Passion

There is another show on tv that I have been enjoying.  It is Eric McCormick's new show, Perception.  I named this post Passion because we all need to find our passion in life, and the episode I just watched, from about a month ago, had a young man in it who was in college on a football scholarship.  When Eric McCormick's character (who is a college professor but also a schizophrenic - not multiple personality - with some very interesting hallucinations)... anyway, he figures out this kid in his class, who is in college on a football scholarship, has a head injury that keeps him from playing football anymore.  The kid goes back and plays in the next game and injures himself even more severely.  Dr. Pierce (McCormick) asks the kid, "Why would you do this to yourself??"  The kid says that ever since he was small, football has been his life.  Who is he if he can't play football anymore?

Now, I have to back up here.  One of Pierce's hallucinations this episode is a younger version of himself.  This younger version reminds Pierce of the plans and the dreams he had before being diagnosed with schizophrenia.  

Okay, so back to the kid, and the question he poses to Dr. Pierce.  Pierce does not let on to anyone he has schizophrenia because it is so misunderstood, and because he has a helper who keeps him kind of focused and on track so he doesn't lose himself in his hallucinations.  So what does he say to this kid?

He tells the kid that he had dreams and plans, and ended up in a hospital, too.  He thought his life was absolutely over.  The kid asked, "What did you do?"  The answer?  FIND NEW DREAMS.

Find your new passion, or reinvent an old one.  You might have noticed that the last post and this one both deal with new shows with a psychological twist.  My passion when I was going through elementary, junior high, senior high, and college was psychology.  I loved the theories and the whole world of different ideas about people... our motivations, our cycles of growth, our thought patterns... so much more.  I think watching these two shows, I may actually be rediscovering an old passion that I can grab hold to in order to make some order out of this world of mine which, for several years now, but especially since I have been on full disability, has been just a jumbled mass of lists and ideas and piles of barely started projects.  

I want to write a book on MS, and on knowing your own MS.  Psychology may just be the door I have been looking for...

Politics and why I have been away... this time...

Politics.  I really hate them, so until now, I have avoided commenting on the entire election.  I have been seeing arguments for and against each side of the races... local, state, federal.  It amazes me how badly people treat one another in the name of politics.  I see and hear what I thought were perfectly sane people talking like the apocalypse is coming if so and so gets elected... and it doesn't matter what side they are on, because both sides are saying the same thing.  All I know is that life will go on, just as it has before.  The way we as a nation treat other nations, the way other nations treat us, the way we treat each other as individuals... it all comes in waves and circles.  I don't know where this election will leave us as a nation.  I just wish for once we could go back to the days before we began locking our doors, distrusting our neighbors, and hating people we once called friends, all in the name of politics.

I was watching Matthew Perry's new show, Go On, the other night, and there is a character on there who is married and lives not only with his wife, but also with her boyfriend.  When asked how he can be so happy all the time, he explains how he has made up an old town called Harborville.  It has 700 people, and he knows all of them by name.  He goes to Harborville (in his mind) whenever he needs to escape the realities of his life.  There he is happy.  There everyone treats each other with respect.  I think we all need a little Harborville in our lives... and a lot less nonsense.