Personal Look Unto Wellness
When I am not feeling well I find relief and comfort talking to my
girlfriend. Occasionally I may think of topics such as my future and particular
things I want to achieve and I fluster myself with over exaggerated thought with
issues like college and school and people and everything else that’s happening
at that moment in my life, but talking to my girlfriend allows me to release any
anxiety that I may posses created by the persons around me and places order back
into my thinking. When I talk, she listens with a glowing understanding and she
always suggests ideas that may help solve my problem or piece back together my
disarray of thought.
Since the time I began to confide in her about my
most personal upsets she has become not only girlfriend but my best friend as
well. Being with her allows me to experience a closeness that I have never
experienced with anyone. She is the one person that can make me feel better and
happier about myself. She helps me forget about problems that don’t need to be
worried about by just being and talking with her.
To me she is that one
very special person that I love. The feeling of love for her is a deep,
passionate, caring, understanding, and unconditional love. Ph.D. Shelly Wu of
the university of Pennsylvania says that love is an intense feeling for a
certain person or thing.” In my opinion love is truly indefinable in the sense
that I cannot explain or break down the exact way I feel for my girlfriend. I do
not disagree that it can be described, but to truly know love is to love and by
loving, you will undoubtedly be loved in return. You might not achieve the
classical sense of, “that special someone love,” but you can find love in
friends and family which is another form of love and it can all be just as
fulfilling just as long as you committed to loving. As long as it is understood
that love is not just a four-letter word or trait but more of a mutual
connection between two people, it can be easily be comprehended. The clearest
way that I believe love can be explained is, “less is more,” meaning that the
less your see love as a definition or a tangible object, the more you will
realize that it is a feeling from within, an untold language that cannot be
heard with one’s ears but with one’s heart.
It would be a lie to say I
never once experienced happiness before I met her but it would be true to say I
have never felt happiness on this level that I am now. When I was younger, I was
not happy, nor was I depressed but some how I found a median between the two.
Two irresponsible parents preordained my future. The choices they made affected
my life as well as theirs. My mother as well as my father established themselves
among friends and families as substances abusers. They became addicted to
cocaine and heroine at a young age. They began to lie, cheat, and steal from the
people that loved them the most. The longer the stayed substance abusers that
larger the craving for heroine and cocaine became and the larger it became the
more money the stole. Once I reached the age of five they divorced and shortly
after their departure from each other my father held up a corner store to pay
for his drug habit and was arrested soon after he committed the crime. He was
sent to San Quentin to serve out his sentence of ten years and I was allowed to
visit him once in that time with his parents. All of this was because my parents
wanted a better sense of wellness but the wellness they were receiving was a
false since of wellness that only created more and more problems, which
developed into stress. After becoming addicted to heroine the body craves it
more often and what use to be habit turned to a necessity and money becomes more
and more scarce as it is spent all on drugs. Now, desperate for money, extreme
measures must be taken and therefore risks are taken, but not for the benefit
for one’s self but risks that may lead to the downfall of life as you know it.
Risk is a way to expand your limits and also a way to endanger your health
(class room textbook information).
At one point my mother enrolled into
an institution that was a way to wellness camp and in this camp were people of
all types who took something that gave them a temporary since of wellness and
reality caught up with them. This camp was segregated between the men and the
women. These two groups would only interact when there was a group meeting or a
reward function for the camp and in those particular situations they were
allowed to interact with one another. I was fairly young and I was allowed to
interact with both groups, the segregation rule was strictly because sexual
communication was prohibited. At this camp I met all kinds of people some
strange and some quite normal, the more normal seeming ones only appeared lonely
and depressed because their lives did not turn out how the intended them
to.
Every so often I would paint with a group of women, this would occur
about once a week. I only remember two of the women out of the group. I remember
their hair and how they both had long blond hair, one’s curlier than the other.
The curly haired one always brought the paint and always had a problem she
talked about. The curly haired woman was not very friendly but her friend who I
did like, the blond straight haired woman, was very friendly and helped me paint
from time to time. She also taught me that I could mix paints to make new
colors. For some reason I remember I made a greenish-yellow color that I called
the snake color and I was so proud of my self. I felt I did something that no
one else could do and it boosted my self-esteem. Self-esteem as says by
Webster’s revised unabridged dictionary it is the holding of a good opinion of
one's self; self-complacency. At that time I needed it since I had no friends my
age and I rarely felt good about myself. After making that color the curly
haired women started to become noticeably louder and then the camp officials
took her away and I never saw her or the paints again.
Along with the
many types of people and one very old Indian man would wake up every morning
very early and sit near the edge of camp away from everyone near the front
gates. The old Indian man did not talk that much but I remember one day when I
was playing I came across this man while I was looking for bugs and lizards. The
old man nodded his head and I said hello to the old man. The old Indian man
asked me if I knew how to catch lizards and if I wanted him to show me. I
replied affirmatively. The old Indian man got of the rock which upon he sat and
slowly moved closer to me and then he asked me to lift a small rock which was
next to me and as I did a lizard ran out from underneath but before the lizard
got away the old man took his long walking stick and struck down on the lizard
to retain it from getting away. He only applied enough pressure to stop, he
never harmed any lizard that I knew of and after he caught it he would inspect
it and let it go. I never really understood why he would inspect each one but
from then on I woke up every morning extra early to hunt lizard with the old man
until one morning the old man was not there and when I ask about him no one gave
me any answer either because I was to young to understand or because they
thought it wasn’t any of my business, but what they did not understand was my
special connection to the old Indian man and how every morning we would meet and
without words understand each other. I understood that he was lonely as I was
and hunting lizards was our way of communicating. It made both of us feel better
since nobody listens to an old man and a small child. In a way we were both
outcast and together we didn’t feel some much like outcast anymore
I
really do not know what happened, either my mom finished the camp or got sick of
it because one day my mother’s mom came and we went to live with her. We did not
stay there long and as soon as my mother could, she moved out to an apartment.
We moved constantly and all the apartments we moved to were infested with
rodents and roaches. Although my mother attended the way to wellness camp she
nonetheless continued to use heroin and more problems arose.
If I was
asked to describe it’s lowest based on the knowledge of my eyes I would say it
was when my mother and he friend went to Compton to get her drugs. The streets
were dirty the housing was almost crumbling the mentally ill and homeless
wandered the streets, some of them had children. The senses of wellness had been
lost and know one cared to find them.
I was always very afraid and
fearful of the people who inhabited this place. I hated my mother for making me
go with her and what made me even more upset was that she would sell my toys to
get money so that she could buy her, “temporary wellness”. On one occasion she
went to the store with my little brother and she took my brand new red bike that
I got for Christmas and my brother took his new blue bike. They left and the
trip took longer than usual and I began to get scared and wondered if some thing
may have happened to them. It was getting dark and I was terrified. Finally they
returned with groceries but without any bikes. She told me that while they had
been shopping that someone had stolen the bikes. I was deeply saddened because I
wanted that bike for so long and when I got it for Christmas it was exactly how
I pictured it. I didn’t doubt her until I thought about it more. She knew what
that red bike meant to me and if I were there while she traded it for another
few ounces of drugs, I would have put up a fight. Then a few weeks later, I was
with my mother and her friend and this time we went to a different dealer than
usual and he had two little kids. These kids were riding bikes, one blue and one
red. I knew these were my bikes because my red bike made a distinct clicking
noise when you pedaled it and the kids red bike made the exact same noise. I
never trusted another thing my mom said or did to me. In my opinion it is not a
good thing for a young child not to trust his mother because a child is most
likely to bond with his mother and feel a connection of trust and love. After I
stopped trusting my mother I stopped trusting everyone. Anything any told me
from then on I never took to heart in fear that it would be hurt
again.
It took a long time for me to trust people and realize that not
everyone was going to hurt me in mental or emotional way. My mother was finally
arrested for theft. My mother her boyfriend, my brother and I were at he mall
and my mom was using her drug money scheme. What you she would do was take
something from one department and then go to another departments register and
say that she wanted to exchange it or get cash back. My mother’s boyfriend was
putting belts under his shirt to take to another store and exchange them but
while in the process he was being watched by the security cameras. He exited the
mall and security cars and police pulled up in front of us already holding my
mother. The store security escorted us up to the top floor of the department
store and showed my mother and her boyfriend footage of them stealing. My
father’s parents picked my brother and me up and took us to our mother’s parents
to which I lived up until recently. There are for more descriptions of the lack
of wellness people contain that I have encountered but I would have to take up
twenty more pages.
I do not consider myself a master of wellness but at
the same time I know I am not an apprentice of wellness rather. I now have a
better understanding of wellness and how it should and shouldn’t be achieved. I
suppose the best way to recognize whether or not your succeeding on your road to
wellness is to analyze the steps your taking to get there. If your wellness is
based on short intervals and long sacrifices that cause harm then your wellness
is not the wellness that can be benefiting. If your wellness is based on an
over-all benefiting way of life then your have a conceptual image of what you
wellness is.