Courage
Once you have identified what is oppressing you, you must enter this intermediary phase that is a bit ambiguous. It is where you weigh the cost of not taking action against the cost of taking action. Just because you know that you are under oppression does not mean you will make the choice to stand against it or overcome it. This is where courage must rise up. If it doesn’t, you won’t take action. What is courage? I will give you two definitions from past patients of mine, Charlene and John (John isn’t his real name). Both come from very different places in their life and have much different experiences. Both embody courage.
First, Charlene. Charlene was in her mid-fifties and had a hard life. Mostly from her own choices. She was working as a nanny for a medical doctor’s kids. Charlene noticed that her appetite had greatly decreased but she was gaining weight. After two days of tests, it was clear. Charlene had advanced liver cancer and was given the bombshell that should would be lucky to live 3 months.
I had known Charlene for about a year or so from being part of the community. She always wanted to come in for care but was always too busy. One day she walked in unscheduled and asked if we could talk for a bit. I was about to leave for lunch and had plenty of time, so I walked her back to my consultation room.
Over the next two hours, Charlene opened up about her life – all of it. It was a story of abandonment as a young teenager, abuse, drug use, alcoholism, and a lifestyle that was less than wholesome. She had three children by the age of twenty-one. Today, they wanted nothing to do with her and she had never met her six grandchildren. Now, she was alone and going to die.
Charlene started care that day. The first thing to change was her attitude. With her first adjustment, she felt like her brain got rewired and she could think clearly for the first time in her life. Over the next few months, I saw Charlene become renewed. She spoke differently, she moved differently, she acted differently, and she have a joy for living. One day she got up from the table and told me she was going to call her kids. I didn’t see her for the next week. When she came back in, she started bawling.
Charlene found the courage to call her daughters and admit her poor parenting skills or lack thereof and listen to their pain and disappointments. As hard as that was, all three of her girls agreed to come meet her.
Charlene ended up living a year and a half. Most of that time, surrounded by her kids and grandkids. She found the courage to do the hard thing and admit her failures as a mom. The weight of fessing up to her past and making good with her children was greater than the pain of not doing so. In many ways, Charlene’s cancer healed the oppression she was under because it served as a wakeup moment for her mortality.
John was a special forces operative and would be dropped off alone in the mountains of Afghanistan. He was tasked with finding, tracking, and subduing the Taliban. John would be deployed for weeks on end all alone. The first time I met John, he was so quiet. I had to pry out any information from him. I went to check his spine and felt some indentions that shouldn’t have been there. I lifted up his shirt to check and saw three bullet hole scars. I enquired. John began to relate to me how he had been shot twice, the first time with three bullets and the second time with four bullets, while out on deployment two years apart. Both times, he had to fend for himself and make due until he could be rescued.
As I got to know John a little bit, again he didn’t share much, I learned that his father was killed in the 9-11 attacks. I asked him how he dealt with the stress of being deployed all alone. He looked me right in the eyes and with more resolve than I have ever seen, he said, “I only have courage because it would hurt too much to not have it.”
What he said was profound. He had pain in his courage. But he would have more pain if he wasn’t courageous.
In your life, find the courage to overcome the oppression you experience. No exceptions. If you are afraid to confront a person, ask for help. If you are afraid to take on a physical problem, talk to me. If you have some demons in your closet from the past, time to get them out. It is time for courage. It is time to realize that the old ways are not serving you and only holding you back.
That is exactly what the colonist did in the years building up to 1776. England was an oppressive force. They tried to conform and adapt. Then, one day, the reality hit and they realized that living under this oppression was not living.