We normally assume that the truth is valuable. Bad news? At the very most, veil it, step lightly around it. Best, of course, to tackle it head on. And, on no account, lie.
This is especially true when it comes to serious medical matters, your health. How can you handle problems you remain ignorant of, or worse, have been misled about? Even if the consequences are very serious, surely it must be better to know them and to be able to plan for them. You can't even begin to accept and come to terms with something until you know what it is. And knowing everything you can know about it will do you far more good than harm.
I may have found an exception to this.
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My doctor had just a touch of professional pride when he told me the news.
"If I did a brain scan, I know already what I'd find. That one small area would be completely dark. There wouldn't be any activity there at all."
Interesting to find that a tiny part of one's brain isn't there. Or is unplugged. At any rate, not functional. A structural defect. Not treatable; doesn't respond to medication and surgery is nowhere near sophisticated enough yet to address problems on this scale.
We had been doing a little testing with drugs. Dexedrine, to be specific. One of those drugs: an amphetamine. Running the dose up and up until I was taking amounts that should have had me walking up the wall and over the ceiling. But it had no effect on the way I felt. I couldn't sleep, true; neither could I piss with any facility (that last side effect was what prevented us from upping the dose indefinitely). No effect on mood at all, though. As far as that went, I might as well have been taking capsules filled with flour.
It didn't surprise me much. Alcohol had never affected my mood either, and I had a massive tolerance for it until I realized it was expensive and pointless to drink. The morphine I had been given as local anesthetic in minor surgical procedures would wear off quickly and again, zero effect on my mood. I had tried marijuana once or twice: again, nothing, though I had written it off to inexperience and quality problems.
"You would have made a great addict," the doctor noted wryly. "Except that you aren't affected by drugs."
Not as much of a paradox as it seems. He explained. Feelings of self-satisfaction and accomplishment are regulated, apparently, by a specific series of dopamine receptors in the brain. These receptors are also affected by many common prescription and recreational drugs, legal and illegal. If they are compromised, dulled, you're neatly set up for addiction. You'll feel compelled to try things that are stronger and stronger, just to get the sensations other people get in the average day to day.
Or of course, if the receptors aren't working at all -- you won't have that temptation, because no matter what you do, you won't be feeling any response. It doesn't matter how hard you mash the buttons if someone has cut the wires. Lucky me!
I knew there had to be a catch.
And of course, there is. I was aware of it before the doctor explained. It isn't just drugs that trigger these sensations. It's life. Or it's supposed to be. Nearly all of our actions are overdetermined, of course. We have several reasons for most of the things we do. For instance, we may do a good job at work because we need to maintain a reputation, we have to be sure we aren't going to get fired, a fellow worker is depending on us, we are living up to our own self-image, it's just plain habit.... but also because doing a good job makes us feel good. A sense of accomplishment, at both accomplishing in and of itself and having others recognize what you have done. People get a lot out of that.
Or so I've been told. Fascinating, that a few cells can make such a difference.
The condition is known as Reward Deficiency Syndrome (RDS), the doctor said. It's inherited, and usually treated with the same therapies as are employed for adult ADD, but since it isn't ADD, and isn't depression, it rather falls through the cracks. And since it isn't a chemical imbalance or a failing in thought patterns but a physical defect, the usefulness of any drug-based treatment is very limited.
The most irritating thing about this malfunction is that the effect isn't balanced. No joy at success might be tolerable if one didn't care about failure either. Unfortunately, the ability to be depressed at failure is located elsewhere and is usually unaffected. When winning is a zero and losing remains a negative, motivation suffers. You're not going to come out on the plus side whatever happens.
It explained quite a bit. My father's odd behaviour, for one thing. By all reasonable and rational standards of judgement, my father was a stunning success at life. He was born in 1902 or 1903 -- the years on his papers vary, since he lied about his age to join the army and wasn't consistent in back-fiddling dates afterward. Having joined at 14 to see the world, he had fought at the Somme, Passchendaele, and Vimy Ridge, and was seriously wounded, being discharged from the army at 16 classified permanently disabled. On returning to Canada, after surviving the 1919 flu epidemic, he had contracted spinal tuberculosis and had spent years in hospitals. In spite of this, and an education that had ended at grade 5, he became an officer in the Canadian Hydrographic Service, nursing the ancient triple-expansion steam engines of the survey ship William J. Stewart as she puttered up and down the eight thousand miles of the BC coast, drawing maps and finding rocks (sometimes by hitting them) in the days before satellites. Being a government ship, the Stewart was so obsolete it was almost funny: they wouldn't convert her from coal to oil until the last coaling wharf at Union Bay was torn down, and the triple-expansion piston steam engines, with their exposed couplings, would take off a limb in the blink of an eye if you slipped while servicing them in a storm. Pretty -- all stainless steel, enamel, and brass -- but deadly. The boilers were old too, the "Scotch" or fire-tube type, the kind that blow the bottom of the ship out if they burst. In heavy weather, they had to make sure that the ship didn't stay keeled over on one side for too long: if the boiler plates had no water behind them, the furnace heat might weaken them to the point they ruptured and blew the ship up. A job where thinking about the possible downside of any and every of your actions paid handsome dividends, in other words.
By the way, if any of you are ever up around Ucluelet, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, the Stewart is still there. She's enjoying a new life as the Canadian Princess, damn silly name, a permanently moored sport fishing base vessel.
Anyway, you would think that someone with a record like my father's would have had a fairly good opinion of himself. And you would think that this would have been more than justified. But he didn't. He spent the latter end of his life acting as if someone had stolen his cookies. Sulky, surly.... cheated. A perfectly intolerable person to be around. When feeling charitable, I wrote it off to his war experience. Surviving Passchendaele, where 350,000 were killed, 40,000 or so so comprehensively that their bodies were never recovered, is sufficient excuse for almost anything short of an axe murder. There was PTSD, of course, he could hardly have avoided it, but I now think the main problem was RDS. Everyone was telling him what a winner he was, but he didn't feel it. He couldn't. I expect he just felt mocked, because he was supposed to be feeling great about everything he had done and he wasn't. Couldn't. No one around to explain to him in those days, of course.
I can't say I like him any better because of this realization. I have exactly one positive memory of him. He gave me some money once to buy some books I wanted. Apart from that, he was a petty bully and a complete jerk, though again, to be fair, he treated my mother very well. If he came back to life and phoned me, I'd probably hang up on him. But I'd tell him about RDS first. Then we'd be even for those books.
It explained quite a bit about my own life too, though one should never seize upon a single factor like this as the key to everything. In particular, what one could call the absentmindedness of it all, and my accompanying meta-anxiety. I tried to express the feeling to my doctor by saying, "I'm worried that I'm not more worried." What I meant was that I should really do something about the future while I'm still young enough to have something describable as a future. My family is long-lived, but even so, one can take procrastination too far. The doctor didn't understand what I was talking about. I was confusing him, he said.
You see, if you lack the hardware to enjoy your own accomplishments, you will be spending your time in one of two ways. The first is working for others and making them feel good, often as they pretend, or more commonly simply allow it to be assumed, that the work you did for them is their own creation. The second is drifting, occupying yourself half-doing whatever comes along while you wait for time and your body to make the decisions for you, rather like the older waiter in Hemingway's story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" -- though with all his nada, nada, that fellow has always struck me as something of a drama queen.
I remember through the years all the people who tried to convince me that Making It and Getting There were important. Some of my earliest and most amusing interactions were with high school physical education teachers. Defiance they could handle. After all, they were teaching teenagers. Polite incomprehension floored them. Yes, sir, I can see that there are two teams and a ball and a goal. No, sir, it does not matter to me. My team will lose? Excuse me, sir, my team is not a concept that has any meaning for me. Besides, both I and the team are agreed that they are better off without me. I know you think this rope or this ramp or this run is a challenge. I do not feel challenged, in fact I do not feel anything other than a vague annoyance, so thank you, I will sit this one out. I will come in last? Why does that matter?
They usually went away after a while, shaking their heads. A few were more of a nuisance. I eventually procured a copy of the School Act and pointed out to the administration that according to the law, physical education was not a compulsory class. I suppose that means that I "won," but again, it didn't feel that way. It was just common sense.
In all this time, I do not recall ever wanting to be anything "when I grew up." What are commonly thought of as the rites of passage into adulthood -- I would say I ignored them, but that's far too active a verb. They just didn't exist. No graduation (they eventually mailed me something that I've since lost); no learning to drive (I didn't want to go anywhere the buses didn't run, or live anywhere that didn't have a working transit system). Instead, I spent some time on the lab crew at our high school, and managed to poison myself, accidentally but quite seriously. Heavy metals, probably. I was doing something impudent with manganese salts. And chromium. And lead. At least I think that's what happened. Memories are a bit hazy, and whatever the episode was, it left no permanent mark as evidence.
I spent the next two years ill in my bedroom, reading a few hundred Penguin Classics. Then, a while living here and there, on disability. And finally, back to university, since the tiny Asian Studies department at the local school was so informal that the classes managed to hold my interest without triggering my reflex against anything "team"-like. I found I had a certain faculty putting ideas together, in any field that was free of math, and began winning scholarships and skipping the ceremonies. Very busy, you see. Seven or eight years of that, a transfer to another school, some time in Taiwan and Japan, and I had a doctorate. Won a few awards. Whoopie.
Except insofar as it helped pay the next month's rent, all this was entirely meaningless to me. Life in Taiwan and Japan seemed just the same as life at home, absent the language difficulty; people were people everywhere, once one took proper account of local taboos. A few were unusually kind, a few were jerks, and most simply... were. I thought that meant I adapted well to foreign lands, but now suspect that it meant simply that all lands are foreign to someone who feels no need to "belong" anywhere.
A friend of mine once talked with great emotion of an incident in her life: she had become extremely ill while living in southern Taiwan, among relative strangers, and said that one of her chief fears was dying in a place like that far away from her family, where no one knew her. I found this bewildering. Being afraid of dying seemed reasonable and understandable, especially for this person, who meant to accomplish a lot with her life. She had a great deal to lose. But among strangers? What did that have to do with it? Dead is dead is dead, wherever it happens. She couldn't understand that I couldn't understand, but I thought and still think that dying among strangers would be an advantage, if anything; less strain on the nerves of your friends. Everyone dies. It's not as if you can make a big fuss and put it off forever.
So, I wandered through academia, my habit of making myself useful to others funding my programs even as it delayed any progress along what might have been considered a career. I still didn't see myself as a Perfesser, even when I was teaching a full course load, putting off my own career to sub for my elders and betters when they abandoned classes at the last moment to go fart around on research grants. Irresponsible jerks. But successful, I can't deny that.
It was a revelation to experience first-hand how little the average professor cares about the fate of the average student, but I can't say it put me off teaching as a career. I was never "on." Job applications were a tiresome routine and I was if anything relieved when none of them came to anything. To tell the truth, I pursued them with such a lackadaisical air that it's a wonder anyone bothered asking. Research and teaching were no problem; the devil was in the details. Minor but vital things like "dressing for success" are all but impossible if there's no pleasure in either them or their expected outcome. I can write a long academic paper on how appropriate dress can improve others' opinion of you and your chances of employment, but I own neither a suit nor a tie. I think I used to have them, but they got lost in one of my moves, or were perhaps destroyed when a basement I was living in flooded. Pointless keeping them anyway; I never did learn how to tie the tie. The knowledge would not stick with me, no matter how much I practiced.
It's amusing thinking back to being shortlisted for a job at the University of Chicago at the time your present leader was teaching there. We would not have had anything to say to each other if we had met. People who want to be professors are alien to my world, let alone ones who aspire to be presidents. I wish him the best of luck and admire his dedication, but what keeps him going is an entire mystery to me, not an intellectual mystery, but an emotional one.
For all that, I did retain for a long time a sort of shadow ambition or drive. I could not find anything at that time that I took any pleasure in completing, but the world's a big place and giving up too soon is self-evidently childish. Maybe next time? Something else? Keep looking, and something might turn up. It's a thin sort of motivation, but I made it work for a long time.
That was when I made the mistake of seeking the truth. I don't blame myself or others, but it really was a mistake.
Since my doctor told me the truth about my condition, the self-deception that kept me restlessly trying new things is no longer possible. It has turned out that the problem is not attitude, or motivation, or interest, or anything more metaphysical than some cut wires. I might as well unplug my stereo but still expect it to start up if I load it with music that's inspiring enough.
I played a little game with myself. It's conceited, but bear with that for a moment. What would I do if I happened upon something that would be truly useful to a large number of people? Say, a cure for AIDS? What would I do? The answer would be, I would give it to someone else, anonymously, to be publicized. And never ask a single question about it afterwards. Enough that it got loose; nothing good would come of people knowing it came from me. If letting others know I was responsible were the price of making the information public.... I'm sure I would concede the point in the end, but I'm also sure I'd be bitterly resentful of the inconvenience and feel very much like a martyr.
Of course, I could never hope to do anything with a fraction of that significance. I did rescue a supermarket security guard once, when he was being beaten over the head by a shoplifter with a skateboard. But as soon as he had control of the situation again and others were coming, I got the hell out of there and didn't return for weeks, taking care to dress completely differently. The job was done. Anything further could mean nothing but trouble. Or so my instincts told me.
I couldn't have run faster or disguised myself more meticulously if I had been the shoplifter, or been more concerned about being found out.
So much for that.
Now, how might I deal with this situation? I've been told that in other forms of brain malfunction, one works around damage that can't be repaired. How might that be implemented in this case?
I did have one coping mechanism that sounds odd but worked at times: extreme exhaustion. If I was tired enough, I got things finished. I don't know why. Perhaps it was just being too tired to self-sabotage. It was the only way I could speak in public, for one thing. But with increasing age, this technique becomes more and more costly, and it doesn't do much for the lack of incentive to begin things in the first place.
I do enjoy RPG gaming, and oddly, I care a great deal about how "I" look in a game. I even have a Facebook page, not for myself, but for my avatar and her various outfits and misadventures (and really, does Facebook deserve anything other than fantasy?). On the other hand, nearly all my gaming is solo, not social, but.... maybe if I pretended to be someone else in this life as well? I wouldn't go so far as to change my gender (my avatar is female to compliment a close female friend, the only person I play multiplayer with, whose avatar is invariably male), but if I treated myself as someone else.... Maybe. Hard to make it work outside the completely artificial atmosphere of a game, though, and.... to be honest, one of the charms of gaming is that what you do in a game means an old waiter's nada back in the real world. It is process stripped free of all significance, and since I can be fascinated by process but have no belief in significance, I feel comfortable there.
The truth shall make ye free? Hmph. Not always. Sometimes what you need seems to be a good solid lie, a utility fiction, to be worn like a hazmat suit when you enter a hostile environment. I need a replacement falsehood to build on.
The problem here is my imperviousness to faith. I have always found "belief" of any kind intellectually ridiculous; it was only much later I realized that it is emotionally incomprehensible as well. "Spiritual" is one of the few words that have no meaning whatsoever to me. This was one of the things that put a damper on my research career, since many of the people I studied were deeply religious. I could not engage that aspect of them at all, and didn't have the chutzpah to ignore it. I don't know whether I get this from the RDS or from spending a childhood with parents who were knee-deep in blood during their formative years and thus deeply cynical towards all gods. But it certainly undermines the sort of organized self-lying that might build up a persona with a shade more sense of purpose.
I have a good deal of intellectual curiosity about what comes next. But no emotional bond at all, which seems deficient somehow, since this is my own self I'm talking about. It's an odd way to live. I miss my old lies.
Moral: Never underestimate the utility of a good, solid lie. And don't assume the truth will always set you free. That's usually to be relied on, but the exceptions are tricky to manage.