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.
My current book is Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. I'm less than halfway through, but so far it's fantastic.

I want to talk about one of the exercises, which aims to shake out key bits of "how other people should change to make you feel valued". To do this, one is to quickly and without thinking much, complete the sentences:

* I wish other people were more ______.
* Why is it so hard for people to ______?
* For a change, I would love someone to treat me like ______.
* Maybe one of these days I'll find someone who will ______.
* In an ideal world with good people, other people would ______.

Continued inside... )
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?
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403: Red-ink fail stamp. (FAIL)
( Aug. 7th, 2015 03:02 am)
Took today as a mental health day; not doing appreciably better at the end of it. Just going to have to hope that tomorrow is magically better somehow.

I've been on the new OC for 27 days, now, with no break for dummy pills. There's enough else going on that it's not yet evidence of anything, but experience suggests that'd be the prime suspect.
403: Reduce - Reuse - Reanimate (Reduce - Reuse - Reanimate)
»

Ow.

( Jun. 8th, 2015 11:29 pm)
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.
It's a marked understatement, for one thing. And when I examine my reasons for making it, I don't like what I see. Shame, and fear that any revealed weakness will be used against me. Neither is a feature of the circles I move in today, so I'm working to dismantle the hold they have on my actions. It'll do me good to put this out here, regardless of response or lack thereof.

The only way I know to describe it is from the inside. So, put yourself in my shoes for a moment. )
403: Reduce - Reuse - Reanimate (Reduce - Reuse - Reanimate)
( Dec. 19th, 2012 07:36 pm)
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.
This is as good a time as any to make sure you all know: I'm sapiosexual.

What's that mean? I'm attracted to people. Minds. The bodies they're packaged in can look nice, but are mostly an afterthought.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled reading.
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 stumbled over http://cleolinda.livejournal.com/1001468.html Monday night, and it caused me to realize that all is not well in [personal profile] 403-land. As she says:
Because even when you grasp the idea that depression is an ailment and not a personal failing... it still feels like a personal failing. You know you're clinically depressed, but you feel like you're just lazy, lonely, hopeless, pathetic. Or sometimes you don't realize you're ill, because those feelings of anxiety and shame and helplessness sneak up on you and feel legitimate, and that's why you don't realize you need help.
I seem to automatically lay on a veneer of "okayness", when I'm not. It lasts until for some reason it can't - so long as I'm believing my own propaganda. At the moment, I don't.

Finals week is going to be Fun.
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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.
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Sleep paralysis is weird. At first it just felt like my body was too heavy to move, then it segued into a dream about being buried under a small mountain of snakes. (Probably the result of a conversation I had last night.) I'm not particularly afraid of snakes, but I wasn't keen on being submerged in them, so it was irritating that I couldn't move. Then I realized, "Wait, that's a good thing! I have no idea if any of these snakes are venomous, and if I'm not moving, I can't piss them off."

And then [livejournal.com profile] zeightyfiv moved in his sleep, waking me up properly.
403: Reduce - Reuse - Reanimate (Reduce - Reuse - Reanimate)
( Oct. 24th, 2010 08:12 am)
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.
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I'm eagerly awaiting the next issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, for two articles that are currently in press:

"Whatever does not kill us: Cumulative lifetime adversity, vulnerability, and resilience", Seery, Mark et. al.

"Feeling the Future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect.", Bem, D.J.
The pre-publication grapevine has it that this one takes standard psychological experiments, like those demonstrating the priming effect, time-reverses them, and gets results which are better than chance. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.


In other news, yesterday's bio class took a long diversion through the ear, nerve cells, and hearing. It leads me to wonder whether my difficulty deciphering words spoken during white noise or other human voices isn't due to something so simple as slow habituation to the background noise.

Curiosity then had me wander around wikipedia to other sensory oddities, where I discovered that there's a word for palinopsia and a phrase for visual snow. I've had both for as long as I can remember, but have only rarely been able to successfully describe them to anyone else.
403: A rack of test tubes with the caption "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate". (Solution or precipitate)
( Oct. 12th, 2010 10:51 pm)
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
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403: Reduce - Reuse - Reanimate (Reduce - Reuse - Reanimate)
( Oct. 12th, 2010 10:01 am)
Normally, I use projects and experiments as a pressure valve. You'll quite often see me start a new project or revive an old one at the height of stress, because I find that I need to do something unrelated to whatever is causing the stress, right now. (Speaking of which, there are a few follow-up posts about prior projects that I've been meaning to write..) But with class, wedding arrangements*, and playing catch up from being sick/recovery, my available time to de-stress is being squeezed from all directions. Usually, this kind of situation does not end well.


* For anyone I haven't yet mentioned it to, the wonderful [livejournal.com profile] zeightyfiv and I will be getting married in early to mid-January. Preparing for this gives me great understanding of why people might decide to elope.
403: Reduce - Reuse - Reanimate (Reduce - Reuse - Reanimate)
( May. 10th, 2010 05:42 am)
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've been thinking about the fainting incident from last summer. At the time I attributed it to simple pain, but in retrospect I've had accidents that hurt far worse which didn't cause me to ragdoll onto the floor*. At the time, I was selling blood plasma in order to pay for groceries, and was having an increasing amount of trouble keeping my heart rate low enough to measure within the agency's "healthy" range. [personal profile] reflectedimages joked that I was actually being paid to undergo fear conditioning, and I think he's right. (The process is set up for maximum efficiency and ended up feeling pretty degrading, on top of the whole biological fluid ickiness. The management could've at least tried to reduce the sci-fi dystopia air of the 'donation' room.) I may indeed have acquired a phobia of blood during that time period. Should probably do something about it, when I'm next in a stable situation with decent health insurance.


* The 'winning' accident is the time in high school when I forgot my housekeys and tried to get into the back yard instead. A foothold that had been stable before gave out underneath me, and I fell onto the (wooden) gate, and then onto the ground.. on the outside of the yard. My memory of the next few minutes is blank, but I somehow got around the side of the house and found myself upright in a patio chair.
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403: Listen to the song of the paper cranes... (Cranesong)
( Feb. 6th, 2010 05:14 pm)
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.)
I've come to the realization that both my major and minor are in subject areas that I don't want to pursue for a living. All of my classes this semester are in either my major or minor field of study. So what do I do for the rest of this semester?
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