Today I actually decided to post my
original first piece. I had planed on using the following text as the first
post for my blog. Yet misfortune happened and a significant bombing occurred
that day which is how my first article “A
guide to Beirut bombings” came to be. Before reading this piece you should keep
in mind that I wrote it while in my psychiatry rotation and I was in a rather
different mindset than today since so much has changed in the last 5 months, much
more than I can describe by typing on my laptop.
While I was passing through the
psychiatry rotation in my training as a physician I often came across humans in
their weakest or strongest states. I was amazed to meet humanity in its outmost
will power, its weakest downfalls and its painless dissociation. It's not that
I am coming from a absolutely sane background, as a matter of fact my network of
family and friends has in itself a big spectrum of dysfunction but what lacks
is the distance I need to objectively appreciate what I'm seeing.
Splitting from reality is an intimidating
notion isn't it? What If your reality was too cruel to live in? Would you take
schizophrenia over reality? Of course not! Right? Well tell me, what's your
definition of reality? Is life about the outings? The money? The job? The Good
sex? The friends? The children? The family? Why is your life worth admiring and
that of a schizophrenic pitiful?
In a nutshell schizophrenia is an
organic disorder of thought where patients lose touch with reality, hallucinate
and develop bizarre fixed beliefs ranging from magical thinking to absolute
nonsense. They are often so convinced of their speech that you are inclined to
consider if it is true or not. Imagine the horror when in the midst of his
delusions, a schizophrenic patient reminded you of your own life and struggles
and you are left with a scary notion: am I going to change my thinking process
or will I one day split from this reality and have the life I always wanted to
live, believe the things I always wanted to believe in at the cheap cost of
having all of this only inside my mind.
The code of confidentiality keeps me
from going into any details but it all started when one patient rightfully
evoking his struggles seemed to mirror a recent debate that had been raging in my
mind, the dilemma of change. Just like schizophrenics, we tend to
rationalize change in the weirdest way possible.
There comes a time where you look
around you and realize the people are not the same, the room is a new one, the
weather is milder and you are trying to convince yourself you have not changed.
Do me a favor, grab a mirror and look in it to see if you could name the person
in the reflection.
Living in Beirut, one comes to
realize escape is not an easy option. You can rarely
drop your past and start over. Off
the top of my head, I can list two reasons for that: one is that the city’s too
small to completely change scenery and two is that the culture is too meddling
to just let you be. Here’s a fact, in Lebanon, it is not uncommon to still be
extensively in contact with the same set of people you grew up with. After all,
half the population lives in an area as big a one or two districts of Paris. If
you’re wondering, Paris has 20 districts.
I personally love to study people.
It is possibly one of the many reasons why psychiatry is high on my list of
possible specialties after I finish my training in medicine. I liked to observe
and analyze the behavior of friends, family and even acquaintances ever since I
can remember. In that process, I came across many ways residents of Beirut have
embraced or at least tried to embrace change. I personally have gone over many
transformations, tried many approaches as I eventually came full circle. I
think I realized why most of our youth resort to immigration. Yes it is true that
finances are the leading cause for people to leave, nonetheless, it seems traveling
is a corner stone in the development of every Lebanese youngster. We travel because
we are suffocated by the small space and smaller circles of society. The chains
of the Lebanese community tighten further as you grow up till you realize, like
I have, that escape is inevitable unless you want to become another pawn in the
sectarian corrupt community. It so happens that you find yourself changing from within, your mind
shedding its older notions and preconceptions but the city around you seems to
be more resilient, after all, it is too small to accommodate the changing whims
of all its inhabitants. This is when a good proportion of its citizens become
entrapped by the will of the majority and changing that reality is hardly
possible without extreme turmoil and resistance from the masses.
That identification with the
schizophrenic happened a couple of times already in the past few weeks and it
got me thinking, why am I finding common grounds with someone whose feet
haven’t touched the land of reality since the 90s? It’s probably because if I don’t
get the chance to free my mind from Beirut’s preconceived notions of what life
should be, I too will turn the outside world into my own personal view of
reality.
No comments:
Post a Comment