This is the third chapter of Sharon’s Playing to an Inside Straight book that she never finished about her health journey . See the other entries in the category Sharon.
KING OF CLUBS
I thought that the King of Clubs would be a good card to represent what we have to pay homage to or acknowledge about our environment. In history, kings have been known for their capriciousness, for their violence, and for their benevolence. I thought that clubs was an appropriate suit because if you don’t acknowledge your environment, you end up getting hit over the head with it.
What do I mean by environment? The time and place that you are born into. Your family, culture, and religion. Any and all social and economic forces in your life that will impact your ability to play your hand out the way you want to. In the first chapter we addressed Nature. Now we are addressing Nurture. But Father Nurture doesn’t leave your life when you turn eighteen. Perhaps your youth is when, like Mother Nature, he has the greatest effect; but, also like Mother Nature who surprises us with those pesky DNA codes that may express themselves at unpredictable times, Father Nurture may suddenly change the rules of the game and leave us hitting our heads against the card table.
The rules get changed overnight when we get involved in a war, when the economy takes an unpredicted upswing or a dive, when we get married or get sick, when we move to a different country or a part of our country that is radically different from the one we grew up in, or when a natural disaster hits. I’m sure you can come up with a few others. The point is, that in reality, most of our life is pretty uncertain. Like a poker game. The Chinese say that there are a number of things that affect one’s life and in this order: fate, luck, feng shui, virtue, and education. The first two we don’t have any control over. Feng shui translates as “wind and water” and is the Chinese system for seeking harmony in one’s life and therefore covers a lot of ground. But it, along with one’s virtue and education, can always be increased by personal effort. And with regards to fate and luck, it should be remembered that none of us really know what our fate is or how lucky we are. That’s to be left to the biographers. So we always have to act as if things aren’t as bad as they seem. In other words, don’t be quick to consign yourself to a fate which for all you know, the universe isn’t even thinking about. On the other hand, remember not to blame yourself for everything that goes wrong. Only if you really caused something bad to happen, take responsibility, correct the situation, and then forgive yourself and move on, but remember to take away a life lesson.
Like the Queen of Hearts, the King of Clubs represents the limitations in our life. But these limitations have more to do with obstacles we may encounter. They are not hard-wired like our DNA. They’re more like software. And remember, one can change software. At least to what’s out there and available.
Case in point. I grew up in California, with both of my parents from the conservative Midwest. Now, I am not talking about politics, but a way of approaching change. The, I’ve done it this way for fifty years and I’m going to do it the same way for the next fifty years mentality. My parents aren’t really that bad. But you get the point. And like for many people I’ve met in life, something really new is very threatening. On top of that, I majored in chemistry in college. So one could say that I was seriously indoctrinated in the Western way of thinking.
Then I find out that I have this disease, that, back in the 80’s, half of the doctors didn’t believe was real, and the other half just wanted to throw anti-depressants at. Now I’m not against anti-depressants across the boards, but I don’t think that they should be a knee-jerk reaction, either. Some of them change your brain chemistry for up to a year after you have stopped taking them! That’s serious messing with your body. Also I had noticed over my short lifetime that I had the bizarre reactions to common drugs. If you’re familiar with the PDR (Physician’s Desk Reference) then you know about the section under each drug that talks about possible side effects and frequency of occurrence in the population. I was always ending up in the ten percent category. That’s not ten percent per se of the population, but that only ten percent of the people who experience side effects will have that particular one. I’m not sure that it’s a one-to-one correlation, but type B blood is about ten percent of the population of the US. And guess what, for some reason that I have yet to fathom, nobody correlates drug efficacy and reactions to blood types.
Now we know blood type matters in transfusions and organ transplants, why hasn’t it occurred to anybody in medical or pharmaceutical research that blood type is the simplest and first thing that they should be correlating? Of course, this is the same brain trust that on the one hand in the 60’s were arguing that there were big differences between men and women and on the other hand only doing drug research on men because, of course, there shouldn’t be any difference between men and women. Let me go on record here and say that scientists on the whole have proven to me that, contrary to public relation hype, they are no brighter than the average population. I know. I went to graduate school and I read the journal articles and I met a lot of them. Some of them are as promised. A lot more of them aren’t.
But back to the case. So there I was, not really wanting to experiment with anti-depressants as a first recourse, when I have a student recommend an acupuncturist to me. Now I had always felt that anything that had been around a couple of thousand years probably had some validity to it. But I didn’t have a clue as how to find an acupuncturist, let alone the radically new approach to healing I was going to have to deal with. Whereas Western medicine deals primarily with treating symptoms, Oriental medicine deals with underlying causes. Which means two things. First, you have to deal with the symptoms longer, and second, it usually takes longer to feel better. But when you feel better, it is a lot different than when you feel better from Western medicine. I rarely take antibiotics anymore. When I do, they’re for the most part the ones that occur naturally in plants and are in an herbal formulation. I used to get over something on antibiotics, but I would still feel bad for weeks after. Now when I am well, I am really well again. Not just sorta’ well.
There are times when one needs the more potent forms of antibiotics from Western medicine and I don’t want to discourage someone from using them. The best way to remember this is that Western medicine is great for a crisis. But Oriental medicine is great for getting your body into harmony so that the crisis doesn’t happen in the first place. Because of Pasteur, Western medicine decided that the germ was everything. They are only now starting to rethink that. Oriental medicine has believed for years that the germ is necessary, but not sufficient. If a person’s body is in harmony, it can fight off getting a great number of pathogens. Remember the feng shui? Harmony in body, mind, and heart. Harmony in work. Harmony in relationships. And harmony in home. You can affect your environment and therefore you can affect your health.
So I went to the acupuncturist and I have greatly healed my health. But the only person who never thought I was crazy or gave me grief about it, was my husband. My family gave me grief. My husband’s family gave me sidelong glances. And my friends politely ignored me. And I don’t know if I would have tried something so alien to my world view if I hadn’t been so sick. But I was born into a time and a place where it had become legal and available. The King of Clubs. Maybe if I had been born in China, the disharmonies would have been treated much earlier and I wouldn’t have lost almost two decades of my life to this illness. But then I wouldn’t have grown up with freedom. I wouldn’t be the me that I know and I certainly would not be writing this. A different hand, a different outcome. And I could have ignored the opportunity to try acupuncture, and I firmly believe, if I were a betting person, that I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be dead.
Environment is not a determined path, it is a set of choices. There is always a choice. Not choosing is also a choice. And death, as one of my philosophy professors in college would say, makes the choices important. If one has all the time in the world, one can quite literally, put things off indefinitely. But we do die and our choices do matter.
So far it seems to me that I have focused on the negative nature of the King of Clubs, and I would like to point out that obstacles are also usually opportunities, though they don’t seem so at the time. Or as Walt Kelly’s Pogo once said, “We are confronted by insurmountable opportunities.” It is good to remember that, when you think that you can’t possibly do something. How do you know, if you don’t try? The only failure in life, is not trying. Besides, I’ll let you in on a little secret: there are no failure police. No one is really watching you because they’re all too busy trying not to fail themselves.
And if someone does discover that you’re doing something that they’d never do and gives you grief about it like my parents gave me grief about acupuncture, put cotton in your ears and ignore them. And if that doesn’t work, temporarily eliminate them from your life. Make like Marco Polo, imagine that you’ve gone to China and there are no telephones or any communication faster than a camel. It’s what my husband and I decided to do when I was the most sick. It was me or them, and I voted for me. We changed our phone number and we took letters we received and put them, unopened, in a journey file. We made like Marco Polo. I know people died, but I didn’t.
Sometimes there is a middle ground in life. Sometimes there isn’t. But if the King of Clubs has handed you a very dysfunctional family, it is not written in stone that you have to have them in your life. That does not mean that you can’t pray for them. It doesn’t even mean that you can’t forgive them in an abstract way. But please understand that forgiveness is really predicated on somebody who has wronged you atoning for the wrong and asking for your forgiveness. This has been greatly blurred by religious and therapists and a true misunderstanding of what forgiveness really is. On the other hand, don’t waste your time and energy being angry and wanting revenge. That’s not healthy, either. But you know what I discovered? If I didn’t have my family in my life, I didn’t have to stay angry to protect myself from the abuse. Forgiving someone in the abstract does not mean having to bring them back into your life. If they won’t acknowledge past abuse, what makes you think they’re going to stop abusing you in the present? This is an example of what I mean about paying homage to the King of Clubs. If you’ve been handed a particularly toxic family that interferes with you playing your hand the best way possible, acknowledge it to yourself and remove them from your life. Or the King of Clubs will beat you over your head with it.
And there may be a middle ground or coping strategies. I now see my family now and then. But I try to have my husband along. This does two things. One, it validates the abuse for me if it happens. Two, it seems to prevent the abuse to begin with. But I have no problem with disappearing for long stretches of time from either one of my parent’s lives. I honestly wish that it could have been different. But at some point you have to accept that people are so wounded, that you can’t help them and all you’re going to do is get more wounded yourself if you continue to try dealing with them. Not all people are willing to straighten their lives out. Individuals and therapists are quick to extol the virtues of families that have all gotten their acts together at the same time. But that doesn’t and won’t happen for everyone. And that’s okay. Not great, but okay. If that’s your hand, my advice is just play it the best way you can. You can only change you. And it’s enough of a burden to play your hand well, let alone take on the burden of trying to get someone else to play their hand better. It’s a good way, metaphorically, to get shot.
Musings of a Restless Mind 