Limitations, beliefs & the consequences of any dictatorship

 

When I entered my master's degree in Clinical Psychology, at Lusófona University (formerly modern where I attended the 1st year of Law), I was not prepared to accept a specialty that was not my first option, I struggled, I waited for there to be enough students for the Health and Stress class in the adult and elderly branch, but there were not, in that year I entered, 2010, enough students that could translate into the autonomy of a class for that same specialty, and there was still no psychogerontology, not even in Lusíada, where I did my degree in Health Psychology and I was not even aware of where there was. I was interested in knowing the intricacies and individual and collective phases of the passage of time between the adult and the consequence of cronos in us, the elderly, the development of this phase and the coping strategies to deal with old age or maturity that arrives, many times, without us having the perception of wealth and, at the same time, of the vulnerabilities that the same brings. I entered the childhood and adolescence business, internally upset, because limited by the lack of options. What I believed at that time, I still have as a conviction. Of children and adolescents, I believed I knew enough, it was all the rest of life that I still needed to understand. I must confess that psychopharmacology was also indispensable to me, I with the mania for research and the thirst to know what the first, second or third generation antidepressant drugs produced. Of the psychotropic drugs, of the whole of this discipline that Lusíada did not have to offer me, on the contrary, it gave me equivalence of it without the knowledge that the subject contained. For these two reasons, I returned to Lusófona. I did the first year of the master's degree and did not return because my personal life, my marriage, had gaps that needed constant presence and discernment for decisions and, on the other hand, because training and being a teacher of adolescents fulfilled me at the time, much more than the master's degree satisfied me, and I needed to earn money to share the expenses of my house, in my children's lives. I did not present the thesis and pushed the outcome with my belly to the inconclusive. I always thought that there would be time and will for its completion, at another time, which would be designed by life itself. The limitation, punctually, of personal circumstances, was wrapped on my back, weighing many kilos in my existence, as an unfinished task, due to the absence of passion. Even today I see it as a mental limitation. And from circumstantial, it is no longer contemplated. Life imposed its priorities.

When I was a child, when I was nine years old, I remember it, I believed that the world was much bigger than what I could see, from the S. José villas, on Rua 5 de Outubro, Ermesinde, that Paranhos was the land where I was born, that Porto was the city I liked to know better, listening to the conversations of adults, namely what I remembered from my father, Lisbon, France, Germany, USSR, the USA, they were all boxes full of fantasy, who elbowed on the shelf, chose the books from my father's library, where bottomless worlds, without sales and without prohibitions awaited me. I "knew" that there were many worlds, compared to the limit of mine, which was full of sameness and comforts, full of absences and family peculiarities. I always wanted to know the unknown, beyond my physical borders. I remember going to the cinema with my grandparents, at the time on Rua Sá da Bandeira, seeing Pipi in the high socks, Jesus Christ Superstar, and being awarded for being able to accompany the subtitling with other films and plays. To read the names of the shops I passed by downtown and ask lots of questions, the names of the streets, the professions and the elastic patience, always elastic of grandfather Rodrigo, who often replaced my father, who death took very early. To go give corn to the doves next to the current siloauto and my flirtatious aunts on the beautiful avenue of the allies, to talk about this and that fashion theme, the house of gloves and hats, the neons at night that the trees along the avenues could not contain. And of wanting to dive further and further and deeper, devouring the details and minutiae of my city. Then, at the age of seventeen, I began to devour other cities, other countries, I understand that life can offer us an accident of being born limited by the geographical or social coordinates of a country or family, but that we will ultimately have to explore it.

I remember things that were much less cheerful and that I only accepted as an adult, without ever having understood in concrete, such as the lack of maternês between baby and mother, the affective absence and not only of parents, whose sick babies were taken away and sought only on weekends, going well. Of children locked in boarding schools, unwanted children with malformed parents or immensely limited, economically or mentally, of the wounds that are born to us and are pearls, if we look at them from new prisms and new perspectives. And for those who do not dare, as in Plato's allegory of the cave, light would be a kind of captivity, giving us back truths for which we are not prepared, if we use the blindfolds that are placed on us by the family, by society and by its particular and universalist dictates. I wonder if any child will be prepared to understand these absences that are nothing more than the supply of the basic needs that any human needs to find the balance and constancy for this imperative that is to grow and develop capacities.

When my mother-in-law came for the first time to see the sea, I was thrilled with her wonder, perhaps to the same extent as she did, because it was not the wind hitting my hair that would make me cry with joy and amazement. She knew the rivers, with narrow basins, the streams with small and gentle banks and the great cliffs that flanked her childhood and adulthood. It has been fixed too soon, that it is always too early to settle down, if we are not trees or houses, and conformism, in this obligatory rigidity, is so obstructive to the brain synapses that we end up believing in limitation, whether geographical, social, political or personal, as the normalization of contents implicit in the coordinates to which we are entitled. Ignorance thus becomes the frontier that prevents us from seeing seas never before navigated in the personal context. Like the walls that, if they are not torn down by time or by the action of man, are maintained, they present themselves to the human eye as historical proofs of the passage of centuries. Ignorance crystallizes with the dictatorship, with limiting beliefs, which, like clothes in the past, passed from generation to generation, from brother to brother, ignorance is the barrier, the contingency to the exploration and discovery of the world and who we came to be within it. Those who are born poor, poor will die, resigned to the fate of narrow-mindedness and material smallness. And if we want to be someone, we have to work hard and hard, and if we are women, we have to do it four times more, we have to compete five hundred times more, to demonstrate that we are so capable of what we set out to do. That you don't study to be a doctor, that you are born a doctor in a golden cradle, that those who are born crooked, late or never straighten up, that company and friendships dictate who we will be in the near future and that, like great-grandparents, grandparents and parents, we will not go beyond that line circumscribed in time, determined by the ream of ancestors of our lineage. We know that ignorance squares with permissiveness, which are opposites and attract, which are pursued in a game between appearances and concealments. We are clearly rambling, pleating, obstructed by the anachronies of distant pasts. Progress is not closely linked to consumerism, on the contrary, the evolution required is the paradigm shift and the dissolution of all beliefs that previously served our illustrious ancestors. No more. From them, we will have to recover the values, since they are completely exposed, only those who do not want to see it do not see it, the inversion they have suffered in dozens of years, the valorization of material capital instead of the bet on the constant valorization of human values. Which are, after all, the wealth of the spoils of human experience, on a collective level on this planet abundant with everything, even shit, at the moment. And when I say shit, what comes to mind is that we will have a lot of work ahead of us, will generations have the capacity to invert the pole of divergences, of the exacerbation of consumerism that has led us to this open-air garbage dump? Where will we send everything that we do not need and hinders human development? The recycling and deconstruction of demodé models are on the list of priorities, but where should we start this path, when information is passed on, based on extremism, populism and lies, fake news and exponentiated miseries? Is war a headline chosen to parade in the media daily, as if it were not the buzzword to increase fear, panic and oppression? Do not forget that all these swear words that parade in our daily lives are the ignition and, why not say it, the perfect composition of the current dictatorships?!

The dictatorship changed its clothes, modernized itself to fit the twenty-first century, as Noam Chomsky says and so many before him and so many after him, as Harari does, but it's a stroke of appearance, a fruitful intestinal turbulence, it's sold cheaply, half a dozen euros, like you see that guy who sells chuços in Bolhão, That's that! You don't see him selling chuços in the summer, only in the winter or in the bleeding of a storm announced in the middle of the day. The people say that the occasion makes the thief, and it does. They are the pearls of popular wisdom that should not be forgotten, but deepened. What is needed is to think about the future, but to bring the debate to the now, since yesterday was and is constantly sealed, every day, by self-indulgence. We are warned that we need to stop fear, open our eyes to thought and articulate arms and legs so that the path unfolds. Our children will inherit the worst that we knew how to produce and this is the responsibility of all those who are still alive. Were you the one who asked for corruption? Or the situation, the pot, the stewardship, of this government I fit in, and in the other I am marginalized, vilified, who I choose between the bad and the worst, to be a facho! Damn! The slaves of the dictatorship, it seems to me, don't even know that it is a dictatorship, choose the safe margin of social dictates, is it enough or do they want more? It is because of blindness, by the carrot on the tip of the cane, that cakes will always deceive fools and we are all flour from the same bag, but I am not a fool! Fascism is ugly, it has scurvy and causes diarrhea and dysentery and they even say that it is good for the skin, mixed with gall from offshore accounts, go there to see that he entered poor and left rich, reeking of dealings and properties that do not even pay taxes, unless you pay an ethics and moral commission to investigate, after all, where do so many predicates, so many omitted checks come from and pre-dated, that every man has a price and his values negotiable on the stock exchange. Even if the cow coughs, I will not let go of the power and I will pass it on to the family, the furniture, the influential and perverted relatives and friends, before I die! We live on this seesaw, but it is the illusion of Sodom and Gomorrah. Shame on you, man, sense of state, that the world does not live for this, it dies for this! And this and this are doubly amplified with mastery, I am ashamed, an atrocious shame, for me and for my grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents who built paths and values that were thrown away, without the right to recycling.

Amazement, curiosity and wonder are part of childhood and should be promoted and welcomed because it is from them that new models of thinking about reality result and evolution comes from freshness, young daring, refusal to continue and proliferation of fear as an excuse to tear the veil. And just like Almerinda, the girl woman I saw discover the sea after fifty, it's always time to change, to innovate and to add the best in us. That those immense boulders in the middle of the ocean were not brought by a thousand men and stuck on a deserted sand, but it is necessary to give space and context to the child who brings an unknown and unexplored wealth. And we can only value it when we give it a field of research.

And it will be for the children that we will have to get to work, destroying, rebuilding and recognizing that our personal and collective limitations do not produce miracles, on the contrary, they are part of the problem and what we really need is material for the solution of the equation that continues to be enveloped and unduly controlled by the power of savage capitalism, that is to say, due to greed, envy and the secular limitation of not being able to broaden the views to a horizon that we believe is watertight and small. We have to think big and that implies thinking the whole.

And for this equation, we need the passion, the talents and gifts that the tiny beings that are the children and the old donkeys that we are, as we already bring, to add to the solution sought. And believe me, in the twenty-first century, contrary to what the ancestors said, old donkeys learn languages, and the one who guarantees us this is the lady of the needs that we, blind, did not want to see. Children are poems, don't reduce them to your own schemes.

What has to die in us is defeatism, anachronism, apathy, conformism, ignorance, racism and xenophobia, taboos and prejudices and the faits divers of those who gain from our limitations, to give birth to the new. What has to die, and for that it needs attitude and action, is the old status quo that fattens on appearances and hypocrisy and that regresses our hope to the fetid fear that we inject into the new generations. It is necessary to expose the wounds and the truths and call a spade a spade a spade and debate knowledge and experience as the only options for the future, from the complex to harvest the simple, from the refusal to reap the choice. The rest are loincloths, illusions and materialism that are no longer useful or have no excuse to be included in the human evolutionary process. And let us stop preambles and susceptibilities in the approach to the issues. And not to return to false issues, such as deception, provincial politics, the sale of titles and pomp and circumstance, and focus on human collective abundance. And I will not say that it is verbiage and rhymes with the diarrhea that we already produce in considerable quantities. Sour chronic, difficult to digest, but there will always be a gaviscon as a positive metaphorical dosage or a prozac that works like a pink barbie fashion glasses, or even the miraculous viagra that always work, straightening the crooked until the next load! Illusions are sold by the dime and cheap! Don't be ants, be cicadas, because music is needed for the motivation of the masses. And for me, pasta comes out with a dessert song.