Why do we carefully preserve and nurture our idiosyncrasies as if they were gold dust that had been handed down over generations as family jewels? It is an interesting subject – one that makes me wonder about a few of my own! One of them I was preserving and nurturing even though the decision to do so was making me suffer continuously without any sane reasoning and led me on a path of self-inflicted suffering and embarrassment. But why? It’s a question I don’t have a precise answer to yet!
For a better part of the year, till I decided to act on it and get it sorted, I could barely hear a thing spoken normally and was getting close to being deaf and the embarrassment was palpable as everyone who knew me, knew that I wasn’t. However, in my interactions with them, am sure there were occasions when they came across me be partially deaf or felt something was amiss with one or more of my mental faculties owing to the responses I was giving them – if nothing, some of my responses, verbal or non-verbal would have left them bewildered and asking questions of themselves but they never said anything to me – guess they were being polite! And there were others, whom I told about my condition as they asked me out of concern after they have had their full quota of being polite with me, and yet others whom I told proactively – they I guess were the most bewildered of all as they were people closest to me and they wondered what they did to hear such nonsensical course of action I had chosen for myself when I had more sensible options available.
At the core of this idiosyncrasy of mine was my skepticism about modern medicine and loathing of visiting a doctor or much less a hospital – I want to clarify here before anyone judges me any more than they have already, that I don’t hold any ill feelings about the profession of modern medicine – just that I strongly feel that people and their bodies are capable of healing on their own and I had over the years instead of letting this belief serving my interests, I had started serving to it to a level that bordered ludicrity. Again, I don't know the reason why.
If I were to ask any random person on the street about their thoughts on modern medicine, I am sure that a significant majority would agree with my belief that one should avoid doctors as much as possible. However, if I were to add a caveat that one of their key mental faculties was getting impaired and then ask this question again, then a significant majority will change their stand – but, not me! And, I somehow took pride in my decision, to begin with, and even though I had nearly become deaf, I continued to not consult a medical doctor to sort out my ailment.
Finally, it was when I had to go to the hospital (not a doctor's clinic) for another matter, I mustered enough courage to consult an ENT specialist who looked at my ears and asked me, “when did I get my ears cleaned of the ear wax?” I knew now that another embarrassment was brewing! I told him, I didn’t know when it was done last even though I knew well enough that I hadn't ever got them cleaned by a doctor! To this, he said, “it appears you have somehow managed to push the ear wax deep inside your ear canal and they have gone in deep and solidified there!” Wow! I seemed to have shoveled and hid for myself a treasure chest of ear wax which now had to be flushed out – he did the needful and within about 10 minutes, I was hearing sounds I had not heard for a long long time! It was as if I had so far been in a soundproof room for the better part of a year barely hearing anything of the outside world and suddenly now I was let out into a fish market with sounds and noises hitting my eardrums from everywhere! It was sudden chaos all around – albeit happy chaos!
The point is that it took all of 10 minutes to rectify my ailment that I had carefully nurtured for the better part of a year! To what end, I still wonder!
Such is the power of our idiosyncrasies – all I can say now is that it would serve us well to be aware of these seemingly trivial matters and stop nurturing them and let sanity prevail at all times. I learned the lesson the hard way and whilst I suffered, I made people around me suffer along with me, which I shouldn’t have! Hope we can overcome such bouts of self-inflicted momentary insanity and stop the long-term suffering we subject ourselves and others to by nipping all such debilitating idiosyncrasies in the bud.
