jenbooks
Guest
- Messages
- 1,270
I should revise a little.
People will ignore it if you just give it a name and don't bother them too much. If you can't do what you used to do, they will ignore you, too. If you can manage to be of some value to them, then they will just ignore the disease and not be too curious.
However, if you tell them the nitty gritty horrible truth of it, they will be offended, upset, irate, defensive. And they will tend to turn on you and blame you. This recently happened to me with an editor I've known for 25 years and it was very painful. He is blaming me for playing the victim and being "embedded in a story which serves you but not your health." He won't drop it either---I just got another email yesterday along with a PDF of an article I wrote that magazine is about to publish. In it he claimed he was surprised but not really, that I hadn't experimented with biophoton therapy yet. Because he believes I don't want to get well. (All the other therapies I'm doing don't count----and if I *did* do the biophoton therapy right away he'd have some other excuse to knock me over the head for holding onto a fake disease). It is horrible and so I've written him off and told him not to contact me again.
So a closeup of the truth usually elicits a kind of "defensive attack"--except from the most compassionate. People have seen this with their families too, from what I've read.
But a quick summary is usually accepted and then ignored. That's less painful, anyway.
Finally--regarding contagion. XMRV has not been confirmed as significant or causative yet so I would counsel people not to jump to the gun about that. And besides, we don't know what is contagious and what is not--sometimes people think lyme or some bug associated with it may be contagious. It's all very confusing. Until there is solid evidence of a contagious retrovirus that is causative, I wouldn't recommend blacklisting yourself...
People will ignore it if you just give it a name and don't bother them too much. If you can't do what you used to do, they will ignore you, too. If you can manage to be of some value to them, then they will just ignore the disease and not be too curious.
However, if you tell them the nitty gritty horrible truth of it, they will be offended, upset, irate, defensive. And they will tend to turn on you and blame you. This recently happened to me with an editor I've known for 25 years and it was very painful. He is blaming me for playing the victim and being "embedded in a story which serves you but not your health." He won't drop it either---I just got another email yesterday along with a PDF of an article I wrote that magazine is about to publish. In it he claimed he was surprised but not really, that I hadn't experimented with biophoton therapy yet. Because he believes I don't want to get well. (All the other therapies I'm doing don't count----and if I *did* do the biophoton therapy right away he'd have some other excuse to knock me over the head for holding onto a fake disease). It is horrible and so I've written him off and told him not to contact me again.
So a closeup of the truth usually elicits a kind of "defensive attack"--except from the most compassionate. People have seen this with their families too, from what I've read.
But a quick summary is usually accepted and then ignored. That's less painful, anyway.
Finally--regarding contagion. XMRV has not been confirmed as significant or causative yet so I would counsel people not to jump to the gun about that. And besides, we don't know what is contagious and what is not--sometimes people think lyme or some bug associated with it may be contagious. It's all very confusing. Until there is solid evidence of a contagious retrovirus that is causative, I wouldn't recommend blacklisting yourself...