I promised myself that the next blog entry I wrote was going to be some funny, meaningless anecdote from my life to lighten the mood out here. Lucky for me I didn't make that promise public.
As I do many days, I woke up this morning feeling sad and anxious, weighed down. It reminded me of the nights I used to spend in Bangladesh, pacing back and forth on the roof, looking up at the mango tree and listening to the unceasing rickshaw bells, asking them for answers; hoping they'd somehow help me make sense of it all.
I've realized lately - since beginning to study the various psychological disorders in earnest - that I may have dissociative identity disorder (you may remember it's prior name: "multiple personality disorder"; think "Sybil"). Everyone tells you when you start learning this stuff that you will start to get paranoid feelings that you have all kinds of pathology, but I'm pretty sure this isn't a figment of my anxious imagination.
Listen to this, straight from our diagnostic manual: "The essential feature of Dissociate Identity Disorder is the presence of two or more distinct identities or personality states that recurrently take control of behavior" (DSM-IV-TR, p. 526). Granted I don't display the other criterion (i.e. being unable to remember spans of time where one personality has taken over), but for this "essential feature" I may fit the bill.
And here's why.
I will be going about my day as usual, with my mental list of things to do carrying me from one activity to the next, and suddenly, for a moment, I won't be me. I'll be the single mother who can't feed her kids; the child sold into sexual slavery; the disabled, disfigured man lying on the side of the road in Bangladesh; Rina.
Increasingly it seems I carry these eyes, ears, and hearts around with me as I travel through each day. I am in the middle of a seminar, or a movie, or conversation with a friend about where we should go to lunch and suddenly someone else will step in my skin. Most often it is Rina as I make my way down the side walk. I can feel her awe at the unbroken pavement, the huge homes (all of ours would be in her eyes), and immaculate landscaping.
I look through the various eyes of these brothers and sisters of mine as I rush from place to place and do all the things that seem so important to my everyday life, and as I do I feel certain that they would be overwhelmed by the senselessness of it. I feel their staggering disbelief as they try to get their minds to accept the simultaneous reality of their worlds and mine. I feel their confusion and helplessness. It's like they are fighting desperately to survive the earthquakes while we keep adding garages onto our sandcastles.
I listened to someone talk about putting things in God's hands in chapel last week, and as has become a normal dramatic practice of mine, I started to weep. You see, I was the child in slavery, hearing someone tell me I should just trust God. "What on earth could that possibly mean??" I wondered, "what should I trust God to do?" Then I heard the real voice of my friend ask me "are you ok?" And I knew that he was thinking of various things that may have happened to me that day that might cause me to be upset: maybe a family member was sick, maybe a customer had gotten angry with me at work, heck, maybe I just hadn't gotten to have coffee (certainly a traumatic event). And how could I explain to him: "Yes, I am fine, it's the people I carry who are not ok"?
Sometimes I get frustrated with this weight. Sometimes I get angry and just want to be rid of it at any cost. Sometimes I'll get advice from friends and family members, who love me and are worried, "Emily, you have to let it go."
But then I'll take a moment and step into the hearts of those I carry with me. I'll feel the weight there, their burden, and on my better days I'll think "Ok brothers and sisters, I'll walk this road with you, and when your crushing burdens are lifted, on that beautiful day, perhaps I'll ask for mine to be taken too." And, strangely enough, when I do this, I feel stronger.
Until that beautiful day, as I'll say again and again, my only hope is that this burden will be transformed into love, not in unceasing, "meaning well," passionate blogging, words, but in actions and truth.
P.S. For my friends simultaneously making their way in the mental health world, what do you think, do I fit in a clinical or non-clinical population?
I might be one of those friends referenced in the final paragraph.
ReplyDeleteIn my not-quite yet expert clinical judgment, if these are symptoms of Dissociative Identify Disorder, then surely Jesus, Paul, Gandhi, Mother Theresa, and countless other compassionate men and women who have carried the burdens of others are included in this clinical population too.
Even if your burden is transformed into actions, those actions will in all odds not be enough. It will not be enough to save the starving child on the side of an Indian road. It will not be enough to make a dent in those numerous one's that have nothing - not a home, no food, no place to bathe. It will not be enough to erase all the hatred that causes people to torture their brothers and sisters.
ReplyDeleteBut it is precisely this overwhelming grief found in this world that most people try to avoid with their temporary distractions or religious justifications and it is, from this, that causes them to do little. It is from this ignorance that makes possible for the grief to exist on the magnitude that it does. At least you know you will not fall into this pitfall. And if you don't look at it as saving all or doing nothing, perhaps not only will grief escape you a bit more, but you'll be able to help wherever you can - as much as you can. And what else can we do? And what else can we do?
For you're right, it is us that are starving, it is us that have no clean water to drink or bathe in, it is us. We all come from the same place and as God wills eventually we all will go into Him.
Until then, lets do what we can.
I fear that my rant is as long as your blog. ;).