Tag: Trauma

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Chronicle

Day 37 and Boundaries

I recently did a Twitter poll where I asked folks what they used to develop their emotional capacity. I listed therapy, meditation/mindfulness, coaching and “nothing” as the options. A full third of respondents choose nothing.

This really took me by surprise as much of my follower base is made up of folks in the technology industry along with significant business and finance types. Most have Silicon Valley mindsets tend to prioritize hobbies like biohacking and performance. Having insight into your mental and emotional state has become a burgeoning part of the quantified self movement. So finding out that a large number of people don’t invest in their mindset was, to quote Geoff Lewis, a narrative violation. I really thought we were all committed to parenting our inner children along with our Wim-Hoff breathing, weight lifting and protein eating.

But maybe I shouldn’t find this odd. It’s much easier and certainly more linear to put gains on your squat and cut your fat mass to show your abdominal muscles. The math on that can be done on apps and coaches can help along your progress. It’s trackable. Clear metrics for success exist. OKRs for your body. But learning to let go of self limiting beliefs, check your desire to self victimize, or refrain from vomiting your emotions all over your friends is less quantifiable.

Still you can track your meditation minutes in Calm or your time with a professional coach which your venture fund offers with their new fangled mental health benefits. So why is it that a third of people happily clicked that they were fine not doing anything for their emotions?

I suspect it has something to do with the challenge of knowing yourself and that knowledge necessitates drawing new boundaries. The further one gets in a journey of emotional and mental health the more one has to let go of habits and people that undermine us. Sometimes it can even mean giving up all the things we thought made up our life. Such is the high price of happiness. People may reasonably make the calculation that it’s too high a cost. That being unhappy isn’t so bad. That boundaries are too expensive for someone like them. So they tolerate what they’ve always known as the unknowns of pursuing happiness is too much.

It’s quite likely I’m overthinking this one as I’m currently reminding myself of the value of boundaries in my own life. Perhaps it’s as simple as being a fish in water. If you don’t know the water is there why question it? A third of people may have never considered the benefits of questioning their existing beliefs and emotions. Which saddens me a little. But also reminds me that investment in emotional growth is a significant edge.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle Politics

Day 36 and Responsibility For Yourself

As a libertarian, personal responsibility is a foundational philosophy. Owning your decisions and their impacts on others is crucial for freedom. It’s also an impossible standard at which we fail daily.

Humans are selfish and fallible creatures, prone to rationalization and justification. We tell ourselves stories about our innate goodness in order to shield ourselves from the pain of our sins. We believe our own lies first.

This has been particularly apparent to me, once again, during the pandemic, as I’ve watched family members make choices over and over again that show how much they need me to forgive their sins. As if I was their own personal Jesus and not their daughter or sister. Ready to tell them that leisure travel is fine because well they are probably being safe and oh sure winter is just so hard. Mental health is just such a struggle isn’t it?

I’m no messiah. I am not here to take your sins and wash them away. I’m just as much a sinner as you. And I’m certainly not the best person to ask forgiveness of when it comes to the health of others. I’m the personification of how your decisions actually affect real people.

You know our little stories about how “the sick and elderly should stay home and keep themselves safe because…list of rational reasons.” We’ve turned it into an entire political stance. We’ve built it into a moral edifice. When it’s just a lie we need to feel better about our sins to survive.

And so I stay at home. I don’t interact with other people. I see my husband and my doctors. Because I know I’m responsible for my own life and my own health and nobody else will be. I’m not asking others to be responsible for me that haven’t actively chosen this as their life path (with thanks to my husband and mother who did).

But I am asking my other family members be emotionally truthful with me. I’m asking them to admit to themselves and to me that their pleasures are more important to them my quality of life. That by taking a trip to a far away beach that they perceive as safe for them, they add to the aggregate set of decisions on a collective level that forces me to stay at home. That those decisions will keep me at home alone cut off from normal activities for longer. Basic life.

If you engage in those choices, admit the truth to yourself. And admit it to me. That your enjoyment of life is more important than me living mine safely. To not do so is to lie to yourself and to me. I can accept your choice. I cannot accept your lie.

I’m shouldering the sum total of all the bad decisions and little sins of everyone else who either can’t or won’t take responsibility for the impact that their own choices add up to at the societal level. It makes me angry, I’m a libertarian not an ubermenschen. I don’t want to carry responsibility for everyone else. If I was I’d probably have different politics. I’m only responsible for myself. So stop asking me to accept responsibility for yours.

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Chronicle Finance Internet Culture Preparedness

Day 28 and Limbic Memory

Today I want to talk about how this past year has set in motion the next hundred years of human imagination. Yes, I think it’s that important.

Mental elasticity is an incredible thing. We humans learn quickly and have a seemingly endless capacity to adapt to impossible things once we’ve wrapped our minds around it. Sadly though, forgetting doesn’t come as naturally to us as learning. Once we’ve seen the impossible happen, we never forget. Instead of storing miracles and crisis in the front of our minds like new knowledge, to be reinterpreted as new and possibly ephemeral, it goes right to our limbic back brain.

The limbic system is set in the deep structure of the brain where it regulates autonomic or endocrine function in response to emotional stimuli. It’s part of our survival response encoding. Which is why trauma is so crucial to evolutionary pressure. Those that survived, generally did because they took an impossible situation seriously. It becomes a part of our reactive unconscious survival instinct. And boy is this going to have consequences for American millennials.

The last year has had its share of impossible things occur. And we’ve gone about our business adapting to things that couldn’t possibly happen before. Early doomers were dismissed on the pandemic, political Cassandras ignored until an insurrection occurred, and now a new kind of financial mania which Stalwart Joe at Bloomberg calls an “upcrash”. He explains the impossible inversion using 1987’s Black Monday 22% drop.

Once people became aware that such a severe crash in so short a time was even possible, the likelihood that it could happen again was never dismissed. The consequences aren’t as big, but in a sense, what we’ve seen in GameStop could be thought of as a Reverse 1987. Upcrash. A gain so fast and rapid, that it might previously have been thought to be impossible.

Why do I include a seemingly jokey memetic internet troll in a list of traumas? Because a positive memory is just as jarring to our limbic memory as a bad thing. We overweight good experiences just as heavily as bad. Once the impossible becomes real our bodies retain the memory.

We’ve now got sense memory for global pandemics, political instability and positive market manias in America. Things we haven’t had for three generations (or more in the case of political instability). And the consequences, most of which remain unknowable, for these visceral impossibilities won’t leave our bodies till we are dead. We are stuck with the paranoia and exuberance of this last year till our grandchildren are in charge.

So we’ve just tossed several intense traumatic evolutionary events onto American millennials that not a single institution can do shit about. And I’ve honestly never been more excited for what our chaotic future might bring.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 24 and Going Easy On Ourselves

I keep a daily journal with some terse observations. I found it a manageable habit over the course of several years. So I was disappointed to look back over January 24th’s 2020 log today. It seemed as if everything in my life had slightly better metrics.

I couldn’t quite figure this out as I think in general my life is going quite well. I’m happily living in Colorado. I’m near my parents (even if needed isolation has meant seeing a lot less of them than hoped). I’ve had some excellent health breakthroughs thanks to more holistic care available in Boulder. So why did it seem like I was struggling more year over year?

And then I realized, oh of course, I just got used to the pandemic. The stress is clearly more but I’ve acculturated. Last January it hadn’t hit daily life yet. The daily stress and turmoil of an uncontrolled disease was still in its “oh shit if this hits us it will be bad phase.” A year along and I’ve become accustomed to the little indignities and struggles of pandemic living. But even as I’m happy with the changes it’s brought to my life it has sadly lowered the quality of life in meaningful ways for everyone. I don’t like dwelling on this as I need the improvements to be meaningful too. And I’m sure they are in ways I’ll appreciate once (if?) this all goes back to normal. But I know it’s going to be another six months from here.

I’m generally optimistic about my preparedness for all types of outcomes. And I am thrilled for the four year reprieve that comes with not having to constantly hear about political news. But this is all still taking its toll. So maybe it’s ok if my medication load is a little higher. I’m alive and well. Who cares if I need a bit more support. If I don’t feel like I look and move as beautifully and easily as I hoped that’s alright in the face of a generational crisis. I can take it easy on myself. If it’s all frustration and pain that’s no way to live. I don’t need to fight for progress every inch of the way. Sometimes it’s alright just to be comfortable and alive.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle Media

Day 21 and The Fast

A perennial topic for the harried is the benefit of fasting. A timeless religious tradition and spiritual practice, fasting cleanses the mind and body. Typically when I fast I do it with food. And I generally do my 7 day water fasts over the Holy Nights between Christmas and epiphany. But as I push through the final stages of healing my previously chronic illness I am considering a media fast instead.

I have a consistent meditation practice but the kind of mindfulness that comes from a break in the information flow seems more appealing. I’m exhausted from the constant crisis of the past three weeks as we careened from Georgia to the Capital insurrection to media deplatforming and silencing to finally the Inauguration. I had my hilarious shopping binge where I picked up every relaxation facilitating product I could find. But perhaps it’s time to admit I need some forced distance between me and the information firehose.

A proper retreat requires a significant break with outside stimulation. Which I’m not entirely sure is necessary. But I am concerned about overstimulation from media arcs both political and pandemic related. In Dr. Sepah’s original writing on dopamine fasting he presented it as a way to regain control over automatic rigid behaviors that have negative stimulus triggers.

In his words this type of cognitive behavioral therapy “weakens the classical conditioning in a process called ‘habituation’, which ultimately restores our behavioral flexibility.” So perhaps rather than seek a fast or a retreat or a detox I’m simply looking to break the impulses and anxiety that the media arcs have implanted in me. I do not wish to engage in the narratives of anxiety or jubilation (neither have inherently more truth) when they are not my own impulses or emotions.

My energy and my emotions are my own. I need them for my own health. They are not meant to be manipulated by outside players with their own agendas. That I need my energy for my own reasons should not even need saying. Media or political players don’t own me. There is no moral obligation that I stay tuned in. My attention cannot save anything but myself. So I will explore putting some distance between myself and the media for a but. My goal is to break from reactivity that was created externally. I’ll still be writing daily. And I suspect I’ll dabble in the bits of Twitter that bring me enjoyment and connection. But I’ll give myself the space to heal.

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Chronicle Politics

I Need To Start Preparing

I’ve managed to make it a full week of writing something long form everyday. And this off the cuff stuff is becoming routine but also I need to start preparing topics and having a thesis or two. Because I’m just winging it. With a violent insurrection in the capital smack dab in the middle no less. As I doomscroll Twitter this Friday night I’m barely able to pull myself away from “The Purge” to think about a topic for a few sustained minutes. How could I ever consider “thought leadering” up some content in the middle of all this!

I feel like I should be doing better. Being more productive about this creative exercise. With as much effort as I’m putting in to parenting my inner child and taking responsibility for my emotions you’d think I’d be coping with the insanity of the week better. And writing better essays. Because when you take responsibility for your own actions you can survive anything right? Well maybe for a couple minutes at a time. And then you add them up and it becomes hours and days and I think I’m just reciting AA program jargon at this point. One day at a time don’t “should” on yourself and such.

Truth is I am struggling mightily. While doing the laundry I tripped and smashed my foot into a cabinet so hard I split my big toe’s nail. I spent a good 15 minutes on the floor crying over the pain and unfairness. Like the 5 year old that lives inside me. Because I just feel that fragile and distracted. To do lists are piling up. Obligations aren’t being met. And here I am crying over an ouchie. But then if you told me that you were doing just great and has never more been more officer I honestly might not believe you.

Today’s consumption was all over the place.

Food: Picked up the raw milk from the diary cooperative Light Root Farm. Then stopped to get empanadas for lunch on the way back. I also got ahead of things by securing and preparing for my spot in a biodynamic CSA farm share for spring. Fun fact about this farm? It’s my first YIMBY effort! In 5th grade I testified before Boulder City Council asking to get permits to farm the land my school had purchased. They said no. I was crushed. Twenty five years later the farm exists (no clue how the permits worked out) and now this spring I’ll finally get to eat the fruits of my labor. You do reap what you sow. It just might take a few decades.

Media: Nothing has made a serious impression on me today. I put on NPR with breakfast. I read the various New York Times round ups. I got annoyed at the latest Olivia Nuzzi talks to anonymous political toady piece. Mostly I read up on various cultures for cheese and prepared to make ricotta and yogurt tomorrow.