Some years ago, I worked a weekend at a local rural hospital to enable the local anaesthetists to have some well earned time off.
Everything was going fine until the early hours of Sunday morning. A bunch of local youths had been driving around the town, going far too fast, the sort of thing you do for fun in your teens. Unfortunately but not unpredictably, they crashed, and two of them were brought by ambulance to the nearest hospital. They were alive when they arrived, but by sunrise, in spite of our best efforts, they weren’t. It was horrible. Never had I missed so much the team of medical staff that usually stand between me and acute trauma patients, providing me with a buffer so that when they arrive in theatre, I can just do the stuff I’m comfortable with. Of course, I’ve trained to do it, but always as part of a team, not the only one around barring two brand new house surgeons. I wasn’t entirely alone, though. There was one familiar face – the surgeon on call was also from Wellington and doing a locum. The odds were stacked against us, and as the post mortems showed, there was nothing we could have done – but I really appreciated having her there. We did our best.
Anyway, fast forward several years, and this morning I looked at my Facebook feed to find this surgeon has written an autobiography. My first reaction? Oh God, I hope she doesn’t say anything terrible about me.
I have been trying and failing over the last year or so to get skilled at meditation. One of the subjects I can’t get my head around is that the self is an illusion. “Look for the looker!” they say, which is meant to be a trigger for a profound insight. But not for me. “Here I am! Here I am!”, goes my wretched inner self.
Imagine my dismay then, some weeks ago when I read an article by a therapist in the Guardian. He was describing a series of sessions he had with a famous person. I can’t believe the stick I get for thinly disguising the people I work with when I write my editorials, how would that celebrity client have felt to see their innermost thoughts on display? Anyway, my point is that the author was not only proud of his inner voice, he had a number of them, and he gave each of them a personality, so that they could carry on a full blown conversation in his head while the therapy sessions were in progress.
So, now I’m confused. Do I embrace my inner voice, warts and all? Or do I keep working to silence it?