Tag: Trauma

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Chronic Disease

Day 621 and Pain’s Anxiety

Before I was diagnosed with my spinal condition ankylosing spondylitis, I didn’t really understand that I was in pain. I know that sounds weird, but I just knows I felt like shit. I hadn’t yet pinpoint the origins of the crisis in my own body. I was a stranger to myself.

Back then getting a diagnosis involved a lot of questions about my mental health. Are you anxious? Would you consider taking an anxiety medication just to see if it help? Are you sure it’s not all in your head? No doctor I’m not sure of anything that’s why I’m asking you.

The thing is I did feel anxious. My central nervous system was in a perpetual state of fight or flight from the pain. I had tachycardia. I was twitchy. I wasn’t a sleeping well. I didn’t want to be touched. It hurt too much. I was exhausted all the time and felt overwhelmed that no one seemed to know what was wrong with me. I’m lucky no one asked me if I was depressed or I might have been put on Prozac.

I’m one of the lucky ones. My chronic disease has a simple blood panel and physical exam to diagnose it. It only took me a few specialists to get to a rheumatologist.

I fear I would have been given an anxiety diagnosis and told it was all in my head if I’d had something more complex. But thankfully we untangled that any anxiety or depression I felt was simply a function of being in an inflammatory condition so acute every movement was painful. You’d have a racing heart and a fear of movement or touch too if everything was painful to the touch

The thing is I am scared of my pain. I do regularly get caught in fight or flight fear responses if the pain appears and I’m not prepared for it. I am militant about certain aspects of self care and my biohacking as I fear flares. I fear the drugs that are required when it isn’t controlled. It makes me anxious to need drugs at all to control my symptoms. Especially in America where a war on drugs has made it hard to need anything stronger than Advil.

Everything about pain and it’s treatment is anxiety inducing in America. And that’s a hard comorbidity to live with in a disease. As if pain wasn’t enough, the latent fear that you might not be believed lingers.

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Chronic Disease Politics

Day 618 and Personal Politics

I hesitate to share too much detail about this but, I’m an opioid user.

Actually I’m not hesitant to share that at all, it’s in fact the core salient point I want to make today. I have a chronic disease and sometimes, blessedly more and more infrequently, it can only be effectively treated with pain medication.

Why am I talking about this? And in public no less? Because unless powerful people that have a degree of social, personal and political capital discuss things we deem unsavory we never make any damn progress on humanizing our inhumane responses. And our response to the opioid epidemic is inhumane.

The backlash to the crisis, a mash up of intense scrutiny, government intervention and rigid rules, has now reached a point where it is doing as much harm as the original crisis of overprescribing. And I hope my personal story allows you to see why.

My spinal condition (ankylosing spondylitis) can be so debilitating that the only way I can get out of bed to accomplish basic tasks is by taking a mild opioid called Tramadol. It’s not in the same category as OxyContin or Percocet but it’s not risk free either.

I’m lucky that my condition is relatively well controlled. I don’t need pain medicine all the time and I work very hard on alternative treatments in the hopes that I won’t need it at all in the future. I spent a small fortune making sure I don’t need a core useful medicine. Let that sink in.

I’m not an addict. I am monitored by a team of professionals. Every step of the way is in fact monitored extensively by state and federal systems along with massive insurance and hospital system oversight. It’s the closest I’ve come to experiencing the Panopticon. It’s life altering in its scope. My entire life by necessity has to revolve around when the system deems it safe for me to get a prescription. Not when my doctor thinks I need it. When Uncle Sam does.

I fucking hate relying on something so dangerous and so demonized but also so regulated. I hate that my entire private medical life is so closely monitored by the state. I hate all of it. But, on very bad days, the choice is immobilization or Tramadol. And I’m not at all ashamed to say I pick Tramadol. I want to be a working productive member of society and that’s hard to do when you are unable to move from the pain.

There is no grace in suffering but what it teaches us. And I’ve learned we use pain as a cudgel to control people in our society. That it is so effective is why I am both a libertarian and fiercely against the carceral state. One day it might be you suffering and you won’t deserve it either. And I pray that you will be shown grace in your personal circumstances.

But I’m lucky. I’ve got other pharmaceuticals, like biologic injections which treat inflammatory conditions, that I can rely on. I’ve got THC and CBD for their anti-inflammatory properties. I’ve got good old fashioned steroids like Prednisone. Which interestingly, my physicians universally believe is more dangerous than my Tramadol usage and did actually require an extended titration down as I was physically dependent on it, as your body stops producing the necessary hormones. They’d rather I use Tramadol for flares.

But you notice the government isn’t up in your face with a massive publicity campaign showing cops busting down Prednisone rings. There are no political advertisements showing how an opponent supports big steroid. Even though if you saw Donald Trump after he got Dexamethasone during his fight with Covid it was pretty clear he felt pretty good. Steroids have gotten me far more fucked up and also higher than any opioid ever has. But no massive surveillance program has ever come down on anyone for anti-inflammatory drugs.

Because that would be fucking ridiculous even though it’s just as addictive in driving physical dependencies , just as debilitating and depending on your body chemistry, just as “fun” as narcotics. Fun fact about me, I don’t have whatever chemical makeup that allows an opioid to give me a high. Which as I’ve learned is a saving grace. Not everyone does. That’s kind of the rub. The risk profile on opioids is a bit worse because some pharmaceutical executives lied about the percentages of people who get addicted. Or who found it’s side effects pleasurable in the absence of symptoms. They did not lie about the benefit of not being in pain.

And that ought to give you a good sense of the problem at hand. The iron law of prohibition strikes again. A massive bureaucracy imposing a fix that intervened in crude and inflexible ways is causing more suffering than it fixes. It wasn’t the intent but it is the outcome.

The iron law of prohibition is a term coined by Richard Cowan in 1986 which posits that as law enforcement becomes more intense, the potency of prohibited substances increases. Cowan put it this way: “the harder the enforcement, the harder the drugs.”

Because doctors were lied to about the risk profile of certain types of opioids in the first place, the backlash is now as bad as the original sin the pharmaceutical companies committed.

Regular law abiding people are getting fucked in their treatment plans because hard enforcement is making it harder to get the low dose drugs. We treat Tramadol users with arthritis with the same tools as as criminals addicted to illegal fentanyl. I know shocker that the American federal government can be as evil as Purdue.

But also historically you know it’s true. And now a huge portion of normal people like me, who just want the benefits of not being in constant pain, are being turned into an over surveilled over controlled population. And I’m not saying there are no risks. But who do you want deciding that? A doctor who knows you well? Or the government? Yeah I’d pick the doctor too.

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Internet Culture

Day 614 and Cuckservative

At the risk of scandalizing any of my relatives, I learned about a sexual kink today called cuckholding. I was not, sadly, enjoying kink SubReddits. I learned about this term from a bunch of Trump acolytes. Apparently cuckholding means watching another man have sex with your partner (usually wife). So now you know.

For those that are not terminally online, the context is that in a lot of right coded spaces terms like cucking, beta cucking, and cuckservative get used to describe humiliation but also insufficient purity to the cause. The cause usually being some Platonic ideal of conservatism right up until it becomes indistinguishable from authoritarianism.

Now I’d not given a lot of thought to the term and it’s apparent intense fascination to conservatism men. But it keeps showing up in even ancillary spaces like gun culture and even Wall Street Bets. Every humiliation is cucking. Every instance of not holding perfectly pure in-group signifiers and adherence is cucking. The beta cuck is in a an internal battle with the alpha Chad. And frankly it got so prevalent I finally had a “lady doth protest too much” moment and asked wtf is the obsession with cucking.

Can anyone explain to me why the right is so obsessed with cucking?

I honestly didn’t expect to learn as much as I did about the anxieties of our age, the particular traumas of living with ego preservation needs from our childhood, and the sheer raging reaction formation that is American masculinity. Honestly I’m starting to spend a little more time there than feel safe.

I quite feel don’t feel up for analyzing the whole mess of reactions but it largely seems to boil down to a Slate or Salon article said this was the hot liberal fetish. This got percolated through forums culture and whipped into a frenzy by Trump meme magic. But because the internet gives you brain worms this turned into an actual thing people got sexually turned onto and now it’s maybe impossible to untangle what is fetish and what is meme. But there is definitely some wild sexual politics around power and property in America and who counts as a full person with agency. I’m including some screen shots for posterity as it might be helpful for later research as I fear this will end up being useful as some internet ethnography.

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Internet Culture

Day 599 and The Lamentations of Their Women

A bunch of people asked me about what happened to me on Twitter over the weekend. I’d been hitting a bunch of different niche communities like startup Twitter, finance Twitter, doomer Twitter, and discourse Twitter with a thread that has a bunch of extremely extra and occasionally outright hostile weirdos saying reactionary shit.

I think it all started when my friend Ashley wrote a post about the commodification of women’s bodies. She was responding to another piece of discourse and found herself getting dog piled by one of the most irritating but unavoidable portions of the the internet; reactionary angry young men.

I didn’t like that Ashley was getting ripped for functionally agreeing with right coded, socially conservative men. I thought “damn, you can’t win with them”.

Entering the Fray

I decided to jump in and tease some of these boys. My inner child loves to shitpost as she finds humor and playfulness protective. I promptly got blocked. I went about my business. Now that I live on our homestead in Montana, I’ve got a lot of chores.

But I couldn’t leave well enough alone. I kept discussing the damn discourse. I expressed my concern that we’ve got such an intense population of reactionary young men who act as if they are perpetually victimized. I expressed empathy for how men are getting screwed and mostly got told it is women’s fault. It did some numbers but it wasn’t going into a context collapse situation just yet. Basically another day on Twitter.

The thread started out with all of the empathy and good faith I’ve come to expect from niche Twitter. We avoided purity politics. Tucker graciously discussed his own journey and how he let go of anger and began taking responsibility for himself and his family. Jack made some jokes. A number of internet friends discussed the varied ways they handled the systemic discrimination that some masculine virtues experience in modernity. Much wisdom was shared about how different they had grown up to be men.

Later that night I wrote a throwaway post about how we’ve got a crisis of masculinity and maybe only other men can get through to angry young boys? I suggested that perhaps right coded men who discuss modern masculinity would have an easier time reaching them. I tagged Tucker Max and Jack Murphy as men who seem to have done a good job taking responsibility for their own lives.

I basically went to bed with a sense that people had been good to each other. And I didn’t really notice being quote tweeted by a niche main character in groyper Twitter or what it would mean for my tomorrow.

It Escalates

His thread contained the following:

  • A very intense discussion of the ethics of doing butt stuff and posting about your experience with polyamory and cuckcolding.
  • The ethics of charging for coaching and clubs and whether one can have masculine virtue if your wife sleeps with other men.
  • A surprising amount of hysterics about what constitutes hypocrisy if one claims to be masculine.

Basically a bunch of people who haven’t figured out their own shadow lives told me exactly how uncomfortable they were with other people’s sex lives.

But honestly it was just so much fucking butt stuff.

Unfortunately that visibility of discourse meant I suddenly got flooded with harassment. A coordinated re-tweeting campaign began. People started digging into back posts and old news headlines. My direct messages got flooded with threats against me and my husband. It was definitely enough that we started thinking about security around the homestead.

I can only assume someone’s group chat or some message board was like “look at the phenotype on this bitch”. And to be fair, some people came with good jokes about venture capitalists moving to Montana. But then there was the graphically racist, as in, “oh we still have Nazis” plot twist. I realized I might need to actually start blocking people. I felt modestly disappointed as I hadn’t been dogpiled in a long time. But protecting myself was more important.

Why

Now you can ask why am I even stepping into these spaces if they contain this kind of abuse? What can I say there is a part of me who enjoys a frisson of danger. The feminine urge to protect our menfolk often runs head long into the reality that they can be dangerous. Walking into male spaces has inherent risks if you take up space in public life.

I have to be honest honest with myself that there is a breed of men who considers all public spaces to be male. I am an offense to them even if I am in the process of lamentation for our men. The space I take up by existing with different preferences is proof enough I am an enemy to be subjugated.

So I guess I owe anyone I teased about blocking on Twitter an apology. There are some people in too much pain out there. And I am not in anyway responsible for their emotional health. Only they can choose to let go of the pain.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 589 and Mental Health

Trigger warning: discussing depression and oblique references to suicidal depression. If you are in crisis please call 988.

I had a scare this morning. Someone I love is going through some stuff. I didn’t know if they were safe for a short period and I found myself frightened by the prospect of losing them.

When I learned they were safe I was relieved but also angry because how dare they scare all of us like that? I scrambled to cope with my own feelings and a desire to engage in codependent behaviors. I called my therapist and pulled myself together.

While I don’t suffer from depression it’s not an entirely foreign concept to me. It has felt closer over the pandemic as I’ve seen others struggle. I have family members and friends who live with varying degrees of chronic depression and I have witnessed first hand how much strength it takes live with it. I have chronic pain and I don’t think it is even in the same ballpark of debilitating as depression.

I’m not any kind of expert and my advice is mostly me talking into the wind so please only take what serves you. But what I’ve learned is that people genuinely do care about mental health if you want to seek a connection. We want to help. We want to help those that want to help themselves. Your people do love you and you may have more of them than you realize.

Sometimes it feels impossible to ask for help. Maybe you cannot ask friends or family because of any number of reasons. But that doesn’t mean you are alone or no one is here to help. There are hotlines. There are 12 step meetings. There are apps and services. As one internet friendly to another you are not alone. If you need mental health care please take whatever step feels feasible even if it’s just a text message into the either. You can do it.

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Emotional Work

Day 585 and Rip Off the Trauma Bandaid

I hope I can capture even a fragment of my emotions as I am on the other side of several hours of post-moving therapy. And I am drained but also armed with more wisdom than when I started the effort.

Moving is obviously a traumatic experience for most people. Anyone who moved as a child has some memories of how the change revealed new aspects of who they are and what makes them feel safe. Parents worry about it a lot about moving and for good reason. I know my mother certainly did and she did her best to protect me.

But we know that life is chaotic. Any type of change is already in a dance with accelerating entropy. Expect your unfinished shit to get drawn into the accretion belt surrounding the event horizon of your fears. Black holes are scary because we know they will kill us unless we commit enough energy to the fight to escape.

Sometimes some parts of us don’t make it. They become lost to the nothing. The dark impenetrable inversion point where we are forced to face the powers of destruction within us. Of course, it’s natural to sacrifice some part of yourself to banish the demon we know to be who we are.

It’s actually shocking to realize that inside of you might be some kind of personal Kali ready to rend the apocalypse at your weak side. But then you try not to think of it too much right? You’d rather ignore your demons right. Don’t feed the wolf right? Feed the good they say.

I am here to tell you that the shadow exist even if it scares you. It’s pulling you in just like that black whole. You can fight it your whole life. And maybe you win. Maybe you have that kind of fuel.

But if you ignore that shadow you will be pulled in it no matter what. Wouldn’t you rather run the calculation on how to achieve escape velocity? It’s going to be expensive. But it’s better to know the costs of living.

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Emotional Work

Day 582 and Overclocked

I have always been a bit of an intense personality. I’m a little prone to getting overstimulated, which often shows up like anxiety. But whatever the fuck is going on in the last couple days is way worse than usual. I’ve been so overwhelmed by even small things, I feel like I can’t control my reactions.

I am hoping it is just a residual effect of moving and the attendant stress. Perhaps my central nervous system is overclocked and it doesn’t yet know I’m in a safe place. 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.

But until then, it isn’t taking very much to set me off. I was driving a friend to the airport and had a full on scream in terror moment when a car honked and cut me off. They got so close to me me I ended up getting forced into a right turn only lane that stuck me onto the highway in the wrong direction. I just couldn’t stop myself from trembling and crying. I was so upset.

Today I had to ship some things in the mail It involved a shopping trip and figuring out some logistics. By the end of it I was completely overcome with a feeling of helpless anxiety as I discovered error after error no matter how hard I concentrated. I tossed my phone across the room just to see if I could relieve the building sense of pressure. It only helped a little.

I’d really like this feeling to pass. It feels a little ridiculous to have my body acting this stressed when I’m living quietly beside the mountains and my own creek. I don’t understand why things that are pretty minor have been crying and panicking. Fingers crossed my body realizes it is safe soon. Or that all the asshole drivers go back to California soon.

Categories
Politics

Day 565 and Mommy Issues

I just want to scream into the void about how disappointed I am in American men right now. I probably shouldn’t but this is my own little space so I may vent briefly and without a lot of citations. I’m angry and sad and I’m pretty convinced we’ve got a bad case of mommy issues with the way we are treating women’s rights this summer.

I’m surprisingly steamed that gay marriage is being protected via legislation before bodily sovereignty. It is just so American to protect the fucking tax regime. Like I get it. We organize all our property around monogamous two person households. Everyone should have equal access if we have it.

Also maybe we could not have the government involved instead. But nope we’ve chosen to get the government involved in social organization and now we’ve got to fight for equal access. And sure the liberals in America are scrambling in this particular summer to front run the Supreme Court being open to overturning settled precedent on all kinds of shit. I get it. I swear. I get it. I’m glad something is being done.

But like in what fucking world is bodily sovereignty for half the population the sort of problem you don’t bother to codify into rights first. Or at all! Why is it easier to protect marriage than my body. What message does it send we protected gay marriage before the right to manage your own body.

We are able to pass legislation on protecting equal access to some dippy tax scheme but we couldn’t figure out how to have control control over your own body if you can get pregnant. White gay men have more sway than brown women. I get it. I get it. I’m just so fucking disappointed.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 557 and Fixation

I’ve got a gift for generating momentum. If I can summon the energy and the willpower, I’ll put my total focus on unlocking whatever blocking issues hinder my goal.

The trouble is that this process doesn’t allow for multitasking. Once I turn my eye on a blocker, I’ll fixate on it until it is solved. I’m incredibly prone to tunnel vision.

I’m usually quite competent at prioritizing and ordering priorities correctly to take advantage of the is tendency toward focus. But sometimes I’ll get fixated on the wrong thing and I’ll stay stuck on a problem that shouldn’t be my first priority.

And it’s really hard for me to pull away from a problem if it’s an emotionally charged issue. Those typically involve my personal life. Problems with my friends, my family and my husband can easily hold my energy hostage. Even if it’s not a top priority, if it feels emotionally like it should be a top priority I’ll struggle to let it go.

Over the spring, one of my fixations was finding a stable living situation. In May when Alex and I went scouting for our second time in Montana I poured all my willpower and focus into removing blockers to purchasing a home. It was a grinding emotional process as where to live and when to make a major investment are hard questions.

Now that I’m less than a month out from the move, I can feel my focus shifting. The creative generative driving energy that secured us a homestead is now searching for its next home. It makes me shiver a little bit. Like I’ve got my own personal Eye of Sauron probing my reality for it’s next target. I know what it should be. But sometimes my focus isn’t well behaved.

Categories
Travel

Day 549 and Rekt Travel

One more institutional bit of trust has frayed and snapped for me. I don’t trust travel any longer. Maybe I trust the big airlines and well traveled routes but off the beaten path travel isn’t for me any longer.

Someone didn’t fully understand my limits and I found myself struggling in a situation well beyond my physical means. The trust was so broken I don’t know how to even begin putting back the pieces from it. I’m exhausted yes, but the worst part is the fear I feel from being put in a bad situation and seeing just how incapable I was of fixing it myself. I’m not independent anymore. And I’m scared and angry about it.

I envy people who can have a situation change and have it’s impacts be immaterial on their day. Oh it’s inconvenient if the travel estimates were three times longer than planned. Oh it’s annoying that there is no air conditioning. Oh it’s frustrating that all these minor details are annoyances for you and intense health risks for me.

I fear I’ll come out of this experience paranoid and much much sadder. I feel stupid I couldn’t protect myself. I feel gullible that I let someone else handle the details. People tease me that I prepare for travel so aggressively. That it’s eccentric and odd and a sign of being a crazy woman.

But when the consequences are so expensive; a thousand dollars gone in a hotel scam, a fortune in gas, an extra thousand to weekend hour doctors to stabilize. I think it’s sensible to be extremely prepared. Nothing black pills you faster than being sick. I tried to act like I could be a normal person and just got rekt.