’This toothache is a good training partner’ – I said and it was only half a joke. I have a rather newly culminated condition, that manifests in pain in versatile strength in the teeth sitting in the left side of my jaw. That area has a heavily amended 6th tooth and a wisdom tooth to be removed because of its position.
But not this is the cause I write this log – I guess no one wondered, what’s going on in my mouth. But at a point in my life, I developed a belief that all illnesses are like punishments.
I don’t know, how it goes in other cultures, but here we say „you got the cold because you went out in April in a single t-shirt” or „your teeth solely can be bad because you eat a lot of sweets and don’t clean them properly”. I’ve heard these a lot everywhere through my childhood. Even if my Mom avoided this dully punitive kind of interpretation every possible way, and in the back of my head I also felt – even as a kid – that this is not smart. A biased human logic, some kind of magical thinking, or religious, or crypto-religious approach to diseases.
So with my mind, I know that this punitive approach is only one among the million other approaches, not even the most constructive. It blows the problem up, instead of solving it, but as it is a thing, I cannot avoid the excessive amount of thinking about it.
Throughout my life, I learned newer and newer ways and aspects of presence with all my studies, professional studies, and work environments. Now I feel, shallower or more like through a personal filter of age, mood, and insomnia-caused constant fatigue and anxiety, than desired. In plenty of cases, I fiddled around just on the surface: ’what to do here? Okay, then I’ll do that to the end of the shift or the class’ (leading to the persistent manner of doing the task mechanically, even if it leads to errors) or ’will I pass the exam?’. In the last case yes, I passed – not even with bad grades, but with little to no practical intelligence left. Now I have a lot of bits and pieces of my former studies, in a lot of cases they come up out of context, but somehow they got in my mind.
With the age I have more and more aversion towards punitiveness and judgmental, statically diagnosing approaches – not because of ego, or because I like my soul caressed and I cannot take any critic, but because they conserve the problem. They make it a hard-shelled ’problem’ instead of a temporary disease, something to understand and cure. Their critical sense is okay - the problem is their irresilient, sometimes even vitriolic manner.
There is individual responsibility. To be an adult, the first thing to admit is that we do have an impact on our lives and environment, and it is important to learn - the earlier the better -, but I think punitiveness is a completely different thing. The evil minimal pair of accountability. Sometimes it's hard to tell things apart and humans are not flawless, so sometimes I find myself acting childish or playing the dumb, but this is also part of the process.