Category Archives: Social Science

Speaking Of Unspeakable Things

I had a wonderful encounter with Tish yesterday. Five hours of glorious conversation! It did my mind and heart good. I can write more about this, but the hour is late. I’m sure tidbits of what we processed will inspire a number of future posts.

We discussed, among many topics, the issue of cultural responses to fat and to bodies that are different from the “norm.” I remembered an article I read in the New York Times last year that I’d blogged about in my retired original blog (The Hestia Chronicles). I dug it out of the archives and am re-posting the excerpt. The Times requires registration; since this is an old article, you’ll have to pay if you want to read the entire piece. It’s worth the cost. It’s the most provocative essay I have read on the topic. Ever.

He insists he doesn’t want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened.

Whenever I try to wrap my head around his tight string of syllogisms, my brain gets so fried it’s . . . almost fun. Mercy! It’s like ”Alice in Wonderland.”

It is a chilly Monday in late March, just less than a year ago. I am at Princeton University. My host is Prof. Peter Singer, often called — and not just by his book publicist — the most influential philosopher of our time. He is the man who wants me dead. No, that’s not at all fair. He wants to legalize the killing of certain babies who might come to be like me if allowed to live. He also says he believes that it should be lawful under some circumstances to kill, at any age, individuals with cognitive impairments so severe that he doesn’t consider them ”persons.” What does it take to be a person? Awareness of your own existence in time. The capacity to harbor preferences as to the future, including the preference for continuing to live.

At this stage of my life, he says, I am a person. However, as an infant, I wasn’t. I, like all humans, was born without self-awareness. And eventually, assuming my brain finally gets so fried that I fall into that wonderland where self and other and present and past and future blur into one boundless, formless all or nothing, then I’ll lose my personhood and therefore my right to life. Then, he says, my family and doctors might put me out of my misery, or out of my bliss or oblivion, and no one count it murder.
–from Unspeakable Conversations by Harriet McBryde Johnson; New York Times Magazine, 2/16/03.

Elaboration

When I make personal disclosures on this blog, I strive for more autobiographical vignettes attached to a broader thought or message, rather than writing as though in a diary. I have another blog for that kind of writing.

That said, I’ve made no secret of the fact that I manage to live with (around, despite) ongoing clinical depression. Years and years of talk therapy helped create insight as to part of its origins; it mostly taught me to be aware of symptoms and to be gentle in my self-assessment (one aspect of depression is a tendency toward rippingly negative thinking about oneself). Talk therapy is also what made me the counselor I am, possibly more so than the graduate courses.

On the other hand, I also take medication, and have for six years; it has helped immensely, and so I believe the depression has its roots in the physical as well as cultural/social. In other words, it’s not all my parents’ fault — it’s their genes’ fault! (Smile, please, that was an attempt at humor.) Medication therapy has its place.

I expected this transition to challenge my equanimity. What I wasn’t certain about was the degree to which I’d experience the undertow. Since my credentials are invisible according to the California Board of Behavioral Sciences, and I’d have to undergo training all over again — which I am simply not going to go through after five years of education and clinical training, an exam, and $60,000 — I’m at a loss. I had a private practice in Austin, but here I do not have the connections yet to establish one — and it would have to be as a “life coach” or other euphemism, without the cachet and seal of approval that official recognition (licensure) provides. Jobs I’ve seen require licensure, even for positions such as utilization management. I’ve kvetched about this here before.

The well part of me knows that it’s hard to reestablish onself, that it takes time, but it can be done. I simply need to put myself out into the world, tell people my vision, explore, connect, and trust that the right situation will arise.

However.

That’s the well part of me, the aspect of myself that shines when my life is mostly trundling along its course in other ways. Yet here I am trying to recreate a social network, a sense of place and home, a spiritual community. The loss of these things, along with the loss of professional qualifications (or at least my sense of them), along with the latent depression, are converging. I’m struggling to establish a routine, a vision, goals. I’m struggling with depression — or some of the symptoms. Significantly.

I know I will be all right. I know what is needed to take care of this. I just wanted to write about it (part of the process of taking care), to let my blog community know that I am grappling with this nemesis again. I am so grateful; my life is a gift. I feel vexed with myself that this crud covers my spirit, that I can cognitively understand I am blessed but still feel lost, listless, hopeless, sad. But there it is. I need some good vibes, folks, some prayers or encouragement or a job in my field (which includes counseling, coaching, teaching, academic advising, writing, librarianship, non-profit program management, and information management).

I am going to take tomorrow off. I shall go into San Francisco to have coffee and lunch with Tish. I’m heartened by this, as I think we have much in common. And just for fun, I’m posting in the extended entry the “flower picture of my ideal job” (from exercises I’ve done in What Color Is Your Parachute). In case you happen to have a job to offer (or know of one) that fits, or mostly fits, the description. Ideas, names of people to contact for information interviews, guidance on finding cameraderie in the job search are also welcome.
Continue reading →