There is a great quote by the American science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin: “There’s a point, around the age of 20, when you have to choose whether to be like everyone else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”
Everyone in life is on different timelines, having different talents with different advantages or disadvantages. Kudos to Le Guin to figure out this truth at 20.
I am incredibly pleased with myself to have started to figure this out at 54, my current age. That is not the point of writing my column around a quote by a writer I have only a vague awareness of.
My point is to voice the potential for a personal, external and internal freedom, which is possible from celebrating your “peculiarities” as qualities which should be encouraged and admired, not thought of as the opposite.
I think the reason I am seeing this concept for the first time more than a half century into my life is the treatment I have had the particularly good fortune of going through to address my substance addiction and various mental health hurdles while, mostly, staying in the qathet region.
There is a clarity of consciousness experienced when you do not drink until oblivion nightly or have to ease an indescribable psychic pain with heroin or the misuse of prescription drugs. When thinking false and limiting thoughts caused by complex imbalances in the neural networks in your brain, it is difficult to see the benefits of anything, especially the odd parts of yourself as a benefit rather than a nagging hindrance.
Life in 2024 carries its own set of challenges. For example, which reality is real, and which one is a falsehood thought up in the deepest and darkest corners of the internet?
Is a large part of what I was taught in the 1970s and 1980s actually wrong, especially the parts in the history- and sociology-centred textbooks?
Those are questions for another time. I can only speak from my own experience to try to tell the truth as best as I can interpret it.
One of the most exciting benefits of relief from addiction and behavioural or chemical dependency problems for me is, instead of incessantly trying to hammer that square peg into a round hole, it turns out that it’s a better idea to take your hammer and smash the concept that you are supposed to be a certain way into a million little pieces.
Maybe not living up to societal expectations is a major flaw in the systems which try to govern us, not something wrong with your unique and beautiful body or soul.
Robert Skender is a qathet region freelance writer and health commentator who contributes a regular column for the Peak.
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