How Do I Define Myself? Hep C Blog Post (Hepatitis C)

How do you define yourself? By your actions? By the job you do? Maybe your spiritual beliefs or your likes and dislikes?


Usually we can get an insight of how to categorise someone by posing the question “so what do you do?”

Most people have worked out who or what they are by the time they reach middle age and have rehearsed and are forearmed for this question.

But imagine after you have spent your life building your ‘brand’ that every line of who you are has been taken away. Hep C has done all of this and more.

To become eligible for a liver transplant, I have signed a ‘contract for life’ that I will never touch alcohol again. Not even to cook with in a sauce! I also know that being the type of person that I am, that if I was to have one drink, it would mean two, which would mean four and so on. I never considered myself to be alcoholic, I never had the shakes or any of that but as my school report always said “Easily distracted”

I can never go back into pubs, I think even the most determined would find it impossible, after being the host, the comedian, the referee and the drinker, I could never go back and do my job with the same gusto without these traits and therefore renders my definition by work, dead.

The same could be said of my actions. I considered myself to be the archetypical ‘bon viveur’. Now, I’m not saying you need a drink inside you to do this, but it helps! More than this though, my confidence has been well and truly bashed and now feels like a dinted tin can with its contents dripped out leaving a void inside. It’s hard to be the life and soul when so much of your life and soul has been poured out.

As for my spirituality, I suppose I was agnostic but believed you do good; you get good, ying and yang, that kind of thing. However that thinking now seems to be so far off the mark. I see good in small places and for that I’m thankful, but in the context of what’s going on in the world I find it hard to reconcile. As for my personal circumstances, need I say more? I have always tried to punch above my weight and this has caused me to be knocked down more than once but I never lost sight of what I was fighting for.

So it brings me to likes and dislikes. Some guru once said, if you don’t like the question “what do you do”, it’s usually because you don’t like the answer. Therefore, if you don’t like the answer then change it. My problem is, I liked the answer, and I liked doing what I did and being defined by it. Maybe that made me one dimensional or shallow. I could ponder my worth later.

So now I’m a guy waiting for a liver transplant. A husband and a father; a warm human being who still has a lot to give. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to define myself as anything more than that or what I would like it to be. I want to dream again, I want to feel great when I wake in the morning, get up and do my ‘thing’ and carry everyone with me for the ride. But I can’t right now and I’m not sure when I will again.

But if I feel like it again soon, I’ll let you know.