Gustavo Perez turns six today

For those of you joining the story in mid-stream, Gustavo Perez was the alias assigned to me by Huntington Memorial Hospital. This is part of their standard protocol when admitting someone who was the victim of a hostile and potentially fatal attack. On the evening of March 5, 2013, while feeding the homeless in Pasadena, CA, I was stabbed in the neck from behind by someone wielding a box cutter resulting in the anterior branch of my carotid artery being severed.  I spent five days at Huntington before being discharged. I slept 12-14 hours a day until mid-summer or so.

This blog was created to help me document the process of dealing with the experience. with some sort of vague expectation that it might help others. I'm either in denial, or I seem to have come out of it fairly well, and in many ways better off emotionally than before the incident. I'll try to summarize how.

My understanding is that for most people when something bad happens, a question that gets asked sooner or later is "why?". Moreover, closure seems to come more quickly when the answer is one the poser of the question can accept.

Thanks to the level-headedness of a bystander who pursued my assailant to the edge of the park where she got into a cab, the police were given the license plate number and they apprehended my assailant almost immediately. Before I went into surgery, the apprehending officer told me that the suspect had told him that the voices in her head told her to attack a church group whose teachings were "sodomizing religion." So clearly to me she was at some level mentally unbalanced. That prompted me to pursue the concept of madness. The seeds of my answer were sown in an essay by G.K. Chesteron: "the Maniac".  There's no good way to paraphrase Chesterton, but i'll try. Chesterton submits that those we consider insane have not lost their reason,but rather that reason is all they have left. The issue is that the universe of facts for such people is so small that they can't help but reach the same conclusion over and over. This led me to consider how people can ignore basic facts while making an opinion .

Some people just NEED to be right - and that need forces them to rationalize rather than accept any truth that refutes their ideology. For others, what seem to be 'facts' are actually a consequence of painful memories, physical/emotional trauma, etc. My choice was to determine that my assailant fell into this category.  As such, I could re-frame the perspective and view her behavior as a result of displaced anger where I just happened to be the target. I'm not sure if I could have gotten there so quickly if someone else hadn't happened to me just a few weeks before. I got cut off while I was driving, and a policeman who'd seen the entire thing pulled ME over for laying on the horn. I started to explain how the other driver had cut me off when the officer interrupted with "people around here drive like &^$#. Honk the horn once and move on." So as I resume my driving, I'm thinking: "but I was GOOD!!!" But with a little thought, it dawned on me that I had personalized it first by judging the person for not observing my own subjective standards of courtesy and acting as if that person had done so deliberately just to irritate me. The reality is that the person who did that would have done the same regardless of who was in the lane he was cutting across. I'm not proud to admit that I realized how much I had personalized things before my attack.

The point is that when one is able to depersonalize a near fatal attack, anything else seems trivial if not downright banal.  The flip side of this is that as I've dismantled/de-energized a lot of the coping mechanisms I'd developed over the years, I have found that many are more accepting of me than I'd believed as well. Rather than becoming reclusive/more protective of myself, I recognize that it's up to me to put myself out there; the risk may be real, but the potential rewards more than outweigh the risk.

I was back at the park the next Tuesday. Later that summer, during dinner one of the homeless asked if I was afraid of getting attacked again. Right at that moment, another homeless person came up behind me and gave me a hug. I turned to see who it was, then turned back to the person who asked the question, and I replied: "well, if I was, that would have freaked me out.".

Fleece

I still wear the black fleece that I was wearing when I was attacked. I'm wearing it right now as a matter of fact. For some reason, they saw fit to cut a long slit from the left armpit all the way down, but still pulled it over my head to remove it. I had stitched the slit closed, but all the stitches had come out, so I stitched the slit closed again this morning.

Fleece also describes a concept in the Scriptures about how someone used a fleece to determine if an apparent calling really came from God or not. The Biblical account refers to how someone left a fleece out overnight and asked God to have the fleece be wet with dew but the ground be dry. It turned out so, but that wasn't enough. The person then requested that the conditions be reversed, that the fleece be dry and the ground wet with dew.

I didn't realize this until recently, but I've been maintaining a 'fleece' type of mentality towards things. Essentially, I've been waiting for some sort of guarantee before taking action. This is not a consequence of the attack, though, this is something that comes from my family of origin.  The irony is that now things are going well, and I'm waiting for something to go wrong instead of moving forward. I guess this is the season I come to grips with this.