Nov 1 2024

And I am done with medical hospitals.

Why, you may well ask? They fired me. I saw the surgeon a couple of days ago along with the x-rays of the new bone I’ve grown and he said that’s a cure, my hip is no longer broken. I thanked him for his care and walked away having arrived on a stretcher. I said I was going to walk out of there and I did.

It was during the 5 months of in-patient care that I looked at a few things in my life, I mean what the heck. I was offered by a victims of crime government agency $6,000.00 privatised psychotherapy for example, so I did a compare and contrast with the free REBT I was trained in by my now deceased friend Will Ross. I chose to stick with evidence based psychology rather than get into self-downing that I’m not mindful enough and I need to pay someone to remind me that I’m a loser, that my mind doesn’t work. I mean ok, all minds wander into self made narratives, memories of the past, thoughts and concerns for the future. In art that’s called the creative process, and we deal with it as a distraction by working from observation as a place to start when we draw, for example, and allowing for possibilities to enter into the work, changing what we initially had in mind. Picasso said we start with an idea: “An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought. ”

In REBT the same thing takes place, we deal with the loss of say, a limb, (I lost 2) as best we can, then ignore it and focus on what satisfactions are still left to us. The purpose of life is satisfaction, ignoring shit is our superpower.

In mindfulness we are taught there is no satisfaction in our memory (of the abuse event) or concerns for the future (possible abuse events) our only use to ourselves is being in the now. So therefore, our basic mental functioning is sick, and needs to be healed. When I suggested to the therapist that this definition is an abuse of the client and a common cult recruitment technique used to extract money from the vulnerable in transition, she responded with a passionate word salad in defence of her obvious religious dogma.

When I drive a car, I need to be in the past: my driver training, the present: alert to danger aka situational awareness, and the future: what’s up ahead I need to avoid. If I’m planning my next painting while I drive, or thinking about the creatures that hurt me, I find myself in the next town very often, but my mind doesn’t wander to the point of driving off the road, because based on evidence I’m still on the road, my mind can do 2 things at once. Artists are trained to carry a sketchbook, to stop the car and make notes of the ideas that come to the wandering mind. REBT says to deal with the uncomfortable thoughts then ignore them and focus on satisfactions, like getting to my destination. Mindfulness says you are a loser for having an active mind and this must be stopped fascistically: “On the other hand, a full mind means you’re not rooted in the present moment. It’s the nature of the mind to think, analyze, and figure things out. That’s its job. That means that left to its own devices, the mind will constantly seek out new stimuli, new things to think about, and new ways to check out from reality.” In the Yoga and Tibetan Buddhism I studied, this meant I needed to give them more money to get ‘fixed’.

In professional art school it means to inform your work with experiences like trauma and pain. In the creative writing courses those mental narratives meant you were composing your next essay or book, so write them down because your mind and what it creates is of value. In mindfulness therapy (and in yoga) it is something to be killed ruthlessly so the focus is only on the munnee hunnee technique of putting you down. Nice nazis essentially who make 200 grand a year saying you are fundamentally broken. Victim blaming.

I use a handy form that explores the 3 major musts, expanding on Epiticus’s teaching of the concepts of unconditional self-acceptance, unconditional other-acceptance, and unconditional life-acceptance.

So I saved the taxpayer some money and fired the nice nazi lady, continuing to use the handy REBT form to deal with any ptsd stuff that invariably takes place. The dreams were awful but once off narcotic pain meds they cleared up. Correlation implying causation?

I like that Epiticus was a disabled slave

and didn’t let that stop him: “Epictetus obtained his freedom sometime after the death of Nero in AD 68,[17] and he began to teach philosophy in Rome. Around AD 93, when the Roman emperor Domitian banished all philosophers from the city,[18] Epictetus moved to Nicopolis in Epirus, Greece, where he founded a school of philosophy.[19] “

During my time in care dealing with a new disability, I took a look at my slavery. Lifelong financial slavery. Now living on my protected pension I have “freedom from hard labour and above all freedom from the continual anxiety that runs through ordinary people’s life — loss of employ, loss of customers, even loss of liberty” — Patrick O’Brian.

I decided that due to disability it was no longer in my best interests to continue to pay off my debt, invoking my medical right to walk away from it preserving my income for the next inevitable life event, like car repair for example or another expensive hospital stay. This current stay had maxed out my credit cards and used up my pension income. A bankruptcy trustee I consulted advised me that I didn’t have to file and to simply let the creditors know there had been a medical issue and send the doctors note and they would write it off. So I did, walking away from slavery. Just like that.

So I used my time in care to consult physiotherapists, medical experts, psychotherapists, and financial experts. They all fired me.

Mischief managed.

Now, where was I?

Ahh yes, nasty ruminating and not once being here now