Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: life and living

Not so much the daily grind, as the things that fall outside the scope of academics.

she said it so much better

blog as therapy, life and living

It’s funny. One of my dearest friends is going through something almost identical to me right now, but the circumstances of our lives just makes it near impossible for us to talk to one another. At about the same time I was posting the below, she was posting a similar thought in her own journal, only she managed to be so much more succinct and on the nose with it all:

Whenever I try to talk to someone about it all, the response I tend to get is basically, “Suck it up.” (In nicer terminology, of course). The problem is, I don’t know if I can anymore. B~ once told me my tendency to just keep taking everything on and sucking it up was going to backfire in a job someday, and I can see that happening at this one – on the one hand, the faculty says, “Don’t take too much! Remember, you aren’t paid for it.” On the other hand, they often don’t realize that their vague expectations and the need for me to constantly clarify is part of that too much. It all sounds petty, and it is, but it’s also significant – I can’t quite figure out how to prioritize anymore, b/c to me, the details I let drop are the only ones I can sometimes.

falling apart at the seams from the pressure of overwhelming apathy

blog as therapy, life and living

I’ve been trying to hold myself together, these past few months, with little but sheer force of will. It’s always kind of surprising to me when I discover that’s not enough, but… it hasn’t been. I have completely failed at balancing my life, at even living my life. I seem to be able to concentrate on one thing at a time – I can either focus on school, work, or life, but even a combination of two there becomes overwhelmingly too much.

An insomniac for much of my life, I have gone from one extreme to another. Where I used to be unable to fall asleep until very late at night, if at all, I now have a hard time staying awake for more than a few hours. I can be sitting at my computer, and wake up five hours later, feeling like I just closed my eyes for a moment – it is supremely disorienting. Not even my academic schedule manages to help me figure out the days now, only the calendar on my computer. Without it, I would be sunk.

I realized, several weeks ago at this point, that one of the things missing – aside from any semblance of balance – is laughter, and how much of life I structured around making sure I laughed when I lived in Seattle. It helps relieve stress and pain, and I anchored my life with it. I don’t, here. I should, but I don’t. There’s a lot I should do right now that I don’t, and I can’t figure out how to work my way out of this. I can’t even find the path back to normal – I just know I need to get there. Or at leas that I should want to get there.

Mom dying threw me for a loop bigger than I really expected. I had thought, “Jessica died. I made it through that – it sucked and was painful and I still miss her, but I did it there and can do it again.” I guess I really didn’t understand or estimate the emotional impact that losing your mother instead of your close friend has on you, but it’s been so different. And I don’t really know why – I can take stabs in the dark, guesses, but that’s all they are. Were I to take them, I’d probably lay most of it on having a support system when Jessica died, and not much of one here. Which is not to say people haven’t tried, but for better or worse, I’m not close to many people here in Albany, and the people in Seattle are simply too far away to be the sort of support system I need right now.

It doesn’t help that when I did reach out, here, to the people I did feel I could lean on, I was told in no uncertain terms it was my problem and not theirs. That’s always fun. “Hi, I’m kind of breaking right now and help?” “Your psychological problems are your own and are no excuse!” Yep. Just what someone who’s barely able to get out of bed in the morning needs to hear, definitely the best way ever to motivate. Maybe general yelling and frustration would work, too?

Or, you know, maybe not.

I’m trying, I really am. I’m going through the motions, in the hopes that the movement alone will kickstart everything – it’s been mostly unsuccessful, with a few highlights here and there. And two weeks back, I was really starting to feel like I was getting it all together again – a bit of insight, a bit of laughter, a bit of energy. But that’s all come crashing down again, for reasons unknown to me, and I’m back in this world of grey and no way out.

What’s worse is that I know I should care about getting out, and just don’t.

I’ve managed, in a short period of time, to sabotage just about everything I have here in Albany, and I’m pretty sure there’s no coming back from that. Which I am also pretty sure is contributing heavily to the apathy. No one cares that I can barely keep myself pulled together, no one cares what it’s done to me, why bother? Why not just drift away?

Neil Gaiman has a friend, someone that acts as his security and handler at conventions, or at least at ComiCon. I was reading her blog after the last ComiCon – she’s a funny writer, and had some great con stories – and I came across her anguished post at the reaction of her dear friend’s death. It was a death she knew was coming, but it still struck her in the solar plexus, knocked the wind out of her, out of her life. She wrote that all she wanted to do was drive and drive until she found the edges of the ocean and then she wanted to walk, walk into the water until the waves covered her head and swallowed her whole and the cold took her and numbed her skin to match her numb soul, that she wanted to walk until she could walk no more, off the visible earth and into the everdarkness of the wide open, the tears on her face mixing with the salt of the sea.

It sums up so neatly how I feel. I want to drive east until the fingers of the Atlantic tickle my toes and just walk, walk away until all there is is the cold relief of the ocean and the silent sea.

I should hasten to add that it’s not a wanting to die – that would be too much effort. That would be caring. That wouldn’t be grounded in overwhelming apathy. That would have colour, texture, feeling. This, this does not.

I think the most supreme irony is, after being rebuffed by the quarter I thought could help, would help, were in the position to do so, I shrugged and threw myself on official university services… only to be told I was too complicated, my case was beyond what they could handle, go see these other people. And to then have those other people never call me back.

I have turned into a walking posterchild for what happens when the system fails. The system of friends, of colleagues, of health care help. Everything, everyone, has failed me – and now what do I do? Now what do I do?

see, knew it

life and living

People should never, ever say to me, “well, it can’t get worse, can it?”

My doctor seems to think that I just need to be weened off my pain meds, because it’s not a life for a 32 y/o. Well, yes, but neither is one of chronic pain. And as she’s telling me my left arm has always been the problem (no, I corrected her and she got even more flustered), she tells me she’s going to wean me off the pain killers, because I’m an addict.

Yes. I have a diagnosed chronic and degenerative pain condition that very rarely goes into remission and has no known cure, and her response is to tell me I’m an addict.

It goes rather without saying that I will be shopping for a new doctor immediately.

(She also tried to tell me a bunch of things, from posture to writing and typing properly, and I went through the fact that I have a wrist brace to wear when I write, I use gel pens because I don’t need to press hard on them, that I don’t even have a callous or indentation on my fingers from holding a pen anymore. She told me I’ll just have to start dictating my work if I can’t type, and I asked her if she was going to pay for it, since it costs an arm and a leg to have someone do your typing for you. She finally broke down and acknowledged I apparently have been proactive about everything I can, but still. Yes, I am dependent on my pain medication to not be curled up in bed in wracking pain. This does not make me an addict, this makes me someone suffering from chronic fucking pain!)

a day of moderate success

...and everything else, Academics, Bioethics, life and living, Philosophy, Pop Culture

I actually feel moderately successful this evening. I finished working on two abstracts for ASBH, one of which was basically a rabbit pulled out of a collective hat at the last minute (but sounds very awesome, if I do say so myself); perhaps the best part is knowing that the hat-abstract (as it were) will be written regardless of its acceptance, just because my co-conspirator and I have been wanting to collaborate together for a while, and this is a perfect topic for us to tackle together. I’ve never written a paper with someone else before, so it’ll be a learning experience – and learning experiences with friends are always the best things.

I’ve got another collaboration going on this week; a fellow graduate student and I are co-presenting a paper this weekend at a school graduate conference, on the value of undergraduates having their own undergrad conferences. I’ll be drawing heavily on my experiences at NUBC, MGRS and SCCUR, but think I can easily talk for a long time on it, and especially the benefits behind it, from organizing to networking and learning how to talk to an audience.

I’m doing commentary on a historical epistemological paper, in large part because I don’t actually run away screaming when people say names like Dewey, Pierce, James, or Montague (and as a friend put, I also know they’re not Donald’s nephews). Glibness aside, I’m looking forward to it – I’m hoping that my response to the paper can double as my paper for the epistemology course I’m taking, and I need to crash my prof’s office hours to see if this would be alright with him.

I actually had some things to say in normative ethics today about Kant – in fact, I feel sort of dirty, since I ended up defending Kant, which is really never a position I expected to be in. Ever. And I’m pretty sure there’s an altar of Mill somewhere, where I need to do penance. But it’s pretty hard to argue with the idea that Kant didn’t say it was more virtuous to follow a duty you didn’t want to, only that duty is at least the base level of motivation. It was actually a really fascinating discussion that ended up being more about how Kant views feelings (passively), and how we have a more active engagement with the idea of feelings, and the very idea that to have the feeling of friendship is to automatically import a set of expected duties that are intrinsically tied to the feelings associated with the friendship. More than anything, it made me want to pick up the book that’s trying to reconcile Spinoza and Kant, especially with regard to the affects (feelings). I’m not a Kantian, and can’t ever imagine becoming one, but I can see a really interesting application here of the tied together notion of feeling/duty, and may be able to expand that out into how duty and responsibility are tied to one another.

I’ve joined a conversation with someone who does contemporary media critique on a couple of shows I really love, and had the distinct and unexpected pleasure of having that person actually compliment me on my ideas, and wonder exactly where I’ve been hiding with them and why I haven’t been involved in the conversation prior to now – the sort of thing that not only strokes my ego (which I need now and again), but makes me feel like I’m not crazy, and do actually have a knack for some of this.

I also found out that a friend’s going to be up here in April, along with several of her students, for a conference, and they’ll be staying with me. I’m looking forward to this, both because I know and enjoy one of her students quite a bit, and I’m pleased to see my friend again, but also because it gives me a firm deadline for cleaning up my apartment/getting rid of things/etc.

Things aren’t perfect – my insurance is still being a pain, my new apartment managers are being major pills, there are several other headaches (or depending, situations that make me just want to crawl in bed and cry and/or drink – H~ suggested we skip the beer and go straight to vodka shots, and I think she’s got a very solid plan there) – but for the first time in a while, things aren’t an overwhelming shade of apathetic gray. I’ve some ideas for why this might be, but I think I’m going to sit and think on those for slightly longer before I take the time to write. (Speaking of writing, I’ve been slowly getting back on the blogging horse, which a combination of power outages and allergic reactions on hands knocked me out of, and in the process have actually written up a couple of things I’m rather pleased with over at the Women’s Bioethics Blog.)

All of which is to say, again, today is the first day the world has had a bit of colour; I don’t know if you remember the movie What Dreams May Come, but a lot of the last few months has felt very much like the dim grey pictured in the movie, and today? Today I’m seeing just hints of how the colour might be able to bleed back through my life – and it’s a hopeful thing.

Oh Frabjous Day!

life and living

I haven’t thrown up in 24 hours. My fever broke late Friday night/early Saturday morning. I’m still sleeping like a log – when’s the last time any of you remember me sleeping for 8 hours straight – and perhaps best of all, I actually woke up hungry today. (By all accounts, it looks like I dropped an easy 5lbs through the not eating/tossing cookies all week thing.) I might actually be getting better. Again. Hopefully I can stay healthy this time around.

(I’m still allergic to the lidoderm, though. Which is really a pain, because I have to make the fun choice of: kill the pain and itch like hell, or hurt like hell and not itch? At least with benadryl, I can control the itching… and the allergy seemed local, primarily on my hands. I appear to be able to wear the patches elsewhere without reacting. So far, when it’s come up, I’ve opted to take a healthy dose of benadryl and wear the patch as long as possible – it’s gotten me to sleep the past two nights, and I seem to be able to wake up just enough to take the patch off without waking up to the point of waking up. Still. Irritating doesn’t begin to cover it, metaphorically or otherwise.)