This Happened

[akiva]

[Phoebe]

Mom jokes are better:

[Phoebe]

Well, I'm sorry you had to go through that but glad that it's out! I am also sorry that I started looking for images of cysts which led me down the road towards images of splenomegaly.

[akiva]

Same old stupid shit is churning in my soul. Fun times.

[Phoebe]

Bad, bad, do not let it sit and churn! In an attempt to fix my brains I have this preliminary report about antidepressants/SSRIs in low and probably ineffective doses: Headaches! Nightmares! An almost frightening courage in singing along with everything playing on the car radio! Total disgust at the idiocy of people around me! Anger at all the BS! Frustration! Extremely hungry! Totally exhausted at wrong and inconvenient times of day!

It feels vaguely like the "centered" feeling one gets when under hypnosis, which maybe is not good because for me that's a place hiding out beneath the fairly robust veneer of "well-socialized docile behavior". I'm not sure we want to let that other part see the light very often, especially outside the controlled setting of guided instruction by experts. Like my husband said, I might throw off the chains of my oppression! He was joking! I'm not! I don't think SSRIs are going to be a solution, but I committed to the full test of the process so we shall see if it improves.

They're certainly not helping anxiety. Indeed, new sources: what happens if you're dying of cancer or alzheimer's or whatever and you can no longer take pills easily? Do they pill you with them anyway like a cat, or put them in an IV, or do you get to experience whatever mental withdrawal shakes go along with being deprived of your daily meds just as you're facing the ultimate existential crisis, possibly with significant associated suffering? Yeah, this crap is doing nothing for me and maybe even directly counterproductive. Oh AND I have noticed a significant uptick in what can only be labelled Narcissism. It's weird because the "inner observer" remains fully skeptical of all this, yet some other portion is as self-absorbedly smug and haughty as a rat who just pressed the lever a dozen times successfully.

[akiva]

You can tell how fucked up I am by the fact that spending time with friends of more than 30 years ratchets up my self hatred.

I need to stop posting about this sort of thing because it’s the same fucking thing every time.

[Phoebe]

Dude what are we here for if not to hear the latest variation on the themes of life? The human condition changes little. All the iterations matter, all the repetitions matter. Checking in is nice even if it's the same check in every day, as evidenced by all these alpha-wave junkies telling each other Good Morning here daily at an hour not even fit for birds and squirrels to be active!

[akiva]

I have two gaping wounds in my psyche—things so pathetic they’re embarrassing—that may not ever heal. I think I’m incapable of healing. And many things poke at those wounds, causing a lot of pain.

[Phoebe]

That is pretty normal, isn't it? Maybe not the having of specific gaping wounds, but the fact that they seem too unimportant to be worth discussing or acknowledging as worthy of healing? People often look around at what others are suffering and think, how do they handle that? Their wounds are legitimate; mine aren't. So healing and care is for people like them, the ones with "real" problems, not people like me who don't deserve it! But obviously that's nonsense? A wound is a wound - I doesn't really matter how you obtained it.

The counselor who helped me with OCD, he always says (well, he suggests things in an oblique way, but then I read his articles where he just says it) finding the reason why something happened, or dwelling on the reason once found, can be a pointless distraction from simply addressing the effects. A person might decide his reason for being hurt isn't good enough, FOR EXAMPLE. But who cares? If you're hurt, you're hurt. Why should you have to suffer?

We also lose the perspective of the context where we were hurt. Like to my kid, his current problems are huge and very wounding, and just because later those may seem like smaller issues in context, right now they're huge and rightly so. Maybe the hurtful thing is huge at one time and seems ridiculous later, but you still have the huge hole leftover to deal with so it doesn't matter how small the cause seems.

I don't know if this makes sense; it made sense when I set out to write it? Very tired.

[Zen]

It seems that the spam bots are still having trouble determining what my gender is:
Exhibit 1:


Exhibit 2:

[mimekiller]

chica taking a prego test in two hours my goodness

[Phoebe]

Oh my!

[Zen]

Well... did she pass? (What's a passing grade in this case?)

[Phoebe]

You know, that's a good way of putting it. It's a pass / no pass but whether something passes is quite dependent on context.

[mimekiller]

another false call! haha!

[akiva]

One of my students asked me (jokingly) if there was a dead animal inside a box one of the other students was carrying. I of course used this as an opportunity to explain Schrodinger's Cat. I probably explained it very badly, but I had to try.

[Phoebe]

You did have to try! That's awesome.

[akiva]

Kind of hanging on by my fingertips this morning. So I'm doing the bare minimum at work. Which means that I suck more than normal, which exacerbates my mood.

[Phoebe]

The kitchen went from 100% clean to 200% dirty in three days, despite regular efforts to keep cleaning it.

[akiva]