Tag: Pain

Categories
Chronicle

Day 1090 and Winter Breaks

I would very much like to take an extended break to restore my mind and my body. I feel as if I could use a week or two offline.

The holy nights have held a place in my heart and mind as the season for introspection. I like doing fasts during this time, but it’s not been physically wise to take an extended fast recently.

I expect 2024 to be a big year. I had lots of little things to wrap in 2023 which is impacting my capacity to fully check out for the remainder of the year. Duty calls I suppose. I am keeping my obligations to others but I may need to find a way to keep obligations to myself.

On that note, I’ll keep this short. It’s better to get back to reading and resting when my capacity is diminished.

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1089 and Silencing Inputs

I am doing very poorly today. All inputs into my system are being read by my senses as pain.

I’ve spent the last two or three hours in a dark room without any systems inputs but background. I’d hoped to become unconscious but was unable to sleep. It was an extended period of consciousness doing battle with pain. I didn’t set a timer or I’d be able to tell you for sure how much time I spent in this state.

I couldn’t read text on paper or watch visuals on a screen, I couldn’t listen to audio or intake spoken word without difficulty and intense focusing, nor could I tolerate novel or new smells. You’d think this would be very boring except that the intensity of the nerve outputs clouded all thought.

My body seems to be reading all changes in systems inputs as painful. I am unsure where the proximate source of my pain might be as it’s both too intense to get outside of and too diffuse to respond to mindfulness.

Typical locations like my thoracic spine hurt but I feel it in every joint as I take inventory. My intercostal muscles across my rib cage and chest are so tight I’d swear I have several broken ribs if I didn’t know better.

I’ve taken several pain medications of varying strengths (anti inflammatory and analgesic) to little effect. I had to stop watching Christmas movies with my husband sometime in the afternoon as I simply couldn’t handle the noise and sound coming from the tablet.

I don’t know how coherent my writing is at the moment and I feared I wouldn’t be able to muster any focus. I am finding it hard to look at my mobile phone screen even at the minimum brightness setting. This usually indicates a migraine but that seems like a secondary issue.

I hope this passes as I do not have time to manage this kind of symptomatic intensity. Perhaps my body knows this and is simply allowing a breakdown on a day where it’s safest to do so. In which case I may need another holiday or two to actually find a break restorative instead of as emergency maintenance.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1086 and Body Language

When I was younger I spent a lot more of my time in my body. As I’ve aged I’ve become more cerebral and this has had a negative impact on my overall health.

I had the opportunity over the last two days to do some bodywork with very present people. It was frankly much needed. I haven’t felt entirely in my own body and was as reactive.

It helped to be with someone who was very present and attuned to body language. I spend so much time communicating in virtual spaces recently that I’ve felt further away from my body than I’d like.

If you haven’t had cause to get in better touch with your body this week might be a good time. There is something to be said for simple communication between humans that isn’t captured in our writing. Maybe artificial intelligence can work entirely without being embodied but human intelligence is still very much embodied.

Categories
Biohacking Medical

Day 1084 and Tension

For the last week or two I’ve been getting tensions headaches. While I have migraines that manifest mostly around hormonal cycles, I can’t say I’ve had a tension headache before.

Migraines make me sensitive to light, sound, and smells but this new headache type was more like a pressure inside my cranium. Typical migraine medicine like Imitrax didn’t do much but neither did Advil or Tylenol. I tried caffeine to minimal effect. Exercise seemed to exacerbate the issue, especially if I was getting my heart rate up.

After discussing it with my physician I’ve got a suspicion that I’ve done something compensatory that has caused tension in my upper spine.

I have ankylosing spondylitis in my thoracic spine so it’s a decent hypothesis that to protect myself from the chronic pain there I’ve added additional pressure further up my spine. A inflammatory issue causing a complete different mechanical issue is a logical differential diagnosis.

I’ve got a couple of approaches to fixing the problem. I can get some body work done to relieve some of the pressure in my neck and shoulders with a massage, physical therapy or craniosacral therapy. I can take more magnesium as it is nature’s muscle relaxer. I also can take muscle relaxers.

I think this development is coming now as I’ve been really upping my intensity professionally this fall. I’ve traveled a lot, attended a number of conferences and meetups, and generally applied acceleration to everything in my world. It’s a good thing that Christmas is almost upon us as it seems like it could use some time away from the world. I will be turning within.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1080 and Hard Feedback

Ego protection is innate. Humans have quite the capacity for engaging in defense mechanisms. As I do my end of year reviews to see what I have accomplished and where I have failed I see my ego everywhere.

The types of ego protection that plague me tend to be with those all too human relationships that are closest to me.

I had to admit to myself that I’d been engaging in entirely unproductive approaches in a close partnership. I wanted more from my partner and I’d express it again and again, but I didn’t seem capable of demanding the outcomes I needed. This was unproductive obviously.

Hard feedback was given to my partner. I had to look into my own motivations for enabling a cycle of letting outcomes that didn’t match our goals occur. My own part in it mattered. We had enforced errors, self doubt, fear and all the other typical buggaboos you might expect in a hard situation.

It can be hard to simply address the hard things head on.

Emotional reactivity is part of our autonomic nervous system. It’s not always right. It’s only sometimes right. And learning to tune it is part of the fun. You want to improve your heuristics over time. You will get more clarity on the world and your place in it. If you wish to persist in feeling anxious and uncertain being passive will have that effect. It literally hurts you. You have agency in deciding to address how you feel head on.

Day 1072 Head-on

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1072 and Say How You Feel

A twitter mutual (update: who I have now blocked for the time being) asked what I think is a reasonable question about social graces and your own instincts.

What is the socially appropriate way to deal with having a strong irrational distrust of someone in your community with mutual friends?

It is my belief that it is best to tell the person how you feel. Feelings are not facts. Everyone has emotional reactivity based on their family system dynamics, expressing how you feel is not a hostile act. Strong people appreciate, knowing how they their perceived. If they don’t, you now, have a valuable data point on how to interact with them in the future and how they may be reacting to you.

Many have the instinct to be concerned about how someone will react and let that color their intuition. You win either way by addressing something head on.

That’s the beauty of the approach. You will find out. They will respond and you can assess by their response and your own reaction to it if you want to continue with your instinct or update your priors.

Emotional reactivity is part of our autonomic nervous system. It’s not always right. It’s only sometimes right. And learning to tune it is part of the fun. You want to improve your heuristics over time. You will get more clarity on the world and your place in it. If you wish to persist in feeling anxious and uncertain being passive will have that effect. It literally hurts you. You have agency in deciding to address how you feel head on.

Categories
Chronic Disease

Day 1063 and Overclocked

Since acceleration is within my meme space so heavily I am pushing myself to go faster. Predictably that introduces some instability in my Julie equilibrium. That’s a fancy way of saying I currently feel like shit.

I’ve been a bit immobile for the last couple hours from hitting some type pain wall from overclocking myself. I’d hope it would pass so I could focus and write but it’s getting late on the West Coast and it doesn’t seem likely.

It’s possible this isn’t entirely the fault of excess strain from travel and it is in some manner hormonal. I wonder if at some point an artificial intelligence will be able to deduce my follicular and luteal phases by sentiment analysis on my blog.

Feels like a compelling argument for restricting government power over your bodies doesn’t it? Imagine the unceasing eye of Sauron collecting context clues about your reproductive system and the right to bodily autonomy goes poof.

Anyways I’m out for the night to go do battle with the pain so I can accelerate more tomorrow.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1052 and Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow

My mother is a real free thinker hippie iconoclast type. I’ve written extensively about my hippie Whole Earth Catalog meets Silicon Valley progressive technologist upbringing if you’d like to get a taste.

Her generation’s history of counter culture and inevitable rise to power has many cautionary tales we’d do well to review. The limits of starry eyed optimism and the cold hard calculations of power play out in every generation, especially as they age.

I recall her support of Ross Perot in the 92 election only to find us swept up as a country in the Clinton victory. The Clinton repurposing of a 1977 Fleetwood Mac song as its campaign anthem remains a vivid aesthetic memory from my young childhood.

Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow
Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here
It’ll be better than before
Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone

Fleetwood Mac “Don’t Stop”

The oddest element of this memory is that while the Clinton victory song may have won as core memory, the deeper aesthetics of the losers have a more visceral hold. My mother’s favorite song was actually used as Ross Perot’s campaign song.

The two must have shared some kind of fatalist streak about America as both chose Patsy Cline’s love ballad Crazy.

My mother can really belt out the pain and agony of Cline’s lyrics “crazy for trying and crazy for crying and I’m crazy for loving you.” I can sing it too thanks to the mimicry of childhood.

Maybe I’m crazy too. Maybe we all are. Because Perot, Patsy and my mother got to the punch of the Clinton victory and America’s love affair with thinking about tomorrow.

I knew you’d love me as long as you wanted
And then someday you’d leave me for somebody new

“Crazy” Patsy Cline (written by Willie Nelson)

Categories
Startups

Day 1047 and Risking Resets

Apparently the last year has been an “annus horribilus” for startups. Kate Clarke writes in The Information.

If 2022 was a year of shock and denial for tech founders and investors as stocks collapsed, 2023 was a year of acceptance of their harsh new reality.

Kate Clarke “Startups’ Annus Horribilis—and What Comes Next”

Maybe I never got over my skis, but I don’t feel like I went through shock or denial as capital markets tightened. I remember a world before interest rates were low. I remember bad times. I have memories of bankruptcies and struggles to raise capital.

I was a teenager watching my father when tech crashed the first time. I was living in San Francisco working for a venture backed company that had acquired my startup when Sequoia said RIP good times and the global financial crisis unfolded.

Maybe the elder millennial timing of my life wasn’t as shitty as we thought. The constant crises were the norm. Unlike Gen Xers I never had a fear of selling out. I was much more interested in finding a way to survive. And I was disappointed to learn that the institutions didn’t really offer that anymore.

When I had good luck I didn’t think my accomplishments were my own. I mostly thought of them as accidents of survival. Praying for exits was less of a joke and more of a bitter reality. And when they did come it was a surprise.

I have made my peace with the risk of resetting the chess board. My optimism has always been tempered by expectations of crisis and chaos. I might even believe it’s for the best.

Categories
Culture

Day 1045 and History Repeating

I’ve been feeling grateful to be older. I’m also feeling grateful to have been educated in a family that valued learning history. The more I see how much we repeat the same stories, the more I realize we just don’t change very much. Maybe the characters and the contexts change, but we sure like to hum a familiar tune.

I’m glad as I acquire more context that I am even able to see another turn of the wheel. It makes me feel like I’ve got a chance to avoid being caught in the churn. If you are a fan of science fiction you might recognize the churn from the Expanse. I’ll let one of the heroes explain it.


Amos: This boss I used to work for in Baltimore, he called it the Churn. When the rules of the game change.
Kenzo: What game?
Amos: The only game. Survival. When the jungle tears itself down and builds itself into something new.

The Expanse

The rules change. But the game remains the same. Human nature doesn’t really change at all just our circumstances.

And as circumstances change so do the rules of how we navigate the world. But the real game has only one outcome. You win and the prize is surviving. The rest is just context.