One of the things I decided to share with the world was my illness. I took this decision for my own benefit, and for my own reasons. While I am aware that I don't have to justify the existence of anything on this site, I do however occasionally receive negative remarks about this section, so I thought I might try to explain the reasoning behind the pages for people to whom that reasoning is unclear.
Home pages can only contain snapshots of a person and their character, and these glimpses, while interesting, can never build up more than a tiny picture of the whole: You might read the pages about my illness and think that I define myself through being ill, or that I am pessimistic in nature, but in reality you don't have nearly enough information to make that call.
This part of the web site is entirely for me. It is not a self-help guide to glandular fever, (even though I am happy to receive mail on that subject). It was designed to be a catharsis, a means by which I could be rid of my illness once and for all, mentally, if not physically.
In 1997 I wrote the phrase, "this illness robbed me of my youth", and publicly added it to a page on my web site. I can now safely add to that, "...and my career". Ironically it was a career that I wanted to dedicate to the study of immunology/virology, (as I first mentioned in my successful interview for the Royal Free Hospital in 1992). While you can see that this is good material for irony, it might also suggest that the pages reflect some form of bitterness directed at the medical profession. No such emotion exists within me, in regard to my lost career. However to live my life as if this substantial loss did not occur is unacceptable to me.
Empathy.
If you want to truly communicate with people, and maybe change their opinions, you have to start from where they are, not from where you think they are, not from where you think they should be, and certainly not from where you think you would be if you were them. It is very difficult to tell someone to be more empathetic unless you lead by example and truly understand life from their point of view: However comparing your life to their's is not part of this process.
Empathy and Illness
Strange as it may seem, some people take a very dim view of other people's illness.
Contrary to what you might think, ill does not necessarily equal weak. People become ill for a reason and they are indicators that the environment is unhealthy for us all. People increasingly get asthma-like symptoms because the air that we all breathe is more polluted. They are the ones that are ill at present, but if they are ignored the problem will soon catch up on us all.
I understand that if you have never been ill a day in your life, or maybe have just come down with the odd cold and flu, that empathizing with someone in my position might be difficult. However, just because you don't know what it is like to be ill for 15 years continuously doesn't give you the right to diminish my symptoms.
Here's two examples:
Person A, wrote to me to tell me how sorry he was to hear about the effects that my illness had had on me, (it turned out that person A was HIV+).
Person B, wrote to me to tell me to "GET OFF MY FAT ARSE".
While it is possible that the latter comment was meant as a constructive solution to what the reader viewed as self-pitying indulgence on my part, it seems to me to be a great deal more likely to be an example of empathy-failure on a large scale, (the former being quite the most fantastic example of self-less empathy that I have ever received via email).
But there are plenty of people far worse off than you:
The fact that there are people worse off than you in the world seems to be true whatever your situation. It is a sad fact, but life really is like that. No matter how bad things get, they can always find a way to get worse. This sounds like an argument for being happy with what you do have doesn't it? It is, but it's also an argument for letting people talk about what grieves them without comparison and judgement: for you cannot make good comparisons where the base line is bottomless: you'd have no idea of the scale.
When someone's father dies, you don't go to them and say "well, my father and brother died so your pain is half of mine". You don't tell them to get things into proportion. To you it might seem a small problem, and in the scheme of things it may or may not be so, but the point is this: If it seems small, it seems small in proportion to your life, not in proportion to theirs.
So in conclusion, this part of the site is really just a simple memorial, it says, "This has been some of my life". You can tell me about some of yours if you want.
Take care,
James/.
A page from James David Chapman's website.
Located at: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~jchap/
Site mirrored here at: http://www.j.chap.btinternet.co.uk
Empathy
