Slowly but surely, I am getting my old self back.
Suddenly, having to live with chronic illnesses doesn’t seem so bad anymore. It depends on the way I look at things, I guess. I admit – it was too much for me to deal with and I plummeted head first, sinking deeper and deeper (particularly towards the end of last year and the beginning of this year) until some friends decided enough was enough and yanked me out of the mess before I self-destructed.
That was about a month ago.
Since then, the end of March and the beginning of April has been considerably brighter. The bounce is back in my step, and I have regained my enthusiasm for … almost everything I used to be enthusiastic about. (For lack of a better way to phrase things. Hur.)
I may not have control over my illnesses, I still have full control of my own emotions, and I cannot let the illness get the better of me and take over.
Looking back, I realized I had let it take over way too much. Granted, it was tough, having health issues/relapses hit me at the back of my head one after another when I’ve barely crawled out of the previous one, not to mention the discrimination I had to occasionally face. At first I was bouncing back the way I usually did, until the energy eventually fizzled out and I just gave up.
It’s been two years. If I don’t come to terms with the fact the doctors visits, tests and whatnots have become a part of my life by now – gee, it’d be an epic fail on my part, man.
Well, I can safely say now that I’ve accepted that fact.
And I’m ready to live life in spite of it.
Life goes on; there are fun activities to engage myself in, places to explore, and sights and scenes to view, capture and keep in memory. Plus, I have awesome people surrounding me all the time who keep me laughing.
One closest friend says that I almost am back to my old self pre-2008, which made me really happy as it is a clear validation of my success at getting back on my feet.
To the friends who have stood by me despite it all, and having to cope with my negative personality ‘transformation’, rant-iness and irritability, thanks for being there even though I wasn’t exactly good company the past year or so.
To the blog readers who are still reading despite me dishing out stream after stream of blog posts complaining about almost every single darn’d thing, major salute to you guys. Likewise, thanks for sticking around during the difficult times (and standing up for me when I get bullied, heh).
I look up to the sky and now the world is mine
I’ve known it all my life; I made it, I made it.
(Kevin Rudolf – I Made It)
I may be a sick kiddo, but so what? I have awesome doctors taking care of me, friends who stand by me, parents who show support in every way they can. Plus, I have myself back – almost – and I’m ready to kick the ass of anything else life decides to deal me with.
Booyah!
Meanwhile – but unrelated – I am seriously itching to get some DDR action at the moment but it’s past midnight and the last thing I want to do is to annoy the neighbours downstairs or put a dampener on their err … night time activities.
One thing I really do not regret is taking up two psychology-related elective modules despite doing a technology-related degree – ‘Introduction to Psychology’ in Spring 2008 and ‘Social Psychology’ in Fall 2008.
Psychology is a really awesome discipline. It looks deep into the human psyche, and the takeaways from the modules I took were largely relevant in real life. It enabled me to better understand the behavour and thought processes of the people around, and got me in touch with the inner-workings of my mind.
I still have the textbooks from both courses. Despite it being almost two years ago, I can still vividly recall how I could practically devour several chapters of the textbook in one sitting, even going to the point of reading the entire textbook despite several chapters being ‘not in the syllabus’.
Needless to say, I aced both courses. Fun stuff, really. (;
It was also through Psychology where I realized that there are many flaws in the way human beings reason. It remains a fact that the world is a judgmental place, and the bulk of it is the result of these flaws in reasoning.
Human beings do make use of a lot of ’shortcuts’ methodologies when perceiving things around them. These shortcuts ARE useful – they do save us a lot of brain energy, and we come to conclusions much faster when using these shortcuts.
However, these shortcuts are often derived from the general ‘norms’ or typical observations of people – which often do not apply to all. Most of us make use of shortcuts so regularly to an extent we fail to realize that human beings are a broad, complex species with a myriad of values, mindsets and behavioral patterns that cannot be fitted into moulds.
Lemme’ share some of the most common reasoning errors!
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