Tag: Stream of Consciousnesses

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Emotional Work

Day 781 and Accelerating

I am accelerating into the turn that is my extremely busy life. The global weirding is upon us, as I’ve been predicting for more than two years publicly on this blog and even further back in the press and on Twitter.

I was initially afraid that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with a faster life. One reason we moved to Montana was to keep the pace of our personal lives calm and level so professional obligations wouldn’t overwhelm us. And yet as more and more obligations and responsibilities became part of my daily reality, I wanted to shrink under the weight.

But I am not shrinking. I am standing tall. Sure I feel like I’m failing every day and I hate the feeling that I could disappoint folks who have placed capital and trust with me.

I am however sure that over the time horizon I have set I am doing things the right way. Everything else is luck and repeating the positive daily habits that have produced results in the past.

I feel happy with the acceleration if I stop giving the fear any oxygen. I’m starting to remember how I used to wield my talents. But this time I’ve got the benefits of five years of emotional maturing from intensive family systems therapy. I see my old coping mechanisms and bad habits withering as I bring the full maturity of my emotional journey to bear.

If life is going to keep getting faster and faster then I suppose my only choice is to enjoy the thrill of acceleration and trust that I’ve done the work to stay on the ride.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 779 and Future Shock

It feels like a lot of people are finally catching up to what a shit show institutional distrust has wrought on American society. Nobody trusts anyone and everyone is going tribal. The level of panic is feeling palpable across media narratives and we are being offered a choice to either get worked up or get on with our lives.

I will admit I feel a little bit smug on this point as I’ve been prattling on about doomer shit forever. But I also got off my ass and moved to Montana and starting picking up some skills so I could continue to feel like my life had some measure of resilience to it. I ain’t getting all worked up about the end of the world because I can’t live in perpetual anxiety.

Maybe it’s because my parents are hippies that it’s not a big stretch for me to imagine what happens when cultural conventions break down. The post war generation had a whole other set of traumas around social change. And a lot of splinter subcultures emerged from how they were specifically betrayed by all major institutions as well.

So I am reluctant to say this is new. Decline is a long slow managed process and new revolutions turn up all the time to solve our problems. I believe in human ingenuity.

But I do think we’ve sped up the pace of culture as we ramped up new technology as each new instance of connectivity has somehow also wrought alienation and anxiety. It’s hardly surprising that half of the internet is in a complete panic over what rules of the game changed.

What can I say except that it’s so satisfying to lie to yourself about how you benefit each time a cheat code is revealed. Perhaps just enjoy the power and get on with it. I don’t know what to tell you to do but find a way to make peace with it. Because otherwise you will be preyed upon. There are thousands of kinds of power and I suggest you find yours.

But I am genuinely concerned that we are headed to a further and faster and new types crisis of meaning as new rules get introduced, and every actor that desires to hold power will be running to capture it.

And I do mean everyone. It’s not that your tribe is good and the other tribe is bad, rather it’s hard for humans to trust each other with too much power. Independence is a very heavy burden and it’s insulting when you won’t carry your share. We’ve been negotiating the boundaries of it since Socrates got poisoned for corrupting the youth of Athens. And we still don’t have a good answer to what constitutes human excellence.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 778 and Touch Snow

I am so all typed out right now. I’ve been firing on all cylinders on text and direct message and group chats and Signal and Telegram and fuck now on WordPress.

So much shit is happening and I need to maybe get offline for a bit. Even if I’m just bringing it back down by a couple hours I think I’d be in good shape. I just literally cannot believe how much shit I wrote today.

I have had a few too many things click into place. So I am going through a bit of a level up while at the same time trying to remember to take care of myself. I am a creature that lives off the acuity of my endocrine system. So I can’t let myself get too stressed or I will literally fuck up my work.

So I will keep today brief except as a reminder that it is possible and desirable to maintain a certain stand of rhythm within your day. Because if you cannot regulate your autonomic state you’ve got no business even being in the game.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 777 and Filter

I like to say I’ve got no filter. It sounds cool to just casually admit you’ve got the balls to say whatever you like. I’m a prolific shitposter. Heck, I’m a prolific poster. Just look at the beautiful seven hundred and seventy seven day marker on this post. I write a lot.

But it’s a bit of an obfuscation to say I’ve got no filter. It’s true that I don’t self censor. I do however sift through what I’m going to say and make sure it’s appropriate for the the audience. I don’t edit necessarily (long time readers have probably noticed the numerous typos and grammatical errors), but I do think about who I am talking to when I write.

I am a big believer in meeting people where they are. Maybe it’s a function of how much time I’ve put into therapy, but I’ve become much more aware of how sometimes a person simply cannot see your point of view. Trust is fragile and we’ve not always earned a right to discuss topics that make a person upset. Through empathy you can get closer though.

Perhaps you’ve been the one with the overly emotional reaction. I’m sure you can relate to the kind of irrational reactionary feeling that comes out of nowhere. You aren’t sure why but certain people or topics or phrasings set you off. Maybe you know why. “Oh that reminds me of my overbearing mother or absent father” you might think. But as feelings are not facts, being rational can only help so much.

So I will do what I can to address the person, or in the case of social media the audience, with language and framings that work for who they are and where they are at emotionally. But I always hold onto my truth and my boundaries. Showing empathy means you can be present for someone you disagree with. And I hope everyone can see the value in that.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 775 and In and Out

I am a bit overclocked. I’ve written about it before and the language is useful so I am quoting myself to remind myself what needs to be done.

It will just take some time to let all the cortisol spikes drain out and the other sundry overstimulation issues to get back to baseline.

I am thankfully not experiencing any of the typical anxiety I have felt in the past when overclocked. I just feel tired and shitty and like I need to had off some of inputs to my team.

I’m noting this all here and keeping it short as I need to get in and out so I can get back to the business of recovery as I have so much to take advantage of in my life right now. And the only way I can do that is continuing to maintain the routines and rhythms that got me to this good spot in the first place.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 774 and Too Fast & So Slow

This post should be filed under “time is not linear” as it feels like a number of things in my life that have been moving slowly, yet inexorably, towards predestined conclusions. And they suddenly sped up towards escape velocity. I feel like I had a force multiplier effect on a bunch of things that just took time to come to fruition.

However I wasn’t fully prepared for how much change was hitting catalyst points until, one by one like dominos, a whole cascade of things began to fall into place.

I saw years of work and trust and love and possibility tumbling and crashing into the waterfall of my life. And I’ll be honest it’s hard to come up for air when it happens. But it feels amazing.

My happiness is apparent to everyone around me. I feel beyond loved. I am not even tempted to go into spirals of feeling unworthy or ashamed. Everyone simply worked too hard to achieve the kind of lives required to fall into the glorious momentum of getting everything you ever wanted. It could all explode but wouldn’t you regret not trying? I know I would.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 772 and Spoiled

For as much as I write about pain, both emotional and physical, so much of my life is saturated with joy.

I was asked this week “when will you accept that you are happy” and I was thrilled to find myself blurting out in agreement “It’s true I am so happy.”

Crawling your way back from a life event that gave you ego death is no easy journey. You either accept that you are responsible for yourself or you don’t. And really bad shit happening to us like illness or divorce or death loss tend to be deeply clarifying.

I feel so spoiled by the life that my choices have given me. For all the mistakes I made, and they are numerous, I on balance made the right calls. I have never felt more loved in life than I do right now. I’ve got what I need and I felt brave enough to go after what I wanted.

I’m surrounded by people who care about me for me. And it’s such a luxurious feeling to be given the space to be yourself. It’s even better when being yourself is the thing that everyone loves.

A Friday night surf and turf feast with filet and crab.

I spent so much of my life fitting myself to my circumstances. And now here I am stretching out to become more of myself and I find myself rewarded for it. Last night my husband and a dear girlfriend made a magnificent surf and turf dinner. Just a restaurant quality meal made by my loved ones at my own home in Montana. And then we all watched one of my favorite movies Margin Call

Crab with lemon & parsley
Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 771 and The Chaos In You

I’m a high school drop out. But in a sort of non-traditional sense. My first encounter with disability happened in the wake of living abroad as a sophomore. I found myself simply not attending my junior and senior years of high school. It was a complex situation.

My mother battled against teachers and administrators using the ADA and standardized tests as her weapons. The College Board as a series of 34 tests called the CLEP that gives you credit for having college level knowledge. It’s a very good short cut for self learners & autodidacts to get credit for what they know. And it’s way cheaper.

Between CLEP and AP exams I was able to provide a pretty convincing portrait of competence to both colleges and my shitty college preparatory school. It was enough to get me into university and to extract a high school diploma despite a record of non-attendance. Reasonable accommodation wasn’t really a thing at the time but you could bury the fuckers in paperwork. A tactic less ethical parents than my mother have surely realized by now.

I was a bit of an orphan in my class as I was quite frankly never there. What teacher could possibly vouch for knowing me? It’s because of this lack of attendance that don’t really consider myself a graduate since the diploma is merely function of testing out. A fancier version of getting one’s GED as it were. So when it came time for various teachers to do things like writing quotes for graduating seniors nobody wanted me.

My French teacher from my sophomore year (otherwise known as the year abroad) must have grabbed the short end of some straw as she ended up having to say some shit about me and opted for the Nietzsche dancing star pablum.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star

I felt terrible for her. She had to find a suitable quote for a troublemaker of the worst sort. I was institutionally non compliant. We hate when people have too much chaos in themselves. Sure culture is mostly made from outliers but don’t be too weird.

Sure dancing stars sound poetic but these days Nietzsche is just another coded message board signal for Leopold and Loeb Part 2 Ubermensch Trad Rad Cath Boogaloo. Naturally some of his current fans are fuck ups because institutional power is always going to push back against chaos until it proves profitable to absorb it. But it’s not always clear who will become absorbed into the mainstream as acceptable.

I’m a careful watcher of who is considered dissident as I’ve been that chaotic kid basically since I was born. I was protected from so much of the sanding off that comes from social acculturation thanks to my parents.

But it’s almost impossible to protect oneself entirely. Much of the work of going to therapy as been about recovering the soul of that chaotic child. I hope I’ve gained the skills to protect her from being beaten down any further.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 770 and Worst Month

I beginning understand why February is considered the worst month. I don’t want to be misconstrued here as I love winter. I’ve been absolutely loving my snowy, sunny Montana winter. But a bunch of shit is going absolutely tits up wrong for people I love.

But like the viral video says, February is an honest month. Grandmothers end up in the hospital every day. Dogs get old and get put dow. The the circle of life happens every day. Jobs are lost and bills go unpaid every day. If they happen in July or over Christmas, we bemoan the bad timing. Layoffs at Christmas we say with horror! I guess February is better in some minds for bad news.

Maybe we need to come to terms with the fact that bad shit happens all the time. When it overlaps with something happy, like a holiday, we’d be upset that our holidays are ruined. And yet if they don’t overlap with anything nice we are sad that life is too bleak. What moments of cheer have we to enjoy in February but candy hearts and the Super Bowl?

The part of me in therapy is reminded that it’s me who decides when I’m a victim of a circumstance. Bad things are as common as good. It’s cold truth of life has always been that it’s filled with the greatest joy and love and the price for those things is the deepest pain. Nothing in this life is free.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 769 and Behind

I feel behind on everything. It’s a source of anxiety that I cannot seem to shake. If you’ve been following along you’ve seen some interesting and intense types of emotions play out.

I want to beat myself for being behind. The need for guilt and flagellation is ever present. Then I remind myself that the pressure is self inflicted and my time horizons are long. If something was due this week or next, the relevant parties either got their deliverables from me or can wait.

I will allow myself the space to be scared to be behind. I’ll allow myself the space to be ashamed I am behind. And then I’m going to allow myself the space to just be behind. Sometimes we cannot see the bumps in the road till we’ve come upon the pothole. And I feel like I found a couple expectedly deep divots in the road of my life.