Not an Entirely Successful Day

 

I was trying to decide, driving home from bell practise tonight, if I was going to stick to the plan and go ghablirg rmmmph burflevork duh duh duh and post a lot of hellkitten pics . . . or maybe mutter a few thoughts about life and so on.*  Mostly I burble on the blog**.  As you may have noticed.  I don't do thoughts that much.  They're too hard.  If I'm going to work on content as well as the sheer slog of getting SOMETHING down on paper/screen, I'd rather be writing PEG II.

            But it's been rather a thought-provoking day.  Not altogether in a good way.   I don't go in much for being a community member.  Some of this is doubtless my own private weirdness, but I think some of it is the way I'm made.  Writers tend to be solitary because what they do is (usually) solitary by definition.  But, for example, most of the writers I know know more other writers than I do, if you follow me. 

            Homeopathy, or homeopaths, tend to be a community, or communities.  I don't know to what extent all professions create professional communities which spill over to a greater or lesser extent into their members' private lives.  Homeopathy may be more prone to this behaviour because it's a minority thing—there aren't that many homeopaths and homeopathy isn't mainstream like doctoring or farming or bookkeeping, and part of what makes it non-mainstream is all that fringey holistic stuff that the strict rationalists deride.  And I do not mean that all homeopaths get along with each other and are unified by a common philosophy.  Nooooooo.  There are feuds and cults and gangs in homeopathy like there are in any group of people—perhaps especially any group of people who believe they have something important to impart to or do for other people.***

            Sigh.  I find this really depressing, the arguing and feuding.  I find it particularly depressing lately because homeopathy has rather abruptly become a favourite target among the so-called quackbusters—don't get me started.  The so-called 'proof' that homeopathy is balderdash has had a lot of press, and it's become vanishingly difficult to get a recommendation to a homeopath from the NHS, although homeopathy is still, I believe, officially on the books in most places.

            This has not surprisingly encouraged an us-against-them mentality among many of the rank and file, among whom I would count myself—although I already had the anti-big-stuff attitude—Big Science, Big Medicine, Big Pharma, Big Government—in place before I found homeopathy.  I'd had it with being treated as either a hysterical woman or a machine with defective parts.  And homeopathy works.  There's a lot wrong (say I) with the delivery system, which depends far too much on the individual homeopath;  but homeopathy itself is brilliant.  I know beyond any gremlin of doubt that it's the reason I'm on my feet.  I still have ME and a charming complement of related mayhem—but I function.  I write books, I hurtle hellhounds, I ring bells, play the piano†, plant roses and so on.  That's the homeopathy.††

            For one reason and another, including but not exclusively that I tend to resist being a member of a group, I've fallen out of touch with the homeopaths I used to know.  The seminar I went to today is the first such I've been to in two or three years.†††  And . . .

            I liked the presenter.  I thought she had some very useful and interesting stuff to say, and, if you will forgive a little crunchy-fringe-speech, I liked her energy.   But I didn't like some of the vibe I was getting off some of the other participants.  Some of what was making me uncomfortable became unpleasantly clear during the morning break.  I was about to amble off and look at the garden around the beautiful‡ old house the seminar was hiring a room of when one of the other audience members spoke to me.  Hi, she said, my name is Grzlthrp.  Are you a practising homeopath?  No, I said.  I took the training‡‡ but didn't set up a practise.  Oh yes, she said, I know that happens to a lot of students.  They get out of college and don't have the bottle‡‡‡ to go on.

            The what? 

            I was too gobsmacked to answer as she deserved, and then the moment passed, as moments like this do.  So I'll have to make do with protesting on the blog:  I am not spiritually inferior because I'm not a full time practising homeopath.  I did manage to say that I had a full-time job, but she'd already identified me as a sad case and told me patronisingly that she'd had a full-time job too, and that earned her lots of money, but that money wasn't everything and that if you were a real, committed homeopath, all you had to do was open your door and your heart and you would attract the people you were meant to attract.

            Ahem.  This is the sort of ravening bulltiddly that gives homeopaths and homeopathy a bad name—I say.  I actually do know what she's talking about, and yeah, opportunity tends to be one of those things that helps those that help themselves.  But I hope she puts that major ego problem in a drawer when she's treating clients.§

            This is probably why, after the break, when the conversation began to drift toward the Horrors of Modern Society and How the Internet Has Ruined Humanity and Social Intercourse and the Younger Generations Are Doomed, I found myself defending the way we live now.  Someone suggested Twitter as some kind of ultimate depravity and inexplicable mind-worm.  In other circumstances I would be the first to agree that it's dangerously addictive and a major waste of time—but that would have to be in a group that recognised its virtues.  I don't suppose I really saw the rest of them drawing their skirts and/or trouser-hems away from me today when I said, excuse me, I'm on Twitter, and it's just another mode of communication like the telephone or the walk round the block to have tea with a friend.  Yes the virtual thing can be dangerous . . . but so are most human things dangerous, one way or another, and kids and teenagers don't only take up with paedophiles and axe murderers on line, they also keep track of their friends, and meet up with those known, three-dimensional friends partly as a result of that sometimes-rather-scary constant checking-in thing most of them seem to do now.  And may I say, as someone who grew up in a world where boy-girl pairs were required, that the modern pattern of hanging out in groups of mixed genders (and sexual preferences) seems to me a whole lot healthier?

            Grrrrrrrrrrrr. 

* * *

 * Life!  Thoughts!  Not the comfy chair!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSe38dzJYkY  

** Yes, of course there's cranky burbling.  You must not be a regular here or you wouldn't be asking. 

*** I am trying not to say:  like Parliament, or the US Congress. 

† And I would sing.  But I've phoned the Cherub and he hasn't phoned back.  

†† And yeah.  I'm still hoping for better.  I personally think this is one of homeopathy's strengths:  there's always something else to try.  If you want to keep on, you can.  And hope is terribly important.  It's not the only thing, but it is a crucial thing.  I am still not saying I will never ride horses again. 

††† Hellhound digestion had something to do with this.  I had them all nicely set up with a regular dog minder before I even brought them home from the breeder.  And then . . .  

‡ if dilapidated, and with the familiar look of a building hastily and somewhat haphazardly modified to a new purpose.  I'm all for hasty modifications if that's all you can afford, so you can keep the building instead of tearing it down and turning it into a car park. 

‡‡ which isn't quite true.  I took some of the training—and then the ME made me drop out.  Which is a whole other issue.  I've told you this.  I still have fantasies of finishing my last year, but the urgency disappeared when the single-register committee crashed and burned.  Speaking of not getting along.  And of depressing.  There is no single register of homeopaths in the UK.  There are a bunch of splinter groups with splinter accreditation systems, some of them more and less sensible and/or expensive.  And when CORE admitted it was disbanding it was like the starting pistol for the quackbusters to come after us. 

‡‡‡ bottle:  Britspeak for courage, backbone, guts, nerve 

§ And she may well do.  I've known several psychotherapists who were very, very good at their jobs who were TOTAL WING NUTS in their private lives.