Surgery as a metaphor

Sometimes, in the process of self-discovery, we discover things about ourselves that we do not like.

Maybe it's an obsession, a pet peeve, a love or hate, a habit, a moral...

Maybe it's nature, maybe it's nurture... regardless of where it came from, it's there. And it's a part of who you are.

Like a bad bowel.

When you have a bad bowel, you can't eat very much. You have little energy. Everyone tells you "it's normal, it's stress, it'll go away."

It doesn't go away.

You go to a doctor with a long, Indian last name who pokes and prods your abdomen and and asks you, with a wooden-sounding accent, to describe your bowel movements.

When you have a bad bowel, they stick cameras up and down your various orifices, take your blood and signature, give you pills and directions, and then send you to a surgeon in San Francisco to have the bad bowel removed.

It's a strange thing, actually. Something you were born with is bad for you. It is harming you, and in order to preserve the rest of yourself, it must be removed from you....


...BY A COMPLETE STRANGER?!?

That's right, sports fans. A complete stranger is going to take a knife to your person. They don't know who you are. They don't know your religion, your mother or father, your past relationships, your collection of vintage playing cards. They know neither the nature or nurture that brought you to their operating room.

They just know how to take bad bowels out of good bodies. You can't help, you can't even watch. You have to take a nap and trust them to not kill you while you're asleep.

You wake up with three scars and a lot of pain. It takes three days before you can walk without someone to support you. At the end of a week, you go home. At the end of a month, you are reveling in the freedom to eat and do and live as you couldn't before.

What a metaphor.

Pick an issue. It could be of the heart, the mind, the personality type. You've found it. It makes you sick. It is a natural part of you that threatens the rest of yourself.

However, all efforts on your own part to get rid of it fail. What now? Do you just accept it? Learn to embrace it as part of your person?

Bob Marley was right. You can't run away from yourself.


So if you can't change yourself... WHO CAN?

It goes against our grain to ask for help in a society where independence is the golden rule. We suffer our diseases for the sake of pride and privacy. Sometimes our glorified sense of independence becomes the ugly force that keeps us who we are.

Can you let go of a part of yourself?
Can you find someone who knows how to help you?
Can you trust them with your disease?

Can you learn to live without it.

The recovery is difficult and the scars are forever. But the pain is nothing compared to the joy of freedom.

Trust me.