|
Going Through The Motions
By Roy Sastrom
It's irritating to be here, especially because I've been here for more than a decade. I often wonder when this is going to end or if it ever will. There was a time when I didn't value my life and I didn't think too highly of myself. Even now my self-esteem is low and I don't think much of myself most of the time, yet I value the life that I have.
I'm forty-two years old and I've been confined in institutions since the age of eleven. I haven't seen much of the so-called free world and I can't tell you what it's like to be happy, because I don't know what happiness is, and I've never had much to be happy about. Of course I don't sit around feeling sorry for myself. I used to, but not anymore. Instead, I get up every morning and go about my routine, which doesn't consist of much of anything meaningful. Most of the time I feel like I'm going through the motions of living or existing.
Imagine that, life consisting of just going through the motions, doing things just to exist or because you exist, because you're alive, and the only thing that makes your existence real is going through the motions.
Above my head on the wall where I sleep is a sign that reads: "What if this is as good as it gets?" Jack Nicholson in the movie, "As Good As It Gets," asked that question. Since seeing that movie, I've asked myself that question on many occasions, most of the time jokingly, but more recently and more often, seriously, "What if this is as good as it gets?" What if my life, my existence, only amounts to getting up everyday and going through the motions of existing, living a life that seems meaningless?
During one of the toughest times in my life I received a book from a friend entitled, "Man's Search for Meaning." The book fascinated me, and years later thinking back, I was struck by how much I identified with this man who was confined in a Nazi concentration camp and how much of his survival depended on finding meaning in his life under such horrific conditions.
What I related to in the book was the repressiveness of this man's environment, his suffering and how he found meaning as a way to survive despite his environment and his horrific living conditions. I probably didn't know it then, but I was searching for my own meaning in order to survive my own repressive and cruel environment.
|
|
Today, more than a decade later, I'm still confined, not in the same place, but just a few blocks away where everyday I can look down the street at Whiting Forensic Division, a place where I found meaning as a means to survive.
Isn't it something, that thirty years ago at Riverview Children's Hospital, I could look up from my window and see the same building?
At the age of eleven I had no idea what was behind the white cement walls that I could see at the top of the hill, I remember it very clearly, but I never knew that it was Whiting Forensic Division. I had no idea that twenty years later I would actually be sitting behind those walls looking down at the very window I looked up from. I had no idea that I was looking at the very place that would change my life and give it meaning, yet here I am at the age of forty-two, more than three decades later going through the motions of living and existing and asking myself, what if this is as good as it gets, because what if it is?
When I think to myself, what if this is as good as it gets, I think, no way, it can't be, and that response, is actually my conscious choice to not let it be, and going through the motions is actually another way of surviving, which says that there has to be meaning in my life, because without meaning there is no will to survive.
When I look back through three decades of my life, I'm not sure how I made it to forty-two. I'm not always sure that I have a future or whether I can actually make it outside the structure of an institution in what people call the real world. I only know that I got where I am today after surviving more than three decades of suffering, and this can't be as good as it gets.
|