joey999,
One of the things that I love about Thunders is posters like you bro.
A forum provides a venue for the free flow of information, ideas and concepts whereby everyone can have an opinion.
Unfortunately not all forums are of high quality and the quality is always a function of management (mods) and the cooperation of the members.
The very best members are able to discuss even the most controversial topics in an intelligent and respectful way without letting their egos get in the way or flaming anybody to make themselves feel superior or smarter.
Your post is a well written one and a shining example that I wish more people would follow when they don’t agree with others.
I therefore don’t consider your post as confrontational but more as an attempt to stimulate interesting debate.
So let me address your concerns here because I think it deserves a thoughtful answer:
Often times when we are going through what we might consider to be difficult times, we see our problems framed in the setting of whatever our values and/or beliefs are; meaning that the pain or frustration we encounter along the way is relative to how much value we place on that particular issue based on what we have already experienced or learned in life. We might even develop these values based on the people we know and what they may have encountered in the past. e.g. a spoiled rich "daddy’s little girl" named Lisa who never had a days worry in her life breaks her nail and thinks its the end of the world, throwing temper tantrums and threatening to sue everyone.
A poor working class Jane loses a whole finger or thumb in a work related accident and despite being visibly shaken/upset still manages to react less dramatically and less emotionally than princess Lisa, she is calm and poised by the time they rush her to the hospital in an attempt to sew it back on. (Ok maybe a bad analogy or gross exaggeration but you get my basic drift here)
My dialogue about getting things in perspective is an attempt to narrow that gap.
For about 2 years, as a result of my nose, I went all to hell, lost weight from not eating and began ruining my health and going out of my mind.
You see "I" thought it was the end of the world when my nose was butchered and I was under psychiatric care and was taking lithium and other anti- depressants. I would hardly talk to anyone and had some serious thoughts about murdering that surgeon but knew that taking a life was not the solution. Through all this I was never so depressed as to think of suicide but I understood how one might arrive at those thoughts.
I knew that the only physical solution was to find a good reconstructive surgeon and that would be the only solution as far as the "physical" is concerned. I didn’t have health insurance so I went out of my way to get a job with health benefits just so I can have this operation. Like I said before I was young and in retrospect I needed to go through this bad experience to become the person I am today. Until the time that I found this surgeon I needed to get my mind in the proper frame because I was making things harder on myself than they actually needed to be; I therefore read books about psychology, philosophy, math, physics and I fed my mind in an attempt to keep it busy and stop it from drifting into depression.
I addressed the "mental" aspect of this problem and learned more about who I really am.
I began to see that all we really are minds encased within a shell. A shell that we must live with for the rest of our lives; to that extent, a face, a penis, our height, our bodies etc etc are physical extensions of ourselves but they are not the real person that resides inside but merely "the shell" It so easy to make that powerful association because we tend to identify how we look with who we are. The mind and body as a whole unit and integrated as one. I have the advantage over others of knowing what its like to be ugly and what its like to be handsome. This allows me to be very sensitive to other people and their physical deficiencies, image problems or health problems. i.e I feel I have a more balanced outlook as a result of my horrible expereince and yet…. in the end it was only a nose that needed to be fixed.
Can we alter these shells? Yes in some cases we can successfully and in others we can only learn to live with the image and look inwards for strength. Look how productive a guy like Stephen Hawking is despite his physical condtion. If there is an actual solution or even hope for a solution then we never give up and keep trying for that solution.
A broken nose to me is not the end of the world, these things can be fixed with a high degree of success. Its ok to mourn or cry because lord knows I did plenty of that when I was butchered but I grew spiritually as a person inside and its then that I realized that something positive came from that nightmare and I began to see things in a better perspective. A perspective that I may have never seen if I had not suffered through what I had suffered through.
I guess what I’m more or less saying is be thankful if you have your health and take inventory of the world around you and you realize that there are people out there that cannot even fix their problems. justlearning should feel comfort in knowing that a very superficial problem such as a broken nose has a solution and the sooner justlearning embarks on that path to finding a good surgeon and getting into the proper frame of mind, the sooner he will change his life and his troubled mind for the better. I hope that by posting my experience, I have brought justlearning some level of comfort and the understanding and fortitude to deal with his problem.
This was the reconstructive surgeon who restored me to a normal appearance:
http://www.drconstantian.com/