Living Autopsies: Visualising Responsibility

Abstract

Stewart’s drinking was getting out of hand. He was starting to feel the impact on his health, but it was his family and partner who’d had enough of him being a ‘bad drunk’ and they wanted him to quit, ‘if he doesn’t do that, then I will have to seriously review the situation of our relationship, because he is going to lose everything if he doesn’t stop’, warned his partner. A wake-up call was needed. Successfully nominated for the BBC Three makeover show Make My Body Younger, Stewart finds himself strapped into a bodysuit nervously gripping the sides of a hospital gurney in a pathology suite. His family watch on as the show’s presenter, George Lamb, invites a pathologist to assess what damage Stewart’s lifestyle has exacted on his ‘insides’. The light dims; the pathologist steps forward to draw his hand down Stewart’s chest which slices open in response. ‘So what is happening now is that the primary incision is occurring, coming down the skin of your chest’, explains the pathologist, who gestures at the incision making it slowly retract, ‘pulling the skin back and we see your heart and lungs’, and then ‘your liver and intestine – all beating away’.

In the quest for happiness and peace the first and most important key is to take personal responsibility for your life. I believe that we are 100% accountable and responsible for everything in our lives, even if we don’t like it.

Julie Way (2009) Inner Self, http://www.innerself.com.au