First Things First
I'm back on the dating market. That's right, I'm on the prowl for a new therapist.
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:
Reduce time outdoors.
Reduce fresh air intake from the furnace or car’s climate control.
Change clothes after getting home.
Hot showers soften lung tissue and make it easier for your lung’s cilia to remove particulate.
Replace your car’s cabin air filter.
If NYT blocks access, use a paywall circumvention service like Archive.is.
I have the BlueAir 211.
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.
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.
KN95s don’t fit tight enough on my head to create a tight seal.
Talk to your doctor about getting an inhaler.
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.