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"one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings." In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don't kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker. [stole a march and said he wondered how much of my own writing on god had perhaps been influenced by a similar malady! I should have seen this "gotcha" coming, but was left wordless]"if anything, it seems to have concentrated his attention on the way in which each debilitation builds on its predecessor and becomes one cumulative misery with only one possible outcome. " in the annals of unsentimental approaches to extinction: not the wish to die with dignity but the desire to have died. To say that the rash hurt would be pointless. The struggle is to convey the way that it hurt on the inside. If I had been told about all this in advance, would I have opted for the treatment? There were several moments as I bucked and writhed and gasped and cursed when I seriously doubted it. It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory. It's also impossible to warn against. So as a rational actor, taking the radiation together with the reaction and the recovery, I have to agree that if I had declined the first stage, thus avoiding the second and the third, I would already be dead. And this has no appeal. The annihilating fatigue that came over me in consequence also contained the deadly threat of surrender to the inescapable: I would often find fatalism and resignation washing drearily over me as I failed to battle my general inanition. Only two things rescued me from betraying myself and letting go: a wife who would not hear of me talking in this boring and useless way, and various friends who also spoke freely. Oh, and the regular painkiller. How happily I measured off my day as I saw the injection being readied. It counted as a real event. But it was an alleviation of boredom, and a guilty pleasure.
All of this, and the childish resentment that goes with it, constitutes a weakening. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my "will to live" would be hugely attenuated.I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.the process both etiolates you and moves you nearer toward death. seeking to make light of his experience, that "what didn't kill me made me stronger." This is one of the manifestations that "denial" takes.one can dispense with facile maxims that don't live up to their apparent billing.

insight character confidence willpower identity writing pain

in list: PERSONALITY TYPES & Thinking patterns in decision-making, how to be an adult & be great at it too

“Good decision making is not a trait of the person, in the sense that it’s always there,” Baumeister says. “It’s a state that fluctuates.”
people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. They don’t schedule endless back-to-back meetings. They avoid temptations like all-you-can-eat buffets, and they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions.
“The best decision makers,” Baumeister says, “are the ones who know when not to trust themselves.”

willpower

in list: PERSONALITY TYPES & Thinking patterns in decision-making

willpower