I really should be doing homework right now, but I should ALWAYS be doing more than I actually do, so I guess I'm used to doing what I'm not supposed to. I'm a bad student! Bad kid! Good thing my parents can't ground me anymore.
I am the official lazy bum of the century. Over spring break, I was sure I had to study for my upcoming chemistry exam. I may have spent an hour or two total...over the nine days I had off...studying chemistry. The rest, oh, I was doing other things. Skiing. Hanging with friends. Being the bum I am at home and eating lots of food and not exercising and singing really loud when I'm home alone. Good times, good times. And reading. I'm pretty good at getting side-tracked by books. I did a little bit of reading on the use of mitochondrial DNA to track ancestry through genetics. Well, obviously DNA is part of genetics. But this mitochondrial DNA is analyzed and I guess one can tell the person's lineage from all the way to the first race of humans that multisected itself. Okay, I know I made that word up, but I felt like using the sect part or whatever, and I couldn't say bisected because bi means two, so I said multi instead. Anyway. Ever heard of the Dobe Ju'hoansi? They are commonly known as the bushmen of Africa, whose ties to the land date back to 100,000 years ago, or even more. They are one of the most discriminated peoples in the world, their way of living being assessed as animalistic and inhuman. Many European explorers went to African and found these people, and when they made a list to report to their superiors the animals they killed to fulfill their missions, they listed the number of male and female Bushmen they massacred...under the ANIMAL LIST!
Doesn't that just give you the warm fuzzies?
Anyway, the bushmen, or Dobe Ju'hoansi (pronounce Doe-bee Joo wah-see) are most definitely human. They are a very special people, because they have been a people for longer than any other group of people in the world. And why is this?
Because, around a hundred thousand years ago, the bushmen living in Africa began an extensive process of adaptive radiation. Small portions of the group would leave and move to other parts of Africa, and then to other parts of the world. In fact, humans eventually occupied all livable parts of the world. And what are we all decendants of? Bushmen. The very people we discriminate and alienate from the spectrum of humanity.
I didn't get through the book--I was almost done with Chapter One! Haha, I have such ADD. But it was fascinating. I intend to finish that book when I have the time, and I'll definitely rant and rave about it when I do so, because that stuff is way cool. I guess the author was, at that point, going to take us through human history as far as emigration goes, and then how the physical changes that we associate with different races occurred and why. And, of course, why it doesn't make any of us more or less human--we still are the same race, as much as we'd like to think that we were beginning the process of evolving into entirely different species. That's just not true. The differences between races are only skin deep.
Oh, and then I read a chapter of Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time," but I didn't get beyond the summary of the history of our understanding of the universe, and while it was interesting, I've already learned that from highschool science, so I haven't gotten to the cool parts yet. I intend to, however, because I want to know why he thinks that time travel is possible! (And there's a higher chance that he's right than most people because he is said to be the most brilliant physicist of our time)
K, so when I got distracted from that book, I started reading Sybil, an absolutely fascinating documentation of a true story about a woman in the 1950's being treated for Dissociative Identity Disorder, or, more commonly known among us normal people as Multiple Personalities Syndrome. I'm sure many have heard of it, especially from the Emmy-award-winning made-for-TV-movie with Sally Field. Oh, man, I have to give kudos to Sally Field for that performance, and for those who have seen it, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. She is absolutely AMAZING. If I could vote for the best actress or actor of all time, I'd vote for her in a heartbeat. Without question.
Anyway, the movie showed a lot, but not nearly as much as the book. And no, I have not finished it yet, but I'm a little over halfway done with it. I intend to finish it soon, though! It's both fascinating and heart-shattering at the same time. Most of all, however, is that by reading this book, I have learned a lot about myself and people--and, as corny as it sounds, life.
First of all, I'd like to say that each and every one of us dissociates. Just like Sybil. Except not nearly to the extreme. Ever had a bad day and not wanted to deal with it, so you turned on the T.V. and became as engrossed as you could with whatever shitty show was on just so you wouldn't have to think about the fact that you are now 2,000 dollars in debt because you totaled your brand new, uninsured car? Okay, I know it would be rare to find someone who's gone through that exact scenario, but we can all relate to that need to escape. And that sometimes we don’t deal with what we must because it’s too painful or annoying or emotionally draining to do so. That’s dissociation! Every time you move on to think of something else–for the purpose of not dealing with something else–you are dissociating.

We all go through trauma. Even the richest, most sheltered, and pampered person in the universe with a thousand people in love with her and everything she could ever dream of goes through instances of discomfort, or trauma. We all react to these in our own ways. I’m sure we could each and every one of us think of times that were horrific and painful for us. If we are exceptionally self-aware, we could pinpoint the ways in which we reacted to these situations. A lot of the times, we have dissociated–tried to think of something else, done something to distract us from the pain we were enduring.

Now, there’s the story of Sybil. I don’t really want to give away too much or go into too much detail, because her story–as I said before–is so incredibly sad. Let’s just say that lots of children are abused, but not in the way Sybil was. As a child, she endured physical, emotional, and sexual abuse with immeasurable psychological impacts. Not only was this abuse painful and nerve-wracking, and, not to mention, totally isolating for a vulnerable child to endure from her very own mother, it was life threatening. Three times–no less than THREE TIMES did her mother go so overboard that Sybil found herself inches away from death. When Sybil saw a gynecologist as a teen, she had such extensive amounts of scar tissue in her sexual organs that the doctor had to tell her she would never bear children.

I don’t know if it’s realistic to expect anyone to be able to understand what that child went through. But let’s just say that whatever defense mechanisms she used would have to be used heavily in order to keep her from breaking. She used several defense mechanisms. The very first one that comes to my mind when thinking about her childhood is fantasy; Sybil experienced such devastating disapproval from her mother that she hated herself, and would fantasize what it would be like to be a good person worthy of approval. She named the character she played in her head Vicky. She also used suppression; by the time Sybil was two and a half, she had learned not to cry, ever, no matter how much pain she was going through. Her mother would severely harm her when she did, so she quickly suppressed her urges to cry so that simply wouldn’t take place.

But this is Sybil we’re talking about. So what defense mechanism did she utilize to the extreme? Dissociation, that’s right! Sybil had one friend in the world, and that was her grandmother, who lived upstairs in her house and loved her very much. When she made pictures that her mother wasn’t proud of her for, her grandmother would hang them up in her kitchen and tell Sybil how talented she was. She could play games with her, and she wouldn’t hurt her. Her mother rarely let her see her, but those moments with her grandmother were what kept her alive to the age of eight. When she was eight, however, her grandmother died. And that’s when Sybil dissociated. Her mother’s fury was too much for her; thus came the first extreme dissociation. Not only did she want to focus on different parts of herself, different needs, different angers, and different discomforts, but she wanted to remember only certain parts of her life at a given time.

That’s the point in time in which she started blacking out. She would never know what happened with time. She’d simply say to herself "Time is funny." One day, she came to consciousness in a fifth grade classroom when she was sure she was in third grade, only to find that her classmates were with her and appeared to be bigger. In fact, so did she. She was terrified, and had no idea where the last two years had gone. She had no idea why she had the friends she did, where she had bought the coat she was wearing, or who had arranged her once childish room into the now more grown up room. People spoke with her about stuff she had done in the past two years, and she couldn’t remember doing or experiencing them.

What she didn’t know was that she couldn’t remember because she had dissociated. For an entire two years, a different consciousness bore the burdens of abuse, neglect, disapproval, and an overwhelming loneliness, anger, and hate. She didn’t know that this became its own separate identity and named itself Peggy, the name her mother called her when she liked her. She didn’t know that Peggy had taken on many traits of her psyche for which she no longer had possession of in the state of Sybil, and that she wouldn’t have possession of them for over thirty years.

Sybil would eventually develop fifteen identities, or personalities, in addition to her "waking self" identity, Sybil. Thus, sixteen total personalities. There ended up being two Peggys..Peggy Lou and Peggy Ann. Vicky, the girl she’d fantasized becoming, became one of her personalities. Then, there was Marcia, Vanessa, Mary, Helen, Clara, Sybil Ann, The Blonde, Mike, Sid, Nancy Lou Ann, Marjorie and Ruth. Did I get ‘em all? I think so...I counted sixteen. Yay!
Needless to say, Sybil couldn’t exactly live a normal life. Amazingly, she made her way through college to a master’s level in art, and then worked a great amount of time to be able to pay for psychotherapy so she could figure out why she blacked out so often, and if it was curable. She would later go through eleven years of psychotherapy.

So, my main point here. I know no one is actually reading this cuz it is such a massive rant, but I love rambling; it’s my outlet! My main point is what this says about people and life. First, I’d like to point out some of the characteristics of her condition. Number one is how knowledge and talents were distributed among different personalities. With different traits of her personalities and corners of her consciousness, she carried different memories, different abilities, and...as I said, different talents! I mean, that’s big! Some of her personalities were okay at piano, but Vanessa (one of the personalities) was an AWESOME pianist. Different personalities experienced different health conditions, namely different...uh...symptoms associated with menstruating, where Peggy experienced none, but Mary was totally crippled by tremendous pain, nausea, and intestinal discomfort.

So what does this say about us? I’m sure a lot of health problems are physical, but how many of them really are, and how many of them are psychological? Is it a genetically inherited trait to have severe menstrual cramps, or is a psychological burden that elicits such discomfort?

What truly determines our innate abilities? I read in "A User’s Guide to the Brain" that our brain has an amazing amount of ability that we don’t even tap into. Every time we make an intellectual connection, which is associated with intelligence (putting A and B together) it’s because of two or more neurons inside of the brain making an electrical connection to one-another. Sort of like when you notice: wow, the meaning of nice and kind are the same. That’s a connection. Know how many possible connections the human brain can make? Forty quadrillion. For those of you who don’t know, there are fifteen zeros in one quadrillion. Therefore, forty quadrillion written out would look like this: 40,000,000,000,000,000. That’s how many connections we could make to reach the threshold of connections our brains can make! I don’t know what the average amount of connections a brilliant person makes in a lifetime, but I’m pretty sure it’s very, very far from even being to half that.

Also, keep in mind that a connection is very special in that it is not like–hmm, how do I explain this? One might think that we have a little packet in our brain that is assigned to remember a specific fact, a word, a number, a color, a memory. But here’s the thing. As a human who knows the orders of magnitude up to quadrillion at this point, I could technically count to 999 quadrillion. I mean, I probably don’t have enough time in my life to actually do that, but it would be a feasible task for my brain. This doesn’t mean that that would take up all forty quadrillion of my possible connections. No, not at all. In fact, it would take up so much less than that, it’s mind boggling. The thing is that numbers are systematic. We learn the numbers one through ten, then we learn every number in tens up to a hundred, then thousands, then millions, then hundred millions, then billions, then trillions, then quadrillions. That’s all we have to learn is how the system works. When we’re counting, we’re not just going from neuron to neuron that stores the understanding of the exact number we’re on. We’re making connections in our brain. We simply put the orders of magnitude together with the numbers we learned (1-10) and then...viola! That’s why my brain has the ability to count to 999 quadrillion.

So, that’s why forty quadrillion possible connections is absolutely amazing. It’s such an ability that we will never even reach. I know for a fact that there are genetic factors in intelligence, but considering that we don’t ever reach our potential, what determines the maximum performance we ever reach? As portrayed by Sybil’s story, different anxieties, pains, or lacks thereof could result in different performances. What does that mean for us? If we deal with psychological issues in certain ways, does that mean, then, that we have a certain amount of control over our performance beyond an obvious genetic barrier?

Next, our society puts a constant pressure on us to be optimistic. This, however, is not nice. At least I don’t think it is. Why? Because people tell us to be happy and smiley when the glass is half full. Why doesn’t this work? Well, since Sybil is what we’re talking about, let’s talk about Sybil. I’m sure that it was less than half of her life that she was actually going through extreme trauma. Her response was to dissociate from it so she could live normally. That’s what would be expected of us; if you can’t be in the moment and be happy, dissociate from it. Think happy thoughts! Everything will be okay. So what’s the problem with that? Everything. Because what really hurts us more than anything is the defense mechanisms we use to protect ourselves. Ironic, don’t you think? Sybil couldn’t live a normal life. She isolated herself from the ability to have human relationships, which was what she really needed after having no love at all from her home.

So my point? NOT FAIR! Nobody can tell you that you don’t have the right to stay in touch with who you are. If the glass is half full and half empty, we have the right to be happy about the part that’s full and sad about the part that’s not. We have the right to seek a way in which to fill it. If we sit there and pretend that we’re oh-so-happy that the glass is full and deny ourselves the right to feel the emptiness of half the glass, it will remain that way and won’t improve.

So! It is AWESOME to be happy. But happiness isn’t happiness if it’s not real, if it’s forced. Everyone should seek happiness, but everyone should be realistic and approach life in such a way that they can be truly alive–the farther we disconnect ourselves from reality, the less we can experience happiness! So it’s, again, an irony.

I want to be happy! So how am I gonna do that? I’m gonna get to know myself, and focus on what I’m happy about and what I’m sad about, and try to fill myself up to the top! Yup, that’s how I’m gonna do it...
(And yes, I am aware that that was a way too long ass rant. Sorry!)