Been a while. Hope you’re well.

Since last time, I’ve still been continuing to live a regular life, getting to activities that were beyond my reach pre-CPAP.

Put aside a lot of the deep emotional processing so that I could get this project over the finish line, so probably gonna resume that in the new year.

Today, I’ll recount the tale of a boy with a simple dream, to breathe, and the pound of flesh he exchanged for a chance at inner peace.

Reactions and Discussion

A few things have stood out from people’s reactions when I talked about the surgery. Including frequently asked questions, with answers below (as conversations permitted).

Surprise. Learning that sleep apnea could be treated surgically.

Deep concern that I had an operation at all. “Oh my god, you had surgery?! Are you okay?!” A few clutched at their chests or put their hands on my shoulder. Yes, and yes. I was most surprised by this reaction, which I suspect is related to a CPTSD-esque self-abandonment thing. Kind of expected a neutral but curious attitude of “Oh, you tried out that new restaurant? How was it?” Instead, everyone, including acquaintances and people I just met, were gravely concerned and feared for my wellbeing. That was nice, and I should probably think long and hard about why I expected nobody to care.

“What kind of surgery?”

1. Five procedures: three in the nose, two in the throat.

   1. Septoplasty to straighten my deviated septum. Estimated 30% obstruction in my right nasal passage.

   2. Bilateral Turbinate Reduction Rhinoplasty to reduce the size of the turbinates in both sides of the nose; not sure which ones. See diagram below. Humidify, heat, and filter air coming into the nose. When they’re too big, they block air from coming in as easily. Improves pressure in upper nasal passage. Reduces mouth breathing. Improves sleep quality and reduces daytime fatigue (!!!) 💀

      

   3. Columellar Rhinoplasty to increase size of nostrils. Tightens up the columella (skin separating nostrils). Also done cosmetically to address “hanging/drooping nose.”

   4. Uvula-Preserving Palatopharyngoplasty (UPPPP) to move the flaps in the back of my throat out towards my molars to open up airway. Like opening curtains in a theatre. Not to be confused with uvulopalatopharybgoplasty (UPPP), where the uvula was not preserved.

   5. Tonsillectomy to remove tonsils and open up airway.

Sombre grief.

1. “Wow, after everything you went through in childhood, you also struggled to breathe at night?”

   1. Yes.

2. “If you can’t breathe or sleep well, what’s the point of going on?

   1. I don’t know.

3. “How did you make it this far?”

   1. I don’t know.

   2. My apnea score was only moderate. I’ve met a few people with severe sleep apnea, with quadruple my AHI score.

   3. On the Epworth sleepiness scale, I rarely fell asleep randomly unless I was in bed, e.g., after work. Never reached narcoleptic levels.

From those who also have OSA or who share beds with people with it: “Tell me everything.”

1. “Do you have a CPAP?”

   1. Yes, and a mouth guard.

   2. Since I have to clean both daily, I don’t always use them every night. When I do, I still sometimes wake up and find both on my nightstand with no memory of removing them.

2. “What made you decide to get the surgery?”

   1. To improve my sleep duration and quality, whether or not I use my CPAP and/or mouth guard.

   2. Who knows? Maybe after I recover completely, I won’t need either.

3. “What was your sleep score?”

   1. AHI score was 16 events/hour, just within the moderate range.

4. “How long was the surgery?”

   1. Maybe around two hours?

   2. My ENT performed surgery on four patients that day. I was third, and the fourth was scheduled 2.5 hours after mine. *shrug*

5. “Was it painful?”

   1. Yes, the first three weeks were torture. All three painkillers combined weren’t strong enough.

   2. I had to space them out carefully because they all had Tylenol. They maxed out my liver’s ability to process acetaminophen/paracetamol. Death by painkiller overdose can be a result of too much Tylenol.

6. “Can I get in with your ENT?”

   1. Alberta Health Services (AHS) and your insurance provider would probably prefer a doctor’s referral (preferral).

   2. My family doctor referred me. It was a yearlong wait for my appointment.

7. “Did it cost you anything?”

   1. Universal healthcare, baby.

   2. Minor loss of income from taking time off work.

   3. Buying special food for recovery, like tofu and chocolate.

That’s the gist of it. For those interested in the gory details, read on.

Editor’s note: I would normally cut out a lot of the following details in a regular post, but I’m going to keep it lengthier for those who might consider taking the plunge themselves. There are plenty more details I could get into, but mostly keeping whatever stood out to me. Apologies in advance for the absence of brevity.

Pre-Surgery

Back in June, surgeon asked when I wanted to schedule the operation. And though I would book it and also possessed a few diagnoses and pieces of equipment to improve my catnaps, I couldn’t exactly be passive about it all in the intervening months. I was still experimenting with the CPAP machine, eye mask, medications, timings, wind-down routines because the specific variables and results would come front and centre immediately after the operation. Surely I could have taken the waiting period lying down, but that seemed…irresponsible.

I tried not to research anything about the procedures. I don’t generally enjoy looking at medical images, least of which the before, during, and after photos. Plus, frankly, I was busy, still enjoying my enhanced productive capacity powered by the CPAP+mouth guard combo.

A month before the procedure, I received an email about a new questionnaire in my MyAHS portal asking for medical history, prescriptions, lifestyle, family history, etc. Shout out to my favourite aunt who helped me with the extended family details.

The hospital also scheduled a call two weeks before the big day to go over all my submitted responses.

“You used to smoke? How many packs a day? Oh, it was actually an e-cigarette. When did you quit?”

“Bring your CPAP machine so that you can sleep after the operation. Label it with your name.”

“Stop taking any vitamins and supplements seven days before your surgery. Night before and day of, take your prescription medications as normal.”

On the eve of the surgery (surgeryve), I was supposed to call the hospital to get my time slot. I, uh, forgot, but they kindly called and left a voicemail.

9 AM surgery time. Show up at 6 AM. Don’t eat or drink anything after midnight.

Probably quite costly when people are booked for surgery and don’t show up. I went bouldering because I wasn’t looking forward to being bed-bound and losing all my gains. I also stayed up late to get some chores done since I wouldn’t be able to for who-knows-how-long. Took my Intuniv as instructed.

Surgery Day

I slept about 3 hours. Popped a Vyvanse. Anticipated the discomfort of taking an upper before going under and trying to go down for a nap after getting cut up.

Parked and found the way through the maze of the Peter Lougheed Hospital with my home nurse. Updated my address with the information desk. Got a personalized wristband. QR code enabled entry into one of the most exclusive parties at the club.

Second floor, Day Surgery unit.

Big whiteboard with all of the operations grouped by surgeon, sorted by time. I was the third of four patients. First two were only 40 minutes apart, with 2.5 hours between mine and the fourth. When did the first two have to arrive this morning?

Beds arranged like a zipper along a large U-shaped room. Thought of how people in Gaza would respond if Albertans said our hospitals were overcrowded.

Found my bed. Little pile of folded cloths waiting for me. Hung up my jacket. Put my CPAP, chargers, and other belongings into the little nightstand drawers. Slipped on my gown, booties, and hairnet. Hung tight while staff, patients, and family buzzed about. Day Surgery nurse took all my medical information. Chilled for three hours while different members of the surgical team came by to visit. Surgeon. One anesthesiologist. Surgical nurse. Two anesthesiologists.

Asked about mixing the stimulant and sleep potion. “If your Vyvanse has a power level of 1, then the anesthetic would have a power level of 1000.”

Despite already digitally providing all manner of medical history, I would continue to verbally recite the same answers about five more times before hitting the operating room. They probably do this so that the anesthesiologists get all of the possible information to prevent any undesired drug interactions. “Think of us as priests. You wanna tell us everything,” said one. I can be honest to a fault, but I suspect that they’ve had important data slip out after the sixth or so questioning from those that wanted to hide something. Felt like a lie detector test. Maybe answers tend to escape based on how different people with different personalities phrase the questions, or maybe it’s a form of spy movie interrogation, but altogether, it seemed vitally important to answer truthfully every time; with consistent confidence, at that.

Surgeon said I was lucky to be having my surgery before the nurse’s strike. I support labour rights. If it were called, non-essential surgeries like mine would be delayed in favour of minor operations for trifles like cancer. Mine was some 3.5 years in the making, so trying to plan for contingencies like a strike was simply a matter of luck. Who could blame 16,000+ healthcare workers for wanting better pay after COVID, increased responsibilities, and the recent explosion in living costs? A deal with retrospective pay increases was ratified shortly after.

Home nurse went home to nap because it was still ungodly early. No reason for both of us to feel like shit all day.

Wheeled to the operating room by a nurse who seemed dead-set on telling me about her children, who were both in competitive sports programs at their schools and playing abroad. Got out of my bed, walked to a new one in the OR. The whole team was there except the ENT. They were strapping this thing to me and putting a blanket here and moving my arm thisaway.

“All ready to go?”

Actually, one last request. The senior of the anesthesiologists seemed caught midway into injecting me with something.

“Oh, sure! What’s up?”

Too embarrassed to share what I requested, but they graciously agreed. The syringe plunger went all the way down.

*fade to black*

Post-Surgery

Woke up to the din of a large, busy room. Couldn’t open my eyes, didn’t want to.

Inhaled nasally. Thought to myself, “Wait, have all of you been able to breathe like this the whole time? What the fuck.”

Parked next to a nurse seated at a computer station. Breathed deep, felt wet resistance in lungs. Coughed hoarsely. Productive and painful.

Nurse asked “Did that hurt?”

Yes.

“Do you need a painkiller?”

Yes.

*Morphine*

Pain remained but felt different. This experience would become a central theme for the next three weeks. Dizzy now too.

Swallowing hurt like knives. Also a central theme for four to five weeks.

Nostrils didn’t ache terribly unless poked. Outside edges were inflamed, like when catching a seasonal bug. Columella was tender.

Eventually realized I was sporting a Moustache Dressing, taped under my nose. Like Einstein’s but soaked in warm, wet blood.

Wheeled back to my original area in Day Surgery. Would lay in bed, moaning and partially conscious, for another 6 hours. Home nurse was already there waiting.

Groggy af. Apparently, my liver had been sleeping on the job since I stopped drinking in 2024. Hadn’t had much to do by way of detoxifying poison from my blood. Took its time to clear anesthesia compared to patients who drank regularly, so said the surgeon. Clear evidence that I led a healthy life. It is healthier to be sober and recover from anesthesia slowly than to drink heavily and clear anesthetic quickly.

Everything went well with the operation. No complications. Surgical team passed on my request, which she fulfilled.

At some point when drifting away, heard chatter of pharmacies, prescriptions, and medical certificates. Was advised to sleep at elevated angle, even at home.

Changing the moustache dressing induced a horrible scent. Thought it was from the new gauze. Spoke with surgeon, and thought it was from cauterizing throat wounds. Finally realized the source was the tape wrapped around my nose. I was asleep when it was applied, so I adjusted to the aroma unconsciously. Only noticed it again after my smell receptors cleared in the brief moments during the swap. That poor nurse, who thought she did something wrong performing a trivial task in her long list of responsibilities. Alas, good sign that my nasal airflow improved. Nauseating though. Despite the overwhelming suspicion that some important body parts were recently severed, I was able to quietly rejoice in the modern miracle of truly smelling the flowers for the first time ever, albeit a flower apparently made of burnt rubber.

Grogginess and headache from anesthetic. Dizziness from morphine. Nausea from the dressing tape. Head hurt more than my wounds. Given an anti-emetic; Gravol, I think. Was told to sleep and that the grogginess would fade. (Narrator: He did not, and it did not.)

Donned an eye mask in bed and polarized sunglasses for wandering about. Painfully bright.

Sucking on ice chips was supposed to help with the throat soreness. One nurse brought me a post-op popsicle (post-opsicle). It was cool, refreshing, and sweet, but no, the cold did not help with the pain. In fact, it sensitized the surgical site even further. Instead of my throat simply hurting, I could now sense the same pain level but in 4k.

“But wait, you did it wrong, Jon,” so saith my self-critic. “You’re supposed to keep chilling the area until it numbs.” Also tried that. Never happened. How much ice do you figure it takes to numb the nerves of intact tonsils in a warm-blooded person? Could barely open my mouth. Foisting ice cubes and post-opsicles onto my still-bloody wounds aggravated the nerve cells on the outside of my throat. I do not recommend this treatment.

ENT came back one last time before heading home for the day. Asked if I wanted to stay overnight in Day Surgery. Announced that I felt like puking, and she said maybe I should because I’d probably swallowed a lot of blood. Quietly wondered what stomach acid would do to my raw throat proteins (throateins). Responded that I’d be better off at home, dreading the cold drive. Reassured me again that everything went really well and to take my time getting better. Patient #4 was already sitting up and smiling, so clearly she knew what she was doing. Bade farewell, turned, and walked off into the night. Badasses rock Hello Kitty.

Tried to get some rest and relaxation unsuccessfully. Though the room cleared out of most staff, patients, and caregivers compared with the morning, a healthy composition of dings, beeps, clangs, and shouts gnawed at my soul. Felt more like a discarded pile of impulses than a person. Head spinning and stomach turning, I started packing up and limping toward the exit. Nope. Need to be wheeled out in a wheelchair. K.

Wheeled past my septoplastic comrade. Acknowledged moustaches.

Reached the ground floor unbothered, and detoured into a bathroom to hurl. Examining my work, all I could see was darkness -- blood plus the faint evidence of a post-opsicle. Thanked the Lord I didn’t vomit in or on the car.

Posted up near an exit to wait for my home nurse to swing around with the car, next to what turned out to be a one-way door that blended into the wall. Met the bewildered glances of a few hospital workers whose gaits caused the trick door to swing wide and lightly bump the foot of my wheelchair. Tried to push myself clear, only to discover the wheels had locked. So little life-force remained to address this non-problem that I endured several encores of this interaction. Everyone survived.

Winced all the way home. Only accosted my driver once for their elevated rates of acceleration and deceleration. It was cold and dark, and everyone was rushing home after work.

Intermission: Fun with words

Rhino-plasty. Rhinoceros getting a plastic horn.

Pharyngo sounds like Ringo.

You can use the full name of the procedure or abbreviate it, depending on how much time you want to save. Bilateral turbinate reduction rhinoplasty becomes bilateral turbinoplasty for short, or biturbinoplasty for shorter.

Home Recovery

Made it into the parking garage and up the elevator. Stumbled into the door in time to regurgitate into the porcelain throne. Perfect aim. More darkness. Raw blood was not sitting well gastronomically.

Grabbed the big pillows. Bed. Siri, turn off all the lights. Deputized a nearby bin as a spittoon/drool tank.

Meds

Home nurse left to retrieve the ingredients for a drug cocktail:

1. Prednisone

   1. Steroid to reduce inflammation

   2. Three per 24 hour period

2. Amoxicillin

   1. Antibiotic

   2. Once daily for a fortnight

3. Tramadol + acetaminophen

   1. Short-acting painkiller

   2. aka Tramacet

   3. Technically valid alternate names that pharmacists don’t recognize yet:

      1. Trylenol

      2. Trymadol

      3. Tyledol

   4. Every four hours. Did not miss a single dose.

4. Tramadol XR

   1. long-acting painkiller (eXtended Release)

   2. Also had acetaminophen

   3. One per 24 hours

5. Rhinaris

   1. Nasal spray

   2. Hydrates the surgical site

   3. Thrice per solar cycle

6. Oxycodone

   1. Apparently also loaded with acetaminophen/paracetamol.

      1. Puts the -cet in Percocet.

   2. Max four times every 24 hours

Didn’t get the Percs until the next morning. Pharmacist from the night before was confused why I was prescribed so much acetominophen and advised my home nurse to come back if pain didn’t subside.

Kept track of dosages with a paper notepad and clicky pen. Didn’t want to deal with my phone and swiping away notifications or failing Face ID with my cotton ‘stache. Don’t usually take my phone into bed anyways. Had to set the lamp brightness to 1% multiple times in the middle of the night to log the timestamps for a couple weeks, but otherwise, an easy tradeoff.

I was to keep my regular medication schedule following the procedure, but it made little sense to take my stimulant during recovery. Pharmacist asked “is there something he needs to be focusing on?” Sleep. Just sleep.

Dine-In Menu

With pain registering from opening my mouth or moving my tongue in the range of mere millimetres, dietary options were limited.

Types of foods that were not on the menu:

• Crunchy

  • Chips

• Pointy

  • Chips

• Spicy

  • Chips with salsa

• Acidic

  • Coffee

• Scratchy

  • Many

• Tall

  • Most

What I consumed:

• Bowl of oatmeal (boatmeal) with scoops of chia seeds, dark brown sugar, and peanut butter

  • Get your dietary fibre, kids.

  • Obstruction from painkillers is real. Popped some stool softener pills after a few days.

  • Chia seeds have greater fibre density and nutritional value than fibre supplements.

• Tofu

  • Soft and chilled

  • Mostly the flavoured dessert type

  • More soothing than ice cubes

  • Takumi!

• Miso soup

  • Simple to make

  • More soothing than ice cubes

• Bone broths

  • Warm

  • Hydrating because salt

  • More soothing than ice cubes

• Cadbury Dairy Milk

  • Is there no more joy left in this life?

  • Taller than I would have liked but worth it

• Pedialyte

  • Hydrating because salt

  • $13.49/L + tax

• Oral Rehydration Solution

  • Hydrating because salt

  • WHO recipe: 1.06 L water, 3 g salt, 30 g sugar.

  • $0.03/L

Day 2 of recovery, the Foothills Sleep Clinic called and said it was my turn in line for a CPAP machine trial. Poetic. Only a two-year wait. I hope that someday our government provides adequate funding for all medical programs rather than slowly ushering in private healthcare. A boy can dream.

Fumbled the refilling of painkillers before the first weekend. Unpleasant.

My breathing rate showed a lower trend after six days, 13.1 breaths/min vs. 16.6. Turns out the reduction was from not taking stimulants. Rate increased after I resumed.

Pain became “manageable” at precisely the one week point. To the hour. Fascinating. Hard to describe the difference. During the first week, they reduced some of the pain by 20%. For the second, maybe 30%? Continued to break through, but felt different.

Ached when speaking, so whispered. Audience couldn’t always hear, so repeated myself in agony. Had randomly created a Personal Voice on my phone some time ago, so used that for a bit.

Mustered up the courage to look inside my mouth. Seeing the scabbing helped to make sense of the sensations. Existentially, suffering is meaningless, but you can create your own meaning from it, and I did so by opening my mouth and saying “Ah.” Scabs looked rectangular. Still dark red after a week.

Noticed when the stitches in my mouth flaps dissolved. It was like a fish bone, stuck in between my molar and tongue, dislodging itself. Minor but sweet relief.

Another list of random observations collected during the remainder of recovery:

1. Can’t exert your body because you need to reserve energy for rebuilding tissue.

2. The AHS handout recommended that I go for short walks to lightly load my body and gradually increase the distance every day, but the cold irritated my airways.

   1. Still preferable to surgerize outside of the precious summer months.

3. Hurt to:

   1. smile

   2. laugh

   3. pop ears

   4. yawn

   5. pick food out of teeth with tongue

4. Antibiotics reset all the hard work I did on my gut microbiome since the last course of antibiotics. Better than getting an infection, but damn.

5. Sense of smell comes and goes in intensity. Sometimes stronger than before, sometimes fainter. Food doesn’t taste as strong at the moment.

6. Uvula feels funny still, one month out. Inflamed. Larger than normal. Sometimes gets in the way of breathing through my nose when laying on my back.

7. I’ve been more sneezy lately.

   1. Allergies? Three years into shots, out of five.

   2. More airflow than ever, so could be an irritant like dust?

8. Hard reset

   1. Quite a long while since I got back to basics. Like, learning how to eat, breathe, sleep. How to function.

   2. Every little idea, project, work-in-progress stopped for the greater good. Most still in limbo.

9. ADD meds hit a bit different with all this extra oxygen, so titrating again.

10. Energy curve

    1. Sleep schedule bounced all over the place while skipping Vyvanse. Multiple hours-long naps per day early on.

    2. Fascinating to be able to reliably fall asleep within minutes now.

After third week, ENT stopped refilling pain med scripts. Advised to switch to Tylenol or Advil, unless I really needed more. I did, so she prescribed mar-karalatol. Shortly after, I stopped taking painkillers altogether. Main pain sensation now is from yawning.

Since I chose late autumn, recovery has been funny because everything isn’t “real life.” At work, it’s year-end and holidays. Socially, people are travelling, though some folks were able to sneak in a little meal before the new year. The climate is cooler, so physical activity is generally lower. The combined effect is that recovery is hard to gauge since aspects of the environment are outside of normal limits.

Worth?

Yes, I would do it again.

Forecast said minor improvement with major pain. I would say moderate improvement, qualitatively. Suppose a new sleep study after six months or so would render a clearer judgement.

Funny thing about pain and the brain is that I can’t even remember what it felt like anymore, six weeks out.

Using mouth guard and CPAP still. While I can, and do, go without, my overall sleep duration and quality are vastly better when combining all therapies. I actually even feel refreshed some mornings. There isn’t such intense pressure to prep them every single day or to wear them every hour of the night.

Struggled with stress management before, and now I have greater executive functioning to improve decision-making and avoid what used to seem like unavoidable stressors. Able to “sleep it off” now.

Nighttime anxiety improved after the operation, though technically inconclusive while still on painkillers. Derived from at least two sources: struggling to breathe during bedtime and daytime. Nervous system calmer now. Wind down routine actually works for a change. All it took was five procedures paid for by a single payer healthcare system, a $500 3D printed resin mouth guard, and a $2,500 CPAP machine with accessories. Easy peasy. What is there even worth worrying about anymore in this existence?

Still too early to provide a complete review, but initial impressions are extremely positive.

Wrap It Up

Sleep apnea surgery. Straightened septum. Reduced turbinates. Enlarged nostrils. Removed tonsils. Moved flaps.

Ouch. Painkillers. Slept lots. Ate simpler.

Still recovering. Sleeping better with CPAP and mouth guard.

Feels like waking up for the first time. Grateful. Humbled. Shopping for Hello Kitty merch as a thank you.

At the end of February, I got a CPAP (Continuous Positive Air Pressure) machine for my Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA), and I’m experiencing restorative sleep for the first time since the womb.

I haven’t been writing since I got the machine. Turns out that getting actual rest allows you to recover much more quickly from…just about everything. As such, I’ve been using this newfound energy to accomplish all the things that have been practically impossible when running on garbage sleep. I’m still playing catch up with sleep, which will probably last until my 70’s. Then I suppose I’ll feel properly rested and finally ready to take on the world.

Drugs

Wrapped up in the topic of my sleep is my stimulant medication. After three years of tinkering, I settled on my ADHD drugs. 50 mg Vyvanse in the morning and 2 mg Intuniv at night. Lock it in.

Glad to be able to close this chapter and reclaim all the brain space that I devoted to the titration process. It’s a major accomplishment whenever I finish any project because of ADHD, and this one was a doozy. One of the reasons I pursued the CPAP so hard was because I was starting to feel like I hit the ceiling with the drugs. Even if I had the stomach for a fourth year of testing drugs, I have a hunch that I wouldn’t get much further with it.

I asked my family doc what was the longest refill he could prescribe for me he could write for both drugs, and he said 3 months. My dosages were already stable for quite a while, so this change in prescription is the final page in the chapter.

Thus, I can finally stop going to the pharmacy every month or so, which has been comically difficult to get to despite my pharmacy being 2 blocks away and doctor’s office being across the street.

This should probably be my last drug update too. Huzzah!

Obstructive Sleep Apnea

I’m gonna (try to) speedrun through the story of how I got my CPAP machine. Not sure if it’s going to be interesting to anyone, but I’ll at least record it for my own terrible memory. Most of you are advised to skip to the next section.

2023 Sleep Study

December (I think). After describing how rough my day becomes whenever I don’t have stimulant meds in my bloodstream, my family doc suggested a sleep study.

Doc: “Do you want to go through the public or private system?”

JL: “Public.”

Surprisingly quick to get the kit from the Foothills hospital. In bed, I hook myself up with a few sensors. Little box sits on top of my little nightstand.

1. Heart rate monitor on my finger

2. Oxygen sensor in my nostrils

3. Breathing monitor strapped around my chest

4. Accelerometer to detect the angle of my body.

Worst sleep I had in a long time.

Results come back with “possible mild sleep apnea.”

Didn’t hear anything for a while, so called the sleep clinic in July about next steps.

“You don’t need to call us. We will call you when it’s your turn. It will be in the fall.”

Whoa. Attitude.

Waited for the fall call. Nothing, so I dropped it.

“Must not be that bad if they aren’t calling me back. Other people probably need it a lot more than me anyway.”

Thought about that phone call whenever I didn’t sleep well, which was most nights.

Ear, Nose, and Throat (ENT) Doctor

Separately, I had lined up an appointment to see an ENT in June 2024 for allergy concerns.

ENT Doctor: “You probably also have sleep apnea. Have you done a sleep study?”

Me: “Yep.”

“What’s your score?”

“What score?”

“AHI score. Apnea-Hypopnea Index. The number of times you stopped breathing per hour.”

“…”

“…”

“I don’t know. I was just told possible mild sleep apnea.”

(Digging up the results, I now see that the report was quite comprehensive, but very little of it was explained to me at the time. Score was 12.0 per hour. Below 15.0, so mild.)

ENT explained the various treatment options in great detail.

• Pharmacotherapy, which is what I’ve already done up to this point. Maybe done the first of five years of allergy serum injections. Daily antihistamines and steroid inhaler until the allergy shots took hold. Drugs already helped a lot, so maybe I didn’t need any further treatment. (Narrator: “He did.”)

• Behavioural therapy, like sleep hygiene, meditation, yoga. Tried this for years, never worked, gave up on it forever.

• Surgical, like opening my airway, which is pretty narrow for a person my size.

Wait wut. My airway is small? I’d been told that my mouth is (physically) small, but dafuq.

“Yeah, so say you didn’t have sleep apnea. Then at the best of times, your body still struggles to breathe because the pipes are so small. Do you struggle to catch your breath during periods of heightened physical exertion, like playing sports?”

“…A little, yes. I just thought that was normal from being out of shape or not doing enough cardio.”

*she puts a scope in my nose*

Nostrils too small.

Septum deviated, blocking my right nasal passage by about 30%.

“Have you ever noticed how you can breathe better through your left nostril?”

“…”

“Okaaay. Well, have you ever noticed that you sometimes breathe through one nostril and not the other?”

“I thought that was normal.”

“Do you breathe through your nose or mouth?”

“Knuckle-dragging mouth breather.”

“When you pull the skin on your cheekbones apart, can you breathe better through your nose?”

“Yes. Wtf”

Nasal valve has collapsed mildly. Like, the skin on the outside of my nose, below the bridge, isn’t as perky. Normal with age.

*she checks my throat*

Airway opening is reduced by the flaps in the back of my mouth.

Tonsils crowding the back area.

Surgery could provide a minor improvement if I’m willing to endure major pain and a long recovery.

These are her proposed procedures, as I understand them:

1. Septoplasty with bilateral turbinoplasties - Shaving down my septum for equal airflow between both nostrils.

2. Columellar rhinoplasty - making my nostrils a bit bigger to improve airflow. Alternative to nasal valve repair but with lower visual impact.

3. Tonsillectomy - remove my tonsils.

4. Palatopharyngoplasty - cut my palatoglossal arches and stitch them closer to my cheeks, like opening curtains.

She advises that if I do another sleep study and if it reveals that I have moderate sleep apnea, a CPAP machine would allow me to sleep restfully without the risks of surgery, like infection, pain, recovery time. Surgery could change my voice. My nose will look different. Eating will feel different.

Cut me the hell up. I acknowledge that it seems a tad hasty. I will take the pain. I will accept the new voice and visual updates. I want to breathe.

Sleep is life, and I want to live.

ENT understands that I understand. Still strongly suggests doing another sleep study because that will inform how to proceed with the surgeries. Then we can measure how bad my breathing and sleeping really are.

2025 Sleep Study

Private clinic. For the record, this isn’t an indictment of the public healthcare system. It’s simply the present reality of past budget cuts by conservative governments to starve the beast, all in preparation for private healthcare in Alberta, à la Bill 55.

Score of 16.4. That is, I stopped breathing for 10 seconds or longer at a rate of 16.4 times per hour during my study. My score from the previous study was 12.0. If my score is in the moderate range, then my insurance will fully cover the CPAP machine, along with the mask and accessories. Score of 15 or above is considered moderate severity.

Get set up for my CPAP machine and mask by another technician. She pulls up my study results.

Technician: “See the red graph at the bottom labelled Pulse? It shows your heart rate moving up and down between about 60 and 100 beats per minute.”

JL: *nod*

Tech: “Now look at this graph with the blue line just above it, Oxygen Saturation. When your airway closes, your blood has lower blood oxygen saturation. Makes sense, right? Every time the blue line goes down, the red line shoots up.

“Whenever you can’t breathe in your sleep, your heart works overtime.”

JL: *eyes widen slowly in horror*

Tech: “Your brain needs a consistent supply of oxygen in order to stay alive. So when you stop breathing and your oxygen saturation drops below about 92% on the graph, your heart rate spikes up to 100 bpm in order to deliver that constant amount of oxygen to your brain. And you stopped breathing 16.4 times per hour.”

JL: “…”

Tech: “So when you’re in bed at night, you think you’re asleep, but your body is actually fighting all night.”

“That’s why you feel tired in the morning.”

Kill me now.

Rested Development

Fast forward to today. I’ve used my CPAP machine for a couple months, and I am…at a loss for words. I am both overjoyed and furious. I want to hug someone and also talk to the manager of something.

Nowadays, my AHI score is below 5/hr, according to my machine. Some nights were 0.5/hr.

Pre- and post-CPAP, sleep lasts 6 hours, which is the most surprising result. The upshot is that now I spend a ton more time in deep sleep. I have a couple years of baseline sleep data from sleeping with my Apple Watch, but for simplicity, let’s look at the month before and after.

The time scales are different because I napped more in March.

Oddly, I slept less with the CPAP, but I got better rest because I spent less time awake in bed and more time in deep sleep. Please pay special attention to the 5 AM region on the Feb 2025 chart. Orange means I’m awake. That is where my misery and suffering lived.

It takes a few weeks to adjust to sleeping with the CPAP machine. Your body freaks out the first couple nights, like “what in the flying fuck is this alien latched to your breathing orifice(s)?” You need to wear the mask during the day to train your body to leave it on all night.

After I started using the CPAP in March, average time awake went down to 6% from 11%. Time in deep sleep went up from 11% to 15%. The numbers don’t seem like all the much at first glance, but those 4-5 percentage points, or 30 minutes, mean that my life feels worth living again. It represents how I stopped obsessing about sleep, stopped blogging, and redirected all that time and energy towards all the activities that were effectively impossible to get to before.

It’s my “happily ever after.”

Post-Script

I feel so many things. Grieving the immeasurable losses. Rewinding to so many dark, fuzzy memories in my teen years laying in bed, trying to fall asleep but gasping for air. Wondering if I would wake up the next morning.

The way the CPAP works is by pushing air into the mask, encouraging my airway to open and to let air into my lungs. Some people have just the nose mask, but I have the full face mask because I’m a mouth breather. The full mask gives me mad pimples on my nose, which are scars now. I can feel people staring more intently at my face now.

Trying to think back to the last time when I felt this refreshed, and I’d have to say it was only a handful of times.

CPAPs don’t cure anything, but they’re a great stand-in until I can get my surgeries. My machine is a lot nicer than I imagined. Quiet, small, easy to operate. Came with a neat little carrying case for travel. Doesn’t count against your carry-on or personal item on a plane.

Imperfect lifesaver ☠️🛟

Yes, I did say happily ever after, but what happened to Sleeping Beauty after she married Prince Charming? While I can see how much my life will improve with the CPAP, it can be a pain in the ass.

It’s another set of hard-to-ignore chores. I have to wash the face mask with soap every day to avoid oil buildup, which ruins the seal and irritates the skin. I already have some pretty noticeable scarring on my nose from the pimples I got after the first couple nights.

It has a humidifier tank that needs to be refilled with distilled water every night or two. It has a cellular connection that uploads my sleep data for my clinic and the manufacturer to adjust as necessary.

The hose and accessories need to be cleaned/disinfected weekly. Yeah, that just hasn’t happened. I try my best.

My model, the ResMed AirSense 11 Auto, has an acoustic sensor that can be used to help their research for new features. Essentially a shitty microphone which only benefits the manufacturer. It was turned on by default when I got it. Reading about it on message boards, users did not know that this model shipped with that kind of hardware. From what I understand, since it’s an acoustic sensor and not a microphone, it’s likely not sensitive enough to pick up human speech. It is placed somewhere in the wind tunnel, so it probably only picks up the wind noise. But if it’s so harmless, why opt everyone in by default and hide its existence from users? Shady on multiple counts.

They have a smartphone app, myAir. Indeed, it was useful to calibrate the CPAP metrics against the sleep tracking app I’ve been using for the last few years, AutoSleep. Switching pillows improved all my numbers. Thought I could stop using my mouth guard now that I have the CPAP, but my sleep improved when combining the two, so there we go. However, it’s harder to sleep knowing that there’s probably a shadow network of advertisers tracking not only my sleep but whenever my phone is connected by Bluetooth and therefore my location. Given the shadiness on the hardware side, fair to assume the software is similar. Deleted the app after a few nights since I can just as easily review the numbers every morning on the machine’s little touchscreen. Not sure what the AutoSleep app is doing with my data, but its usefulness is far greater than myAir’s.

My ENT said that based on the initial results of the CPAP and her 20+ years of experience, there was a decent chance that I could be fully cured with the surgeries. At the very least, they’ll improve the effectiveness of the CPAP and could minimize how much or how often I’d need to use it. If I’m okay with the risks, she recommends I follow through because I’m still young. Aiming for November of this year. Can probably take 3 weeks of short term disability because of my insurance.

Overall, I’m overjoyed to have a CPAP machine at all. Got a great machine which insurance fully paid for. The chores aren’t all that bad since my brain is refreshed enough every day that I can prioritize them early. All the negative features of the device can be disabled. Surgery lined up in the same year means all of it feels pretty temporary. Perhaps I can pass on the machine to someone in dire need if/when I’m cured. But one step at a time.

Addendum

Time to play with the words because that’s how my mind works after saying/writing/reading them so often in such a short time.

CPAP. Sleep apnea. Don’t know why they ended up sounding so similar, but whenever I say one of them, people always seem to hear the other. The manufacturer also has a smartphone app that tracks your AHI score every night, a CPAP app for sleep apnea.

If an Atlanta rapper dropped a track on Apnea-Hypopnea, you’d call it hip-hopnea. Or sleep rapnea. A$AP CPAP.

• Diary of a CEO - Dr. K (YouTube)

• DrDrayz - Natural Deodorant (YouTube)

• Hacks (Crave)

• James Acaster: Repertoire (Netflix)

• Guesthouse Berlin Podcast #20 | Fabian Dikof (SoundCloud)

• StoryGraph (Brighton Ruby)

• The Great (Prime Video)

• Jan Blomqvist - Canopée des Cîmes (YouTube)

• You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment (Netflix)

• Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut (Netflix)

• The Sympathizer (Crave)

Happier Than Ever

Life has never been so quiet, and I’m happier than ever!

This night-and-day difference is similar to the one back in June but much bigger. But knowing me, my body probably won’t settle into this slower rhythm until Summer 2025.

Finished two big, multi-month projects in November, one personal, one for work. Took a whole month to snap out of Cow Mode after that.

Personal project was selling the condo. It was a significant topic in a previous version of this blog, and now it’s gone! Many thanks to our realtor for doing the heavy lifting. While it was both a source of income and grief, it served its purpose, and I’m happy to have divested. Mixed feelings, but the dominant ones are relief and freedom. Being a landlord for four years through the pandemic and other life events has taken its toll on my already-weary soul, so now I can rest easier and catch up with myself.

As a result of all this capacity opening up, I’m resetting my coping system. Deleted all the comfort shows from my home theatre PC, ripped from the DVD era. Yes, I have a computer server for my home theatre. That should tell you how much time and resources I’ve devoted to using this distraction.

Coincidentally, my therapist left town for the winter. I’m gonna try my hand at self-regulating until they get back, but they also provided referrals to other therapists they thought I could work with. I’ve been doing remarkably well as of late. I’m less compulsive with self-soothing via snack attacks and doomscrolling. Dedicating more time to reading books rather than internet stuff. Cleaning out my backlog of chores and projects.

To avoid sliding down the path of winter sadness, I’m employing this novel framework called “moving my body.” Obvi not mind-blowing stuff, but the big difference this time is the new capacity in my energy budget. Bouldering twice a week consistently. Picked up some winter cycling gear for Black Friday, and joined a bike gang that mocks my ebike. I even broke out my Nintendo Wii U to play Wii Sports. Boxing is a pretty nice way to wake up and get ready for the day.

IBS

One of the drivers for this post was to follow up on my IBS-D. I said “let’s check in again in November,” but that was a lie. It’s been over six months since I wrote about my irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and I’m happy to say that it’s gotten a lot better. Not fully gone, but nearly there.

It’s hard work always buying and preparing fruits and veg every week, but what other choice do I have? When you don’t get enough dietary fibre, your gut bacteria starve, and they eventually start eating away at the mucus lining in your colon, leading to inflammation and other tummy issues. Can’t just keep living like I’m a baby, free from responsibility. I’m eating for two (trillion) now.

I probably should have listened to the advice to slowly introduce dietary fibre into one’s diet. I went a little berserk for a couple months, scarfing down big salads and all sorts of fermented foods every day, thinking I could speed up the process. Kim chi, yogurt, sauerkraut, olives. Mm, ya, no. 2024 was an especially flatulent year for me. On Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut, one interviewee said it could take 9 to 12 months to fully recover your microbiome. I suppose a person can speed up the recovery by a few weeks or months by not going as slow, but alas, I don’t need my Kirkland Signature diarrhea pills anymore.

Drugs

Finally got my flu shot and first HPV vaccine in December. Not sure why I missed the HPV when I was a kid, so I’m just about caught up with all my immunizations. Probably due for another COVID one.

Haven’t gone back to vaping since I quit. It is finished.

Started trialling Intuniv (generic name: apo-guanfacine XR), which is a non-stimulant ADHD medication. Taking it in combination with Vyvanse. Apparently it’s a classic combo. After a couple months, it feels like it’s settling into a nice place. Vyvanse as soon as I wake up, Intuniv at 8 PM. Both have half-lives above 12 hours, so the Intuniv brings a steady flow of dopamine at night and in the morning. Now my head doesn’t hurt as bad when I wake up, and it’s easier to start my day. My sleep is actually kinda regular now. 😭

The allergy shots I started two years ago are starting to take hold. I can usually breathe through my nose now. Dafuq.

This one isn’t quite a drug, but I saw my Ears, Nose, and Throat doctor before the holidays. I’m lined up for multiple surgery for sleep apnea in the summer, and possibly on short notice if a slot opens up earlier. Best case scenario from surgical intervention is taking things from, say, 85% to 95%. Nasal canals are uneven, so cartilage needs to be shaved down on one side. Tonsillectomy. Doing something to the columella. The flaps in the back of my mouth, the palatopharyngeal arch (I think), are too close to the centre of my mouth, reducing airflow, so they’re gonna be pulled outward like a set of curtains. Pain and recovery will be significant, but since my sleep has always sucked, I think it’s worth the risk.

Low Cow

I haven’t gotten such a large response from the blog in a long while. I usually get between zero to three text messages/emoji reactions per post, and this topic got about a dozen. The idea is resonating, so perhaps it’s worth exploring further.

Been thinking more about how Cow Mode exists on the Human-Animal Spectrum. That is, there is a continuum of cow states rather than it being a discrete, yes/no situation. There are different ways to be a cow.

(Tangentially, I wonder if better names can be struck. “More Cow Bell” is already taken. Low Power Mode. Low Cow-er Mode. Lowing is a type of cow sound. Low Cow also sounds like low cal(orie). Locale. SoCal. Low key. Low cow and high cow. The Human-Animal Spectrum is a form of zoomorphism, assigning animal characteristics to humans. Animorph Spectrum. Yep, got ’em.)

The Animorph Spectrum defines a few deviations from the ideal Human Mode, where a person’s brain is fully developed and they have full access to it all day every day. Human Mode has mythical/legendary status because of how oppression and capitalism come for us all. Self-actualization would be a more popular term.

Perhaps Cow Mode is the state that the mind takes on after overexertion. What I described last time was merely one version of High Cow Mode. It is highly specific to my place on the Animorph Spectrum, stemming from anxiety and trauma. However, given the people that texted me about it, I don’t imagine any of them simultaneously experiences CPTSD, ADHD, and all the other things I have to endure. One enters Cow Mode after using up all of their physical and mental faculties, running out of juice (milk?), and hitting a wall. Notably, once I realize I’m in Cow Mode, I feel a soft and natural pull back towards Human Mode, like a bubble floating up out of the water. As in, it’s hard to keep being productive once you’ve become a cow, even Low Cow.

Fun fact. Cows are ruminants. Latin for “to chew over again.” Ruminants are animals that gain energy from plants using their special stomachs. In psychology, rumination also refers to the replaying and rehashing of the same negative thoughts, one of my old pastimes. Rumination isn’t ideal because you often get stuck trying to understand what you did wrong, and then you struggle to move out of that mental movie theatre towards taking any type of corrective action to help the offended party. Thankfully I’m much better here than I used to be, but now I’ve overcorrected by fixing so many things that I enter Cow Mode. In other words, I stopped spending so much time ruminating only to become a ruminant.

Action Item: Reverse Gaslighting Myself

“A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.”
- Charles F. Kettering, American inventor, engineer, and head of research at General Motors (1920-1947)

One of the managers at work dropped this new pearl of wisdom on me recently. Makes me feel better about writing as much as I have in the past, and thankfully, I’ve written a lot less in recent years. Nature is healing.

The solution to spending so much time in Cow Mode is dead-simple: spend less energy than I have.

So why can’t I just sit still? I get anxious when I’m not doing anything, and a tightness develops in my chest after a short time. As in, it physically hurts me to do nothing.

The primary way I’ve shifted this emotion is to scramble to be, or look, busy. My headspace is already preoccupied with different strategies for best managing my energy. Like, at least every hour. Even with two different ADHD drugs, my attention and focus can still be sticky, so some days I finish 10% of 9 tasks; other days, it’s 150% of 1. Saying ‘no’ is the simple solution. FOMO probably complicates that.

To understand what drives my overproduction, I’d probably have to sit still long enough to look at some more childhood trauma. This time, it’s the fear of being worthless because I’m not producing external worth at all times. “If you got time to lean, you got time to clean.” Thus, the solution to minimizing time spent in Cow Mode is to fix my self-esteem by reaffirming my intrinsic self-worth. Easy peasy.

Correcting this cognitive distortion feels like, what I’m going to call, Reverse Gaslighting® (RGL). In therapy, some people need assistance to feel their big feelings, while others need help with more logical problem-solving. I usually need help with the feeling part, which requires that I stop using my mind to veto or override my body’s natural corrective instincts and then to let my body release all the tensions and bad energies. In fact, I sought out my current psychologist to assist with body-focused work because I have most of my therapy hours doing more of the problem-solving and emotional processing.

But now that I’ve clocked loads of time feeling my feelings, I now find myself needing to bolster my brain’s grip on reality. Since I was gaslighted for a long time, my body’s instincts have been rewired for the purposes of my gaslighter. Therefore, this next stage of healing requires that I stop listening to my body’s reactions and instead, divert that energy to strengthening my brain’s grasp on reality. Leaned too far in one direction, now have to lean in the other.

“Being traumatized is not just an issue of being stuck in the past; it is just as much a problem of not being fully alive in the present.
- Bessel van der Kolk

For instance, my nervous system has been rewired to spike at certain triggers, so my brain keeps reacting to dozens or hundreds of emergencies from the past, even when it very clearly doesn’t apply to the present moment. In the summer, I was having dinner with my cousins, and one of them asked “why are you so anxious all the time?” Truly, there wasn’t much of anything to be concerned about, but that’s just how I roll, hypervigilant.

Thus, on the face of it, RGL is not really that complex, but I must say that it feels weird. Almost wrong. It’s probably what victims of cults have to endure when getting deprogramming. Put another way, since I just watched The Sympathizer, RGL must feel like when someone is rescued from a re-education camp and needs to be re-re-educated. You have to be repeatedly told, by yourself and others, that since you have faulty ideas about reality, your feelings are about a situation are not as accurate as they could be. Clearly an oversimplification, but still, the correction feels like a violation.

Perhaps surgery would be a better analogy. In order to fix something, this stranger has to cut open your skin and hurt you.

The non-oversimplified version of RGL would at least highlight the abuse. That is, there is a valid explanation for why the victim’s current feelings are invalid. In the original gaslighting, the abuser’s main explanation for all kinds of misunderstandings comes from the victim’s cRaZiNeSs.

In the absence of my current psychologist, here are some rebuttals from the combined voices of previous therapists, friends, authors, etc. on RGL:

“Reverse gaslighting feels wrong if you only look at it from the simplified view. If you want to look at the complexity of the situation with more nuance and understanding, your feelings are still valid today because yesterday someone attacked your confidence in your own judgement. So that explains why you tend to misread or have different emotional reactions to these types of scenarios compared to most people. ”

“Our emotions are the main pathway that our brains take in signals from the world through our bodies and senses. They inform our heads on how to respond. Our brains crunch all these experiences and spit out these warning signs because there was a resemblance to a previous dangerous event.”

“Sometimes the brain is wiser than we can imagine, and other times it’s a confused chunk of electric tofu.”

“Emotions are simply one guide on how to exist in the universe. There are many others.”

“Distrusting your body’s new feelings, post-gaslighting, would repeat the original violation. Your gaslighter made you distrust your mind, and you can’t get back at them by distrusting your body.”

“Your heightened nervous system shows that you can trust your emotions. There was garbage fed into the input, and your body output garbage feelings. The system is working as intended. Now, all we have to do is replace the garbage input with the good stuff, and you will be healed.”

“Let’s workshop your feeling of fear in this scenario. You lay out every single neurotic thought about what’s going on and what your body is telling you is going to happen, and we’ll get together a committee of your must trusted advisors to decide on whether your judgement is the most accurate. Then we’ll walk with you through this fear, and then we’ll decide whose prediction was the most accurate.”

“The assumptions that fuel anxiety turn you into a god. When you develop fear and anxiety from gaslighting, the fearful thoughts and their resulting behaviours assume that you can know anything and everything. It places full confidence in you alone and your ability to consistently predict the outcome of all events with perfect accuracy and precision. Anxiety tells you that everyone else is wrong, even if there are many people far more qualified to make such judgements and with the receipts to prove it. We can have compassion for your experience of living with anxiety, but it quickly turns into a dangerous situation, for yourself and others, when it becomes your sole advisor.”

“CPTSD informs us that there were many valid reasons for you to associate quiet with danger. Those reasons are no longer valid, so take your time in trusting this new reality. Many people with CPTSD have trouble with sitting still.”

“When insecurity and danger are the norm, safety becomes the danger because it’s different. Fear of the unknown is common and natural.”

“You have thousands of memories of voices telling you the wrong thing. It’ll take time to fact-check them all.”

In essence, I’m still gripped by this childhood fear of something “bad” happening if I’m not productive, so I rush to protect myself from this catastrophe by doing all sorts of tasks to build up my castle’s defences. I’m practising self-compassion and being patient with myself for still struggling with what seems to be a simple problem.

Wrapping Up

I’m happier than ever! 😁

I still have my dark days. Some are great, some dogshit, but there is noticeably less dogshit, now sprinkled with the faint hope of autonomy and agency thanks to my various flavours of therapy: pharmaco-, physio-, psycho-, retail-. I spent a lot of last year dealing with some longstanding problems, like IBS and dialling in my drugs, and now that I’m almost finished those, along with my two big projects, I’m starting off the new year with a lot more energy in my budget.

Now I can focus on the frequent problem of sliding on the Animorph Spectrum into Cow Mode, which results from using more energy than I produce. This overexertion is driven by fear. To stay closer to Human Mode, I need use Reverse Gaslighting to retrain myself to believe that I have intrinsic worth and to give myself grace. Should be fun.

June: The Shift

Shortly after my last post, I felt a shift. Am I better? Am I happy? Second week of June 2024, it was like the cloud that had been raining on my parade for years had simply gone away.

Sudden and unnerving. Like, what the actual fuck. I had committed to the whole victim and martyr complexes, and then whatever was driving the pain just let off the gas pedal. Am I whole? Recovered? Seems so. Is this real life?

Um. What do? What do you do when chronic emotional pain vanishes?

July: Party Retirement

Had a mid midsummer.

Early and late summer were great for seeing my chosen family, but otherwise felt like a lot of disappointing nights out on the town. When an event doesn’t live up to its expectations, you have to recoup the energy from somewhere. You end up paying for it twice, both in the preparation and in recovering from the disappointment.

Since the dawn of time, I structured my week around working hard and partying hard, but it hasn’t been as fun lately. I had to reflect and reconcile how poorly I was investing my time. Sitting at the club, staring intently at the dance floor, and trying to will myself into having a good time. Like, am I not traumatized enough for clubbing anymore? Unexpected loss, and I’m not handling it well.

I carried on because of inertia and denial, but the truth shouted pretty loudly at me this summer. There seems to be no combination of DJs, clubs, or drinks that results in a fun weekend night anymore. The tool stopped working, and it appears to be beyond repair.

Thus, I have to make the transition to more wholesome activities during the week and the daylight hours. Weird, but also feels like it’s time. I’ll still go out to enjoy good music, but the weekly nightclub routine no longer sparks joy. Bittersweet.

August: Play Therapy

Now that I’m not spending so much time hungover, I have been catching up with Past Jon. Repaying debts. Fulfilling old promises.

I wish I could say I’ve been catching up on sleep. I’m so tired all the time, which must mean that I’m truly an adult. I thought I crossed that threshold the first time a retail store worker called me “Sir,” but I think this is a much stronger indicator.

Nah. Instead, I devoted a lot of free time to play. Not an expert, but one form of therapy for young children is through playtime since they don’t yet have the language or other skills to express themselves. Not sure what that says about me exactly, but I knew what I needed and I did it. Sometimes play meant researching the best products to solve menial problems around the home. Other times were spent in hobbies, like constructing new prototypes of original inventions to specific problems I face.

And no, it’s not the same as the average adult partaking in a hobby. I was reparenting myself. Paying back time to Past Jon who told himself that he’d put his own needs aside for the many needs of a dysfunctional family until everything quieted down. Summer ‘24 was Quiet Time.

After playing hard for the summer, I’m ready to go back to the snail’s pace of the average adult working full-time under capitalism. Now my new interest is in measuring sound quality and building my own hi-fi speakers, and I have much reading to do.

September: Drugs

I stopped vaping nicotine! It took about a year and more money than I care to admit, but I’m done. No more recharging batteries. No more visits to the vape store. No more messy refills.

I’m also wondering it’s time for me to revisit the ADHD meds. Briefly got switched to generic Vyvanse because of insurance, but noped out of that situation after two weeks of misery. I’m sure it would have been fine if I took the time to titrate my dosage, but the timing was not ideal. I hear the non-stimulants are doing wonderful things for people, and I’ve heard of one person’s story, whose symptoms sounded quite similar to mine, who’s taking a stimulant by day and non-stimulant by night. Back to the doctor’s office we go.

June-October: Cow Mode

June, I felt better. July started and ended with family. End of August also family. Sprinkle in some disappointing party nights. Played. Stopped vaping. So what did happened during that time to allow me to feel so much better? Cow Mode.

What is Cow Mode? I don’t know how the psychological literature refers to it, but in my experience, it’s when the anxious Squirrel Mode of the traumatized human brain runs out of energy and just relaxes. No, it’s not the same as the Anxiety character from “Inside Out 2.”

A psychological taxonomist classifying this zoomorphic neurological state might suggest that it should rather be labeled “Cow Moo-de,” but phonetically, that sounds more like Cow Mood. That doesn’t exactly work when referring to other states like Goblin Mode, a more active and self-indulgent phase. Cow Mode is mainly passive, with brain activity concentrated in the medulla oblongata for the purpose of chewing cuds and staring at objects.

One theory for this change is from the traumed brain recognizing genuine safety and releasing its anxiously-aroused energy, allowing the body to return to a relaxed state. The squirrel found a nut, returned to its shelter, and moo-tated into a cow.

A better theory would look at the muscle of the anxious brain simply running out of energy and collapsing, with the hope/blind faith that the Squirrel Mode built a safe enough environment into which the brain could safely come undone. It is a violent and sudden change.

My version of Cow Mode is the result of years of intense therapy, world-building, and narrative rewrites. It’s not the same as some guy plopping down on the couch after work and watching TV for hours. It isn’t an inspirational rags-to-riches undercow story reaching its triumphant climax. It is the reckoning of finding yourself in a corner and turning around to face whatever put you there. Not courageous, not shrinking away. Just a quiet, blank stare.

While Cow Mode started off as something that happened to me, it now seems like a skill I need to learn to invoke on command, regularly and in short spurts. On a dairy frequency.

Having said that, it also seems like my environment has been calm in a way for a few months, so beyond all hope, my characteristic anxiety powered down after much anticipation.

Well, up until yesterday.

November: Anxiety Returns

The emotional boundaries I patched together have crumbled, and now I suddenly find myself back in Squirrel Mode.

Sad to say that this development isn’t much of a shock. I’ve been fraying at the edges while finalizing several large projects simultaneously. Haven’t been 3D printing or modelling anything in almost a month when it used to be a daily activity. Several books patiently laying in wait for my return. Calendar looking fairly asocial lately.

On the bright side, it doesn’t feel like I’m clinically burned out. I’m generally coping a lot better than in similar situations in the past where I was severely burnt out, at least detecting the problem earlier than before. Exercising somewhat regularly. Climbing at the bouldering gym once a week for the past month or so, with a frequency of twice weekly within spitting distance. Sold my ebike and replaced it with a better one, so sneaking in some cycling before the freezing cold sets in. Booking my medical appointments in advance and attending them on time, generally. Say whaaaat?

And oh yeah, no nicotine to take off the edge either. 😐

I also wouldn’t say that I’m in the clear; I’m not not burned out. Still have lots of work to do in taking back space for myself and maintaining my boundaries. The difference this time around is that it’s easier to convince my anxiety that I’m allowed to take care of myself. My problems don’t seem so existential anymore. No moral panic. Maybe they never were. It always seemed like some huge injustice against me, but I can clearly see that I’m not alone. Just take a look at… *gestures broadly at everything*. Now I can view myself at a distance, with the perspective that the electric tofu inside the bowling ball-shaped bone enclosure (“bone-closure” for short) is getting zapped funny yet again. That is, my brain is always uncomfortable. Who has time to sort out all of its complaints? All I can do is to try my best to address the main few while conserving my limited resources for the other areas of my life. Anxiety is but one signal from my body. I can see what it’s going on about, and I am taking the appropriate actions. Next.

Wrap It Up

It’s been quite hard to sum up the last six months. If this anxiety sticks around for a bit, I may have to keep writing since it’s one of the few things that helps.

Not partying because it isn’t fun anymore. Catching up with old hobby projects and play time. Dropped the nicotine vape habit, but going to start investigating non-stimulant ADHD drugs.

Spent months in Cow Mode. The opposite of Squirrel Mode. Blankly staring at stuff. One part worn-out anxious brain, one part therapy skills, one part quieter environment.

Back in Squirrel Mode. Going to have to conserve my resources. Doesn’t feel like the end of the world like before.

Must learn how to animorph.

I have reached record lows of energy, somewhere between fatigue, from which you can recoup through rest and sleep, and exhaustion, from which recovery is not so easy. To get me through this period, I have been leaning comically hard on Sudoku puzzles. I do have better ways to spend my time, but I’ve had so little energy for the last few months that I don’t care. I finished so many Sudokus that life lessons have started to appear. Thankfully there is hope.

Why Sudoku and not some more effective coping technique like the twice daily walks I used to go on? As far as I can tell, I’ve been living with a deep fear that I’ll miss something important while outside of my home. It’s the nasty version of FOMO. Sudoku is a brainy activity that I can actually engage in while staying inside in case something goes wrong. And as you might have guessed, this anxious behaviour has not been fruitful. No crises have been averted because I was staring at numbers in a grid. Would have benefited far greater if I had gone for 15-minute walks in the past four months instead of finishing 1000 puzzles total in the Good Sudoku app. Yes, that’s the real number. Split about even between Expert and Pro difficulties. I can show receipts, but it already feels too shameful admitting the number. I got a bad case of number shame.

How did I get here? How much time you got?

Diarrhea

Next up, diarrhea. Irritable Bowel Syndrome with Diarrhea (IBS-D), specifically. I didn’t feel so hot coming back from Mexico, and family doc said it could be Traveler’s Diarrhea. Sometimes it resolves itself in a week, so managed symptoms with Imodium and electrolytes. Symptoms persisted, so took antibiotics for a week. No dice. Waited two weeks after the antibiotics to send a stool sample to a lab, and all of the tests came back negative for parasites. Another doctor said that IBS can temporarily appear when travelling, taking six to eight weeks to clear. Added probiotics to the symptom management. Three months later, diarrhea is managed but now I can’t eat certain foods.

Closing out two big projects in February and spending a week in Mexico did a number on me. When people get frustrated, they might say something like “if things don’t change soon, I’m gonna snap!” It’s never specified what will snap, and in my case, it was my gut. In that time, my mind’s been spinning, looking for some single root cause of the gastric distress, and all the answers keep coming back as ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Despite cutting off the sources of stress, the hormones and their effects take their sweet precious time to fade.

The gastric system is resilient. I wouldn’t say I’ve had many tummy issues, but I have had a complicated relationship with food, like eating emotionally, bingeing, stress-eating, snack attacks. Probably not fuelling my system with the nourishment it needs for the work I put it through. Stress compromises the immune system, then sleep suffers, and a vicious cycle of stress and insomnia take you for a ride.

Watched an interesting special on Netflix called Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut. Highly recommended. Not a new fad diet but more of a look into the latest research on the gut, or microbiome, being the second brain. People living in industrialized nations tend to not eat enough dietary fibre and have lower biodiversity in their guts. Gonna have to start packing in a lot more fruits and veggies, between 20 and 30 servings per week. Fermented foods add live bacteria. However, you have to gradually introduce fibre into your food intake if you were previously deficient because otherwise your tummy bloats and you get mega gas. Guess who didn’t follow the recommendation. And recovery sounds like it takes on the order of six months to a year.

Sounds great, but that’s too easy, isn’t it? I’ve also developed a relatively new sensitivity to dairy, despite drinking lattés almost every mornings since 2015. Plus I’m still not clear on what triggers my IBS. Is it a FODMAP sensitivity? I love onions and garlic, so that would be truly tragic. Probably need to cut down on fizzy sugar water, one of my primary emotional crutches. Gyatdam. Red meat seems to be off the table at the moment, and the Netflix special says you have to microdose poorly tolerated food for several months. It’ll probably be 2025 before I can comfortably eat an entire burger or steak. Took months to destroy my microbiome, it’ll take months to restore it. Should be a blast.

Exhaustion

The IBS contributed to my already-sparse energy. Exhaustion is new for me. Exhaustion is I thought it was just an adrenaline crash that would clear after three weeks. Maybe I was just tired from being busy for four months, but this tiredness is hitting different.

Hoo boy, it’s awful, let me tell ya. It’s pretty random, but when it hits, I just want to crumble on the spot. I’ve been losing weight from the diarrhea, but never have I felt so heavy. Almost feel narcoleptic.

Finally got my test results back from the sleep study I did in January. “Possible mild sleep apnea.” Treatment is a mouth guard and nasal strips, so no need for a CPAP machine yet. Already got the mouth guard, so time for another grocery trip for the nasal strips. Any bets on whether that will fix everything?!

Also got a blood test, and turns out my vitamin D and B12 are below the healthy range. Stopped at Costco for supplements, and it’s improving. Never took part in this subculture of vitamin supplements before (suppbculture). Most North Americans have low vitamin D through the winter, and apparently everyone’s been taking these supplements for years. Doctor recommended 1000 IU each daily, for those interested.

If I had to quantify possible causes of my exhaustion:

• 35% recovering from busyness

• 20% loss of nutrients and electrolytes from IBS

• 15% low vitamin D and B12

• 15% CPTSD and depression

• 10% regular adulthood

• 5% ???????

So yeah, exhausted because reasons. What do?

Grief

Not sure if the grief is more a result of the exhaustion or a cause. Probably both. Nevertheless, I am in a new state of mourning and grieving.

Historically, grief has only visited me for brief periods despite being a frequent theme in therapy and psychological reading material. The primary homework from the CPTSD readings is to break the vicious cycle of the self-critic. Right after that, the priority is to grieve.

Recall that the self-critic forms when the traumatized infant needs an explanation for why its caregivers aren’t present. The blame then focuses both internally and externally. My self-critic leans heavily inward, and I’ve been telling it to fuck off about a dozen times a day over recent months. My self-critic also has an external focus, and it’s been much easier to pull that back and just redirect it inwards. Every once in a while, I manage to correctly redirect the anger towards my caregivers.

If I’ve reached the stage of grief, perhaps I’ve managed my critic well enough. But be careful what you wish for. The dam has burst, and well, fuck.

Why grieve? How grieve?

Why? If I don’t do it, then who will? The wounds are already there. Who else is supposed to kiss my emotional boo-boos?

How? Well, apparently you just sit in it. Just…yeah. *colourful swearing and cursing*

Here are some of the griefs that have been completely sucking the life out of me:

Example 1 - Alone time

I’ll be settling down for the evening after a hard day’s work. Then, sometime right before bed, my heart will just start pounding. I’ve spent many nights walking backwards through my day and wondering what exactly triggered this freakout, but after a couple hundred nights with no answers, the average person would stop wondering and allow their heart rate to jump over 100 bpm while playing Sudoku.

The thought recently flashed through my head that maybe the source of all this pain is from my parents leaving me alone to cry when I was upset as a baby. I certainly don’t have any evidence for such a bold claim, but the thought has plagued me ever since. Maybe Lil’ Jon was forced to cry himself to sleep. Sounds like common parenting advice at the time and even today, but from what I’ve read, co-regulating with your baby doesn’t spoil them. I obviously don’t have any explicit memories of this happening, but after rebuilding from the wreckage of countless emotional flashbacks, it’s the only explanation that has made any sense at all so far. Perhaps someday I’ll find a better one. Or better yet, peace.

Example 2 - Waiting for care

Some mornings, I’ll be working from home and finding myself complaining internally when some environmental change hasn’t been taken care of by someone else, even though I could very well do it myself. I’ll be cold, hungry, clammy, but why isn’t someone reading my mind and taking care of my every need? This isn’t a commentary on my marriage, to be sure. I’m a grown-ass man, I can change the thermostat, grab a snack, wash my hands, and I eventually do.

So where is this all complaining-while-doing-nothing suddenly coming from? After a couple weeks of these new complaints, a whisper of an idea formed in my head. “Maybe your inner child just wants a parent to take care of them.” God damn it.

I can’t say that my parents did nothing to raise me, despite what it sounds like. I saw them busting their asses to make sure I ate well, went to school, had clean clothes to wear. And yet, the feeling haunts me. There’s no comfort in the truth from this careless whisper, just grief.

Example 3 - Uselessness

A lot of my adulthood has been a sprint and marathon to evade the label of being useless. In the process, I became a human doing instead of a human being. Apparently, the message I’ve internalized from youth is that “if you aren’t useful, then you are worthless.”

Isn’t that such a cruel doctrine to live under? Brutal! All sorts of people have reassured me that it’s fine to not be useful at all times. If someone collapses in a crowd and requires CPR, there are only 3 or 4 people that are supposed to be useful, and everyone else needs to stay out of the way. Be useful by being useless.

People whose primary caregivers were taskmasters will understand. “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean.” Everyone retains their intrinsic self-worth as a person at all times, even when you’re not producing value for yourself or others. It’s normal to be useless and retain your worth. So I need to grieve over the loss of my humanity.

Just a sample of the horror show that plays in my head. Lots of grief to soak in.

Hope

While all of that sounds like a recipe for a great party, it’s also everything I’ve been working towards. The war is over, we won, and now it’s time to tend to the wounded. Despite the traumas Baby J faced, his response is finally strong enough to overcome them.

There’s still plenty of work to do. Can’t kick up my feet just yet, but the scales have finally tipped in my favour. It only gets better from here, but fuck me, it feels like shit. Body feels like it’s constantly on fire. Nerves, chills, shakes. Pain. Don’t think I’ve ever felt physically worse.

I’m slowly getting back to exercise. Hitting the dance floor on the weekends, taking more walks, lifting some small weights at home.

I’ve never eaten healthier, so need to keep it up for at least six months. Check in again in November.

I just passed the halfway point of this tunnel, and the light is already blinding.

Drugs

Thought you’d get away without an update on my drug intake, didn’t you?

Tried locking in my Vyvanse prescription at 40 mg, with 10 in the early morning, 30 in the late morning, but the 30 wasn’t hitting right anymore. 10+40 is the new hotness. Kicking ass and taking names. Then hyper fixating on the origin of those names and falling into a Wikipedia rabbit hole for several hours. Probably need to start skipping my Vyvanse on weekends to catch up on sleep.

As for nicotine, I’m now at four failed attempts to quit. While the old me might have beat myself up, I was reminded that drug addiction is a symptom of some painful cause. If there are emotional bombs going off all around me, is it so bad that I’m leaning on a crutch? Quitting an addiction requires both internal and external work. I’m quite tired of the level of introspection I used to maintain, so the current option is to quiet the world around me until I feel like working on my insides again.

Along that vein, I’m going to start drinking lightly again. Since my body sucks at relaxing, having a few on weekends isn’t a big deal. Read that the Asian Flush is a recognized genetic mutation, where alcohol is metabolized quickly and its toxic byproduct acetaldehyde is metabolized slowly compared to those without the enzyme mutations. What that means in tangible terms is that the hangover from one drink for me is probably equivalent to the hangover from two or three for someone else. So even though I won’t be able to have the same fun as I used to from drinking, I’m at least grateful I can still drink at all. And as an added bonus, I’m statistically less likely to become an alcoholic because of the Flush. One less vice to worry about.

Wrap It Up

Writing this post has been torture. Between the IBS, exhaustion, and grief, I have been only just been able to function by going to work and doing chores. Some things are helping, like exercise, vitamins, sleep. Not better yet. And it looks like I need to keep up whatever I’m doing for another five months at least.

In the mean time, I’ll be settling into my new mourning. See you in five months.

Personal Updates

No news is usually good news, at least for this blog. This time, I’ve returned because I think my brain is too backed up, so I’m here to offload some of that. I also recently had one of my classic hour-long anxiety attacks, which I thankfully haven’t had in a while, and the only thing that makes it go away is writing.

“Blogs are a conversation no one wanted to have with you.” - Michelle Wolfe

Since my last post in…October(?!), I spent a lot of the time catching up on old projects. Back when my roommate/wife went to grad school, I chose to give up the vast amount of time I spent on hobbies. It turns out that Young Jon was using hyperfixations to manage his ADHD before getting diagnosed. Some years passed, hijinks ensued, and finally, my overall life situation just started to take off in a very positive direction in the fall. That was the week I started trialling Vyvanse, but more on that later.

My functioning went through the roof, I learned how to manage my CPTSD, my mood was higher, and my schedule became clearer than it ever had ever been in my life. Breaking records, left and right. As such, I got back into my hobbies, like tinkering with computer- and audio-hardware, modelling inventions with the 3D printer, breaking out my soldering iron again. Getting back to the gym and barbell, sorta. I even learned how to manually relax my mind and body, which is one of those development milestones that can become impaired when you grow up with insecure attachment, trauma, adverse childhood experiences, and all that jazz. I physically stink at relaxing, so knowing how to activate the relaxation reflex feels like a major accomplishment.

I’m happy. I don’t think I’ve ever really been able to say that truthfully before, and it’s only gotten better with time. I certainly enjoyed many forms of privilege and saw many upsides in my existence so far, but the weight of the undiagnosed CPTSD, following me through all the peaks and valleys, always dragged me down. Most of my smiles were tainted with any of many symptoms in a carousel of mental health issues. I barely had any self-esteem to speak of, little and brittle. After many hard-fought battles and therapy, I feel like I woke up for the first time.

I’m not saying that everything has been butterflies and rainbows since autumn. Got my first COVID infection in December. Couple that with catching a stubborn cold right after recovering, my meteoric rise was interrupted by some two months of being sick. Then stuff happened in February, my background levels of depression got pushed to the foreground, just spent a week on a beach erasing parts of my brain by listening to and staring at ocean waves. Now here we are.

I don’t think my environment suddenly became perfect, but it feels like the Universe stopped flinging shit at me. For now, at least. Seems stable.

So this post isn’t an award acceptance speech or anything, just context for what I see ahead. At birth, every new soul is handed a list of tools and challenges for the journey, and then they’re released to the wild to encounter other souls and all sorts of interesting situations. Everyone’s combination is unique. I’d like to say that I’ve risen to many occasions, and now the rules of the game have relaxed, like when you’ve explored all of the dark corners and each area is visible on the map. Still carrying many of the challenges from early on, but I’m going to enjoy every moment of whatever this current stage is.

So what’s left to talk about if the sun is finally shining on me? Well, I got a couple ideas if you’re interested.

Drugs

Nobody asked, but I’ll give an update anyways. Been fine tuning my Vyvanse, which has simply been amazing.

Changed my dosage and timing like 8 or 9 times now. It’s like finally finding that one clothing brand with the cuts that fit your body type, and now you’re trying on the sizes that you wore with other brands. Takes time to test the usual suspects, maybe take a few risks, send some selfies. I’m currently taking 10 mg at 7 AM and 30 mg at 10:30 AM, and I’m going to lock it in there. Two years of tinkering with these meds, and while I’m grateful for all the miracle of modern medicine, I’m over all of the process. This is great and good enough.

Vaping less. The process of tapering my nicotine got real low, below 3 mg/mL concentration. Even managed to quit for like, a day, but I learned the hard way that quitting before an acutely stressful period is unlikely to succeed. Small delay, but it doesn’t matter which direction it goes as long as I move forward. Honestly, it felt like my body was resisting, but turns out my stress intake was building for a couple months and ended up higher than I realized. Back from vacay bébé, so back to the grind.

Still drinking decaf. Sleep has even improved despite using a stimulant with a half-life of 14 hours. Sleep is life. Still not drinking alcohol, not even at Beach.

Rush Hour

I’m still figuring out how to dismantle my incessant need to rush through many non-urgent tasks.

Rushing is different from hurrying. To hurry is to move quickly while maintaining quality, whereas rushing is much more urgent and panicked, usually cutting a lot more corners. If I walk more briskly than normal to the bus stop, I’m hurrying. If I forget my keys and lunch, and one of my shoes is falling off while I sprint there, that’s rushing. Say I’m washing my hands at home. I always take the full 20 seconds to scrub with soap and water, yet why should I ever rush such that I freeze or scald my hands? I know the general set point for each of the faucets. So uh, yeah, what’s going on?

I’ve been working on this quirk for some time, and so far the treatment has mostly been to engage with the panicked side of my brain and have a conversation with it.

Rational Brain: What the actual fuck, man?
Panicked Brain: Gotta go. Gotta go.
Rational: Why?
Panic: Because!
Rational: Okay, sure. That’s a compelling argument. You’ve convinced me.
Panic: Shut up, we can talk about this later.
Rational: Fuck you. When? Give me at least one reason.
Panic: REEEEEEEE

Now multiply that conversation by all the mundane tasks. Taking out the trash. Putting my socks in the laundry hamper. Loading the dishwasher, muttering to myself.

A less-than-reasonable observer who’s listened to too many hustle culture podcasts might interject that everyone chooses to make time for the things that are important to them. I could become really rigid with my schedule and strong-arm my goals through every barrier, but I’d be bumping into guardrails. I’ve tried the brute force tactic many times, almost as a way of life, and I can assure you that its inelegance is as ineffective as you suspect. It’s like watching sports cars weaving through city traffic only to end up at the same red lights as everyone they passed.

In this recent time of quiet, I’ve actually discovered at least two pretty valid reasons for hurrying. In my experience, I will either A) forget to do it later or B) lose motivation before the deadline. They still aren’t good reasons to rush.

I’ve written at length about my ADHD time blindness and traumas, which contribute to the feelings of anxiety and panic. I still show up promptly for the mission-critical items in my schedule, but short of that, it’s anyone’s guess if I’ll do a non-urgent job on time.

As an aside, recall that Pete Walker said that talking about CPTSD symptoms as separate diagnoses is like describing allergic reactions as something like Severe Eye Watering Disorder. ADHD apparently falls under the CPTSD diagnosis, and I still don’t have that relationship figured out. Just read about how one of the most cited studies on Alzheimer’s was based on fabricated data, and the disease now needs to shift theories to being treated as an autoimmune response of the brain. When tens of millions are impacted each year and tens of millions spent on research being pointed in that direction, that’s a cause to pause. I just found out about my ADHD two years ago, and now it’s being redefined? Gaddamn.

One uncomfortable truth behind my never-ending rush hour is that I’m afraid someone will be mad at me. Doesn’t matter who, even strangers. I’m apparently gripped by the fear of disconnection from making anyone unhappy. I wonder if there is some sort of childhood attachment issue driving that. 😑

The other truth is more a byproduct of suffering under capitalism, which is that I don’t have the space or capacity to feel my feelings without the rest of my little coping system collapsing. So I’m just literally running away from myself until my body says no and collapses instead. Sweet.

The bright side is that I now objectively have more time for most things. Children are off the table since I got snipped. No major extended family obligations to speak of. I delayed gratification as a general policy, to the point where depression got the best of me several times, and now it is time to indulge. Like damn, even in low stakes video games, I would always be saving up items and currency for “later,” even when it made the games more stressful than real life. Doing The Work® after this new morning will include such groundbreaking techniques as:

• washing my hands with water at a comfortable temperature,

• mapping out a route before I start driving,

• taking a break from playing with electronics to snack or eat a proper meal,

• and so much more!

Thus I’ll have more free time, but that won’t mean I’m more available. I’ll probably just be at home, laying on the couch, watching TV for a lot of it. I am so very tired.

Acceptance

Touched on acceptance in my last post, so wanted to follow up on it. Reached a moment where I thought “This is my life.” This is it. I wanted it to look a certain way by a certain time, but it is what it is. The moment was neither sad, nor triumphant. Just vibes.

Part of the problem was that I wanted to have it all, but something had to give. Trade-offs. I would have liked to have children, but turns out it was incompatible with getting an education, a career, processing childhood traumas, fostering rewarding relationships, partying, travelling. The idealism from my 20’s has taken enough hits, and looking around at the landscape, I’m pretty stoked about what I have and what I don’t.

I also finally understand what people mean when they say to just hold on, like the Wilson Philips song. I’ve experienced it a few times where you approach a challenge with nothing more than your presence, like in school when you haven’t completed an assignment, and somehow you make it through unscathed. The teacher asks you to hand in your work, and you confess that you don’t have anything. They ask why not, and you reply that you were busy juggling a bunch of other big problems, so this one fell by the wayside. You expect a ceremonial shaming in front of the whole class, and as you brace yourself for a lashing, the teacher mercifully offers you a short extension. I’m not talking about flagrantly shirking one’s responsibilities, but there is just something about showing up honestly and humbly when you know you failed to fulfill a requirement. Stumbled on a blog post earlier today on a similar experience, called Eleven Magic Words.

One example that comes to mind is when I got a ticket for running a red light. I was picking up my parents from the airport, returning from a two-week trip. Alberta has the Justice of the Peace Act to prevent minor cases from needlessly going to the higher courts. One of the areas it covers is the Traffic Court, so people suggested I talk to a Justice of the Peace about getting my ticket reduced.

Once I met with the judge, I explained that I knew I shouldn't have run the red light, that I normally drive safely because I often had passengers in my car, but I was in a bit of a rush because I was busy in school, I missed my parents, and my brothers weren't available to go to the airport. I apologized and said I wouldn't do it again. He pointed out that I was driving 54 km/h in a 50 zone. I just said "Yeah. 😐" Then he reduced my ticket from something like $240 to $50. Said he would have reduced it completely if I weren't speeding.

That’s the general vibe I had entering the Fall of ’23. Been slogging through the mud for nine years, and I submitted to the Universe that yeah, this is all I can bring. This is me. Probably going to be untangling my CPTSD for the rest of my life, suffering through emotional flashbacks triggered by silence, tweaking my medication every week or two, sleeping 5 to 6 hours a night, mood and energy forever too low. This is the best I can do, and I’m sorry that I can’t do more. Then the curtain lifted, and things just started getting easier. I don’t know the magic incantation. I’m not sure if there’s a term or meme that already encapsulates this situation, so let’s just call it something like “showing up with open hands” for now; the feeling of not deserving what you desire, but you still ask for it anyway. Still faced a crisis since then, still have bad days, but I’ve been walking on sunshine for the last four months. Cảm ơn, Chúa.

Wrap It Up

I’m happy. Bet you never thought I’d say that.

Glad to be writing again. Been funnelling my creative energies into fulfilling promises to Past Jon about getting back to my hobbies after making important sacrifices and investments with my time. Retrieving my soldering iron from storage was an important milestone that made me emotional, so now I’m finally back to playing with my toys. Sleep has been much better. Moving my body more.

Got my drugs dialed in like never before. Powered by Vyvanse on the daily, using a dosage and timing with record-breaking efficacy. Brought my nicotine down low, but stepped back to take another running start at quitting.

Still stuck in a never-ending rush hour, but it is relenting. Been telling myself that there was never a reason to rush, but I at least came up with two reasons to hurry, anticipating my loss of memory and motivation. And now I have an unprecedented amount of free time. Being child- and family-free helps. Using my time wisely by laying on the couch.

Reached another level of acceptance with my life and what I’m able to bring to it. Showed up with open hands, then Life magically got easier. Feels like waking up to a new morning. Nothing lasts forever, so I’m going to enjoy it as much as I can.

Brb the kitchen sink just started leaking.

Recent Updates

Things were looking bleak some weeks ago. Struggled and tweaked my treatment/management of symptoms and kept coming up short. Had to reach a place of acceptance that maybe this was my life now. Feeling awful all the time and never sleeping enough and nothing helping the bad feelings go away.

Then last week marked six months at the new job, and my body dramatically relaxed. As such, a big portion of my brain capacity opened up, and that led to a lot of improvements in other areas. Back in the gym. Sleep quality and duration increasing. Still not drinking much, maybe one drink a week. Seeing people and engaging in hobbies. Resting. Can’t believe it’s actually happening.

Drugs

Still reducing my nicotine. Topped out at 20 mg/mL in the summer, now down to 5. Fairly linear experience so far. Most smoking cessation programs aim to reduce intake by slowing release with stuff like nicotine gum and patches, and compared to cigarettes, vaping gives fine grained control over things like concentration, juice, heat, cloud. Pretty neat.

Watched Dopesick recently, a really good mini-series on the opioid epidemic. A person might feel compelled to quit all addictive substances after watching such a program, but willpower can only go so far.

I’d like to pull out one clip from the show. In order to increase sales and lie to the public, Purdue Pharma was looking for a doctor who could confidently state that opioid addiction wasn’t real in order to sell more of their extremely addictive product. He said that all addiction was rather something called “pseudo addiction.”

Take out the word “pseudo,” add in emotional pain, and I think it’s mostly correct. When there’s untreated pain, a person has to find a treatment that will reliably soothe their suffering, despite the other negative side effects. Layperson understanding of addiction. I’m still working on treating my untreated pain through the healthier means in addition to the less ideal ones.

Switching ADHD meds. Started on Dexedrine earlier this year, and recently started to use it off-schedule; not within the recommended levels. I developed a dependency that required increased usage for the same effect, which is what happens when you tango with amphetamines. Suppose you could also call it the early stages of addiction. Clearly I needed something stronger, and it’s recommended to stop Dex at regular intervals anyway to see if the underlying behavioural symptoms still exist in their original maladaptive form.

Spoke with my doctor, so currently in the midst of tapering off that in order to trial Vyvanse, which lasts longer in a day (half-life of 14 hours versus like 3 for Dex) and has a mild side-effect profile. This decision came in the middle of tapering off nicotine and reducing my steroid inhaler, so now I’m caught in a fun drug withdrawal vortex. This is the other side of the coin of my Drug Era. Stuff still works better than without drugs, but it gets real uncomfortable when it doesn’t.

Complex PTSD

Leaning into the CPTSD self-diagnosis.

Whereas PTSD usually involves a single traumatizing event, people with CPTSD experienced multiple traumatizing events without being able to escape.

Feeling bummed out yet? Hang onto your butts.

CPTSD is a rather unfortunate initialism that’s hard to say and read, but that’s all that the Public Relations team could come up with for this disorder. Too many letters that don’t roll off the English-speaker’s tongue. Calling it “Shit’s Fucked” probably wouldn’t fly at the psychology conferences.

Books

The Body Keeps the Score (TBKTS)

Finished TBKTS in early September. Felt like “wow, finally a book that gets me.”

It talked about the limitations of drug treatment for complex trauma, so I’ve finally decided to not try ketamine therapy, at least for a long while. Friend reminded me that it isn’t even talk therapy but more like a supervised drug trip where you’re allowed to talk about whatever but you don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to. That’s all well and good. Talk therapy has limited efficacy for people with childhood trauma.

Book pointed me in the direction of neurotherapy. Found a good psychologist who practises such dark arts, and they were only the second person I reached out to, so the dating experience wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be this time. They seem capable and competent to treat my childhood trauma, but will need to take it slow. Too much going on right now.

They specialize in neurotherapy, where I’ll have a helmet with electrodes attached to my head to read my brain waves. Also, working my way up to having electrodes zap different parts of my brain to stimulate growth in damaged or underdeveloped areas. Reading from my brain seems like no problem at all, but making changes to it feels scary. Not altogether different from drugs penetrating the blood-brain barrier, except for the hundreds of millions of pills prescribed every year compared to the paltry sample sizes of neurotherapy studies, but a topic for another time.

Complex PTSD by Pete Walker

“Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving” by Pete Walker, or “CPeteySD” for short. Recommended by a member of my chosen family a while back, and wow, finally a book that gets me.

Was asked recently what my favourite genre of book was. My favourite books say “Do this and not that because we did a ton of research.” Amazingly, CPeteySD feels so much more powerful than TBKTS in that regard. Barely three, four chapters in, and it feels like a miracle drug in paperback form. Not only has the author worked through this illness themselves, but they’ve been guiding patients through the same treatment for 30 years. The book is also graciously written in plain language, which I feel is the mark of a deep understanding of the material.

Sometimes learning about mental illnesses, or psychoeducation in therapy-speak, is enough assistance through the shitstorm. Cracking open the book has unleashed a ton of introspection, growth, epiphanies. Reading slowly because I have to stop a lot to highlight sentences or paragraphs. Can’t deal with all the truth bombs on my own, so have to text heavy passages to certain supportive individuals and freak out in that way. Like this one:

When we are chronically stressed out [stuck in sympathetic nervous system activation], detrimental somatic changes become ingrained in our bodies. Here are some of the most common examples of body-harming reactions to Cptsd stress [I’ve bolded the ones that apply to me]:

• Hypervigilance

• Shallow and Incomplete Breathing

• Constant Adrenalization

• Armoring, i.e., Chronic muscle tightness

• Wear and tear from rushing and armoring

• Inability to be fully present, relaxed and grounded in our bodies

• Sleep problems from being over-activated

• Digestive disorders from a tightened digestive tract

• Physiological damage from excessive self-medication with alcohol, food or drugs

What do you think of my self-diagnosis? Now I get why I have such problems with chronic muscle tightness and with sleep from constant adrenalization. Goddammit.

Book’s probably the primary reason I haven’t been able to write so much because the heightened pace of emotional processing took me by surprise. Used to read to fall asleep, but not with this one. Alas, this dark cavern in my brain now has a map and a bright spotlight. Now all the other problems make sense.

I once heard renowned traumatologist, John Briere, quip that if Cptsd were ever given its due, the DSM [The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] used by all mental health professionals would shrink from its dictionary like size to the size of a thin pamphlet. In other words, the role of traumatized childhoods in most adult psychological disorders is enormous.

CPTSD seems like a large umbrella that covers many sub-disorders, so a person can be misdiagnosed with a few things while missing the bigger picture. ADHD falls under this umbrella. 👀 Elsewhere, Petey states:

Reducing Cptsd to “panic disorder” is like calling food allergies chronically itchy eyes.

I dropped the ADHD reading because it didn’t feel like it explained enough about me. Not much trail left to hike, so found a new mountain peak to climb. What have I gotten myself into?

Common theme in CPeteySD is the self-critic. The traumatized child internalizes a critical voice as a coping mechanism from constant rejection, so they naturally a perfectionist and anxious attitude to prevent future rejections from anyone, no matter how big or small. No wonder why I have such terrible self-esteem and why I care so much about what strangers think of me.

Final point on this is emotional flashbacks. When you read about plain old PTSD, it is heartbreaking to hear how people have flashbacks that feel like they’re physically transported back the traumatizing event in the past. I got that after the car accident. Flashbacks with CPTSD are mostly emotional in nature without the visual element. When CPTSD comes from your parents, well, let’s just say that almost anything can trigger an emotional flashback. Men in positions of authority. Home. Loneliness. Food. Smells. Shit’s Fucked.

Again, far too much to say on this topic. Gotta keep this train rolling.

Fatigue

My energy be low. Like, really low. Likely withdrawal symptoms from the amphetamines. Randomly losing all energy to move is frustrating and unpredictable as hell. Getting better in recent days, but still sucks ass. Hoping the improved sleep and consistent gym attendance will add energy back into my day. Mindfulness about emotional triggers will keep me from going too deep into shame spirals.

Coming Out

Oh, and by the way, I’m bisexual.

Realized it about five years ago. Never felt like I struggled to reconcile my sexual orientation with my identity, so didn’t feel the need to come out. There’s a small part of me that wants to be known for who I really am, though I’m doing this because I feel more compelled to share to help the people struggling out there. If I hadn’t ended contact with my parents nine years ago, I suspect they would have disowned me for this anyway.

I’m not about to make any big changes as a result of this discovery and announcement. Still happily married and still plan on continuing on that path.

The modern commentary on bisexuality is that it falls under pansexuality, and though bisexuality is an older term based on older theory, it can still feel like a more appropriate label for people. On average, it feels like my sexual attraction is 95% hetero and 5% homo, but there are moments or days when the mix is very different. Whatever it ends up being, it’s all still valid and considered bi and pan.

The asexual community also informs of us of the difference between sexual and romantic orientations. You can be asexual yet homoromantic, that is, not being driven to have sex with anyone yet wanting to have a romantic relationship with a person of the same gender. You can be asexual and aromantic and still have sex and be in romantic relationships too. Do you ever eat when you’re not hungry? I feel like I’m bisexual and hetereoromantic. I feel attraction to both men and women, and I’ve only ever wanted to be in romantic relationships with women and not men.

Bisexuality also has an interesting position in the queer community. Despite being the third letter of the initialism, gay people can be hostile to bi folk for not picking a side or for being confused. There’s a lot of erasure and invalidation of this orientation for some reason.

Trigger warning: mention of CSA.

I do have to make a correction for the few folks I did share it with in the past. I used to say that I wondered if it had to do with being a victim of childhood sexual assault by a man, but that’s not how this works. The correction is that people are just born this way. I attribute the incorrect statement to how a person can understand things mentally when discussing topics at a distance whereas the logic changes when it’s up close and personal. Alas, my apologies for saying a wrong and harmful thing.

Grew up in a Christian household, so let’s address that side of it. The Bible never says that it’s wrong to be sexually oriented in a different way. It’s not a sin to not be straight, any more than it being holier to be straight. It’s easy to poke holes in the “logic” of Christians who discriminate against LGBTQIA2S+ folks. If anyone out there really wants to piss off a Christian, quote the Bible at them. Tell them to read passages like Matthew 5:28, Matthew 7:3-5, John 8:7, John 12:47, and Romans 3:23. Any Christian protesting and making signs to oppress queer folk are simply hypocritical and xenophobic. Read somewhere that someone studied these types and found that many of them were in fact queer themselves but had so much self-hatred that they would lash out externally. “The [person] doth protest too much, methinks.” If such bigots don’t want to change, then the only real remedy I can see is to distance yourself from such people, at the individual and societal levels.

In any case, there you have it. I’m bi.

Wrap It Up

Phew, finally made it to the end.

Doing better than ever. Changing up my drugs. Reading CPeteySD. Therapeutic Moments. Fatigue.

Bi!

The Great Downregulation is finally happening. These past two months have been the most secure and quiet that my spotty memory can recall. Plus I went to a psychedelic clinic this week, so I wanted to take an inventory of how I’ve been faring.

Still don’t seem to have that much energy. I cleared most of my social calendar in August so that I could get some rest. After months of practising sleep restriction in the evenings, I’m now allowing myself to either nap or just close my eyes after work. Been changing my substance use to enhance sleep.

Bought nicotine vape juice with half the concentration. Brewed mostly decaf lattés in the last month. Spread out my ADHD meds throughout the day. Stopped using my sleep mask in the mornings, so now my circadian rhythm is back in line with the sun, waking me up at 7 consistently. Sleep debt still bouncing between 15 hours and 8, so need to keep working on that. I’m starting to use Benadryl as a temporary sleep aid.

Books!

I stopped going to trauma therapists some years ago in favour of working on more present day issues, so it’s nice to be back in the general vicinity. I still talked and wrote about it a lot throughout that time in an indirect way as I explored other topics like Attachment Theory and ADHD, so it may not seem like I’ve been that removed.

Finished reading “What Happened To You?” a couple weeks back.

One of the most important lessons I learned was the concept of therapeutic moments, directly engaging with the pain in short spurts. The key point that spoke to me was that therapeutic moments should be rather short in duration, on the order of a few seconds. It’s the individual brick used to rebuild boundaries, and it takes a ton of therapeutic moments to heal from the emotional wound. Healing day by day, slow and steady. Damn. The alternative is retraumatizing by diving in too deep, so yeah.

Dr. Perry illustrated the concept of therapeutic moments with the story of a thirteen-year-old boy who had a severely painful childhood. Mom was depressed, father abandoned them, foster father was so abusive he trafficked him and gave Jesse a head injury that landed him in the hospital with a coma.

When all of the conventional means of treatment failed to produce results, someone on Jesse’s treatment team suggested placing him in a retirement community, where he would eventually work as a transportation aide. He helped the senior residents around the facility, and they could use the camaraderie. After years of providing support, he eventually earned a promotion, which included room and board. He even enrolled in a vocational school after he graduated from high school. With the many interactions throughout the day from solving technological problems, taking people for walks, listening to their stories, etc., he was able to form dozens of supportive relationships with a diversity of community members. Over the years, he experience thousands of therapeutic moments, and his functioning returned to average for his age in a shorter time than anyone expected. Quite the turnaround for such a bleak start.

Therapeutic moments taught me to not engage too deeply in emotional processing for too long; wish I heard that years ago when my ADHD time blindness tangled with my complex trauma. If the pain is massive, you can’t rush it. Like healing from a physical wound, it’s a rather slow process with no option to accelerate or bypass it, and you need weeks or months to fully heal from even a minor surgery. Jumping in too deeply is like picking at a scab or some stitches, causing the body to restart the healing process.

Great book with valuable learnings and a format that’s easy to follow. Highly recommended.

Picked up “The Body Keeps the Score” again. Keeping a pretty good pace by reading it right before bedtime, which has improved my sleep.

Sometimes it feels like Bessel van der Kolk is speaking to me directly. Don’t tell my high school English teacher, but I’m going to quote a bunch of passages that jumped out without much commentary.

Recovery from trauma involves the restoration of executive functioning and, with it, self-confidence and the capacity for playfulness and creativity.

Traumatized people are often afraid of feeling. It is not so much the perpetrators (who, hopefully, are no longer around to hurt them) but their own physical sensations that now are the enemy. Apprehension about being hijacked by uncomfortable sensations keeps the body frozen and the mind shut. Even though the trauma is a thing of the past, the emotional brain keeps generating sensations that make the sufferer feel scared and helpless. It’s not surprising that so many trauma survivors are compulsive eaters and drinkers, fear making love, and avoid many social activities: Their sensory world is largely off limits.

After trauma the world is experienced with a different nervous system. The survivor’s energy now becomes focused on suppressing inner chaos, at the expense of spontaneous involvement in their lives. These attempts to maintain control over unbearable physiological reactions can result in a whole range of physical symptoms, including fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and other autoimmune diseases. This explains why it is critical for trauma treatment to engage the entire organism, body, mind, and brain.

If you feel safe and loved, your brain becomes specialized in exploration, play, and cooperation; if you are frightened and unwanted, it specializes in managing feelings of fear and abandonment.

However, processing by the thalamus can break down. Sights, sounds, smells, and touch are encoded as isolated, dissociated fragments, and normal memory processing disintegrates. Time freezes, so that the present danger feels like it will last forever.

Constantly fighting unseen dangers is exhausting and leaves them fatigued, depressed, and weary.

People with PTSD have their floodgates wide open. Lacking a filter, they are on constant sensory overload. In order to cope, they try to shut themselves down and develop tunnel vision and hyperfocus. If they can’t shut down naturally, they may enlist drugs or alcohol to block out the world. The tragedy is that the price of closing down includes filtering out sources of pleasure and joy, as well.

People who cannot comfortably notice what is going on inside become vulnerable to respond to any sensory shift either by shutting down or by going into a panic—they develop a fear of fear itself.

Because traumatized people often have trouble sensing what is going on in their bodies, they lack a nuanced response to frustration. They either react to stress by becoming “spaced out” or with excessive anger. Whatever their response, they often can’t tell what is upsetting them. This failure to be in touch with their bodies contributes to their well-documented lack of self-protection and high rates of revictimization and also to their remarkable difficulties feeling pleasure, sensuality, and having a sense of meaning.

Numerous studies of disaster response around the globe have shown that social support is the most powerful protection against becoming overwhelmed by stress and trauma.

Sounds a lot like me in my mid-20’s. Proud to say that these excerpts don’t describe me completely anymore, but they do show up a lot. My self-confidence has grown significantly. I’m playful, creative, inventive. I still enlist substances and activities to numb my senses, but I’ve decreased my alcohol and binge eating by a lot. I can tolerate uncomfortable emotional sensations for longer. And now I lean more readily on social support rather than solo alternatives to regulate my mood.

Still have another third of the book to go, but it has been an enlightening read. Refreshingly takes a lot of burden off of me and back onto what happened to me.

What Now?

Reading on complex trauma recently has gotten me thinking about my overall recovery, and it feels like I’ve only just been able to achieve stability, which has felt quite brief. They talk about healing and post-traumatic wisdom. lolwut. Is that even a thing?

The complex trauma books have expanded the amount of the grace I need to give myself. Looking back over the few months, it’s discouraging how drained I’ve been, but on the brighter side, each day where I don’t encounter toxic stress is a massive victory. So struggling through fatigue is far preferable even if it feels awful. For all the things that happened to me, including the things I did to myself in trying to deal with it all, I think I’m managing pretty well.

That’s the reason I started vaping, as an acknowledgement that I don’t have enough willpower to get myself out of this mess. I’ve had a lot of fun this summer, and now I just want to wind down and sleep. I did straight talk therapy for a long time, and now I’m a couple years into my drug era. Without a more supportive tribe with which to co-regulate, this is how it has to be.

Mindfulness and meditation always seem to be the answer to how to self-regulate, which is annoying. It feels like it takes so many deep breaths to really calm down. Alas, I’m giving in and finally doing the thing that’s supposed to help me the most. Humbug. After putting it off, I’ve finally found a place to fit it in to my everyday experiences, so that’s more progress.

Despite my energy being lower than it was when I was powered mostly by fear and anxiety, it’s also grown from where it once was since starting therapy. I’ve taken two weeks off from all kinds of physical exercise, so starting slow again with 10-minute yoga sessions. I must harness the power of saying no, which was dangerous for Young Jon. Have a book picked out for that too.

Silence is one of my triggers. Yeah, it’s wonderful. That’s what happens when you grow up in a dysfunctional home with constant fights that never resolved but were simply replaced by the next argument. Fear of silence has made me a great employee and roommate. 🙄 I’m learning to turn silence from an enemy into a friend, microdosing it in the Therapeutic Moments tradition to get closer to autonomy and restore executive functioning. Fuck, this is gonna take forever, if it even happens before I hit the dirt. Thinking about healing feels foreign and distant because I’ve been in the process of stabilizing for so long. Healing would be great, but damn, it feels far away.

Down the K Hole

Met with a psychiatrist at the psychedelic clinic. They guide trauma victims through exposure therapy while using ketamine to prevent emotional arousal. It’s considered an off-label use, but many studies have shown it can produce long-term improvements if followed up by other treatments. That is, psychedelic therapy isn’t a magic bullet. The benefits drop off beyond six sessions, so that’s the max that this clinic offers.

After submitting an application form last month, they called to evaluate whether I’d be a good candidate. Then they set up an appointment with a psychiatrist for a deeper assessment of how I’m doing, what I’m looking for, and if my overall health or medications would conflict with the ketamine.

The appointment involved me recounting my story, which is always enjoyable. At a high level, the general state of medicine means that people who suffer with mental health issues have to put on a performance of their disability for people to believe them. Psychiatrists sit somewhere in between the realms of physical and mental health, closer to the former than the latter, a doctor/pharmacist hybrid.

The last time I saw a psychiatrist, they said I seemed fine and didn’t need what they could offer, which was in the midst of one of my lower periods during The Struggle. I’ve typically favoured psychologists, who fall more on the mental health side, but my current condition requires something stronger than what I’ve been doing. I don’t know exactly what I might need, so this is just one guess.

In the end, I was approved to proceed with the ketamine-assisted therapy whenever I was ready. Could start as early as Monday. If and when I proceed, they recommended not taking my ADHD meds beforehand because ketamine, which is a horse tranquilizer, mixed with stimulants could interact in undesirable ways.

I originally thought I didn’t want to proceed because of the cost, but now I’m thinking that I should at least try one session. Maybe in the new year when my insurance refills. What else in everyday life costs more than $1000? Rent, cars, bikes, phones, tablets, laptops, vacation getaways, winter jackets. Seems like an easy comparison for the long-term benefits of treating trauma, even if it’s about five times the cost of an hour with a psychologist. Feels like a problem for Future Jon to worry about. At the very least, I need to get back to a trauma therapist in the meantime.

Wrapping Up

I’m so tired. Resting finally. Simultaneously reducing and increasing drug use. Sleeping better but still room to improve.

Trauma books be hitting the spot and helping me to fall asleep. Incorporating therapeutic moments to microdose silence and emotional pain.

Considering trying out ketamine-assisted therapy at some point. Gonna start looking again for a psychologist that treats trauma.

Now I’m gonna go lie down.

I spoke about the heartache I'd been experiencing as a result of physically processing unresolved childhood pain. A friend suggested that it could also be a side effect of the medications I'm on, and turns out chest pain is one of the side effects of Dexedrine. Was I simply experiencing a physical symptom and misinterpreting it as an emotional experience?

The question got into my head as a former victim of gaslighting. (Need a fun idea for movie night? Watch the 1944 movie that originated the term, "Gaslight!") Is this just how amphetamines affect the heart? Did I imagine all that emotional pain? Big, if true. Embarrassing too.

I finished reading "What My Bones Know" by Stephanie Foo, and she experienced something similar, referring to it as "The Dread." You sometimes hear how the human body and brain are either really wise or really dumb. Foo pointed out that when you're a little dehydrated, you feel thirsty, but if you are really dehydrated, you feel exhausted. But if you only notice the exhaustion, you might not think to drink a bunch of water. And if it made you irritated at people or situations, would those feelings be completely invalid? If you randomly decided to rehydrate, would that resolve all that tension and discord?

I'm calling this stage of healing and recovery my “Drug Era." The heartache didn't really change whether I took my Dex or after it had left my system. Was it withdrawal from nicotine? No noticeable change before or after vaping. Antihistamines can make you drowsy as well, so was my low energy from killing histamines or depression? Antidepressants were added to the mix after raw-dogging talk therapy for the first several years because I reached a plateau in the progress on my therapeutic goals. My mood had never been higher, but since my body was disagreeing with the side effects, I quit those and still haven't found a replacement. Need to touch base with medical professional on this chest pain.

My family doctor was recently in training for psychedelic-assisted therapy, so I asked him if he was taking patients. Apparently it wasn't that kind of training, so he suggested I contact one of the clinics in Calgary about their services. I spoke with one that required an assessment with their physicians and a referral from mine. Comes out to some $7,000 for six sessions. Seems like a pretty steep premium from the standard $220 with a traditional psychologist, so...that price gives a person pause. Am I really in that rough of shape?

The music I've been listening to has also changed to softer and sadder music rather than my usual hype and bassy playlists. Until further notice, I've relegated the physical symptoms to simply being one component of the equation, and I'm going to lean into the sad music. It's apparently the season of deleting old songs from my playlists and fixating on ear worms. If you've got some sad songs, send them my way!

After I published my previous post, my car broke down the next day. The post before that, I lost my job the following day. What is this a sign for? I wonder what other exciting challenges Life has in store for me after I share this one!

Car started giving off multiple warnings, the power steering cut in and out, the dashboard turned off, and the engine sputtered as I muscled the steering wheel into a parking spot. Some people said that the multiple warnings meant alternator problems; the part that recharges the battery. Dealership said it'd be $600. My previous interaction with a dealership service involved fear mongering to repair a "serious safety" issue that cost $700 and took hours longer than quoted, whereas my original mechanic later said it wasn’t worth fixing at the time.

Following that post, I practised positive thinking. Had car troubles last year before the annual road trip. At least this time, it happened two weeks before I needed to hit the road, so I had time to either get it fixed or book a rental. I'm also in a stronger position financially this year. The car managed to sputter into the parking lot at work. Lots to be grateful for.

But wait, there's more! Turns out one of my coworkers is a mechanic. He could find me a replacement for a good price and said the repair wouldn't take long since the alternator sat higher up on the engine. Was reminded I had it replaced last year, so thankfully it was covered under warranty by the garage and parts supplier, and they repaired it within a couple days. Not as much need to practise positive thinking since there was a positive outcome, but at least I was able to catch the thoughts before they ran away with my feelings.

My nervous system is well-acquainted with dealing with crisis and disaster, so the car wasn't exactly a huge problem in the grand scheme. Stephanie wrote about how her Complex PTSD primed her to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. You're mentally unwell when your brain is looking for a massive threat when there are none, but it's suddenly the most healthy when calamity does strike and nobody else knows how to deal. The tough part for me has always been the energy crash and reaching calm again. I'm trying my best.

Trying New Things

My old coping strategies aren't cutting it for this new challenge/opportunity, so I’m making some changes. What's going to help? I don't know; let's find out!

Yin yoga with a new-old teacher helped me reach nirvana briefly. Yin is the restorative type of yoga where you hold stretches for several minutes while sporting comfy sweaters, laying on thick bolster cushions under cozy blankets. Quite the challenging class, followed by this big emotional release during the final shavasana/corpse pose. I’d like to keep going to yin.

I recently noticed the heartache coming and going with stress, and the biggest source of it currently comes from the way I’ve been working at my new job. Labouring less is the first order of business. I reached an important milestone this past week, laying the foundation for increasing quality and reducing turnaround time for all future projects, so I think it's high time I switched over into Maintenance Mode®. I feel proud of bringing the learning curve down from the typical six months down to three. I've also just finished up my first vacay bébé since last summer, and I was able to catch up on sleep and Do Less. Also booked the week of Stampede for vacay bébé since I’m going to Cowboy Raves. Seeing Skrillex for the first time, deadmau5, Bob Moses, Excision, Bijou, ATLiens. I'll get a healthy dose of bass, dub, and time dancing on concrete. The local music scene hasn't been getting me where I need to go, so I’ll be very glad to hear the stuff I like. My genre is bass house, which was apparently just a fad that faded in the middle of the last decade. I describe it as Skrillex House, so maybe bass house will get another chance in the sun now that he's finally received the vibes I've been sending.

To shake things up, I had the bright idea to go to a Body Pump class after seven months away from the gym. Actually didn't even know the name of the class until after it kicked my ass. Forgot my water bottle, snack, exercise shoes. I thought I was in decent shape, cycling 1.5 hours every few days and bringing in all my groceries in a single trip. Nope. Usually the soreness goes away after a day, but this time it took five. It’s like I’ve never been to the gym before.

My friend was the instructor for Body Pump, which had the best music I’ve heard in a workout class whereas most usually play tunes similar to the toe-tapping sound of Belgian techno anthem, Pump Up the Jam.

All this struggle to chill tf out makes me glad I started therapy when I did because it feels like I'm fighting a war against neuroplasticity. Plasticity is a funny word because we usually experience plastic in its hardened form, but it refers to a chemical’s ability to start in a standardized shape and morph into whatever you want, like when a 3D printer melts a thin filament into a phone stand! As you age, the brain loses plasticity and becomes more hardcoded into the pathways it already formed. Started reading “What Happened to You?” by Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey, another fun book that makes it easy to read about trauma, and he mentions how fetus produce 20,000 neurons every day in the womb while an adult can make a mere 700. There's the expression that you can't teach an old dog new tricks. You still can, but it takes far more effort than teaching a young puppy. My neurons have certainly lost some of their plasticity, but I'm still trying and achieving change.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

As much as I need to change up my coping strategies, I also need to focus on stability in other areas. Eating regularly with better nutrition, practising better sleep hygiene and bedtime routine, keeping my work hours a bit more consistent, seeing friends, resting. (I regularly make these pep talks with little success.) Pretty sure the key is to silence the voices and tolerate the deep discomfort with feeling unproductive, which is progressing but only with deep thought and great concentration.

Choosing stability means that any incremental improvements aren't worth restructuring the system. Acceptance. It flies in the face of my endless pursuit of perfection. I resent when organizations prioritize the status quo over improved output, but that’s what my organization is facing. Going to an intensive gym workout after a long absence is not controlling growth. Given the massive fluctuations in my last 10 months, it's high time I tapped on the brakes; stomped?

Last time, I spoke about how some people have very quiet and boring lives. A close friend recently acknowledged how weird my life has been, how stuff keeps popping up on me, and it meant so much. Validating to hear that it's unusual to have so many sizeable threats crammed into such a short time. A quick look around at my immediate circle shows folks facing a handful of problems, and most people don’t overshare like me. (Would you agree, reader?)

Leaving my pity party to engage with others and hear their stories, most people don't seem to enjoy as much quiet as I’m imagining. Much of my circle seems overwhelmed on the regular. We're all just trying to get by and barely managing to do so. They're considering taking leave from work, daydreaming of taking lengthy vacations, or recoiling from everyone and everything. It's comforting and discomfiting to see how poorly others are faring. On the other hand, I’m trying to celebrate trying and not be envious of those who are thriving. Feels bad to know that many would love to have my first-world problems.

Gratitude Feels Grating

Though all of my therapists have told me to think more positively, it only just occurred to me that they were right. In my defence, I've needed to move mountains in all that time. Part of my hesitation is that optimistic attitudes can quickly slide into toxic positivity and serious denial/procrastination about doing The Work. Now it feels superior to the despair and "woe is me" I've been practising so far.

Choosing happiness and gratitude makes me marble-mouthed. Does settling require me to become complacent in the pursuit of...whatever it is I'm pursuing? If I actually got what I wanted, would I actually be happy or would I simply lock onto the next thing? It seems too simple, but is it the life hack I've been looking for? Is this one of those simple-and-difficult exercises I need to practice every day until I die? I have a lot to be thankful for, and I can't say that I've tried that hard to incorporate gratitude into my everyday existence.

For all the whinging I’ve done on this blog, here are some things I can be grateful for:

1. Greed-flation hasn't hurt me as bad as most since I was able to build a small moat. My mortgage is on a fixed interest rate, so overpaying for a few years has resulted in savings now.

2. I have a job that I love and that loves me.

3. There is deep love in my relationships. I have a robust support network that provides comfort and care following the disconnection from my family of origin.

4. I enjoy housing security. Rent increased only by a little when re-signing last fall.

5. The frugality forged in the years of lower income has returned to centre stage as I find opportunities for cutting costs and shortcuts, now supercharged by a Costco executive membership, Amazon Prime, a larger network in the city, social media comments, and ChatGPT.

6. Affordable access to healthcare for my mind and body has resulted in vast improvements that improve my functioning. The resolution of past traumas allows me to live closer to the moment and to deal with new situations with greater effectiveness. Small threats don’t feel as catastrophic now.

Positive thinking still feels minor in the ultimate aim of survival and self-actualization, but it also seems to be an important tool in the arsenal. A muscle that needs development and consistent practice. I’ll remember to take it more gently than Body Pump next time I’m at the emotional gym.

Wrap It Up

Heart still hurts. Thought it could be physical symptoms, but it doesn’t seem to change when taking pharmaceuticals. Need to talk to my doctor again. Listening to sad music. Send me songs about heartache!

Trying new coping strategies because the old ones aren’t working. Reducing stress. Working less frantically. Mixing vacation and Stampede.

Stabilizing other areas. Resting more. Thinking more positively.

I…feel lost and confused. I don’t really know what is going on with me and whether my plan is going to make a difference. I’m also not sure that I have time to sit around and philosophize about it. Clicking buttons on a computer will surely get me closer to the answer.

Oh, and my dad pushed his way onto my radar recently, so, uh, that’ll be on my mind for a little while.

We focused enough on whatever I was facing last year, but it's time to find someone new. For the curious, I saw them in January and took a break until May, and in our last session, it felt like they forgot a lot of fundamental details about who I was. There's probably room for grace and working things out, but coupled with the mismatched schedules and location, it no longer seems worthwhile to make the trek. Sure, I could do therapy remotely and the experience of finding a new psychologist feels as awful as dating, but it just feels like it’s time to start with someone new.

Still adjusting to the new job and finding ways to optimize the overall workflow. Pretty sure my Myers-Briggs personality test categorized me as an ENTJ, the Field Marshal. In combat, they would be coordinating the movements and timings of multiple groups and resources. I've been creating new test tools and automations that my job doesn't necessarily require, but since it's a smaller company with an appreciation for experimentation and process improvements, it's been well-received. Trying to balance the concept of "a stitch in time saves nine," finding myself at times on the wrong side of both just getting it done versus and taking time to fix the process. At the same time, I've even underestimated how much time I've saved myself by these little investments, and even if I feel like garbage most of the time, I know I’d be in much rougher shape in even a couple weeks if I didn’t stop to work on bug fixes.

I haven't written as much recently because I have been putting first things first.

In university, I was the co-president for the Electrical Engineering Club, and one of the main challenges I faced was pulling the group out of a sort of fall from grace. The EE Club was well-regarded in previous years for its level of general engagement and its high performance in events like Geer Week, but that was not the case when I took office. Thus, there was a hefty chunk of infrastructure work required to set the stage for future years to succeed. Like the Edmonton Oilers seem to need every season, it was a rebuild year. We did sexy work like rewriting the constitution, which had a joke clause that allowed the president to do whatever they wanted; I told the executives that I could empty our bank account with a smile and no one could say boo, so that clearly needed to be removed. We cleaned out the storage area which became a hoarding space. We met with the Electrical and Computer Engineering department to discuss students' academic needs, one result being our microcontroller course being revamped from developing firmware for the classical Motorola 68k in favour of Nintendo hardware (wtf!). We scraped by during Geer Week, a fun week filled with group activities and competitions, discovering in the process that there was apparently a manual given to each discipline’s student club on what events were going to be held and what was going to be judged. At least our musical performance at the bar rocked its way to first place, so that was nice when we finished dead last in pretty much every other category. New security measures for the office. Replaced the yellow fridge from the previous century with a new model. Implemented an intern system for budding future executives. There was more, certainly, but you get the idea.

All fun stuff, ya? All terribly cutting edge and exciting. I find myself in a similar situation now. I had to ask my therapist and friends if I was just making mountains out of mole hills when describing the last 10 months and whether I simply misjudged what I needed to do and if I just made the wrong decisions. They didn't seem to think so. Let's quickly review what's been dumped on my plate in that time (in ISO 8601 format):

2022-09: Finished stress leave and returned to work part-time
2022-10: Started working full-time again
2022-11: Rented out the condo
2022-12: Rental condo's neighbour flooded their apartment and affected our unit
2023-01: Coordinating repair of the condo
2023-02: Vasectomy
2023-03: Job loss
2023-04: New job
2023-05: Couple urgent projects at work and home

Some of those items were self-induced problems, some weren't. Everyone has stuff going on that we don't know about, but I get the feeling that there are many that haven't had as much happen in a similar time frame. In any case, that's where I am. Started using a new sleep and energy tracking app, which informed me that my sleep debt was at 15 hours over the last two weeks. My goal is to sleep 7.5 hours every night, so that means I’ve averaged 6.5 hours a night. I've since shaved down the sleep debt to 11 hours, but it's going to probably take two weeks of concerted effort to get it back to zero. Skipping caffeine seems logical, but skipping it means I don't function as well and still feel too wound up by bedtime.

There are many barriers fighting against the urge to attend to first things first. The ADHD brain gravitates to hyperfocusing on the dopamine fixes. Plus my personality is always seeking the fun in life, so it becomes weary very quickly looking at the boring things that grown-ups do, like washing clothes and scooping cat litter. All of the childhood trauma means that I have to parent myself. There are aspects of everyday life that are challenging because certain skills aren't fully developed yet, and possibly never will be. Telling time and prioritizing tasks are still challenging in my mid-thirties. I recently tried to make a habit of meditating every morning and night, and I got to about 120 days in a row. The habit never stuck. Hurray for basic tasks taking way more mental resources than I feel they should.

Getting back into exercise. Huzzah! Cycled to work for the first time a couple weeks back, and the route was surprisingly easier than I thought. I'm travelling all the way to the southeast from downtown, but since there's a fully separated path, the 45 minute ride across 18 km (11 mi) on the ebike somehow feels shorter than the 22 minute drive. Micromobility at its best — delivering smiles, not miles. I prefer cycling to the office early over driving later. Didn't think that would be the case. Not quite lifting weights yet, but moving laterally or diagonally is still progress. Wildfire smoke and climate change are additional barriers that are essentially inescapable.

Quick side bar for managing the impacts of forest fire smoke from someone who suffers from allergy-induced asthma:

1. Reduce time outdoors.

2. Reduce fresh air intake from the furnace or car’s climate control.

3. Change clothes after getting home.

4. Hot showers soften lung tissue and make it easier for your lung’s cilia to remove particulate.

5. Replace your car’s cabin air filter.

6. Air purifier.

   1. If NYT blocks access, use a paywall circumvention service like Archive.is.

   2. I have the BlueAir 211.

   3. The Corsi-Rosenthal Box works on the cheap, but since it’s loud af, only use it if you have some way to avoid the sound, like if you live in a large space or have noise-cancelling headphones.

7. Humidifier

   1. I have the Levoit 300S, but my only gripe is that the smart home feature only works for Google and Alexa. I’ll have to add it via Home Assistant, but for now, the integrated scheduler works fine.

8. N95 masks

   1. KN95s don’t fit tight enough on my head to create a tight seal.

9. Fashionable safety glasses.

10. Talk to your doctor about getting an inhaler.

    1. I’m on Symbicort 200 mcg.

Still working on physically processing old wounds. My body has decided it’s the first thing I should do every morning. It's hard managing the day-to-day while that major drain is occupying my brain space and physical energy. It gets first dibs, and then whatever else is left needs to be claimed by all the other demands on my attention. Sometimes I'll cook food for the week but won't have dopamine left over to brush my teeth. Corporeal experience. My body is using one of my old mottos: can’t stop, won’t stop. Fucking hell. Fastest way out is directly through. Thanks, Pythagorus. I wish I was high on potenuse.

Sometimes I give in and let the hyperfixation take me. I kinda watch from the sidelines as my body takes over because it runs toward what will make it feel good. It's not great self-care, but given my lower energy and the pervasive discomfort, all I can settle for is something that makes me feel alive even if it slowly kills me.

These days it feels like I'm making unforced errors, like a kite that isn't facing the same strong winds it's always known. It’s like when you're an excellent fighter as the underdog but terrible at defending the belt. I never feel good. It takes all day and night for me to finally tune every single dimension and variable to my body's satisfactions and before you know it, bedtime. Stress makes the brain perceive small aches and pains far more loudly than the actual wounds would suggest. The overreaction also applies to the mental. At some point recently, I just had to embrace that I would perpetually feel awful all the time and would need to keep doing the work.

On a lighter note, there’s been a shift in focus in all the nonconsensual emotions processing. For five months, it felt like all that came up was turmoil from my nuclear family of origin, but it’s moved to more recent events. Maybe now that it's spring and I'm getting outside more, my brain has finally caught on to the shift and rearranged the order of the towering inbox. Or maybe I really am processing my way through the backlog of unfelt emotions and the topic can finally change. Don't get me wrong, it's still gutting me and making me weep at unusual times. A tragic song I added to a playlist long ago with a "meh, it's better than nothing" suddenly metamorphosed into an ear worm that I replayed all day long, accompanying my crying sessions. I suspect the kitties are like "oh, you finally stopped listening to the same 8 songs? Great! Oh wait, now you're just repeating the one. Umm, k. Please turn it down so I can take a 6-hour nap."

There are a couple people to whom I need to send brutally honest messages, but given recent trends, it's not likely to happen. It feels like the work that I need to do, but it also feels prudent to kick these cans down the road. It's even a major hurdle making time to write these letters without sending them. Maybe I should be writing that instead of this blog post. Hmm. Be right back.

*eight days later*

Phew! That was a tough exercise. Won’t be sending them, but I think it helped.

As boring and unfulfilling as it's been prioritizing first things first, the hard work from the recent past has been paying off.

For example, my allergist said that it would take a few years before the allergy shots I started in December would take full effect. You can mix up to five allergens into the cocktail, but apparently it’s better to not jam it full. We settled on cats, dogs, and pine tree pollen. The full battery of shots takes anywhere from three to five years, but she said it only takes roughly half that time for people to experience full immunity. Antihistamines have helped in the past, but my mind developed this perception around them not working that well, even when taking several 24-hour pills at once or multiple times per day. I already went through a fairly strict and lengthy regimen of allergy shots as a kid for seasonal allergies, but the technology must have progressed over the last 20 years. That is, taking action and paying out of pocket for allergy shots has paid off far more quickly and powerfully than I thought. Cycling through the pollen and fuzzies, it's downright miraculous that I'm still functioning this spring. It's still early, and maybe I get lazy eventually and don't finish the whole suite of injections. It was a minor pain in the ass to go to appointments every week, so thankfully I'm down to a monthly schedule. Taking care of first things first apparently has positive results.

Books

I recently started reading "What My Bones Know" by Stephanie Foo, a memoir about her life and diagnosis of complex PTSD. It isn't yet recognized by the DSM, but thankfully other psychological bodies do. Someone who faced a single traumatic experience would surely have different symptoms to someone exposed to hundreds or thousands traumatic injuries. Get your shit together, DSM.

Foo references Bessel van Der Kolk's seminal "The Body Keeps the Score," which I started but stopped abruptly because it assigned so much homework before continuing. It said that processing complex trauma required processing through mental, emotional, and physical faculties, and despite years of work, I’d been lacking on the physical front. I've since been physically processing a lot, giving myself room to grieve and feel the pain I couldn't withstand from childhood, but damn, it hasn't gotten any easier despite leaning into it. Still vaping lots. Still vegging out in front of the TV lots while playing vidya. "Tears of the Kingdom" has been a meaningful respite in this cold world. I mentioned the physical pain draining all my energy to my therapist, and she asked what kind of grounding techniques I had been trying and what worked. I said that I was trying all of them, and nothing has worked. I only have so much dopamine and energy to self-regulate, and what little coping I can manage to try hasn't gotten my feet all the way back to the ground. So sometimes I just lay on the floor moaning or crying.

She also explained that the person who developed the ACE score later said that even though it was helpful for understanding the public health impact of childhood trauma, it wasn't as useful in determining an individual's prognosis. I've done a couple deep dives in recent years into whatever's been ailing me, but Stephanie helped me to step back and look at the complete picture. Attachment Theory is helpful, ADHD is a bitch to manage, and a friend said recently that I seem deeply depressed (so business as usual), yet those deep dives obscured my awareness of the other mental illnesses constantly fighting for my attention. It's a stark reminder of how much lower my expectations for myself should be.

Stephanie also decided to forego the talk therapy route and went straight to EMDR, which is fine if it works for you, but I'm apparently one of the few with C-PTSD for whom talking worked. Additionally, one of the symptoms of C-PTSD is a lack of knowledge of how they’re feeling in its various forms, like social awareness and interoception, and one of the common pieces of feedback I've gotten from therapists and my social circle was the high degree of insight I have into my own experience.

Positive thinking is helpful for everyone, especially for people with trauma (which is still everyone). She talked about writing a gratitude journal, which is essentially cognitive-behavioural therapy. Change your thoughts to change your behaviours. The mind is far more sensitive to negativity for survival reasons, so reading the book reminded me that I have to put in at least double the effort the average person does to benefit from an optimistic and hopeful attitude. Sometimes it feels like all these diagnoses are a death sentence, where I feel far older than my birthday would suggest.

"What My Bones Know" has been a refreshing reminder of the challenges in front of me. She used the phrase "emotional flashback," differentiating it from the depiction in popular media where a person is fully immersed in the setting of an old, painful memory. I can relate. I'm certainly aware that I'm not back in my childhood home cowering in fear from my parents, but my emotional brain has definitely teleported there on a regular basis. She spoke with someone who also had C-PTSD, who had a hopeful outlook. Yes, it feels impossible fighting fate with such a diagnosis, but there are enough examples of people who created a rich life while managing the symptoms. I didn't relate to her recounting of EMDR therapy, but I did when she spoke of yin yoga. I should book more classes. I'm going to try harder to think more positively. And I'm going to stay in more to sleep and recoil from my emotional injuries.

I'm thinking of Tsunade, the Fifth Hokage from Naruto. She was this beautiful woman who used her ninja powers to change her appearance in exchange for shortening her lifespan. It would be easier for me, in a way, to not work on all these issues, but even though it adds more stress to my daily experience, it means I get to be beautiful while I'm still around.

Also read "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" by Ocean Vuong. It was wonderful. Really nice to enjoy some Asian/Vietnamese representation. Such a different experience from my own, laced with so much familiarity from our shared cultural heritage. He thanked his mom in the Acknowledgements at the end, but because he said it in Vietnamese, he jerked a few tears out of me. "Ma, cảm ơn." Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to break the multi-year silence to call my mom, but it was just touching to enjoy the fuller meaning of what those words mean in my native language. We're also of a similar ilk, immigrants who struggled to learn a foreign language yet somehow figured a way to write in it for an audience; no, I haven't won any writing awards like Ocean, but I have spilled a lot of ink. Maybe I'll take a writing course someday. Lovely book written with massive gentility and intention.

How else am I putting first things first?

Resting. It's always been the name of the game, and lately that name is being called up front and centre. If I don't rest more, I will surely venture onto an even worse path than I'm already on. At work, I'm putting in extra work for the short- and medium-term, and it's thankfully already paying off. I could reduce my struggles even more by just not doing it, but I'll feel that pain within the span of a few days or weeks. There is space to let up every now and then, but it's a bad feeling to re-encounter a friction point that I could have easily fixed with a few minutes or hours of investment.

Thought my life was quieting down, and then I had a hell of a Friday last week.

• My nic vape died again on the way to the office.

• I had my first big reaction to an allergy shot, partly from my regular family doctor being on training and the other clinic doctor going on vacation. Also didn’t plan to bring any antihistamines with me that day.

• Finished a deadline for work while sneezing and wiping my nose every 5 seconds.

• Then got heat stroke cycling home even after cycling for a couple weeks in similar heat and forest fire smoke and sunshine while chugging water.

Some of that was self-induced, certainly, but I did everything I was supposed to and still got creamed. Trauma response activated that day, so recovering all weekend still wasn't enough. Cycling doesn't quite reach the same emotionally regulatory peak as lifting weights in the 5x5 Strong Lifts fashion, aka prison workouts, but it is getting the job done.

At the same time, I recently found my breath again after probably two months. I woke up Thursday and was suddenly able to breathe deeply. It's usually difficult in the midst of my Dexedrine surge, but my environment has also not been conducive lately to finding rest. Partying and dancing had been mainstays in my coping and self-soothing arsenal, but they haven't been hitting the spot the way they used to as of late.

Wrap It Up

I’m in an Edmonton Oilers-style rebuild year. That means taking care of first things first, and it sucks ass. My body always feels awful, and almost nothing has been able to make the pain stop. Juggling awareness and management of my mental illnesses is a full-time job, and I can only really come up for air once in a while. Sleep debt certainly doesn’t help either. Stopped reading about complex trauma in “The Body Keeps the Score,” but it found me again through “What My Bones Know.”

Looking at it positively, my overall situation is far better than it’s ever been, so I’m grateful to have the privilege and space to work on these higher level problems.

Thanks for reading my not-so-regular update.

Not much to say. We agreed to part ways; I wasn’t laid off, but I think it would be considered constructive dismissal. Day of, I was advised to go home and rest, take care of myself, all that good stuff, and then I applied for like 40 positions by bedtime. Found a new position after three weeks. Quite the rollercoaster of emotions. On the very bright side, this job is easily the best fit I've ever had. I was torn between finding something quickly and one that I could work in long-term, and I’m happy I took the time to find the right one as it’s paid off immensely in short order.

The whole transition was a shock to the system. First time in 13 years of working where a recruiter found me. My three- to five-year plan of moving into hardware engineering got sped up. I still plan on taking the scenic route, working closer to the factory floor and gradually moving closer to a design position. I’m working every day in the office, but it works out since I get to work a lot more with my hands instead of sitting and typing all day. That ends the chapter of my career where I work with customers directly. The world is trending towards more remote work, but that’s not practical for my career path of hardware. I’ve done enough years of remote work and staying at home, both recently during the pandemic and in years past pre-COVID, so I’m happy to have a more regular routine in the office. I don’t think the kitties will miss me playing loud music during their six-hour afternoon nap, but they do seem to miss the belly rubs.

Post-Pre-Vasectomy

I already shared my Pre-Vasectomy Thoughts. I’m back to finally follow up. As you can imagine, I’ll get into some of the sensitive details, but I’ll (try to) be mature about it. It actually feels so long ago, and I didn’t even really consider it as part of my daily existence after about three weeks. However, it’s been on my mind just as a matter of closing the loop, so I’d like to get it off my chest and out of my head. My three-month anniversary came around recently, and as part of the whole procedure, I sent in a sperm sample to see if it really worked. Now that I’m mostly recovered from the job swap, as evidenced by the resumption of the involuntary physical processing of old emotional wounds, it’s time I got back to writing, which has usually been the best way to treat this aching pain in my chest.

IntraMed Medical Clinic sits in a very unassuming building, which was clearly an old residential home converted into a medical office. There was a little seating area with one other person already waiting, and there was a sign that said we weren’t allowed to use our phones. lolk. I waited for a few minutes, and then I was brought into an office where I was given some forms to sign and some documentation with more detailed background information than what was on the website.

There was an odd portion where they mentioned that your testes would remain intact and that you wouldn’t turn into a girl. Feels tone deaf for the times, but I figure it could also be a common comment from patients. Also not allowed to have sex or to ejaculate for a week following. Freezing sperm costs something like $450, which seems like a decent form of insurance if you weren’t 100% sure you didn’t want to conceive, but I was sure. The info packet also covered topics like chances of something going wrong with the procedure, such as infection or other reactions, but they all seemed really low. 1 chance in several thousand. Sometimes the vasectomy even reverses itself, which seems miraculous but also within the realm of possibility of what the human body is capable of. Reversing the vasectomy apparently costs $7000(!!), and it’s not always successful. Seems like a high price if you really want to conceive.

I signed the paperwork, and after a few minutes, Dr. Cross came in. He had to run downstairs for another procedure before mine, so he wanted to do my final questionnaire before that. He asked if I don’t want kids, and I said yes. Also asked if I never wanted kids, and I said yes since I didn’t feel like explaining the situation yet again. He asked if I had any recent surgeries, any reactions to medications or anesthesia, if I was in good health. He checked my (anti-)family jewels and I went to the operating room, which was probably a converted bedroom.

Mid-Vasectomy

Waited some more, and then a male nurse came in to get me prepped. When my appointment was booked, they said that I needed to shave a particular section of the area two days before the operation. I opted for the male Brazilian, which is criminally somehow not called the Bro-zilian or Bruh-zilian. Apparently I’m a glutton for punishment.

Laid down again. Nurse looked at the area and said “Very nice.” Not too sure what that was referring to. Iodine to disinfect the area. Wrapped an elastic band around my trunk and tied it to my t-shirt to keep it out of the way. Waited a little while until the doctor came in, and then the small talk. Asked if I was ready. Yup.

“Did you drive here by yourself?”

“I did.”

“Are you going to drive yourself home afterwards?”

“Also yes. I thought about bringing someone for emotional support, but I think I’ll just livestream it on TikTok for the likes instead.”

*no laughter from the doctor or nurse*

Paid for the Premium Package for my Premium Package, which included a local anesthetic. The paperwork said it would feel like an elastic band snapping against the skin, which was about right. One on each side. Waited a short while for the numbing to spread.

The doctor narrated while he worked. Making an incision the size of a ballpoint pen’s tip. Pulling out the vas deferens. Snip. Cauterizing, smoke filling the air. (The last time I smelled something so unique was when I got my laser eye surgery.) Sewing the freshly cut bottom half of the vas deferens into the scrotal wall. Then repeating on the other side.

Nurse cleaned me up again, and Dr. Cross bid me farewell. Probably off to operate on the guy I was waiting with in the seating area. I removed the elastic band, and pulled my pants up and shirt down. Carefully sat up and waddled over to the desk to go over care instructions once I got home. Wasn’t painful yet, but didn’t want to introduce unnecessary complications. The nurse offered to get me any snacks I wanted to help my body to recover. Ginger Ale, Coca-Cola, Pringles. They hilariously gave me “Dad’s Oatmeal Cookies,” and I later pinned the empty wrapper to the fridge door. Extra Strength Tylenol/acetaminophen every hour for the first day, and add in ibuprofen every four to six hours starting the next day, all conveniently separated into small Ziploc bags. They reminded me that I had Dr. Cross’s phone number to call or text if I had an emergency or any questions about the healing process. Showed me the bag which had a bottle for the sperm sample I needed to send to the lab after three months to verify if the vasectomy worked. I would need to ejaculate 25-30 times within the three months, and I would need to abstain for three days before collecting the sample. It needed to be delivered within an hour of collection and kept at body temperature, by putting the container into one’s front pants pocket, for example, while driving to the lab.

Finally, I was given a Post-It note that said “20 minutes” to give to the receptionists as a secret code to indicate how much time I needed to wait around before leaving. I played on my phone despite the sign that forbade it. Mostly doom scrolling Reddit. Timer buzzed me, and then I drove home.

Post-Vasectomy

The first day was the worst. I was technically allowed to move around, but it was strongly discouraged for the first week, which was also the worst. For some reason I didn’t take time off work, and I probably should have even thought I was working from home. Couldn’t really come up with a good reason why beyond stubbornness and pride. Oh well, I got my vacation paid out after they let me go. I still read and wrote emails for customers and kept everything the same minus the mandatory days in the office. Rotated multiple ice packs to manage swelling. Waddled around the condo. Wasn’t allowed to have sex or masturbate for the first week, and from the second to third week, I still moved slow but mostly back to normal. Recovered fully after the third week and didn’t really give it much thought until I had to send in my sperm sample.

Just got my results back Friday, and downloaded it from Alberta’s MyHealth medical records service. Looks like it worked!

Reactions

People had interesting reactions hearing about the vasectomy. Some men even winced at the mere mention of it. Told me to stop talking after sharing that I got a Bruhzilian. Seems like most guys are happy to leave the non-condom birth control labour to their female partners. Also sounds like IUDs are common and painful, yet anaesthesia is limited to strong non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Shame. I think every guy that doesn’t want children should get a vasectomy, but good luck getting past that male fragility.

Some of the reading I did on sexuality discussed new research on how the brain, the biggest sex organ, plays its part in libido; Come as You Are by Emily Nagoski has interesting new information. Everyone has a set of accelerators and brakes, like on a car. In the immediate aftermath of the US repealing Roe v. Wade, which protected American women’s access to abortion, some guys apparently found success on dating apps by setting their profiles to simply say “I had a vasectomy.” Getting the desired test results has been an accelerator for me. The thought of accidentally conceiving was one of my brakes, so the vasectomy was a double whammy in boosting my sex drive. Didn’t expect that. I’m all about simultaneously maximizing effectiveness and efficiency, so the vasectomy made perfect sense for me. Highly recommended. Would do again.

My only regret was paying the $200 to bypass the queue in the public system. I could have waited until the fall, but I used my class privilege to access the two-tier healthcare. I have a list of reasons that only reaches the level of excuses for doing a not-nice thing as a social activist. If I had it my way, the universal healthcare system would have far more funding than it does now to preclude such wait times. Let’s see how the next provincial election turns out and whether the voting public decides to act against its own interests. My decision to get the vasectomy and to write about it was in solidarity with women amidst the current environment of birth control options, so while I’ve helped women, I’ve worked against the average Citizen in Alberta and Canada. Not sure where the chips lie in the end, but it is what it is.

Wrapping Up

There was a lot more suspense around the vasectomy than I thought was necessary, at least in my case. Much like the very personal and odd way that I chose to get laser eye surgery, it was a minor pain in the short run but major relief in the end. Nobody needs to get a Bruhzilian, but I also find that that high level of pain is worth the comfort compared to shaving my downstairs. Laser hair removal is probably the better option, but it currently seems rather expensive, requiring quite a few sessions to get the best results.

Alas, I have finally discharged my duty to follow up on the vasectomy. Like I said earlier, I haven’t exactly thought much about it since it happened, and writing this post was probably a heavier weight on me than the actual surgery. I’ll say again, every man who doesn’t want to conceive a child should get a vasectomy, whenever they have a few weeks to write off for the recovery. (Not medical advice, so talk to your doctor.) The pros and cons for most dudes is probably one-sided in favour of it, except with the main con being that toxic masculinity has most guys feeling squeamish or sensitive about their “manhood.” Feminism is for everybody, including men, where the patriarchy seeks to control everyone’s minds and bodies using shame and fear to prevent equity for all. Conservatism teaches that men who enjoy body autonomy get to decide that women should not, with one flip-side of restricting access to abortion being to force men to get the snip — removing a person’s right to choose. One side enjoys the privilege of controlling their bodies while denying the other the same liberty.

If sexually active men with no intention of conceiving want to take real action towards equality for all, get a vasectomy. I got one, and I’m pretty happy with the results.

Yes, I willingly started vaping nicotine, an addictive substance. Lots of people vape or smoke, so who cares that I started? I’ve made my peace with it, but I have so many thoughts circulating in my skull from addiction “education” in grade school, and the vasectomy kicked up lots of emotions around my childhood and overall health, so I wanted to offload them somewhere and clear up my head. I’m attempting to use responsibly. My family doc and allergist know about it, and I have an inhaler with a steroid and bronchodilator. Seems fine so far.

There’s certainly a foolishness in thinking I can wield this harmful and insidious substance. By subjecting my throat with highly energized matter in a gaseous state and coating my lungs with a waxy oil, the act of vaping decreases the lungs’ ability to fight off infection during a time when aerosol- and airborne-transmitted respiratory viruses abound. Using a high concentration sends me to the toilet. It’s too soon to tell what the long-term health effects of vaping are, even though it hit the scene in 2003. Rather than inhaling 7000 well-studied chemicals from cigarettes, I’m breathing in three less-studied ones. However, after about 10 years of imbibing, I’ve reached a point where I barely touch alcohol at all these days, even on nights out with friends. I’m not entirely sober, but whereas I used to have up to 15 drinks in a night and going out every weekend, I average maybe three drinks a month now.

What’s the upside? My anxiety is lower, I practice deep breathing, I take more breaks from various forms of work. Sounds great, right?!

The operative analogy in my head at the moment is a garden hose leaking. I have all this emotional pain stored inside me that wants to get out, but it’s coming out faster than I can manage. A person could spend their energies trying to plug up the outlet with fixtures and they could also turn off the valve upstream, but it’s easier said than done.

Miseducation About Addiction

What we grew up knowing about addiction was that it was simply a matter of choice. Campaigns like D.A.R.E and Nancy Reagan's “Just Say No” only reinforced that concept, which were good vanity projects but woefully inadequate for the audacious goal of understanding and stemming a public health crisis. If you engaged in your addictive behaviours, it was only because you wanted to. Anyone who didn’t want to stop chose not to, and as such, all energies were focused on changing their minds using facts and logic. Motivation took the form of appealing to their decision-making, using such effective techniques as guilt, shame, and brute force. Many would grow up confused when “just saying no” wasn’t enough to end their dependence on a substance. Free will is certainly one absolutely necessary tool in breaking the cycle of addiction, but what we know now about how trauma and Adverse Childhood Experiences™ affect health outcomes and substance use opens up treatment options that are more effective and efficient, without bashing people over the head with a social hammer.

Adverse Childhood Experiences

Trigger warning for those with severe anxiety or PTSD, there are mentions of various forms of abuse. For everyone else, it's just...depressing.

There’s a great TED Talk on Adverse Childhood Experiences as a primer on the concept. Here are some excerpts from the Wikipedia article:

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) encompass various forms of physical and emotional abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction experienced in childhood. The harms of ACEs can be long-lasting, affecting people even in their adulthood. ACEs have been linked to premature death as well as to various health conditions, including those of mental disorders. Toxic stress linked to child abuse is related to a number of neurological changes in the structure of the brain and its function.

The concept of adverse childhood experiences refers to various traumatic events or circumstances affecting children before the age of 18 and causing mental or physical harm. There are 10 types of ACEs:

• physical abuse

• sexual abuse

• psychological abuse

• physical neglect

• psychological neglect

• witnessing domestic abuse

• having a close family member who misused drugs or alcohol

• having a close family member with mental health problems

• having a close family member who served time in prison

• parental separation or divorce on account of relationship breakdown.

The different adverse childhood experiences are not isolated and in many cases multiple ACEs impact someone at the same time.

A study in the USA based on a large sample of people showed that more than half of the people have had at least one ACE and 20% experienced three or more ACEs. In England around half of the population have experienced one or more ACEs.

Adverse childhood experiences have a dose–response relationship with many health problems. As researchers followed participants over time, they discovered that a person's cumulative ACEs score has a strong, graded relationship to numerous health, social, and behavioral problems throughout their lifespan, including substance use disorders.

The World Health Organization administers one of the surveys. Mind you, I've never actually taken the ACEs questionnaire, which seems easy enough to do on your own and grade, but just reading through it is upsetting by itself, partly from recalling my own experiences but also from imagining what others had to endure. Thus I don't have my ACEs score, although I have a hunch it's not low. Let’s look at some of the questions:

1.4 At the time of your first marriage if you did not choose your husband/wife yourself, did you give your consent to the choice?

2.2 Did your parents/guardians really know what you were doing with your free time when you were not at school or work?

4.2 Did you live with a household member who was depressed, mentally ill or suicidal?

4.6 Did you see or hear a parent or household member in your home being yelled at, screamed at, sworn at, insulted or humiliated?

5.4 Did a parent, guardian or other household member hit or cut you with an object, such as a stick (or cane), bottle, club, knife, whip etc?

8.4 Was a family member or friend killed or beaten up by soldiers, police, militia, or gangs?

Depressing, right? It pains me to think of what other options have to live through as well as the various combinations.

My cute little garden hose analogy breaks down quickly when you realize that there are many fixtures that can easily screw something over the open end. I’m not a plumber like the Super Mario Bros 🍄, so bear with me. So let’s say that there is no threaded metal thing. There’s only a torn hose at the end and the water pressure is too high to easily cut the rubber, and maybe a stray dog is attacking the plumbers hired to fix it. How do you plug the leak when the soil is soaking and spilling into the neighbour’s yards? Emergency! Also, the faucet is jammed, so you can’t shut off the water at the source without a lot of effort. Maybe it’s corroded so badly that even a huge pipe wrench can’t turn the knob without causing further damage.

My approach so far has been to stop fixating on the spilled water and instead to refocus on closing the valve. I employed mostly talk therapy to address the sources of my emotional pain. And there’s been real progress! When I was still partying hard, I used to drink like a fish, though somehow I maintained enough discipline to very rarely indulge during the work week. I’ve treated my ACEs directly through prolonged exposure therapy, which has certainly prevented a lot of further suffering. But that heavy investment came at a cost, and now I’m tired. I’ve slowed the flow and clamped down on one leak, but now it’s relocated to another opening. It’s like when I switched away from Apple Music’s bugs and traded them for Spotify’s. And my arms are tired from prying the pipe wrench to close the valve from which my emotional pain flows.

Band-Aid Solution

I’m ready for Band-Aid solutions. I’ve traded my alcohol abuse for nicotine use. We now have the technology to reduce the amount of harm caused from smoking tobacco by getting to the nicotine directly. The toasted smell is replaced by delicious flavours, which create their own craving.

The average amount of nicotine absorbed from a cigarette is about 2 mg. My back-of-napkin calculation says that if a disposable vape has 9 mg of nicotine and a concentration of 20 mg/mL that lasts over 3000 puffs, which is probably an overestimate for marketing purposes, a person requires 33 puffs to inhale the equivalent of a cigarette. I’ve since switched to a refillable vape paired with an e-juice that has 5 mg/mL concentration with a menthol-like flavour called Extreme Ice. At one quarter of the concentration, it should take an average of 132 inhalations to equate to a cigarette, which also means that I use the vape and irritate my throat more. I’m probably more hooked than I would like to admit, but I also have more control than if I smoked tobacco.

Observing how nicotine boosts dopamine production, here’s a graph of my relative dopamine concentration throughout the day after taking Adderall XR. I have no idea what dopamine dispersion actually looks like, so this graphic is informed mostly by subjective experience and vibes.

I take a 10 mg capsule of Adderall with eXtended Release as soon as I wake up, around 6 or 7 AM, so I vape more before the Adderall fully kicks in and after it’s worn off to get out of the blue “Trapped in flesh prison” area. If I do it too much during the middle of the day, I get a headache, though the e-juice with lower nicotine concentration reduces that. Recall that the 15 mg capsule of Adderall was too much for me, sending me higher in the red “HEADACHE” zone for a few hours, and trying a 10 mg/mL nic salt e-juice, half the concentration of the disposables I started with, still made me go number two. Over time, drugs like nicotine shrink the green “Feels Good, Man” zone, so the goal is to eventually reduce both the vape time and budget using healthier alternatives, perhaps reversing the trend and growing the green section. Note how low the baseline is at the far left and right. It takes so much work just to climb into the green zone. It’s exhausting, and perhaps it merely requires more time to rest to naturally raise the baseline.

It feels like the fastest way out of this habit is through it. There’s no turning back now, and I need to approach ACE management from a different angle.

Trying an addictive substance once isn’t enough to get a person hooked. There are plenty who’ve tried out of curiosity or were surrounded by those that indulged liberally, but they walk away just fine. Weed doesn’t have a chemical pathway for addiction, but it surely can form a behavioural habit. I just finished reading “When the Body Says No,” which is an interesting examination of the physiological connection between chronic stress and disease via the hypothalamic, pituitary, and adrenal glands. Accordingly, not everyone develops a debilitating health condition when regularly consuming harmful substances, even with genetic predispositions. The book’s subjects all tended to compulsively take on especially elevated levels of stress from the people around them, whether by being forced by others or from their own desire to be loved. Predisposition suggests means that genetics alone don’t predict onset, and other factors are at play, namely psychosocial factors and chronic stress. How is someone like Snoop Dogg able to smoke so much weed? It’s consistent with his public persona to smoke a lot of fat blunts, but why doesn’t he prefer a less harmful option like a weed vape? Many drink and smoke well into old age, though I’m sure many more die prematurely. Hospital patients are given morphine, but not everyone leaves with an addiction to it. I’ve also never done nearly as much research on alcohol’s effects on the body as I am with nicotine, and I still put lots of it in my body anyway. Vaping is too new to investigate the long-term health effects, whereas researchers have very clear understanding of what happens when you’re rolling down the street, smoking indo, sipping on gin and juice. Using an addictive substance doesn’t seem to guarantee a full-blown addiction.

Recovering From ACEs

I don’t have it all that bad in recovering from my ACEs. Drawing insight from the Social Justice lens on topics like oppression and privilege, it’s less difficult for me to access resources to stop the leaks because I have many intersections close to the centre of the wheel of power/privilege. I’m an able-bodied, cisgender, Asian man with light skin, living in Canada in 2023, and I benefit from proximity to whiteness in its various forms. My Christian parents had full-time jobs and provided care and comfort. I’m a dual citizen of Canada and the USA, carrying passports for both. I can read and write in English, and I had access to enough capital to pursue a post-secondary education, with which I was able to obtain meaningful work at a decent income and purchase property. (The poorest 50% make fewer than 2,800 euros in purchasing power parity per year, about $4,100 CAD, and my household income puts me in the top 10%; I’d previously read somewhere that cited it was in the 1%, but this new World Inequality Report from 2022 corrects that. Maybe the massive upward transfer of wealth from COVID has changed the balance too.) I can afford mental health plumbers like a family doctor and psychologist. I never experienced violence from gangs, police, or military. As much as I whinge about my situation, it’s humbling to know that I’ll never have it as bad as many other children around the world and throughout history. In acknowledging my privilege, I can more clearly situate myself against a global context and leave my pity party, liberating me to use said privilege to liberate people who are far more oppressed than I am. Rather than giving to charity, consider sending money to Black people as mutual aid, like Taylor McNallie, Adora Nwofor, and D Fretter, especially for Black History Month. And after the month ends too.

The human brain is wired for negativity. A friend could give you 10 compliments and one criticism, and you might forget that you were ever complimented at all. Most people would rather prevent a small loss, even if it meant they could risk it for a much larger gain. This negativity bias is even more powerful for the traumatized person who has been shown that, in real terms, the world is a dangerous place. It takes a lot of reprogramming to open the mind’s eye to see the beauty in the world; if perhaps not within most interpersonal relationships, then at least in the natural world. Nevertheless, when you gradually meet the right people and keep out the harmful ones, a mindset of hope slowly replaces the negativity. The effect is positively asymmetrical too. Perhaps there really are a lot more dangerous individuals in your daily dealings, but it only takes a few good friends to counteract their darkness. Having a single true companion by your side is able to heal a lot more than the hurt caused by the bad eggs. It feels like a cliché of wedding speeches in popular media where one of them says to the other “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I wouldn’t trade them for anything because they all led me to you.” The evolutionary helpfulness of the disproportionately negative focus of the brain has its limits, and it is far more beneficial to retrain it to see the positive, even for emotionally healthy individuals.

That’s all to say that I’m now reaching this plane of existence where I can remove the shackles of faith in the evil in people and lift my eyes to the wondrous beauty around me. I can safely trade my well-worn pessimism for an optimistic lens. And I also have to look back and weep at all of the signs of hope and the encouragement from others that I rejected. Far too many times, if someone tried to say they liked me as a person and enjoyed my company, that everything would be alright, I would pull back and wonder what kind of suspicious, ulterior motive they had, as if they were manipulating me into having positive feelings towards them. I still have trouble receiving harmless social niceties from new acquaintances like “it was nice to meet you,” but this new positive outlook is the antidote, even as I have to force it.

For my younger friends of the Generation Z, there are a lot of valid and convincing reasons to see that things are getting worse and to feel hopeless about the future. Your feelings are completely valid. The CDC says that 3 in 5 young women today are persistently sad and hopeless, the highest level in 10 years of surveys. If I lived in Ohio and a train full of dangerous chemicals exploded in a fiery blaze, I would pack my family in the car and move away as fast as possible. Leave all our belongings, maybe bring some cat food, but getting away from one of the worst ecological disasters in recent history seems okay. (Who knows what I would actually do? Watching “The Last of Us” has me thinking about post-apocalyptic scenarios.) US rail workers were recently denied paid leave along with the right to strike, and now we have this modern day Chernobyl. (Explain that, capitalists!) It seems like the fabric of society, cobbled together after the World Wars where it was agreed that civil rights should be extended to groups other than white men and that we should generally take care of each other, is unraveling. It’s sad to say, but there is a greater burden on individuals now to fend for themselves and their pods. But there are still reasons to hope.

It sounds crazy to feel hopeful. At the same time, there are still powerful structures still standing that altruistically support those that need a hand, enough that a strong counterargument could be made that we are still living in one of the most wonderful times in human history. AIDS is being cured in stem cell trials, mRNA vaccine research is being turned diseases like Multiple Sclerosis and cancer, workers’ rights and union sentiment are on the rise. There are food banks, activists risking their lives on the front lines, and the Internet to provide isolated individuals with a sense of community beyond their physical limits. I guess I’m saying I’d rather risk the heartbreak of hoping and being proven wrong than to be certain of disaster and be proven right. Hope feels like an act of resistance against the universe eventually averaging out to heat death and capitalists brazenly breaking the working class’ spirits for easier exploitation. My mind only knows to look for threats that aren’t there, so shouldn’t I at least give some equal say to the opposite, searching for reasons to hope even if there might not be any?

Killing Me Softly

There is the parable of the patient that goes to their family doctor and says “It hurts when I do this,” to which the doctor replies “Then stop doing that.” The way my personality developed was in response largely to trauma and unmanaged ADHD, and now it’s time to end a lot of those practices, like reassuring myself I have time to sort out my to-do list regardless of what my Temporal Neglect Syndrome (time blindness) tells me. The way that I exist and interact with my surroundings is part of what is killing me softly, so I’m putting an end to some of them. And vaping helps a little bit.

The vaping habit is a heavy-handed approach to managing my lower stress tolerance. It forces me to stop whatever upsetting thing I’m working on and go for a smoke break. I’ve historically accepted stress full blast, but now when I get that hot feeling in my head, I stand up and go for a walk with my vape. Stress prevention is the name of the game, and nicotine use can be more effective than my mindfulness practices. Snacking used to be my go-to, and nicotine is minimizing that. I sound like a fashion model trying to keep my weight down, I know. Do two wrongs make a right?

Hope In Action

A friend shared a tip from her therapist, which was to make an Anxiety Emergency Kit. When your brain starts to choke up and the walls start closing in, it can be hard to remember the tools you can use to get out of that situation. Since I have a weakness in down-regulating my stress and a terrible working memory, it's time I updated the list for when my vision starts to narrow.

I’ve talked recently about how I’m in the safest place of my life so far and about the process of throwing out stress from the deep freezer. The thawing effect of releasing old tensions is deeply uncomfortable. I think one of the typical outlets for this discomfort is physical activity. Since the three week ban on exercise post-vasectomy is ending soon, so I’d like to return to that soon. In the meantime, damn it’s fucking uncomfortable. Rest and relaxation are closely associated, but my experience of rest is not relaxing but has long been a painful sensation. Shaking it off is the way, and there’s a lot to shake off.

The plan is to reduce my vape dependence as the weather warms up and the de-stressing process tapers off, creating space to get my dopamine from natural and healthier sources. Using cigarettes and the disposable vape’s nicotine concentration as a starting point, smoking cessation usually follows a gradual reduction in concentration and slowing of release through nicotine patches, gums, and toothpicks.

This following list is more for my own reference, so feel free to skip the section below.

Featherweight: Up to 5% improvement in mood

• Stepping out on the patio to listen to the birds chirping.

• Healthy snacking. Veggies and hummus.

• Playing vidya games. “Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” comes out in May.

• Smiling.

• Meditating.

• Splashing my face with water.

• Drinking water.

• Sipping fizzy sugar water. Simple sugars in liquid form help the ADHD brain with self-regulation.

Lightweight: <15%

• Sitting in silence.

• Phoning a friend.

• Masturbating.

• Showering or taking a bath.

• Going for a walk. I should put my keys and earphones nearer to the door.

• Blasting my favourite music. There’s an audiophile amount of speakers and headphones in my home, but I have to be in the right mood. My roommates don’t much like the noise though.

• Wearing my night guard to bed.

• Eating a warm pastry.

• Stretching.

• Taking a nap.

• Self-massaging. Shepherd’s hook, massage gun, hockey ball, peanut roller, foot roller.

• Laying down.

• Crying. This one used to be impossible for me and not because I was such a toxically manly man. I repressed and suppressed all negative emotions and replaced them with humour. Can't run from the bad feelings forever.

• Playing with the kitties.

Middleweight: <30%

• Sexing.

• Seeing friends.

• Getting a massage.

• Working out at home. Doing yoga with my long-distance girlfriend, Trainer Jessica on Apple Fitness+.

• Seeing my therapist. It feels worse before it feels better.

• Cycling.

• Cooking.

• Engaging in hobbies. I want to get back into audio and electronics.

• Reading.

• Writing.

• Going out of town for a day or weekend.

Heavyweight: <50%

• Dancing at a night club.

• Working out at the gym. There's something special about the barbell.

• Vacationing.

Why is the biggest category only up to 50%? I don’t exactly know, but I suspect it has something to do with my depression and anxiety. Maybe it should be higher, but that’s just how I feel, I guess. I don’t know what I need to get a higher score, but that has been my empirical observation. Is it even possible? Is it just a simple attitude problem? Further research is required.

Conclusion (finally)

Phew! Thanks for making it to the end!

I’m tired of healthy coping, so I started vaping. I’ve been through some big life changes in recent times that make me feel safer than ever, and the uncomfortable process of thawing from chronic stress has me turning to a simple fix to calm my nerves. I have some ACEs, and recovery has gone well. Hope is rising! I plan to reduce my nicotine dependence as winter ends and de-stressing wraps up so I can use healthy coping strategies from my new Anxiety Emergency Kit.

Nicotine has gotten me through a very odd, three-week period filled with several highs and lows. Combined with my prolonged exposure in treating my trauma, I’m finally able to take an optimist and positive outlook. And I can finally say it:

Life is beautiful.

It took some eight months to decide if I really wanted to have this procedure. I actually wanted to get it back in November, but I wanted to wait for my schedule to quiet down before going through with it. I’ve already worked through a lot of these topics on my own, and I wanted to share the thought process for those in the family planning stage. I’m not trying to gain sympathy or complain about how hard I have it. Like any good math student, I’m showing the steps taken to arrive at my answer.

In short, why am I getting a vasectomy and deciding to never bear my own children? I don’t want to.

So many follow-up questions.

Why have children at all?

To the question of making babies, the default position is yes, you should bear your own offspring, stemming from various areas like the patriarchy, capitalism, the Christian family unit, Asian culture. There is a lot of pressure to have kids in today’s world. I understand the upside well enough, along with the recognition that seeing it and experiencing it are completely distinct realms. I've heard many new parents trying to describe the indescribable joy after seeing their newborn, a feeling that they never thought was possible. I'm certain I could feel the same. Maybe that's enough to propel a caregiver through the dark valleys of the coming years as their child gradually develops into an independent individual, in combination with all the mountain peaks of first milestones like steps, words, teeth, friendships, days at schools, performances, sleepovers, bike rides, crushes. Children *can* be an amazing addition to a family. They can provide parents with fulfillment and meaning to care for a dependent. Putting your DNA forth into future generations builds the dynasty of the greater extended family.

A lot of the time, the back and forth around what you should do as a parent centres around the inevitability of having children in the first place. There are ways out of it, through various stages of the reproductive and child-raising cycles such as contraceptives, education on sexual health, access to healthcare services like abortion, adoption, amnesty sites. The broader topic of giving the people what they need to live a fulfilling life doesn't get the same airtime.

Parenthood is something I genuinely wanted for myself and still do. However, my circumstances have eliminated the opportunity for me, and I’ve reached a state of acceptance. It feels a little tragic, but the more I think about it, I’m not even close to wanting to follow through with actually raising a child or several all the way to adulthood. I'm too tired.

What are the costs of parenthood?

Given the current economic climate, a good number of parents have told me that, for a married couple in their working years, a huge amount of support is still required in order to effectively raise kids. For couples that have lucrative salaries and unlimited, free babysitting, it seems like there's still a lot lacking in terms of having what you need to raise a little human. I've only lived in Alberta, and it seems to me that small-ish cities like Edmonton and Calgary are built in a way to maximize individuality and isolation. As far as Canadian provinces go, this one is the best suited for raising a family, yet it presents sizable challenges with regards to real estate and transportation. I would want to raise healthy children that could walk or cycle to school or the playground or to hang out with friends. Understanding my privileged position, I'm actually fairly well set up for that, having secured housing and property ownership within the inner city, rife with separated walking/cycling trails, and I can even use my ebike to go to my office on the edge of town. I have enough household income to support renting a large condo or house, so the argument of insufficient housing and transport for my pod doesn't actually stick. The problem then becomes about living too far from the people in my support system. It's like when my cats wander into a room and meow because they feel lonely. Dude, you put yourself there, and we're not even that far away.

I also want to buy a house, but I just can’t afford it for the foreseeable future. The argument for having kids is like trying to convince me to stretch myself to work multiple jobs, cut costs, and sell everything when I’m perfectly happy renting a condo or single family house. Even if the vasectomy is mostly irreversible, I could still adopt, but I don’t want to do that either.

On the other hand, there’s the perspective that perfection is the enemy of good. Some say kids don’t actually need a lot. I can concede that argument to an extent as well. However, I can say after having grown up in a house that lived that mantra on the daily, it's not a good time. There are people whose families have multiple consecutive generations of unwilling or regretful parents, coerced into raising children and simultaneously doing their best and doing a terrible job at it. There is an Anti-Natalism community for just such folks.

Childcare reaches a lot of separate areas like minimum wage, cost of living, worker protection laws, unionization, real estate, flexible working arranges like remote or hybrid models, vacation time, greed-/stag-flation. Parenting isn’t considered a real job, but anyone saying so seems to be pretty quick to judge a mother doing a bad job of it. If you posted jobs on LinkedIn for all the roles a parent assumes, such as a cook, cleaner, nurse, babysitter, tutor, therapist, mentor, life coach, chauffeur, etc., you’d find the salary requirements add up quickly. Unfortunately, in a typical heterosexual couple, childcare is the woman’s responsibility while the man goes off to make “real” money. While he could earn the majority of the income in terms of usable currency, she would be cutting far more costs than he would make, along with taking on the majority of the blame and little of the credit.

Canada has one of the longer periods allotted for paid parental leave at 40 weeks, but it's not all roses. You go on Employment Insurance and get either 55% of your regular income, up to a maximum of $638 per week for 35 weeks or $383 for 61. That feels insufficient for how costly it is to live, even prior to the current period of greed-flation.

Transportation becomes surprisingly important in a place like Calgary. Since the fundamental underpinnings of the way this city was built favours car ownership, neighbourhoods become much less livable for everyone. When kids are old enough to go outside, Calgary’s population density and urban sprawl mean that they probably live a decent drive away from things like schools and recreational facilities. It’s not always practical for a child to walk, cycle, scoot, or transit to see their friends. There are protected bike lanes downtown, but elsewhere we just have painted lines, which are somehow supposed to stop the average truck drivers in Ford F-150s which get larger, taller, and heavier every year. The average electric vehicle’s batteries effectively double the weight of new cars and trucks, increasing the amount of kinetic energy brought into collisions [remember E = (1/2)mv^2?], making collisions more deadly. I barely want to drive myself around most days.

I could move to a more livable city, but I’d leave behind my support network, which I’ve spent years crafting and investing time and energy into. Not only would I no longer have them in my life, I would also lose a community that I meaningfully contributed to as well.

There’s also the emotional toll of parenthood. If you don't already have a strong sense of self (🙋🏻‍♂️ guilty), babies only make that harder. It's easy to take on the role of caregiver, but it takes a lot of courage and philosophizing, sitting silently with the question hanging in the air without rushing towards an answer. With kids, there is no silence or time to think, or at least it becomes much harder for a tired person.

At least I’ll save money on condoms.

Common Suffering

There's the unfortunate undercurrent of jealousy from some parents of newborns when they see a childless married couple. It's not even that well-disguised because people have said "you guys should have kids so we can be in the same position and you can know how hard it is." ...wut

Who are the people asking/forcing/pressuring me to have kids? Everyone and no one. People ask, and understandably so because I’ve said for some time that it’s what I wanted and was planning to start trying in 2022.

What about freezing your genetic material? You want me to donate these amazing genes and great smile to a sperm bank? Nah, I’m good.

What If I've Already Been a Parent?

I’ve had to parent and re-parent myself, along with a few close friends and family members. It’s like some classes where teachers/professors don’t do an amazing job of explaining the course material, and after begging and pleading for them to do better, you realize that you have to pick up the slack and take the initiative to teach the material to yourself and your fellow classmates. I’ve already passed the final exams for the required courses and gotten my Parenting degree, so why are you talking like my education wasn’t valid and that I have to redo the entire program? If you want me to bear new children to raise, now we’re talking about me going on to graduate studies, which I don’t have any interest in or energy for.

Slave owners forced their slaves to have children because it meant more free labour, as well as another lever to pull when they wanted to manipulate them into a weaker position. It benefits employers to know that you’re a parent because that gives them more leverage. It’s harder to leave a job for better working conditions when you have another mouth to feed and your risk tolerance is lower, so parents have to accept worse treatment and less pay to an extent.

Solidarity with Women And Access to Abortion

Getting a vasectomy is an act of solidarity with women, who are generally expected to carry the burdens of birth control. Women get IUDs, take hormone pills, buy condoms, consult with their doctors, get tested for sexual transmitted infections, while men complain that a condom doesn't feel as good. If women do get pregnant and decide to abort the fetus, they face protests by conservative groups who want to subject them to a modern form of slavery. There are many examples of pro-lifers who spend their free time protesting at abortion clinics, shouting abuse and horrible obscenities at vulnerable women, while using the abortion services themselves when they "need" it. Good for me but not for thee.

If people really want to reduce the number of abortions, they could do so through many simple and low-cost methods. Sex education on how to use contraception correctly. What it means to be sexually healthy and mature in a physical relationship by understanding and communicating your needs and boundaries. Basic understanding of gender identity and sexual orientation besides the current model of "ew, that's weird." Handing out free condoms.

In the US, 85% of abortions happen before 9 weeks, and they look nothing like what you might have seen on an anti-abortion protester's picket sign.

A clump of cells is not a child, and abortion isn't murder. Otherwise you could claim tax credits with the government for a dependant for at least a couple months, even if you have a miscarriage. By getting a vasectomy, the issue becomes moot.

Closing Thoughts

The prospect of having children was one of my motivations to get my mental health in order. I could see that I was on a bad path, and I wanted to get my shit together before subjecting my hypothetical kids to the burden of having a father who was mentally and emotionally unhealthy. A person should want to care for themselves for their own sake. Sometimes parents try to use kids to fix things like their failing marriages, and even when there’s conscious decision made by consenting adults use kids as a relationship Band-Aid, it suddenly becomes too sensitive a topic to confront after the deed is done, and it’s quickly and implicitly excused/forgiven/accepted.

There are amazing families that inspire hope for humanity. If you want to have kids and you have all of the means to do it well, then please feel encouraged to do so. Even given what I’ve spent so much many words explaining above, if I still had what it took to procreate, I would do it. Everyone has their own opinions about what a family is, what it means to be a parent, how to pass knowledge and wisdom to a child facing hardship. We can all do whatever we want, at the philosophical and practical levels, so go for it. This is how I feel on this topic, and this is how I’m living out my values.

A few people have grilled me about whether I’m really sure if I want to have a vasectomy. If only that same energy were applied to those that want to want children.

Summary

Once upon a time I really wanted to make my own babies. Now that I’ve counted the cost, I realized I don’t want to to anymore, and I’m going to have a medical procedure to ensure it. There is a lot of pressure to make babies, and it’s a costly venture in many respects, from money, sleep, real estate, transportation, mental health, identity. There are parents who are jealous of the childless and want them to enter into the same suffering. I’ve already had to parent myself and close friends/family, and I’m tired. A vasectomy is an act of solidarity with women who have to carry the burden of contraception, and it negates the need for an abortion later on.

I’m the most established and secure I’ve ever been, and it’s relieving. I had a moment the morning of New Year's Day, sun peeking through the windows while I was still lying in bed. “I’m finally safe,” I thought. I've identified with my suffering for so long that I scarcely know how to thrive. It's only been a couple weeks, and I already feel the changes from accepting this new reality. I’m too tired to make resolutions, so taking a passive approach. Looking forward for the year, I have a few theories that would be cool to see.

Theory One: Resting

As a decision-making aid, whenever I have to choose between doing more or less, my default choice will theoretically be to rest. I've been proposing this idea at least annually for the past decade, but this year, one difference is I have a better understanding of why my self-regulation has historically been so poor. Armed with the knowledge of ADHD and Attachment Theory, the power of Adderall's amphetamines, and the benefits of some eight years of therapy, rest is starting to become reality. I used to have several large projects on the go, each of which would randomly yet regularly call for me to invest Just A Bit More® time and effort now to save some in the long run; a stitch in time saves nine. Now that most of those projects are closed out and their documents archived, it's time to pack up and go home. The tiredness I'm currently feeling is probably compounded by the damage I’ve done to my body with all the drinking, late nights, chronic stress.

My sleep cycle is shifting from the strict six hours starting at midnight to a more fluid seven and a half, starting anywhere from 10 PM and ending somewhere between 5 AM and 7:30 AM. I'm also napping a lot more, especially on weekends. It's not ideal for sleep hygiene, but I don't think my body is complaining so much about the extra slumber.

Theory Two: Reading Books

One hope I had after graduating from university was to spend more time reading books. I tend to find enough interesting analysis online from tech pundits, but long-form blogs aren’t quite at the same calibre as well-researched books. Being in a heightened state of chronic stress didn't really allow for intake of quality reading material. Throw in unmanaged ADHD too, why not? It was pretty discouraging whenever I'd somehow be able to force myself to sit down long enough to crack open a book, eventually to find myself merely passing my eyes over the same paragraph 10 times without taking in any of its information. Alas, reading books and actually absorbing their contents is possible and practical again, and it feels great. There's only so much internet content a person can and should consume, but how can you avoid doomscrolling with the way our societies are shifting during this pandemic? Reading books feels like a rebellious act of self-care against the vicious capitalist cycle of working too hard and stewing in chronic stress.

In following through with my commitment to reading books, I'm keeping a promise I made to Past Jon. My therapist once mentioned a technique about rescheduling an emotion when you didn't want to deal with it in the moment. She said that by returning to it at a later time, not only do you perform the beneficial act of actually feeling the emotion, but you also build trust with yourself; building accountability by following through on commitments. That concept simply did not land at the time. Why should I have to build trust with myself? Reading is allowing me to appreciate what that means. It’s certainly preferable to the alternative of betraying myself.

Theory Three: Moving My Body

One of the ways the stress cycle manifested in me was through either hyperfixating on work/hobbies or becoming a couch potato. So I could either sit for hours at my desk or stare blankly at the TV, play vidya, and blast music. One result of relying too heavily on these coping strategies was a stiffening of my body, merely shifting the problem from my mind to my body. Consequently, I developed a monthly routine of seeing a physiotherapist and massage therapist, regularly maxing out my health insurance and health spending account each year for these two services before paying out of pocket. Additionally, I had a recurring appointment to go dancing at the club most weekends, but that isn't really an option in Calgary anymore. As much as I might want to, and for all the new initiatives in the local music scene, the dots simply aren't connecting, so I have to find some other outlet for physical exercise, like yoga, ebike, walks, gym. I'm seeing success with limiting exercise into blocks of 10 minutes at a time. Sharing activity data with a few people with the Apple Watch has been surprisingly fun and motivating.

Theory Four: Seeing Friends and Chosen Family

I'm fortunate to have some very special people in my life, and I want to keep up the dates filled with coffee, ramen, laughter, heart-to-hearts. This theory has been going strong for a while now, and I think the trend will continue this year.

Theory Five: Reducing Stress Intake

The name of the game is to reduce stress intake. It has been less than practical for me to avoid or prevent it from entering my system, at least until this year. I've developed a new mantra when it comes to taking on more stress: “that's so pre-23.” I got some practice in 2022 by snoozing some decently important projects to the following months, so I hit the ground running in 2023. I've always had the ability to say no, but the harder part I was lacking was putting my foot down even when my rejection was rejected. I would say no, the other party would also say no, and after a few exchanges back and forth, I would eventually fold. Reminding myself that buckling is “so pre-23” is that little extra bit of sauce that helps me get from “no” to “abso-fucking-lutely not.”

From Theory Two: Reading More Books, I sat down to read for a decent chunk of my holiday break. I unsuccessfully tried to read a few books outside of my usual genres. I don’t know why but psychology books are just doing it for me lately, so I picked up “When the Body Says No” by Gabor Maté. You’ll recall him from my ADHD reading as the author of “Scattered Minds,” who was especially poignant when discussing Attachment Theory. Fun fact, now that I'm certain I don't want to raise children, I'm planning to get a vasectomy. For the interested, my doctor pointed me to this clinic, and I've already submitted a request for an appointment: https://intramed.ca. I encourage men that have sex with women to consider it. Another topic for another day.

"When The Body Says No" is an exploration of the connection between chronic stress and disease. “The research literature has identified three factors that universally lead to stress: uncertainty, the lack of information and the loss of control.” Central to the discussion is the body's stress response, managed by the hypothalamus, pituitary, and adrenal axis (HPA). It's the critical link between the psychological and physiological realms, and the book essentially serves as an intro to the field of psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), the study of the connections between the brain, nervous system, and immune system. There are some surprising patterns amongst patients with certain illnesses, and the work is ultimately a call for more research in the area connecting psychosocial factors with physiological illness.

Now that modern humans don't have to fight off animals in the wild, the same stress response meant to save yourself from physical danger is now used for navigating softer ones, like social exclusion and unkind words. Similarly, animals use anger, in the form of growls and physical displays and such, to prevent unnecessary injury. Failing to mount the trauma responses (fight, flight, freeze, faun) results in stress. This book forced me to examine the impacts of suppressing my anger and redirecting it at myself instead of the people who caused it. Ouch, man. Rude.

De-repressing Anger

Since the dawn of time, I've semi-consciously suppressed my anger. One of the chapters of the book touches on attachment. (Of course it does. We should call him Gabor Mattaché.) The idea behind suppressing anger is that the youngling seeks to preserve their relationships, even if temporarily or artificially, with their attachment figures by redirecting the full heat of their rage. That fire must land somewhere, and unknowingly, the child typically ends up burning their own hands in the process. Even at a young age, I realized that I couldn’t keep going if I was constantly processing all of the excess anger typical of dysfunctional relationships, so I simply put it away in cold storage.

I’m going to highlight an interaction with an old friend. They were going through some tough times in their personal life, and after fucking around, they were finding out the consequences of their actions. During this time, I tried to be a good friend, staying nearby while most of their other friends turned their backs. That was all well and good for a time until their struggles started to grow, and then my support started to look more like a lifesaver in a heavy storm than simply a friend being empathetic during tough times. They started clinging to me, desperately trying to get me to hang out with them every day, every weekend, and this carried on for months. I was going through my own struggles, so while I enjoyed their company enough to escape my situation occasionally, they were hanging on for dear life. I didn't see the tentacles slowly wrapping around me.

It slowly became clear that this person was taking advantage of my generosity. I should have gotten mad and set stronger boundaries. However, since I had completely disarmed this particular emotional tool, I just let it keep happening. As a result, I was dragged down along with them, and I had to find out the hard way that I needed to not only let them go but to run for the hills. In failing to do so, I only enabled their behaviour and worsened my own problems, which remained unsolved for longer than necessary. A similar situation repeated itself in 2022, but at least this time, I was able to say “no,” and eventually, “absolutely not.” At the same time, since I was slow to respond, my body had say “probably not,” but it was still good enough as a combined response.

At a minimum, I need to pace myself when it comes to the emotional labour of reconnecting with anger. Recall Theory One: Resting. In the past, I’ve delved headlong into long-term issues that needed patience and time to fully resolve. I'm going to leave the questions alone and keep my heart open until the universe presents the answers. Maybe I still feel that way because I never knew how to wield my anger in a healthy way. I already feel better as I write about it even a little, even though it's so upsetting. Nature is healing itself.

Wrap It Up

I'm the safest I've ever been. From this new environment, there are some theories crystallizing for 2023, such as resting, reading, seeing loved ones, minimizing chronic stress, and reconnecting with anger.

Reading "When The Body Says No" showed me that the child with insecure attachment preemptively shuts down anger at others and instead redirects that anger at themselves to protect their interpersonal relationships. I'm reminded of the time a close friend took advantage of my generosity, but I recently used anger to protect myself. My body also had to say "probably not," but based on my family history, any anger response from me is better than nothing. Let's see how the other threeories pan out this year.

2022 has been the year of grief, eh? And thankfully it’s not just me. Grieving all the familial strife. Spending this summer trying to make up for the summer we lost in 2021. I’ve been grieving my poor relationship with myself, which necessitated a break from work to practise intensive self-care. Having to treat myself as two separate entities in a trench coat, the brain and the body, to trick people into thinking that I’m a functioning grown-up. In ways both large and small, it’s like a lot of my old coping strategies had finally reached their limits, and I had to do a full system reboot to take on life again as an autonomous adult. Spent a lot of time accepting brutal truths and having faith/extrapolating that I’d be okay on the other side. Finding out that even after you complete a major challenge that you thought you couldn’t win, you just have to keep going; if you watched “Stutz” on Netflix recently, they’d refer to it as putting another pearl on the string. Grappling with being diagnosed with ADHD and managing the overgrowth of its unmanagement. Add the cherry on top of having my ebike stolen. 😭

But fear not! I had three significant events this year, and I accepted that they were well beyond my control; even pessimistically suspected I would take the L on all three. However, they’re all wrapping up in my favour, and I’m kinda speechless (he said, with much more speech to follow). Humbled and grateful. I don’t much like to gamble the way some of my friends do in the casino, but it’s inevitable with one’s own destiny. Control is an illusion, and anything else is just anxiety. Alas, I got lucky, and I have at least three happy endings to the year.

Got our cats this year, my kitty Walter taught me a lesson recently. She’s a little ‘fraidy cat that loves cuddles, so within the span of a few seconds, she will come near for pets and brace herself to run away when you approach to provide the pets she asked for (?!!?!!??). And it turns out that both her genetic and adopted cat dads are like that too. So much of my survival has been marked by excessive fear. Foreboding joy. At the most generous, it’s a sad and unfortunate way of walking through the world. At its worst, the privileged will never be able to truly enjoy anything, like the guests at the White Lotus. Walter, she has everything provided for her, like delicious cat food, places to sleep, a cat tree that her dad designed and built, so she is objectively safe and cared for. And despite her natural timidity, she has plenty of brave moments where she explores the space because she’s curious about what Dad is tinkering with today.

In response to my excessive fear, I have to essentially force myself to feel positive emotion. Anhedonia, or the absence of pleasure, is a feature of depression. For example, these winter holidays have brought out the lovelier emotions of gratitude and connection amongst my chosen family. At one such gathering, the focus of conversation moved towards some of my more admirable traits, and it felt so overwhelming I jokingly turned to walk out of the room. Someone asked me why I was running away, and I replied that because of my special brand of family dysfunction, love was always mixed with deep pain, so I initially distrust positive emotion. And sadly, awareness of this shortcoming isn’t enough to make it go away. Some of you never grew up around manipulative abusers, and it shows. (And I’m happy that you never had to go through such an experience, and I hope it stays that way for the rest of your days.) It might seem like I'm so egocentric that I’m fishing for more compliments, but it's like a mental block that’s been programmed into my brain to protect myself from similar pain. Forcing myself to relax enough to receive praise is an odd exercise. Awkward af, but it’s working. I’m not in that environment anymore, so it’s okay to retire this defensive tactic and replace it with the highly advanced technique of “taking a compliment and saying thank you.”

On a lighter note, one of the themes of this season has been to “do it before I forget.” There’s a pinball machine of competing interests that I consider before doing anything important because of perfectionism, and one of the non-idealities of this workaround of “doing it before I forget” is that it indulges my time blindness. There are proper channels for managing my forgetfulness, detailed back in one of my ADHD posts, but it's tedious constantly having to adhere to it. There is a class of tasks that can and should be done in the moment, no matter how annoying or wasteful it might seem at the time. Having not grown up using one, I am still training myself to place dirty dishes directly into the dishwasher rather than the sink. However, the dishwasher isn’t always promptly cleared after the previous cycle, so things build up in the sink. It’s not a big deal, but at least I can scrape the dish’s contents into the rubbish and give it a rinse. In my experience, I’ve never really come back to do it later, so it’s best to “do it before I forget.”

Even when items do get properly scheduled and prioritized, one of the things I hate is when a to-do list item lives in my head for too long time, which is probably a lot shorter than most people's tolerance. I categorize it into the “Important and Not Urgent” quadrant, and it sits there for weeks or months, with periodic reminders that I should eventually get around it when I have time. The right decision is almost always to keep snoozing it yet again, but then it creates a new problem where I want to artificially bump up its priority just to clear it from my mind. Familiarity breeds contempt. Writing for the blog has fallen into that category for *checks notes* six weeks?! Damn. Maybe in the end, prioritizing and snoozing tasks is the right thing for a person with an executive functioning disorder and limited capacity to self-regulate who gets busy, but it annoys me. Surely I must get the timing right on most of the important things. I pay my bills on time.

Nevertheless, it feels like I’m getting better at moving at my own pace. It’s taken years, but I’m finally at a place where I actually stop to listen to my body before making a decision. (It feels like I’ve made this pronouncement several times before, but if you just let me have this moment, I think I might actually stop declaring it.) One central improvement seems to include having conversations with myself. Asking what’s so important that I can’t take a few seconds to myself has been simple and surprisingly effective. I’m a classic people-pleaser, and the healthier, opposite side of the coin is autonomy. Maybe I’ve stopped catastrophizing because my environment has also quieted down. Alas, I’m trying to choose myself first.

I started a habit of a minute of daily meditation this year, and I finally ended the reminders after about 180 days. I’ve heard it said that it takes people around 60 days to build a habit, whereas those with ADHD take a lot longer. I’ve been going without the notifications for a few weeks now, and it’s quite nice. Every day isn’t perfect, but I’ve finally developed the muscle memory to start a meditation when I’m feeling stressed. I learned that the key to fully benefiting from the meditation is to control the flow of air through my mouth. That sounds rather obvious, but it stands in contrast to the ideas of pushing out my belly, relaxing my shoulders, lifting my head, etc. Such movements still occur, but it helps to know which one to start with and focus on. After 20 breaths is when I start to notice the physical relaxation. For most of those 180 days, I had been only practising the deep breathing for 1 minute with about 6 or 7 breaths, so it’s one of those things where I just have to keep going until it works. It seems tedious to stop whatever I’m doing and hyperventilate for a couple minutes, but what’s so important that I can’t stop to take 20 breaths?

In addition to going at my own pace and meditating, a friend reminded me that all of this writing should be for an audience of me. At the start of my blogging, I outlined that its purpose was to be a public diary, to help me flesh out ideas and allow others to join along for the ride, but I lost my way for a bit. Remembering that has been sobering. Then the question quickly turns to why it takes such a high word count for me to be kind to myself. Ugh.

I actually feel a little hopeful for 2023. I tend to have about one crisis per year, so I'm above average for this solar cycle. Not going to say that this is going to be my year, but I think it's going to suck less than 2022.

Summary

2022 has been the Year of Grief. Three life events, and three happy endings. Managing unmanaged ADHD. Eliminating excessive fear and forcing myself to feel positive emotion. Moving at my own pace autonomously. Meditating for 20 breaths. Writing for myself. Feeling a little hopeful for the next year, but don’t jinx it.

Maybe I‘ll try to be brave, just like Walter.

Spent the last week renting out the studio apartment, and now I’m just trying to return to a quiet and boring life. Despite the eventful schedule, I managed to reach a point of happiness on Thursday. Recognizing how much I had on my plate early in the week, my mind picked up on a stressful feeling and pushed back against taking on any more. There’s probably some aspect of childhood trauma that increased my baseline stress to a much higher level, so I get uncomfortable when my stress is low because it’s an unfamiliar place. What a wonderful way to live, right? Resting and recharging have always felt itchy, almost to the point of painful, which has been…confusing.

My environment needs to be at least somewhat calm in order for me to be calm, which isn’t a controversial statement. It makes sense to be stressed when times are stressful, and it similarly makes little sense to be stressed during a peaceful period unless you factor in some sort of traumatic response. I developed anxiety from living in a dysfunctional home, so it’s not so surprising that I now present with both the hyperactive and inattentive forms of ADHD. Danger was always lurking somewhere in the room, planning a jump-scare after I let my guard down, so I have a skillset around dropping everything to attend to an urgent threat. It’s taken time and effort to create a quiet and peaceful life for myself, but I’m finally getting there.

A therapist shared an analogy where they picked up a grape with their fingers and asked how much juice I would expect to be squeezed out in the simple process of grabbing it. I said “None,” and they said I was right. Then they asked how much juice would come out if someone had first peeled the skin off the grape and then picked it up. They said that’s what trauma does to a person. All of my experiences should be viewed through the lens of someone being extremely sensitive, and it would appear that most people do not go through life this way. Being told to just “let things roll off my back” or “grow thicker skin” have proven unfruitful. Not news to anyone who’s read this blog for more than a month.

I recently passed Day 150 of meditation using my habit-building app. One of the most beneficial aspects of meditation for me has been the decoupling of the stress response from non-stressful events. Mindfulness doesn’t fix the problems directly, but it is an enabler of the solution. If you don’t stop to breathe and survey the landscape, you won’t notice the problems until they get much larger and become harder to fix. And the fix for my anxiety is exposure therapy. In my experience, sitting in silence to rest and recharge is not harmful to me like it once was. Hurray!

The ADHD Evidence Project

I’ve gone through the ADHDevidence.org website a few times, and honestly, writing about it feels tedious at this point, but you may not be surprised by someone with ADHD trying to quit a project early. Alas, allow me to talk at least a little about this wonderful resource.

It’s pretty cool that there’s a website that has all the robust evidence, indexed and summarized in an easy-to-read format. It is easy to share with anyone who suspects they have or someone they know has ADHD, and it’s got enough quality material to sway a person’s opinion and facilitate further research. I had a close friend also read “Scattered Minds” recently, and they could not relate to the experiences at all, though it was important for them to understand for the sake of their family member and friends who have ADHD. I got a strong hint from a friend’s suggestion earlier this year and from relating to ADHD memes on Reddit for months, but imagine how much time could have been saved and unnecessary suffering could have been avoided if someone could have shared the ADHD Evidence consensus statement with me. Now you know, so pass it on.

There are 206 statements based on current research. For my own records, the ones that jumped out at me were 18, 57, 59, 61, 65, 66, 77, 79, 88, 96 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 117, 128, 129, 130, 132, 140, 142, 144, 145, 149, 207. Here are the top three that I felt resonated hard.

61. A Swedish national register cohort study of over 540,000 people found a dose-response relationship between cumulative indicators of adversity in the family and ADHD. A death in the family increased the subsequent likelihood of ADHD by 60%. Substantial parental substance abuse, criminality, or psychiatric disorder each more than doubled the likelihood as did residential instability and household public assistance (Bjorkenstam et al., 2018).

My dad’s mom passed away I think in like 1998. A parent is less capable of parenting when grieving the death in the family, which in my dad’s case was his parent. I’m not in a position to diagnose, but I suspect he also suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which certainly didn’t help my chances. We’re not Swedish, but I think the concept carries over mostly.

105. A meta-analysis found that children with ADHD had medium-to-large impairments in socializing with peers as measured by rejection/likability, popularity, and friendships (61 studies, over 24,000 children). They also had moderate impairments in social skills such as sharing, cooperating, turn-taking, reciprocity (68 studies, over 148,000 children), and social-information processing, such as recognizing social cues, identifying problems, generating solutions, and avoiding biases (23 studies, over 3750 children) (Ros and Graziano, 2018).

I’ve always wondered why I was so socially awkward, and if you know me even a little, you probably have as well. My pendulum swings from giving people both too much and too little attention. My emotions are too strong. I like people too much, my fear of rejection is beyond. I’ve had to work hard on this one while I watched the people around me getting along just fine with less effort.

132. A study of over 36,000 people from the U.S. reported that ADHD increased the risks for problem gambling, spending too much money, reckless driving, and quitting a job without a plan for what to do next (Bernardi et al., 2012).

I have trouble self-regulating. I need lots of external assistance, so I should just accept that; would that be considered externally-regulating or unregulated? Yes, I certainly try to use the healthier coping mechanisms like exercise and meditation, but damn. People used to be terrified driving with me, and I always thought it was just their own squeamishness. Then a family member confronted me while on a drive out to the mountains, and I’ve slowed down ever since.

A term you may have heard in casual conversation is when a person says they have an “addictive personality.” I’m not an expert on the topic, but I think addiction resides at a level deeper than the realm of personality. People of all personality types can struggle with addiction. Like so many problems with mental health, it’s more of a function of deep emotional pain, but we could probably pull out a nugget of truth from the “addictive personality” camp. Traits that are part of your identity enjoy a special immunity from commentary or criticism. There are protected characteristics that make you a unique individual, important stuff listed in acts and charters covering equality and anti-discrimination, like disability, race, age, gender, sex, sexual orientation, religion, pregnancy, class, political opinion, marital status, national/ethnic origin, among other things. (I wonder if there is a pnemonic device to easily remember them all. I got as far as DRAGS, but when you look up all the characteristics protected by legislation in even a few countries, the list becomes quite long, which is a good problem for someone who compulsively tries to make acronyms out of groups of words for his own mild amusement.) And thankfully, younger generations have been socialized better than previous ones to not attack such aspects of a person’s identity. Addiction does not define a person. Similarly, if a human being struggles with a dependency, it should be shielded from judgement. One misunderstanding of addiction is that the person makes a conscious to engage with it while failing to acknowledge the pain underneath driving it. It can happen to anyone, and it’s not nearly as simple as simply pulling up your bootstraps and crawling out.

With ADHD, the brain isn’t fully developed. If such a brain then has an increased risk for problem gambling, spending too much money, reckless driving, and quitting a job without a plan for what to do next, then the Harm Reduction mentality would say it’s better that they’re alive and not dead, even with the addictions. To the existential question, what’s the meaning of life? It’s anything that keeps a person going.

Anyways, this brings me to my main point.

Functioning

Objectivity versus Subjectivity (aka Sobjectiversusity)

One of the curious aspects of mental health is the objective and subjective measures of said health, and a person’s ability to function within society is one of the more objective measures. Surely, we want everyone to improve as time progresses, but there are peaks and valleys like anything else. So even with the best therapist suited for your personality and therapeutic goals, having some external bar to compare against helps to contextualize the sometimes wild swings from the relative scales.

Functioning is an objective measure in the same way that cheese can be hard. Subjectively, all of my productivity with home chores starts with refilling my Brita filter carafe. If I’m trying to scrub the bathroom, I have to go out to the kitchen to refill the water filter. Why am I like this? It probably has to do with knocking out an easy task to get a quick hit of dopamine, and though there are probably other ways of getting the ball rolling that might be more efficient, this system is functioning for me right now. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, to be sure, but I suppose the downside is what happens when I’m unable to refill the carafe. Heaven forbid.

In addition to the objective and subjective components, Time is a critical piece to the functioning measurement. How well are you coping compared to six months ago? For some reason, six months is a magical number that appears in numerous areas. Your performance is measured against that of your demographic cohort within the last six months. It’s a reasonable system to compare against the average, but it’s not a perfect metric, certainly.

Notice how, in the screenshots above, the DSM-5 mentions both functioning and time within the first sentences on ADHD. There’s probably a strong, empirical reason behind the specific time frame of six months, but who knows what it is? I’d guess that most people get over their problems in that time, or maybe that’s how long it takes for one being to notice behavioural changes in those around them.

And how is that working out for you?

Functioning is also a measure unique to what each individual wants out of their present and future conditions. That is, you create your own goals. Every once in a while, I might ask myself if I’m living the life I’d like to live right now. Well, I’d personally like to own and live in a detached, single-family house in a mixed-use neighbourhood, but the markets for employment, real estate, and urban design have different ideas for people like me. Or do they? Perhaps if I really got my shit together, I could make a lot of sacrifices and buy a house that I can afford. It wouldn’t be anywhere near a city, I might have to sell a few Apple devices, but I’d have a house. Then I could tick the checkbox on my Mental Health Report Card that says I’m functioning, yes? But how could I be functioning when I don’t live anywhere near the people I want to spend time with? Or if I’m not in a walkable community? I would have space for my favourite possessions, to engage in my hobbies, and even for loved ones to come by and sleep over. But how often would I see my friends? Maybe I don’t need other people to check the boxes on my report card, which also happens to be an inevitable part of adult life. Everyone kind of goes their own way, even if they all try to stick together, so I should set my goals accordingly. I’ll stick to renting a condo for now and then renting a house in the near future, but who knows? Future Jon might have different goals than I.

Working Out Your Core

Is there a set of core responsibilities a person has to fulfill in order to qualify as functional? Supposing there were, it probably includes some of the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. There are the physiological needs, then safety, belonging and love, esteem, cognitive, aesthetic, self-actualization, transcendence. My immigrant parents were probably more concerned with my physiological needs like food and shelter than my safety or esteem. Since we touched on addiction earlier, there are people suffering from a substance dependency who are said to be “functional,” as they can still fulfill most of their responsibilities, chores, errands, tasks. My Adderall prescription is probably creating a physical dependence, but I’ve never felt better. There was a time when I would have said that I was functioning even without the medication, so I probably simply had to make up the difference in neurotransmitters some other way. Everyone’s circumstances are so wildly different, even for a single specimen over time, that it seems somewhat pointless to enforce a common measure. Necessarily, functioning doesn’t have an absolute core set of measures that can be used against everyone, which seems like pretty good news.

Peer Evaluations

As unique as an individual’s definition of functioning can be, your neighbours can still have a say. There are those who are in denial, lying to themselves to cope. Kids these days call each other out by saying stuff like “cope,” “seethe,” “smoke more copium,” which is pretty hilarious and reasonable given they’re the social media generation. When it comes to group dynamics, your ability to function shouldn’t violate another person’s ability to do the same. Note the differences in meaning between the words “prosocial,” “asocial,” and “anti-social.” Does an action benefit the social group, harm it, or is it neutral? Most people say they’re being anti-social when they really mean asocial. Wanting to stay home instead of going out to the big party means you’re being asocial. Attempting to overthrow the government in reaction to policies that protect the wider group against an international health crisis could be argued to be antisocial. Social justice is a prosocial means to allow everyone to function equally, whether it goes by the name of feminism, Black Lives Matter, queer rights, or any of many causes. It asserts that there are people who have been unfairly given far more resources and capacity to function than others, often stolen and for many generations. Thus, taking back those rights is correcting an injustice, which is not the same as prioritizing your own rights over those of others. Seeing gay people kiss on TV is not quite as offensive as the lynchings, erasure, and disproportionate imprisonment of queer folk. Young voters in America between the ages of 18 and 29 showed up big to vote in midterm elections this week, standing up for social issues like equality for everyone and putting the Red Wave out to sea. It’s nice having prosocial neighbours who recognize that when everyone is allowed to function and participate in society, then we all win more than if we only priotize a few in-groups.

As for me? Seven months after I had my mental breakdown, I am functioning again. I don’t have the energy left to spell out everything on my Mental Health Report Card, but rest assured that most of it is checked off. Some of the focuses on the Report Card are shifting these days, which makes sense given the transitional period I find myself in. I’ve already written at length on this topic, so you probably don’t want to hear any more on it for a while. 😛

Wrap It Up

So that’s it for the ADHD topic as a central focus of my writing. I’ve done some reading on the disorder, implemented plans to mitigate its effects on my functioning, and I’m ready to close it off and kiss it goodbye. Thanks for sticking along with me as I did this deep dive for the past few months. I’m sure most aren’t going to need the information, but I hope it’s been helpful for the few that suffer from it or who have a close friend or family member with it. If you have burning questions that go deeper than what I’ve covered in print, then feel free to contact me privately.

I am self-regulating. Since starting work at the beginning of September, I had three quiet weeks and then two massive weeks. As such, I am pulling back and saying no to new commitments. I’m back to my full salary, full-time work, full-time life.

Canadian Thanksgiving came and went just last week, and I had a mini crash of energy then, which wasn’t as bad as it sounds. At my company, you can either take the day as a statutory holiday, or you can work it and bank the hours for a different day off around Christmas. I was on good behaviour for about two months straight, and after deciding to take the day to rest, I unravelled pretty hard. Went out dancing on the Friday, but I only had one drink. Then it was two straight days of hyperfixation on hobbies, forgetting to eat, all the stereotypical ADHD problems. Didn’t go outside, had disorganized play with computers and video games, let the chores pile up as my muscles cramped from working at the desk or on the couch too long. On the plus side, one of my wired speakers can now also operate as a wireless speaker, my smart light bulb responds more reliably than before, and I can play Nintendo GameCube and Wii games on my Wii U. (My controversial take: the Wii U is a better console than the Switch, aside from the new games. Fight me.)

I know, my big confession is that I indulged in hobbies on a long weekend. What a monster. What caught me off guard was just how severe it was and how long it lasted. But once I got it out of my system, I was able to resume my normal functioning. I hadn’t been in that kind of headspace since before the spring. This whole autumn season has been quite unusual compared to the last 30, so the hope is that I won’t struggle with keeping balance moving forward.

So that’s the personal update. Onto the main event.

I’m not sure if this is still true, but a few weeks back, when you took the C-Train on the portion connecting the northwest of Calgary to downtown, there was this massive banner on a building that said:

How do you go back to the way things were?

You don’t.

[edit 2022-11-12: managed to snap a picture of the banner on a recent trip on the train, so adding it here.]

It’s true, but it’s hilarious to me how stark and aggressive it is, especially for all the remaining oil and gas workers taking the train to work into downtown every morning for who-knows-how-long that banner has been up. If you don’t live in an area run by essentially a single industry, then perhaps you may not be able to appreciate the mental gymnastics performed and logical fallacies used by people in said industry, solely to justify their own salaries. It’s not enough that they out-earn people with far more education and training because of the supply and demand of that market, but apparently they need the oxygen to be taken from every other sector in order to artificially boost their own, cutting taxes and social services. Eventually and appropriately, when the market suddenly devalues their job and they’re laid off, it’s completely unfair and some liberal politician is the sole culprit and needs to have death threats sent to them over Twitter and stuck on the back of their spotless pickup trucks. Then they’ll complain that the social assistance, the ones that their employers and coworkers voted to defund, somehow doesn’t have enough funds to support them. Somehow everyone and everything needs to stop and Time itself needs to be reversed just so they can enjoy the good ol’ days, which, in Alberta’s case, was a once-in-a-lifetime dynasty that lasted 40 years. We can’t go back to the way things were. I think the banner was hung on the SAIT building, a technical school which admittedly has a vested interest in training students for future jobs, but still, Chad move. A stronger wake up call than the average cup of coffee.

Aside from enjoying the schadenfreude of dunking on O&G workers, there’s probably a lesson in that banner for the rest of us. I’m entering into this new season of accepting new realities. There are probably some truths floating around in my head that are still pending board review before being approved and integrated into my broader existence, so let’s follow the banner’s call and look at some of them.

One of those truths is that I’m in a transitional phase. Back in the spring, I mentioned that a lot of things were suddenly very different, but I don’t think I’ve exactly hit the next stage of stability and equilibrium yet. It feels like when you drive in a city with a ring road surrounding it and you’re passing through one of the four corners. At full speed, which is at least 10 km/h over the speed limit if you’re in a major Canadian city, you could settle into a curve for more than 10 seconds. Thusly, I have accepted that the road isn’t straight anymore but that I haven’t hit the next straight yet. I am still in the corner, in a prolonged state of change. Better than a state of carnage, I suppose.

Here are some aspects of this transitional phase:

• I went from taking my ebike almost everywhere all summer to now a mix of car and pedal bike. It is taking time to develop the muscles. I may loop the bus back into the mix in the winter, but we’ll see.

• I used to hit the gym for 1.5 hours on almost 5 days a week, and now I’m at a more realistic 45 minutes at 3 days a week. Got a day job.

• With the reduced activity, I am gaining a bit of weight, which is normal. Additionally, knowing that people with ADHD are more likely to have eating disorders and to be obese, I need to give myself a lot more credit. I used to compare myself with the average person, but I need to accept where I fit in the larger picture. There’s probably a similar effect for people with trauma.

• The days are getting shorter and colder, so shifting to sweater weather. Almost my entire wardrobe is designed for it, so bring on the hoodies with dropped shoulders and the oversized crewnecks.

• I'm transitioning past the days of toxic stress. The short term disability cemented my new/old spot in the economic ladder where I can take proper care of myself in order to keep working. I spent a few years in the labour market a few rungs below that, and it was not exactly fun. Necessary but over, thankfully.

• My feeling of hopelessness is gone. More on this below.

When studying literature in grade school, I was always drawn to the stories of man versus self. These days, I realize the better way of framing my conflict is person versus their brain. Sometimes I wake up and we start fighting right away, before I even have a chance to get my Adderall. Pretty sneaky, brain.

Given that I’m back to full-time life, my brain keeps trying to tell me that this is it. I'm an adult, and it’s all on me now. I'm alone. Now what I think it’s trying to tell me is that I’m independent and responsible for my choices, that I’m accountable for my actions. Sure, I get that, but I’m not alone, dude. The sentiment hearkens back to my parental abandonment among other rejections and disconnects, but where I am now, I know it's also just a feeling. It's likely an outlet or scapegoat for a host of other melancholic or depressive emotions, but it hits like a break in the dam. I know that I'm not alone. I have many people close to me who love me and got my back. I'm fully aware and convinced of this notion, despite what my brain is trying to make me feel.

The reason why this complication gets so tangled can be attributed to my experience of being gaslighted by my family. It’s quite the mindfuck when one person gaslights you, but when your whole family participates in the dysfunctional cycle and pursues the alternate reality, you can’t look to the people around you for validation. I learned this the hard way later than I would have liked. I mentioned earlier how I no longer feel hopeless, and the dysfunction is where I learned it. I valiantly/foolishly tried to fix it, a child battling against a carefully crafted and powerful Reality Distortion Field, and thus the child internalized a deep feeling of powerlessness and futility. The struggle wasn’t completely pointless as it was where I developed my skills in communication and persuasive speech. I worked hard at reversing the effects of gaslighting by trusting my own judgement of reality and verifying my answers with others.

And that brings us to this new conflict of person vs. their brain, where I can confidently say that I can’t always trust my assessment of reality. An emotion is a fuzzy sense, an instinct, a different way of knowing, and it's fickle. It's somehow both more wise and foolish than I need it to be, a jackal and a saint. Being generous, my brain is right that there are times when I feel lonely. But bitch, I'm not alone. Go home, brain; you're drunk.

So that's it for the Short Term Disability saga of 2022. There are still has a few months left in the year, but this defining period is wrapping up. The chapter isn't over as there are still some storylines and other loose ends to tie together, but the final battle is finished. I won. I took some injuries and lumps along the way, but I came out the other side as a better person. I'm ready for its conclusion. I thought it would never arrive, and yet here we are. This may also signal the end of my deep dive into ADHD research. I'll still run through the ADHDevidence.org Consensus Statement before I call it quits since I already did the work, but I think I got what I needed out of the entire exercise these past few months.

I am tired. So very tired. It's the beginning of sleepy season. It’s more than just a function of the colder temperatures and shorter days. We're well into the fall by now, but as the Stark family and other northerners say in Game of Thrones, "winter is supposed to be coming but climate change has made for a longer summer." I'm going to mostly keep up with being sober and choose sleep. I won’t say no to every outing, but it’s certainly not the default option after a full work week anymore (and hasn’t been for a while). Gonna choose compassion for other people in the same sleepy season, whether or they realize they’re in it. People be taking sabbaticals, quitting their jobs, not responding to any emails or texts. Honestly? Understandable. I don’t know what to do with sleepy season, but if SAIT has anything to say about it, we can’t go back to the way things were. We have to march forward, sleepwalking.

Personal Updates

My bike was stolen two weeks ago. Yes, I had it registered to Bike Index, had an AirTag installed on it, and reported the theft to the police. At first I was big mad, but now I’m just heartbroken, so now we have to see if the bike turns up or if I just have to take the L and buy a new one. If I do buy another, it’ll probably be the Jetson Bolt Pro from Costco, which has a game-changing value in the price-per-watt department. In the mean time, I am riding my old bicycle, powered by biology. Trying to make the best of a crappy situation. At least it forces me to expend more calories, so I’m going to join the ranks of cyclists with tree trunks for thighs and use up all this extra energy stored in my adipose tissue. I now have to be careful to not overtrain however, since too much exercise has been shown to make people eat even more calories than they expended. Not the worst result in and of itself, but it doesn't feel ideal to exercise so much that it makes me binge eat. Also, I take more time to properly lock my bike, knowing that I can't exactly trust my ADHD brain's working memory. That ebike got me through a difficult summer, so it's been an emotional time. It represented my independence and technological prowess. Thank you, ebike. I hope we can be reunited again.

A friend also introduced me to the concept of Dutch bikes, which stands in stark contrast the North American approach to cycling. They sent me this video from the Not Just Bikes channel. (I don't really watch YouTube as a way to pass the time, but this channel is probably the first I would actually consider subscribing to.)

Essentially, the Dutch treat bicycles as a mode of transportation, whereas North Americans treat them as recreational sporting vehicles. They dress for the destination, we dress for the journey. The way we regard cycling as some extreme sport requiring triathlon clothing and expensive lightweight frames is simply classist. Thus, one way I dutchified my pedal bike was by installing a cruiser handlebar, which is wider and swept back, allowing a person to sit upright and more comfortably. My original handlebars, in the style of most road bikes, was causing me terrible pain in my shoulders and neck. The intention of the bent-over posture with the narrow road bike handlebars is to maximize power delivery in the legs' pedalling motion, which comes at the expense of pain in the upper body. In any case, swapping it out has made my cycling more joyful. My bike already has a couple other Dutch features, which was a nice discovery.

A week after the bike theft, the car stopped running. Also not the worst thing to happen to a person, but it did feel like I was being tested. I mentally captured this moment where I was cycling home with a 36 lb. battery in my saddle bag, bopping along to one of my favourite songs. I made the saddle bag using an IKEA FRAKTA, aka the BIKEA SÄDDLE BÅG, and I expect this song to be played at my funeral rave, aka funerave.

One quirk of the car's make and model is this plastic cover over the battery which had these clips holding the positive battery cable, and unclipping them required placing one's large hands in a tight, cramped position. It took a lot more effort, swearing, and sacrificing skin cells on my right hand than I anticipated for a battery replacement, but fortunately I cast said plastic cover to the shadow realm, never to harm another living soul again. Still got the light on the dashboard afterwards, so had to tow it to the garage anyway to get the alternator replaced. So I'm gonna have to wait a while to get a new ebike; the old one might still show up.

Aside from the two transportation-related mishaps, there’s been this big, unspecific sadness looming over my head for the past couple months. It feels like when you're standing on the beach and a wave crashes onto the sand and starts flowing back out. It isn’t a lot of force on your legs, but it does present a challenge to stay put or to move around because looking at the flowing water can throw off your sense of balance. One friend mentioned that they always feel sad during Mercury Retrograde. Another friend suggested it was general pandemic grief. Using all the mood boosters doesn’t seem to help much, like exercising, eating fruit, spending time with friends, sleeping lots. It doesn’t seem connected to any recent events. I just feel sad. Nothing more to say or do about it besides to sit in it for a while, let it pass, and keep going. I wonder how many other people are feeling the same way.

Had enough of my life story? Ready to be distracted by my ADHD? Let's do it.

Lots of knowledge blasted through from the previous post, so let’s make some sense of the emotions by mapping out what applies to me and what actions I can take to mitigate the impacts. Expect mentions of Apple devices and the software specific to its platforms.

Medication

Prior to starting back up at work again, I mentioned trying 5 mg Adderall, but now I'm up to 10. The Medications functionality in iOS 16 arrived just in time! Some days it feels like I could use more than 10, but I think that’s the arms race that got me in danger earlier this year. Beyond the challenges of returning to work, my schedule has been full outside of the day job as well. The loss of my two main modes of mobility these past two weeks has been hard on my overall functioning, but I think I’ve been rolling with the punches and Adderall has been helping a ton. As a bonus, I’m crashing pretty hard in the evenings and sleeping soundly through the nights. People can hold general skepticism around any kind of medication, and it's especially true for the drugs targeting the brain. There is a potential for addiction with Adderall, but you wouldn't say a person with diabetes is addicted to their insulin, would you? I have a heavy week in front of me, so on top of managing my stress and saying no to everyone and everything, I may try 15 mg to see how I fare. Only one way to find out.

Externalizing the Internal

I'm going to have to talk to myself out loud a lot more. It's already a good practice for anyone dealing with complex problems, but with my deficit of executive functions, I need to do it a lot more. It's probably one of the reasons why I've felt the need to blog for so long.

Sources of Motivation

Barkley recommended that those with ADHD brain should externalize their sources of motivation. It feels weird to hear this because I’ve spent a lot of effort trying to internalize my motivation. Granted, dangling a reward in front of myself in order to complete a task is not the same as using the opinions of others to validate my self-worth. It’s a lot more realistic to give myself a Halloween-sized chocolate bar for washing the dishes than to labour for approval from strangers. Other external motivators include the Activity Sharing social feature on Apple Watch, the Meditation function in the Mindfulness app, and using the AutoSleep app to track my sleep.

Time Blindness

It’s abundantly clear to me that I have time blindness, and I’m learning just how severe it really is. It appears to be both a cause and a symptom of my anxiety. That’s a great interaction. I have to ask myself a dozen times a day "What's the rush?" or “Is it rush hour?” I use a lot of timers. Apple Watch is important, and setting timers is one of the few things Siri can usually manage without issue. I make extensive use of the Calendar app, inputting the location and setting alerts for "Time to Leave." Even still, it’s pretty damn annoying trying to get through the day when your brain keeps freaking out over nothing. They say you shouldn’t accommodate the anxiety, but there’s only so much self-regulating a person can do in a single solar cycle.

With my recent loss of automobility and micromobility, I've been taking the bus, and it's an area where I have to pay extra attention to because of my time blindness and where I live. Calgary was designed to require a car to function comfortably. Marchetti’s Constant says that humans everywhere throughout history have travelled an average of an hour per day for work. That is, as we developed new forms of mobility that could travel farther and faster, people didn’t work closer to home or travel less but instead, they all travelled about the same amount of time to work and at greater distances from home. My bus ride to the office takes one and a half hours one way, so I’m travelling three hours a day by transit when I go to the office, triple the global and historical average. I used to really hate taking transit because some years ago, I found that Calgary Transit drivers could either be early by 5 minutes or late by 5 minutes at any of my stops. It’s less of a problem now with the Transit app, its partnership with the City of Calgary, and the app's GO feature, which shares and crowdsources vehicle locations from other riders. Sprinting to catch transit is…unpleasant. It's bonkers to think that transportation would be so hard even when you live in the inner city. It doesn't have to be this way. Today, half of the world's population lives in urban areas, and that's set to increase to two-thirds by 2050. We'll all need to find more efficient uses for space that aren't as wasteful and lethal as individual car ownership. I can't wait to have a reasonable bus route in Calgary when I'm still working in my 60's.

My Working Memory Sucks

I have to put less trust in my memory from now on. It’s possible that I can improve it through training, but it doesn’t seem efficient to put much effort there. Instead, I can easily arm myself with a bunch of memory aids and techniques to give my brain a break.

One facet for mitigating poor working memory is by setting reminders, and would you believe that Apple has an app called Reminders for that very reason? There are the usual controls for setting notifications based on date and time, but you can also set a location-based trigger within a certain geofence. Siri is helpful here, and I ate my words when I originally thought the smart speaker trend was useless. I have a HomePod mini in my bathroom for playing music, but would you believe that its second most-used function is when I ask Siri to add an item to my To-Do list before I forget? For leaky memory, I use Siri and Reminders (SiReminders).

In addition to the pens, notebooks, sticky notes, and saying thoughts out loud to compensate for my unfortunate working memory, I’ll point out this free app called Drafts.

One of the many purposes of Drafts is to quickly capture information. The developer has tuned the software to drastically reduce the distance between thought and action. Some of their opinionated design choices include making the app lightweight; syncing across iCloud; making apps for the iPhone, Mac, iPad, and Watch; integration with Siri; and automating actions via Siri Shortcuts and x-callback-url schemes. There are shortcuts to create a single reminder or multiple reminders if my draft has multiple lines, plus there is a lock screen widget as of the latest update. Beyond the free version, a subscription costs some $25/year, and it is well-worth the money for me. On top of unlocking the pro features, I'm paying to keep the indie developer’s lights on so I can keep using the app for years to come, which is apparently a lot to ask in the broader note-taking app market. This might all feel like overkill, and you’d be right for most people. My working memory sucks that much.

Wrap It Up

Thanks for making it to the end!

My ebike was stolen. The car broke down and then I got it fixed. Since then, I’ve been using my old pedal bike and the bus. Been feeling big sad for some reason these past couple months. I still have ADHD, and there are a bunch of different techniques and technologies that can compensate for it. Such techniques include medication, meditation, externalizing the internal, and candy as motivation. Since I’m such a techie guy, I use tools like Apple devices, timers, Calendars, Reminders, and Drafts. Your mileage may vary, but this is what works for me at the moment.

The first week is also the hardest since that's the biggest shift. Catching up on emails, remembering passwords, replacing my laptop's dead hard drive, meeting new hires, learning that the CEO was promoted into the parent company. Week 1 to 2 will simply be an increase in hours, which will still be its own challenge, but it's much more gradual. I'll still have time to build up the computering-at-my-desk muscles, figure out the optimal break schedule, increase my body's tolerance to stress or being away from home.

I'm going to be working three days from the office. There's a full gym and locker room at the office, so that could both save me time and money. Because of the two-week extension in August for my short term disability, I was able to reset my sleep schedule, and I'm back to being a super early riser, sometimes waking up at 5 or 6 AM after a full night's sleep. I hope that means that I can start work early and leave early. We shall trial-and-error this aspect of my schedule.

Another fun component of the return to work phase has been the opportunity to try out all my new ADHD management skills. For this post, I'm going to focus in on a YouTube video that my friend sent me.

This video was taken from Part 2 of a larger, lengthy lecture by Russell Barkley on executive functions in relation to ADHD. It features a lot more hard facts than processing emotions as in the book "Scattered Minds." I'll cover only some of the video since it's so dense with information. At least he had a good takeaway page that makes for a simple to-do list for the ADHD mind, which loves to-do lists.

Barkeley proposes that we instead view it as a problem with executive functioning (EF). That is, rather than focusing on attention and hyperactivity, the evidence suggests that we frame the problem using the brain's frontal lobes, which house the executive functions. It's a fancy term for our ability as humans to self-regulate. How do we control our behaviour when our bodies want to react automatically to external inputs? If you see some delicious food, do you just eat it? Or do you question if it's safe, if it belongs to someone, if you have to pay for it? Executive functioning makes us different from all other species. I like the way Wikipedia stated it.

Cognitive control and stimulus control represent opposite processes that compete over the control of an individual's elicited behaviours; in particular, inhibitory control is necessary for overriding stimulus-driven behavioural responses.

Why focus on the brain? On average, ADHD brains are 3% to 10% smaller and two to three years behind in their development. The five areas of the frontal lobe are 10% to 25% less active. The brain stops developing in the mid-30's, so there are important implications for developmental milestones. The ADHD brain will hit them all but at very different times than for a neurotypical person. There's a well-known story about Phineas Gage, who survived having a rod blown through his forehead because of an accident with TNT. Afterwards, he went from being one of the most responsible people at the railroad where he worked to having problems with managing money, social life, living alone, and sexual urges. With the front part of his brain being irreversibly damaged, he couldn't use his executive functioning skills anymore.

Executive functioning is self-regulation. Self-control is anything you do to yourself to change your behaviour to alter the future. There are two broad categories: inhibition and metacognition (self-awareness). Since there are a ton of different models for executive functions and no clear concensus, we'll just go with whatever Barkley uses, which says there are 6-7 individual functions.

• Inhibition includes motor, verbal, cognitive, and emotional control.

• Metacognition covers verbal and non-verbal working memory, planning and problem-solving, and emotional self-regulation.

Executive functions live in the frontal lobes of the brain. There are five structures and three executive networks, and ADHD interferes with all three networks to a varying degree in each person.

1. "What?" Network. Frontal-striatal circuit.
   Response suppression, freedom from distraction, working memory, organization, planning.

2. "When?" Network. Frontal-cerebellar circuit.
   Motor coordination, timing, and timeliness. The cerebellum allows for the gracefulness of our movements and thoughts. Time management is worst in ADHD of any other disorder.

3. "Why?" Network. Frontal-limbic circuit.
   Emotional control, motivation, hyperactivity and impulsivity, aggression. Without it, the emotional brain, aka the limbic system, runs free.

Since executive functions aren't well-defined and understood by the academic community, Barkley says the tests are essentially irrelevant. Impairment defines the disorder, as in the inability to function compared to most people, and the cognitive tests for EFs are fairly disconnected from humans live in their day to day lives; Barkley uses the example of sorting numbers or cards. Instead, EF rating scales, filled out by all of the people who spend significant time with the individual, have been shown to be more predictive of a person's impairment in real life. Such a rating scale might ask something like "On a scale of 1-10, rate how well Jon is able to make a plan before starting a task." Many with ADHD pass EF cognitive tests but fail EF rating scales. Paradoxically, society relies instead on EF tests and assessments, which have far-reaching effects into daily lives such as determining disability status and payments. Maybe it's a good thing I didn't spend much time to pursue an ADHD assessment.

Because there is a deficit in executive functioning, the ADHD brain is split in two, with knowledge in the back and performance at the front, and both sides don't communicate all that well. For most people, the connection between knowledge and performance is quite strong, whereas with ADHD, the person gets stuck in their thoughts and can't manipulate their bodies quite as well. It can almost feel like being locked in a prison of your mind, screaming at your hands to stop scrolling social media timelines but being powerless to control the meat machine. As such, providing training will not matter because there isn't a knowledge gap. Interventions must be applied at the point of performance, out in the real world. Have to create scaffolding around them, re-engineer the environment.

ADHD creates a diminished capacity, but that does not excuse the individual’s accountability. I wrote about "striving for ownership" of emotions last week with the three links in the chain: awareness of the events around you, your understanding of those events, and the feelings that arise therefrom. The problem with ADHD here is with time and timing, not consequences. All important social consequences are delayed, which is hard for ADHD brains to connect. You need to bring consequences around very quickly, even if they are artificial. Have a shorter leash, so to speak. Behavioural modification helps with functioning. Have to build "ramps." Stakeholders have to be involved because you can't do it alone.

Cutting to the punchline of the video, how can we compensate for executive functioning deficits, according to Barkley? We do it by reverse engineering the EF system:

1. Externalize important information at key points of performance

2. Externalize time and time periods related to tasks and important deadlines

3. Break up lengthy tasks into many small steps

4. Externalize sources of motivation

5. Externalize mental problem-solving

6. Replenish the self-regulation resource pool (willpower)

7. Practice incorporating the 5 strategies for emotional regulation in daily life activities. (He doesn't mention what they are, but these are what a web search brought up:) Situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, response modulation.

There is a limitation in the self-regulation/willpower fuel tank, and since it has a smaller capacity with ADHD, it needs to be recharged regularly using:

• Rewards and positive emotion

• Encouragement

• Shorter spurts of work with frequent breaks

• 3+ minutes of relaxation or meditation

• Visualizing long term rewards before and during self-regulating task

• Keep blood-glucose high by sipping sports drinks

• Exercise

Executive functioning deficits are neurogenetic. Medications are neurogenetic therapies, so it is absolutely appropriate to use medication to treat ADHD, which are three times more effective than anxiety drugs and antidepressants. Additionally, ADHD is the most treatable psychiatric disorder. ADHD is the diabetes of psychiatry, says Barkley. The condition is underdiagnosed and the medication underprescribed. 90% of people respond, but 40% of children and 90% of adults are not recognized. We are undertreating the most treatable disorder.

Phew! Lots and lots of information. According to Barkley, ADHD should be renamed "Executive Functioning Deficit Disorder." Executive functions allow us as humans to control our behaviour to alter the future, and people with ADHD have trouble with both controlling their behaviour and caring about what happens in the future. As such, I should follow the to-do list to compensate for executive functioning deficits, and regularly recharge my willpower.

During my extra week off, I finished reading Scattered Minds. Hurray! The last few chapters were on addiction, medication, and loving yourself.

Addiction

There are lots of ways to understand addiction, but in this context, it's a way of avoiding emotional pain. As you might know from experience, pain in this life is inevitable, so engaging in an addiction merely delays the moment where you need to feel the emotion. I think this categorization of addiction makes for a very wide net and includes many that wouldn’t consider themselves as abusing substances. Freud said that “unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.” Yeesh, take a deep breath, Sigmund. Scattered Minds says that those with ADHD tend to struggle with addiction because of poor impulse control.

Famed social worker Brené Brown said her therapist diagnosed her with having a “pupu platter of addictions,” which I can relate to. It doesn’t look like I struggle with a traditional understanding of addiction, which typically appears as one of three vices: alcohol, drugs, or gambling. Viewing addiction in relation to pain, a person can use anything to avoid feeling anything, like adrenaline, romantic relationships, social media, food, working out.

What’s the cure, says Scattered Minds?

“The task of integrating thought and feeling is called striving for ownership,” writes the psychologist and addiction expert Robert J. Kearney

When people are response-able and not in denial, they are aware…of what they feel and they know…what has gone on inside them to generate those feelings. It is a three-part chain connected by awareness: awareness of events, awareness of interpretation of those events, and awareness of the emotional reaction following those interpretations. If the chain is broken, ownership of the feeling is lost. When the task of ownership is being performed, the chain is solid.”

In short, awareness of events, interpretation of those events, and the emotional reaction. Understanding what's going on around you, what you think of it, and how it makes you feel. ADHD brains tend to have a deficiency in neurotransmitters like dopamine. I’m prone to anxious thoughts, my mind misinterpreting risks, and thus I overreact to small concerns. Knowing my brain's biases will help me to take a step back, to ground my thoughts about what's happening in reality, and to recognize that I probably have exaggerated emotions around the ungrounded thoughts. Then I can correct and compensate for the biases.

Additionally, a person could use the sophisticated technique of feeling your feelings, aka stop delaying the inevitable. That's the most effective way to make them go away. Rage, be sad, grieve, lament, mourn, elate, laugh. When you constantly procrastinate your feelings, you tend to think of them as persistent. However, when you fully engage with one, it disappears.

I’ve spent all summer sitting in my emotions. I feel generally caught up with the backlog. Maybe not perfectly, but enough. That seems to have put a stop to a lot of the compulsive behaviours like stress eating and binge drinking. The darker emotions can be sticky, so at the same time, I got deeper into the healthy coping like lifting weights, journaling, meditation, all in an effort to clear my mind again. After four months of this loop, I'm ready to go back to work while I strive for ownership of my thoughts and emotions.

Medication

Scattered Minds suggests that a person try medication last after trying other interventions, but other proponents suggest starting with it. It probably depends on your specific situation. Medication won't cure anything, but it can certainly make the other strategies more effective or make everything worse. The focus should be on finding the right type of drug, and then you can figure out the dosage level. The child or teenager with ADHD should be given the autonomy to decide many aspects of their medication, if even to use any at all, unless the adults in their lives feel like activating the counterwill endemic to the disorder. It's already hard enough to discover who you are as a young adult without throwing medication at your brain.

Adderall extended release somewhere between 5 mg and 10 mg has been a big hit for me recently. It reduced my appetite, but man, I haven't been this productive in a long time. I’ve been opening up the gel capsules and changing up the quantity. I was originally prescribed 15 mg, but it turned out that that was far too much. The first day I had 5 mg, MAN, I got shit DONE. I take it first thing in the morning and my energy crashes around 6 PM, which feels lucky. You may recall from earlier that I wasn’t stoked on the options for ADHD drugs, but I finally activated a part of myself I hadn't seen in a many months, maybe years.

I started drinking decaf coffee again. Probably should play it safe instead of introducing two chemicals into my body at the same time. Better to make one change at a time to gauge its impact on the overall system. Boring. Annoying. Ugh. Getting a full night's sleep for a couple weeks has been amazing.

Funnily, some people with ADHD need to have their stimulant medication working later into the night in order to sleep. It helps them to regulate their thoughts enough to quiet their minds, whereas being unmedicated means their thoughts race while they’re laying in bed. And I’ve read multiple comments where others said the first thing they did upon waking was to take their pill and then go back to sleep for an hour. Seems wiser to play it safe with amphetamines.

Loving Yourself

The final chapter was short.

The people who seek out support for ADHD management tend to be tired and exasperated from the struggle to be accepted, to be different yet trying to blend in, to understand the mystery of one's own experience. There can be loads of grief and strife in relationships because of ADHD that is minimally managed, so a lot of grace and understanding need to be extended to housemates, friends, and family. There are some simple and effective strategies for managing the disorder.

The Latin root for attention, tendere, means to extend, to reach. Love and forgiveness need to be extended to the person with ADHD, especially to oneself, in order to create space for the interventions to work.

It's only been about six months since I've been digging into this, but I have dedicated a lot of brain space to the topic in 2022. I think I'm loving myself a lot more than usual by dedicating most of this short term disability period to healing and equipping myself with knowledge and techniques. I'm being less critical of myself for a neurophysiological developmental disorder impacting my executive functioning. The message to love myself is well-received. I’ve historically been pretty bad about it, and terrified as I am this time around, I'm trying.

The Need to Read

Scattered Minds is supposed to be an older resource, so it'd be nice to see the current state of the art. Gabor Maté brings that unique perspective from attachment theory, but it tends to feel a little one-dimensional after a while. Even before reading the book, I got annoyed at hearing my own voice saying "attachment" out loud every time. If you know any good books or resources on ADHD, let me know!

ADHDevidence.org popped up in a quick search, so it'll be a very interesting read, digging into the scientific papers side of the discussion.

Wrap It Up

Finished reading Scattered Minds, which talked about addiction, medication, and loving yourself. I'm working on addiction by sitting in my emotions, on medication by taking Adderall XR 5 mg, and on loving myself by being less critical. Next up, I'll dig into ADHDevidence.org or whatever you guys suggest.