Categories
Emotional Work Medical

Day 896 and Watching Pain

Two of the people closest to me emotionally are having bad days. I’d like to discuss what it feels like to watch someone’s pain when you yourself are intimately familiar with pain yourself.

It hurts to watch someone else in pain when you yourself know how much it takes from your spirit and how little it gives. Because you see, I know now that pain simply is, just like nature, death, & grief. There is no moral valence to suffering. It is a lie that our culture loves to tell that pain is a good teacher. Ben Hunt of Epsilon Theory wrote beautifully about being in the grip of totalizing pain.

They say that pain is a teacher. This is a lie, at least when it comes to pain beyond understanding. suppose understandable pain could be used as a correction, as part of a causal learning process. Pain beyond understanding, though … pain beyond understanding teaches you nothing.

Ben Hunt

America is in a pain crisis. Most of it is chronic and challenging to treat. It’s worse for our most vulnerable who struggle to be treated because we see pain too often through the lens of shame, punishment & physical dependency. We only admitted to the problem because the opioid crisis brought into stark relief that the kinds of pain we are in are rich, varied, traumatic and systemic.

But it’s important to remember that pain is personal. Mine comes from a chronic spinal condition called ankylosing spondylitis. And it comes and goes. Other people have different pain. And it’s hard to articulate no matter who you are.

I forget the contours of pain when I’m not in its grip. Such is it’s overwhelming power that pain is the only thing you can focus on when you are in it, but it melts away from your consciousness like snow on a sunny day the moment it dissipates. Pain is both all encompassing and a ghost on whom it is impossible to keep a grasp.

Day 183 and Pain

Because pain is both absorbing and fleeting, we need our loved ones to witness it. Without the framing of someone outside your experience, it’s easy to become lost in the pain. The other side of this is we forget how to grapple with pain when it strikes unexpectedly as our memory kindly looks to remove it leaving us open to suffering when it reappears. Others bearing witness helps with both.

I won’t sugar coat how much of a challenge it is to watch someone suffer through pain. The first instinct is often to leap to solutions and caretaking. Which sometimes our loved ones may need. If they are lost in pain and unable to help themselves the saving grace can be someone pulling you out with reminders or rendering of treatments.

That being said, you must remember to ask before you care for someone. Simply going straight to your preferred solutions may not be what is needed. Be gentle in doing so being invasive can worsen the suffering. Respect the agency of those in pain by asking if they have a preference for how you engage with them in their pain.

A simple example from my own life today. I asked my loved one if they would prefer to rest rather than engage with me as I know when I am in pain my preference is to lay down. I framed my pain in relation to theirs.

But crucially I followed that relating assuring I did not presume this was their preferred outcome or experience but merely that it’s mine and that I’d like to know theirs. Do not presume that a preference you have is someone else’s. Always ask upfront.

Maybe they want company, or a medication, or a distraction or a myriad of other possibilities. There is no one cure for pain. But it is eased by the love of those we love in return.

Categories
Chronic Disease Travel

Day 889 and Soul Delay

A girlfriend asked me if it felt good to be home in Montana. I said I wasn’t sure as my soul hasn’t landed home yet. I think it might be somewhere over the Arctic at the moment.

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

William Gibson – Pattern Recognition

I don’t feel like I’ve really landed yet even though I’ve been home for a full day. My body is going through various forms of blowback and regression as I resorted to Prednisone while in Europe.

I’m itchy and in pain and simply going about my routines despite it all. Rhythms and processes run my life because I’m a traditionalist. What you do every day is what you become.

Everything physical I do has a cost and nothing is higher cost than travel. I am bearing those costs at the moment. Blessedly the costs feel removed and remote as I am a perhaps disassociated as my soul may or may not be somewhere over Greenland.

So if you’ve not heard from me it’s because I’ve got a bit of soul delay with my jet lag. Or a bit of jet lag with my soul delay. You can expect reintegration soon.

Categories
Startups

Day 887 and Twenty Twenty Four Hours To Go

And I wanna be sedated. Alas I do have something to do and places to go. Namely home. So I better hurry hurry hurry before I go insane.

As I’ve covered at enormous length, I do not care for travel. My reoccurring nightmare is packing for a trip that never comes. A liminal state of impermanence, in which I must be prepared at any moment to grab all my belongings and leave.

My month in Europe flew by. I hardly noticed the time. Some of that is due to tie up and down nature of travel stresses. Most of it flew by because I was having fun.

I learned a lot on this trip. I learned about racism and pluralism and the ever present dangers of populism. I learned about green energy policy failures. I learned that freedom to travel and transact is a privilege reserved for the select few who have good passports. Colonial legacies and festering wounds from resource wars and genocides still keep borders closed. We are not yet one human species and it will get worse before it gets better.

As much as I am looking forward to being home in Montana for our glorious summers, I am leaving behind some pieces of my heart in Europe. I’ll be back soon. But only once the weather has cooled down again. Climate change and chronic illness are not good bedfellows. But in twenty four hours or so I’ll be home. And I hope to recover quickly from the stress of travel.

Categories
Travel

Day 886 and Breaking Camp

When I travel I prefer to set up a base camp. I do things from one place regionally for a month. I have a lot of accoutrements that come with me and I travel. Having a disability like a chronic spinal autoimmune condition is a huge pain in the ass.

After I have my set up I try to run with a regular daily routine when I am abroad. Additional stresses like jet lag, heat, new allergies, a suppressed immune system that easily picks up a stray infection (skin is my most common vector not lung these days), and other more quotidian travel stresses all hit me hard.

I do my best to take care of myself when I travel as any hitch in my routine can mean lost productivity. I plan my trips meticulously.

Today I am breaking down those routines. Packing them back up into my three bag cascade crisis management packing solution. Because what can go wrong will go wrong so plan for every scenario you can envision. Then you pray the unknown unknowns don’t get you.

Travel is an elaborate cost benefit analysis for me. If you do what you love you will never work a day in your life. And I do love calculating my inputs and seeing if my outputs breaks as predicated.

If not then I learned something new about what to model for next time. Breaking camp is where I see what I can improve. And what I did well. Everything has its cost. And I take responsibility for it.

Categories
Biohacking

Day 881 and Set a Timer

I’ve always been the type of thinker who enjoy playing with differences and similarities. I find it pleasing to see common attributes of humanity. I’m soothed seeing we are more alike than not even across vast genetic & cultural distances.

I equally enjoy spotting games of “one thing is not like the other” as part of the general pattern recognition that evolutionary Darwinism implies. The freaks and mutants are who push us forward. Recognizing the value of positive differentiation is the basis for every job I’ve ever loved from fashion to finance.

This might be why I enjoy tools like timers, trackers, spreadsheets and other measurements of inputs and outputs. I like inferred knowledge and probability. Those goofy old standard test questions “this is to that: as that is to this” were my favorite.

I understand how totalizing using these tools can be. I’m currently experiencing the intense urge to smash my Apple Watch as I am asking it to “set a timer for 45” minutes several times a day. I’m setting shorter timers too.

I am spreading out a biohacking regimen while my body goes through an ugly symptom flare that suggests both allergy issues and a general immune response to what I believe is an infection from some scratching that opened my dermatitis. Fun huh?

The expectation that one’s body is unique and an N of 1 pairs poorly with averages, reversion to the mean, and the persistent beeping tinging ringing reminders of a timer going off telling you to follow the routine. So here I am wishing to some spreadsheet brained hope that my inputs and outputs will balance and I will be fine if we got the dosing right.

Which is the prayer of everyone who has ever experienced a medical malady. Set a timer, wait, and pray to an actual God as the ones in our phones aren’t up to the task of being deities just yet. More like having a troublesome djinn that promises the pain will go away if you do exactly ask it asks.

Categories
Chronic Disease

Day 880 and Pollen

It seems as if I exposed myself to a bit too much pollen in my wandering yesterday but I’m so itchy I’ve reconsidering whether pain is more or less all-absorbing than itching.

So I am giving myself permission to take it nice and easy on this blog post today. This morning I ordered an enormous number ($150 or so) of creams, unguents and lotions as well as a number of anti-histamines from a German apothecary in the hopes of gaining some relief.

Drug Delivery By Wolt
An assortment of German antihistamines and a few fun free samples as I guess I spent a lot.

I take multiple antihistamine already but I got a fourth (it’s Claritin in the US. A got a corticosteroid cream, something called Zugsable or black cream (it smells like tar) and a Linola Fett cream which appears to be like Weleda skin food without the fragrances. Plus some melatonin as I’m not sleeping so great with this itching. They tossed in some cosmetics as well which I will definitely put to use. And that’s all she wrote today.

Categories
Travel

Day 875 and Spring Fever

I had a flu this time last year. I was in process of closing on our home in Montana. What a week that was for me. The first piece of real land I ever owned. Better late than never.

This May I think I just have plain old hay fever. Blooming trees on Frankfurt city streets combined with a roadside bedroom has me sniffling and itching. I broke out the prednisone. 5mg at first. Then upped to 10mg the next day. I treat prednisone like most people treat opioids. “In case of emergency” would be preferable.

Maybe I simply get spring fever of some sort and I can romanticize it like some British Regency period piece as interpreted by Shonda Rhimes. Ah she had the rheumatic touch when she bought her ancestral home. But then had the vapors when she came to the Hapsburg Court. The deadly poisons of springs first flower has felled her bloom. Spring fever indeed, my pretties.

I didn’t even use ChatGPT for that. My brain can spit back up sick tropes. Nevertheless I do feel a bit felled by this inflammatory cycle that has required a little more attention than preferred.

Categories
Aesthetics Community Finance

Day 863 Abstract The Pain Away

When I was a small child I attended meditation retreats with my parents. Hippies amirite? The particular branch practiced was some variant of Kashmir Shivaism, but I’ve got to imagine it was heavily edited for the consumption of white Boomers.

Who else would take a vacation to sit in silence, chant the Bhagavata Gita at 5am and practice sevā, all while having six year old children? Silicon Valley’s syncretic culture produces some weird hybrids. Seventies counter culture gave us some of the best religious revivals in American history.

If you didn’t catch the word sevā earlier it’s actually going to be the anchor of the post. Sevā as it was explained to me as a child at the ashram is selfless service. It’s work you do without expectation of reward. It is a dedication to others.

Practically it meant that anytime we lived at the ashram everyone contributed some set of work, mostly unskilled labor but not always, in the form of sevā. I did everything from food preparation and dish washing (working a commercial kitchen dishwasher is actually fun) to caring for some donated horses. I had fun summers as a child.

But the point was that everyone participated in some way to the functions of the ashram no matter who you were. And we did have some weird celebrities but that’s not the point. Sevā applied to us all. Though I’m sure glad I never looked too hard at the politics of finances of these ashtrays. Childhood innocence. As a child I just thought it was fun to contribute to the adult world.

But what I remember now is a sense of connection. That no aspect of these retreats was ever abstracted to far from me. The service was meant to bond you to an experience of a world bigger than yourself. And by recognizing that, you’d somehow connect more with others.

I try to remember that now when I am in lonely cities where every aspect of living with others is transaction. A food delivery service whisks you a meal in an hour in a country where you are an outsider without ties, bonds or service beyond the basic civilizational contract of capital markets.

The global cosmopolitan gloss of mobile applications have abstracted service away to the point where we can have an entire day of discourse about a man being sad a house cleaner washed a cast iron skillet but we can’t admit that we all pay for service as it cracks the facade.

We’ve got no sevā because that’s an expectation too great to hear. We can barely manage to pay a fee for service anymore. Imagine if we had to operate without intangibles. We can barely make Uber Eats function with taxes, tips, and services fees. Bless the markets for this freedom and curse it in the same breath.

Fuck the pain away? No, we abstract the pain away. No need to see who contributes anything. You can complain to a faceless chatbot cum customer service artificial intelligence about how some man on a bicycle didn’t deliver your order on time. The service lives below the machine now and has patience for frailty.

And yes I’m writing this because my Korean fried chicken and kimchi order got lost in a side street in Frankfurt for an hour or two.

Don’t worry the corporate entities that intermediated between me, the restaurant and the courier decided in my favor. The customer is always right as long as they have paid the fees to pretend that are lords.

All pain in the above transaction was abstracted away into some governance structure that decided it was worth 25 euro or so. One presumes some public market agreed on the price. I guess I did too. We all did.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 862 and Separation

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder. But I don’t feel absence in my heart. And it certainly isn’t positive. If only absence were so tightly concentrated and concretely clear. I feel it in my entire body. And it’s painful.

Perhaps it’s the new emotional attunement gained from my five week nervous system bootcamp but I feel separation from my loved-ones keenly. It’s an amorphous horror that traps me in sympathetic paralysis.

My throat closes up, my chest tightens, my jaw clenches and I gasp for air as I try to stave off the grief. I cry but not freely. It’s a poorly controlled gulping sensation as close to drowning as I can imagine.

I don’t know if it is a sense memory from childhood. But I register the subtle smells of abandonment, loss, and separation with the sensitivity of a hound. I imagine the pain to be a sort of umami. Another taste beyond the two poles of sweet and salty. My pain is savory.

That kind of depth usually means something is coming up from the very beginnings of life before conscious rationality. And I long to struggle against it. I want to fight it off with intellect. I hate the sadness that washes over me, bringing me despair I didn’t know was inside me.

And yet it is there. And all I can do is remember to let it out. I remember to stop the gasping grasping attempts at control and feel my way into the emotions of separation. And maybe then it will find ways to dissipate. The only way out is through.

Categories
Medical

Day 834 and Inside Out

I had a really rough night last night. It’s entirely possible my original theory of industrial lettuce wasn’t the whole picture.

For a little timeline clarification. Yesterday, I woke up with stomach troubles after eating agribusiness salad chain for dinner on Wednesday. I had meetings on Thursday so I took some varied drug store tummy medicines and gutted it out. I even had a very fun time at my meetings. But then as the adrenaline of the day wained I was heading towards disaster. The nausea and had was getting worse.

I realized I couldn’t attended a dinner with some old friends but Alex was fine. I told him to pick up some Tums on the way home. As his dinner wore on my symptoms got worse and worse.

I felt like I was beach ball ready to pop. My stomach was distended so far I felt like I had back problems my stomach pushed out so far. I was tight Mike a drum. The pain and nausea consumed my focus. Around 7:30 or so I called Alex saying I needed a doctor or a visit to urgent care. I couldn’t tolerate it any longer.

Blessedly our doctor in Montana called back almost immediately. He had just personally had a case of stomach flu or norovirus himself and mentioned it was trending up nationwide. At that point I was mostly moaning and curled into a ball from the nausea and gas. He prescribed an antispasmodic called dicyclomine. It helps calm stomach cramping.

I had an hour of crying and praying waiting for it to kick in. I’m sure I scared the shit out of the other hotel guests with the moaning and crying. I was begging Alex to please fix it. To find something else I could take. To do literally anything to relieve me of this horror. Thankfully around 930pm or so it kicked in fully. How do I know?

I was able to vomit. A lot. Seven times over the course of half an hour. And then I was fine. My stomach deflated down to a normal size. The nausea abated. The pain and cramping subsided. Four hours of intense misery has passed with a drug that turned me inside out.

I spent all of Friday in bed sleeping it off. I missed all my meetings and couldn’t eat anything till dinner time came around. I’m having some soup and I suspect I’ll simply pass out. New York is an inside out kind of place sometimes and I’ll just have to live with it.