to protect or promote one some randomly chosen cause that appeals to us, to enjoy pleasurable things and activities, etc. etc. You could just as easily say we are all empty people killing time until the day of our deaths and a return to the carbon cycle as a corpse. That is true also, and what we choose to do or believe to kill this time should not be up for judgement by anyone else as no-one is born knowing the “true” purpose of life, as if it was one definite thing. Could time be better spent saving endangered animal species than prayer? Maybe, depending on the belief system you elect. You could just as readily believe that movements to protect animal species during this lifetime are redundant, but that certain religious practices will lead you to an eternal wordly kingdom where there will be an abundance of animals that will exist in harmony with all other creatures. They are both equally valid, and albeit arbitrary, ideologies about human life.

I, despite my hatred of labels, will readily identify (and label myself) as Christian. This disclosure has led me to meet a lot of people who express to me their belief that religion is wrong and religious people are not open-minded enough…  Now isn’t this a massive generalization? Sounds not very open-minded to me, but I could be wrong.  I think a key to remaining open-minded is to admit that there is even a minuscule possibility that we are wrong, that the “others” may be right, or maybe even that there is no right or wrong answer.