iThink...thereFore, iAm

“The ability of a material to absorb energy and plastically deform without fracturing. Material toughness is the amount of energy per volume that a material can absorb without rupturing. It is also defined as the resistance of fracture of a material when stressed.

Toughness requires a balance of strength and ductility.”

- Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toughness)

Being sick has its advantages. For example, if the illness incapacitates the body, the mind is often free to obsess about a great deal of other things like how much work there is to be done, the fact that things are not working well but one has no idea how to proceed, how miserable one’s situation is, and all the nonsense that has occurred in one’s past. Unfortunately, none of these are extremely productive.

Or so one would think.

I posted about a week ago about hardships and tough life - it came back to me today that even though there may not be a concrete lesson in each of them, other than the fact that some Marvel Heroes are more real than we think, there is something that we can glean about ourselves having looked back on it. I know this because today I found myself thinking that I would never had thought I would go through all the nonsense I did/do or maybe even will be.

And this just means one thing to me: I am both stronger and also more fragile than I think I am.

Paradoxical? Bear with me as I explain myself.

As I never thought I would have to experience being cheated on/being deceived and backstabbed by all the people I thought were friends/having to remove myself from my social circle and reconstruct a new one/being down and out at times/majorly f**king up some things and having to deal with the consequences (which was my own fault really, and I can’t complain about it except that I could have been smarter), I never quite prepared myself for that eventuality. At that time I naively thought that being in the situations that I would allow myself to be in I could have avoided such things, but unfortunately my hope in mankind at its peak had to be pushed back down to reality. I’ve had the experience of hitting rock bottom - academically, financially, emotionally, and to a much smaller extent physically (if being in a wheelchair counts). But I made it through, jaded as I might be, to be alive and well today. Yes there are scars, and yes some things will forever be embedded in my heart and mind, but I took all that shit, unprepared, and I’m alive.

I’m stronger than I thought I was.

At the same time I realize that it made me crash and burn pretty hard. At my lowest I was pretty much out of whack for a year - nothing could be done. Work stopped, play stopped, everything just hung there in stasis because the very thing I put my faith into collapsed completely, leaving me at the bottom of the Temple of Doom with no whip, no knife, no trusty sidekick and most importantly no brown fedora. Indiana Jones would have at least had his fedora. I was weaker than I thought because I was naive and lacked a safety net - I could have ended up like The Flying Graysons.

Toughness is built up in a material in many ways - forging, creating dislocations in the crystal to a small extent, alloying, subjected internal stresses on it, and so on. I may be wrong because I don’t quite remember my Materials modules anymore. But my point is that these little chinks in your life can be a weak point, or when used successfully and wisely, they can also make you way tougher.

But I’d still like my healing factor.