Life In the "First World"

Wednesday, July 30, 2014


"Well at least I don't have Ebola."

This was one of my thoughts earlier today.  Sometimes, when I feel my day is really boring or unremarkable, negative thoughts will start to crowd my mind.  When nothing else succeeds in distracting me from such thinking I will try to remind myself of all the good that I do have in my life.  And occasionally I do this by thinking of the morbid aspects of human experience which thankfully are fairly tolerable in countries like the United States.

I have been reading different media to learn more about the current outbreak of Ebola in Africa.  Not until recently did I learn the origin of the word Ebola.  Ebola is named for a river in Zaire where it was first identified in 1976.  A Stanford University thesis website has some interesting resources to assist the curious reader in learning more.

The current outbreak of Ebola is noted to be very severe.  Hundreds have died.  And due to the porous nature of the borders between

Successfully quarantining something as virulent as Ebola is obviously a major priority.  But how easily can it be done?  Apparently not very easily.  A recent article in the Washington Post noted a disturbing story of a man named Patrick Sawyer who traveled from Liberia to Nigeria.  He later died of Ebola in Nigeria.  He traveled in aircraft.  Who knows how many people he may have come into close contact with during his travel?  Because the incubation period for Ebola can be as long as twenty one days it might not be clear until late August just how much the virus may have spread due to Mr. Sawyer's travel.  Even more frightening is the fact that Mr. Sawyer was planning to visit his family in Minnesota in August.  I live here in Minnesota.  This is one of the benefits and horrors of the age we live in.  International air travel has made it possible to travel around the whole planet in a matter of a few days at most.

Here is one of the most sobering sections of the article I referenced above:

"Health officials rely on 'contact tracing' - locating anyone who may have been exposed, and then anyone who may have come into contact with that person.  That may prove impossible, given that other passengers journeyed on to dozens of other cities."

Dozens of other cities.  Yikes...

The spread of Ebola, cholera and polio across thousands of miles has been made possible by the phenomenon of international air travel.  If an infected, highly contagious person carrying something like Ebola were to enter a city of millions of people the chance of an effective quarantine essentially goes to zero.  Because the current outbreak of Ebola began several months ago it seems highly unlikely that successfully containing the current outbreak will occur without extensive, coordinated, skilled effort.

Here I sit in a cafeteria in the 'First World' nation of the United States in the state of Minnesota.    And I contemplate how one man who died thousands of miles away could have brought Ebola to Minnesota if he had lived a little longer.

The world has become a very, very small place.

......

Sometimes when I leave work I feel what seems to be an immense yet fleeting despair well up inside me.  I wonder if all my efforts to improve my life and finally move beyond the significant harmful impact caused by the chaos, abuse and deceit I experienced as a child will produce the results I desire. 

Back in March of this year I experienced what seemed to be a period of stagnation.  My improvement seemed to come to a grinding halt.  Looking back I suspect I was simply weary of enduring the worst winter to consume Minnesota in decades and nonetheless remaining steadfast in my commitment to healing.  My weariness eventually eroded away, spring finally came and my improvement resumed.

Until recently I felt I was continuing to improve.  But in the last two weeks I have felt overcome by apathy unlike anything I have experienced in a while.  I still feel motivated enough to go to therapy, exercise and write.  But my means of making a living is grating on my nerves.  Doing clerical work as a highly educated man is something I find very stultifying.  I have been exactly where I am now at other points in my life and I never seemed to jump to the next evolutionary leap in my professional life. 

Despite the very real progress I have made in the past year I find myself feeling very weary.  There are some days when I feel like I need a personal assistant to help me manage the multifaceted demands of my recovery process.

……

My therapist led me through a technique called ‘impasse work’.  He asked me to envision having a dialogue between my mature, adult self and my eight year old boy self.  As I have noted throughout my blog this summer I have attempted to recall more about the summer of 1982 when I was eight years old.  The months immediately after my father nearly died are still essentially still a virtual visual blank in my memory.  But I recently have been able to recall much of what I felt during that time.  I felt very bitter.  And I felt sad.  And I also felt inhibited, scared, angry and trapped.  That’s a lot of darkness for an eight year old to carry around.

When I acknowledged my awareness of feeling bitter that summer I felt a bit perplexed by how compatible being enmeshed in a state of bitterness could truly be with being eight years old.  Isn’t that age a bit young to feel something as nuanced as bitterness?  Isn’t bitterness something that develops only after a lot of suffering has hardened someone’s heart?  I asked my therapist about this.  He acknowledged he once had a six year old boy client who was so bitter he tried to kill himself.  Can you imagine a six year old trying to commit suicide?  It seems very counter-intuitive…almost preposterous.  But despair can strike very early on if trauma has impacted a life early in a person’s development.

In ending the session my therapist encouraged me to maintain an active dialogue with my eight year old boy self.  This will make for interesting writing!