Been a while since I last wrote - my mind being on some unbloggable matters in the meantime. Now then where was I?
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I often get what others consider to be odd trains of thought
– although to me they are fascinating insights to life! One of these that came when I was learning
Welsh has been particularly relevant to my recent thoughts.
The grammatical construction in Welsh for certain illnesses
is ‘there is a cold on me’. It struck me
as feeling less permanent than ‘I have a cold’ in English merely something that
is on me but we can brush off again. Yes it is just grammar not a mindset, your
car is ‘with you’ rather than something you ‘have’, but it set off a pattern of
thought about how we think about illnesses.
Those thoughts are being chewed over again now. There can be
3 types of health issues we face –
- Accidents – breaks, tears, etc things that have happened to us and often can be fixed with a bit of time, the broken leg, the bruising.
- Illnesses that come ‘on us’ – they are not part of us, but something we fight to get rid of, to remove from our bodies and lives.
- Dis-ease that is part of us – plumbed or wired in they are somehow integral to us, we live with them as a permanent thing, maybe all our life or the rest of our life.
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| The tree has embraced the fence as part of itself... |
Okay there may be other types, but my point is that for 1
and 2, even when the situation is incredibly serious, to the extent of life
threatening, it is a situation that is to be fixed, challenged and fought. When it is a part of who you are like 3 then
it is a more complicated relationship – what does that mean to who I am?
This experience includes a wide range of situations from
those whose lives revolve around the dis-ease or impairment to people who are
impacted in a much lesser way. It covers what is very obvious to onlookers and
things unseen.
How do I reconcile that that which is at the same time a problem
to be addressed, managed, treated etc is at the same time part of me, to the
extent that it has shaped and formed who I am, my personality, relationships
and view of the world?
I hope to reflect on all this in future blogs around my sense of self in relation to depression and possible bipolar aspects to my personality.
