Self help and Bridget

There was a scene in Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason where Bridget, after overhearing Mark Darcy nonchalantly mention to giraffe-legged Rebecca how Bridget fanatically subscribes to dogmas contained in self-help books. This spurred Bridget into pushing the panic button and throwing away some of her treasured self-help books. (Though it turns out Mark Darcy really loves Bridget for him to consider reading these books himself, but that's an aside.)

Personally, though I find Bridget funny and amusing, I really do not totally see my mirror image in her especially on the aspect of resorting to self-help books.

You'd catch me reading self-help books only when I've reached the rock bottom of my emotions. As a general rule, self-help books are no help books to me at all. But I am sympathetic to Bridget. It all boils down to trying to make some sense out of things, people, events and other worldwide or personal catastrophe in order to keep one self sane.

I remember way back in college, while reviewing for an exam in Psych 155 (abnormal psychology), specifically the various personality disorders, I was grip with fear when it occured to me what if, --- "what if I had gone insane?"

Eventually, reading through symptoms of personality disorders listed in my abnormal psych book, I realized that sanity could also, like reason, be relative and variable. It comforts me that the true measure of sanity, at least clinically, is when such mental condition becomes debilitating, causing an impediment to carrying on with a normal life. Though I have questions on what is normal, I have have come to accept this definition and take comfort at it. Due to the very productive life I've lived, I think I'm quite remote from being insane. Whew.

Years after psych and having gone through law school, taking the bar, joining a firm and being a lawyer for 3 years and 9 months (or 3 years and 4 months counting from the day the results of the Bar came out), behavior previously labed as "abnormal" has been re-classified as "conditionally acceptable". I realized this quickly after hearing other people speak ill of another, branding that other person as weird and eccentric, when glaringly, that accusing person has his own share of, in my opinion, weirdness and eccentricity which he fails to see.

I believe we are at liberty, as adults, to behave in a manner beneficial to our emotional well being, as long as such behavior does not impinge upon other people's sensibilities. As we grow older and as friends begin to have their own lives, it is now up to our own to keep oneself mentally and emotionally healthy.

Still, precious friends (and family too) beat any self help books anytime. I am glad I have friends who keep on coming to me to share their thoughts and feelings, who are there to listen to me, in my shrewd or even non-sensical state, or even just keep me company when I'm going through the unspeakable. Having my precious treasures , my friends and our mutual acceptance of one another keeps me perfectly sane, at least in a clinical way.

When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

I've had this book for about a year now but it was only last weekend when I've had the inspiration to read it. Yes, rummaging through my bookshelves, now occupying one-fourth of my ex-bedroom (cause it's now more like a very untidy storeroom), is one of my productive alternatives to procrastination. And so, instead of getting started with what I was supposed to do, I plucked the quite heavy hard bound book from the shelf and began reading.

It took me just one day to read the quite sizeable book. Hmnn... basically, it's about an Englishman whose parents mysteriosly disappear in Shanghai where the family was based since the father was employed with a British company who imports opium into China. Set in the early 1900s, the Shanghai depicted in the novel was the cosmopolitan Shanghai, the Europe in the East. In the fringes of the International Settlement were the Shanghainese villages, a wall dividing two worlds far apart. I wish I had read the book without being able to perceive that Ishiguro is Japanese. My personal biases persisted, having a cognitive resistance to a Japanese writer writing about a British in Shanghai in the first person. Christopher or Poppin, the main protagonist in When We Were Orphans had only one friend in his lifelime who he considers to be closest to him, Akira, a Japanese boy who lives next door.

Several years after the boy Poppin was brought back to England after he became an orphan, he returns to Shanghai, at the brink of World War II, now as an acclaimed detective, determined to unravel the mystery behind his parents' disappearance, which eventually, he did.

Being Japanese, I thought Ishiguro painted them in a positive light in this book. There was a scene in the novel where Poppin, who strayed in that portion of Shanghai already occupied by the Japanese and was actually turned over to the British Embassy unharmed. I began to doubt the historical accuracy of the novel, having read Iris Chang's "Rape of Nanking" which is a memoir, until I was reminded that this is fiction and Ishiguro has the artistic license to write his story. Afterall, his novel does not attempt to advocate for or against a race or any political decisions made during the war. Instead, he succeeds at depicting and chronicling how a certain kind of love can make a person go at great lengths to protect another from hurt, from pain, from despair. As a child, Poppin and Akira shared this kind of love, each striving to protect each other's feelings when it matters. Impelled by her desperate desire to change her son's impeding fate, Poppin's mother chose a miserable half-life existence just to allow him to remain whole, alive, albeit, an orphan. Ironically, these acts of people who love us and we mutually love gives rise to feelings of misery and guilt. It is difficult, but the choices made by people who love us can only be returned by feelings of gratitude, and a resolve to not to waste and put such act of love in vain, as Poppin did.