Identity and dis-ease - part 1

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 –

1. 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.
2.  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.
3.  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.

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.