Impaired

I remember when I was growing up, myself the son of a cardiologist, growing up amidst a community of physicians and lawyers and successful businessmen... I remember every now and then, at the annual Christmas party hearing the whispers of so-and-so's divorce... of Dr. You-Know-Who's affair and sex addiction, of little Johnny having to sign up for the military for medical school because Uncle Blah gambled the family fortune away in Vegas.

Whispers. Knowing looks. Disapproval in a sort of Scarlet Letter kinda way. That tsk-tsk sentiment of pity mixed with schadenfraude and disgust. "So-and-so is impaired... (whisper), he's at Betty Ford... he's getting sued by his secretary for sexual harassment."

It seemed so juicy, so carnal yet entirely remote from my otherwise unremarkable suburban adolescence. The kind of thing that you just love to hear about but can never in your wildest dreams imagine happening to you. Why do people become impaired? Addicted? Self-destructive? Why?

Is it the circumstances of a life or something innate? Nature versus nurture. I guess I always used to think of addiction or self-destruction as a human frailty that was entirely under self-control. A form of personal weakness to which I was immune. Yet another form of hubris.

Now, looking back, facing my depressing Fridays, feeling this urge to drown my tough days sometimes with a swig of Jack Daniels, I'm no longer so judgmental about all those poor souls that I witnessed growing up. Now, sitting through friends' and friends' parents' divorces and mix-ups, experiencing my own losses and pitfalls, just growing up and experiencing life a little bit, I wonder how any of us avoids a mid-life or late-life crisis, physically or mentally.

Judgment is so easy when you are young. It is so easy when life is green and fresh and filled with endless blue sky. How different after a wound or two.

Physician, heal thyself. I understand now what Hippocrates was talking about. I'll put the glass down now and go for a walk.