Questions About Self, and A Story

Who am I outside of acting?  This is something I ask myself on a daily basis.  I'm not sure I'll ever know the answer.

My first instinct during these holidays was to hide away from my drama school community and rest up in Shiny Town with my family.  But this, as I've slowly come to realise, is antithetical - I used to hide away from my uni mates because I never liked what I was doing.  Wanting to hide now that I have found my home away from home, is merely an old habit.  I have no reason to hide from my community now.  And yet I still seek my solace and my solitary time.

Being home is an opportunity to work on the other sides of my life that I have neglected for so long - the family part of my life, the Asian food eating part of my life, the friend part of my life, the commercial part of my life, the reading part of my life, the watching films part of my life, the health part of my life, the writing part of my life.  But being away from all of this for so long has made me question the need for all these things.  I know I'm supposed to say that these things are all incredibly important, and they are - I just haven't quite found my groove in them yet.

On the other hand, I cleaned my room.  That's been a long time coming.  After 8 months of utter disarray, I can now see my floor.  My room in Shiny Town is definitely my childhood room...I still have paintings and sketches up on the wall that I did when I was a kid.  Hell, I even have pictures of myself in Montesorri on my wall.  I tried putting up the Incomplete Manifesto for Growth on my wall but it doesn't seem quite right there. A childhood room will always remain that way...despite my many attempts to adultify it, I don't think it will ever get there...

Today I caught up with a friend from med school who is now a doctor.  Earlier in the year she had asked me for a couple of sentences detailing what I had been up to since I'd left med for their graduating handbook.  I had emailed her a couple of sentences about drama school and then left it at that.  When I saw her today, she handed me a copy of the insert, double-sided and in colour, detailing the whereabouts of about twenty students who had either joined the year mid-course, taken a year off, or left altogether.  After chuckling through the crazy stories of some of my more eccentric ex-classmates (one friend took a year off to be a pyrotechnician, another did the Kokada trail and got malaria, and another is the Vice Captain of the Australian and NSW women's cricket teams), I asked what the last paragraph paying tribute to a PhD doctor meant.

'Ahhhm,' she said, 'that's an interesting story.'

She explained to me that this guy was a medical student whom I probably had never met, who was from Israel, and who had a PhD in psychology.  He was dedicated and well-read, and had published many articles and book chapters on medical topics as well as being passionate about sushi and watching Japanese horror movies.  An avid guitar player, he loved music, and considered scuba-diving 'heavenly'. One of the reasons why he came to Australia to study was because he loved exploring new cultures and meeting new people.  The other reason was because he had inflammatory bowel disease, and he had come to find a place where he could legally die.

From my knowledge of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), (this is aided by some Wikipedia checking, as I've forgotten some of it), the condition is a life long disorder that is characterised by vomiting, diarrhoea, pain and blood in the stool.  Although it affects quality of life, it rarely affects the length of it.  A very minor predisposition for colorectal cancer is outweighed by the high monitoring rates from colonoscopy, and as a result, cancers are caught earlier and treated.  And although it can be debilitating, it is often manageable on its own or managed with corticosteroids and other immunosuppressants.  I have a few friends who suffer from the disease, and although find it annoying, most are able to manage it and maintain a normal life.

This med student must not have been able to maintain a normal life.  After not being able to find a place in the country where euthanasia was legal, last year he took matters into his own hands and killed himself.

I thought this story was incredibly tragic.  There is something horribly sad about people not being able to find the relief they are looking for in this life.  That the solution to pain on this earth is to end it through death.  If we can't find happiness in this world, how can we know we'll ever find it in another?  I hope he found peace in the end but I think it's devastating he had to kill himself in order to do it.