403: forbidden

I was expecting this to happen eventually, but not soon.

I spent February in the UK with my sweetheart. ~80% positive experience even though I spent most of it either sick or grotty from asthma. It also served as early warning to update my passport (3yrs early), when the border guard got a colleague to double check that my face matched my photo ID.

At the same time, my interactions with officials on both sides of the international border—as well as occasional service professionals across the pond—were uncomfortably gendered. There wasn't any moment of hesitation to select a pronoun or honorific, as people had towards me in many U.S. contexts since the post-COVID reopening. It's about as dysphoria-inducing as being consistently "ma'm"d when other's default perceptions of me were feminine.

I still feel vastly better with my sex hormones balanced towards testosterone, but damn if I like the side effects.

I just realized that it's been a couple of months since I wrote anything here. I'm trying to be more consistent than that.

Mostly what's been happening in the intervening time is that depression has been kicking my ass. I got a little bit of relief while on vacation in Seattle, but that was also only a little bit of time, and now it's back in full force. Most (75%? More?) of the intrinsic reward that I depend on for motivation to do much of anything has simply evaporated into the ether, so far as I can tell. If nothing else, the habit I've needed to cultivate these past several years of 'eat every 4h like clockwork' is standing up well under stress testing, even if what gets eaten is banana-and-yogurt rather than a proper meal. Cooked food was an early casualty to the acute shortage of fucks to give, but regularly putting something in my stomach has not been.

I'm finding this difficult from another, unexpected direction. Some 2/3 of my life was lived in an environment where the family-unit (whatever its variable composition) had no resources to deal with awareness of my problems, let alone the problems themselves. And so I learned to wear the mask of okayness everywhere, to reinforce it at home, and to withdraw from people so that they wouldn't be burdened by my needs*. But right now, living with Z, there is no place to withdraw to. And I'm malfunctioning too badly to keep up a socially acceptable veneer, no matter how my conditioned reflexes scream that Bad Things Will Happen.

The fact is that my problems right now are a weight on Z, when he's already operating near the limit of what he can handle. I can see that my inability to get traction on dealing with the current MDE is deeply frustrating to him. (It frustrates me as well, of course, when I can feel anything besides the undifferentiated greyness.) And yet, he's still here. He has not rejected me for this un-chosen thing that my brain does, or backed away from my suffering out of self-preservation. I am inexpressibly grateful to him.

Now if only I could find where my unwanted programming lives and shove his counterexample down its throat.


* This meshes interestingly with having also picked up such a degree of hypervigilance in any social situation that it doesn't leave enough attention for being aware of what I need, much less what I feel. At any given time, which failtastic bit of programming predominates?

Today I got poked and prodded and X-ray'd some more. The doc I saw this time was more informative than the ER staff, probably due to not juggling a dozen or more patients at once.

The specific problem is that I have a vertical fracture through the head of my fibula. It's "minimally displaced", which is good. Doc is optimistic that it will turn out to be stable without further intervention, but still wants me to go back tomorrow (11h from now) to see the sports-medicine surgeon who's in a couple mornings each week. Between them, they'll decide whether I need the broken bit surgically reattached to the rest of the bone to make it hold still and heal.

Today's exam has left me quite sore. 9h after getting home, I'm still needing extra painkillers to do anything besides lie here and hurt. So I'm not really looking forwards to the next one, even if the result is likely to be good.

All this has got me thinking about how I'm never sure how much pain one is expected to be able to tolerate. If we're going for functionality targets, there's a pretty big difference between what I need in order to reach 'able to do most basic self-maintenance if provided with ample distractions in between', vs. 'able to produce in-depth analysis of X.' - The latter being my bread and butter; the former being where I'm at right now. (Aside from which, it's disturbing to be left clinging to a rock rather than swimming in the ocean of data that I call home. Am I beyond the low-tide line? Will there be a hospitable tide pool to limp to if I am?)

At any rate, I have to get up early for that appointment. Goodnight, Dreamwidth.

About a month and a half since I last posted, longer since I've read with anything approaching regularity.

The semester has come and gone; my last final was yesterday. I liked all of my classes, but have taken an incomplete in two of them because I've been considerably less than okay, in ways that have prevented me from getting the necessary work done. Those problems aren't fixed (and my brain certainly isn't fixed, by any stretch of the imagination) but I have a bit more time with a bit less pressure to work around them.

In other news, my sister has been staying with us since September. She had expected to be in a better job and moved out on her own by now, but hasn't been able to make either one happen. Her current plan seems to be returning to AZ after the airplane ticket prices go down from their holiday highs (about a month from now). I'm just as glad - I like her, but an extrovert trying to share an apartment with two introverts is stressful all around.

Chanukah is behind us, and longest-night still ahead. Here goes.

I don't know if it's the weather, a cascade effect from ordinary "earned" aches being worse than normal this week, or something else entirely. Whatever it is, right now I'm uncomfortably aware of joints that I normally don't even remember that I have. OTC painkillers take the edge off, but that's about it. (I'm currently rotating among acetaminophen, aspirin, and ibuprofen, so that I don't get too close to the maximum dosage of any of them. Checked for negative interactions first; none are known.)

( What's to be done about the rest of it? )

I know this because I crashed at home after following a job interview* with the hunt for replacement shoes**. I wanted to eat, so I ended up crashing on the ground floor, which is not a restful place. I ended up stuck there for the next eight-ish hours, because I didn't have the spoons to gather my stuff out of the common areas and drag it upstairs. Around 04:00 I started to have enough energy to make that happen. And here I am. This has ended up being a 19-hour day.

Are we having fun yet?




* Interview with the Reddien lab. They publish stuff like this.

** It was ultimately a successful hunt, in that I returned home with a pair of birkenstocks along with replacements for the boots that look fine outside, but which are so worn inside that they've started giving me blisters. The birks were easy. Finding actual close-toe shoes that fit required attempts at four different stores.

I'm up TDE in order to attend to a social obligation in Connecticut this afternoon. Dragging out of bed, I realized something - the old pattern of getting what ought to be "enough" sleep, then 2-3h later finding that my body started telling me to go back to sleep, doesn't seem to be a feature of living here in Somerville. Even with the airplane overflights.

One of my assignments for Social Psych this term is to get people to fill out a Johari window for me. It's come to my attention that there's a similar tool, called Nohari, which uses antonyms of the original list. For curiosity's sake, I decided to fill out both.

So, please select six words each that you think describe me:
Johari
Nohari

More and more light leads to my body insisting I get less and less sleep, when my need for it hasn't changed.

I hate this fucking place.

I like working with big, messy systems with lots of variables. From where I stand now, that's the most prominent thread connecting what I've enjoyed about studying STEM fields.

It makes me wonder whether I wouldn't be better off in a field that's generally acknowledged to be difficult to handle with reductionistic methods. (Classic example being the life sciences - if you take a creature apart to try to figure out how it works, it very quickly stops working.)