Writing Memories

Thursday, Aug 24, 2023

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I’m doing more than just surviving these days. Nothing’s perfect. There are lots of shadows cast over my life, but they’re just part of the landscape, not warnings of impending doom. More than just getting by, I’m also doing things that I find fulfilling, and have moments of sincere joy.

I’ve started things up again with my therapist and will be doing more than just telling him what’s happened to me each week. We’re going to start exposing the roots of my feelings and figuring out how to create better, more appropriate reactions to my triggers. I’m looking forward to this.

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Something very unfortunate happened a few weeks ago. I can’t get into specifics, but there was a complicated, dangerous situation with multiple different parties, each with their own version of what happened. In the end the danger was resolved and no one was hurt, although most of us were badly shaken.

I spent time wrestling with what happened. I reviewed the sequence of events, trying to see if I missed something important. Did I do the right thing? Was there something I could have reasonably done that would have nipped the incident in the bud? Were there signs I missed? I lost sleep, playing it over and over in my head, and at every turn I questioned things.

There were times where I felt like a monster. Self doubt and his nasty cousin, self loathing, were close at hand. But after some hard work, I was able to put them in their place. This time, I was able to see the lie my dark side was selling me and discarded it as such.

In the end I realized that while yes, there were things I could have done better, what I did was reasonable considering everything that was happening. It was a messy, complicated situation, and I was doing the best I could at the moment. 

I also had to tell the story many times, to people I care about and to people who had a right to know. It wasn’t something I wanted to do, but it was the right thing to do.

I told the story one more time the other day, and I received some unexpected feedback. To paraphrase what they said, I could have told the story with me being a victim, or beating myself up over not responding perfectly to a volatile situation. I could have been upset at the people present during the incident and what they said, did, or how they reacted.

My friend reminded me that every time we retell a story we are helping our brains reorganize the memory so we can understand and store the memory more effectively. The way we tell the story to ourselves writes and rewrites the memory. It changes the way we see the events that happened, and how we relate to them. It’s one of the slippery ways that our memories aren’t reliable, and why the way we think about our past is incredibly important.

Not wanting to put words in my friend’s mouth, it sounds like I did a good job of owning my part in the unfortunate incident. I accepted responsibility for what I did without overreaching and blaming myself for everything going wrong. I didn’t blame anyone else, either, but expressed understanding and compassion.

Hearing this was a breath of fresh air. It showed me that the work I’ve been doing on myself is paying off, and the results are noticeable to those who know me well. It also underscored to me the importance of being as honest and clear as possible with myself and others when dealing with the hardships of life. Because the way we tell ourselves these stories changes the memories we write.

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What are my qualifications? None, except for my own experience and a desire to help. Going back to Doctor Who, “I am an idiot … passing through, helping out.” I hope my own struggle with my darkness can help you with yours, or understand the struggle of someone you love.

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Life before death

Strength before weakness

Journey before destination

Shifting Gears

 Thursday, Aug 03, 2023

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I am limping along. Emotionally I am well, but physically and mentally I am exhausted. I have trouble telling if this is some kind of burnout, or lingering effects of long COVID, or even a side effect of my fluctuating blood glucose. There always seems to be another round of illness, from strep to dangerously low glucose levels to horrible aches and pains all over my body.

And yet I feel pretty good inside. Not healthy, but more centered. Not tidy, but like I can see a pattern in the mess and understand what I need to do to start cleaning up - with permission from myself to take my time in doing so.

So, I take that as a plus. Direction over velocity. Journey before destination.

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After a long time away, I had my first therapy session in months. I hit a wall, mentally and emotionally, back in January and needed to take a break from it. It took a lot of consideration, but I realized that I had become frustrated with a lack of progress. I was spending my sessions updating my therapist on what had been happening, and I didn’t feel like I was actually improving.

I sought out the same therapist, and thankfully he was still available. I explained why I stopped the sessions, and he understood. In fact, he likened it to a shift in my growth. The way I expressed it to him months ago was not ideal, but it was an understandable reaction to my changing needs.

He described my previous sessions as relational therapy, which focused on my relationships with other people. My spouse, my kids, my parents, my inlaws, my boss, my friends, you name it. Looking back, that is 100% correct. I was drowning in stories I had to get off my chest about interactions that left me frustrated.

Occasionally I was able to dig below the surface of that, identifying a question, a cause, or a trigger. Something that intellectually I understood, from all my consumption of therapy material, but had trouble noticing in myself. But because I was still drowning in stories and their consequences, I didn’t have the space to investigate these seeds and see what they grew into.

Shifting gears, we will focus on goal-oriented therapy, emotion-focused therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy - which brings me full circle. When I first started researching depression I read a wonderful book on CBT that I can’t remember the name of. I read it in an attempt to better understand the suffering of someone close to me, and stumbled into an understanding of my own depression. However, never having done the actual work of CBT, I never learned the tools I needed to apply it to myself.

I am excited, and a little worried. This isn’t just going to be me talking to someone about my problems. This is going to be me trying to figure out exactly what those problems are, why they affect me the way they do, and how I can reprogram my own responses.

I told my therapist today that my long term goal is to be able to be angry and to respond to everyone involved - including myself - with calmness and kindness. Not to ignore the anger, which will make me sick, but to integrate it and reclaim it, teaching myself how to take the gift of my anger and take away the potential harm, turning it into a useful response.

He also said that, from our conversation, it was clear that I had done a lot of work on myself in the past few months. It was good to hear that, because sometimes it’s hard to recognize our own progress. Especially when things have been dark.

So. It’s time to shift gears and focus on fixing the problem, not just talking about it. Time to do the work. Time to be better.

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What are my qualifications? None, except for my own experience and a desire to help. Going back to Doctor Who, “I am an idiot … passing through, helping out.” I hope my own struggle with my darkness can help you with yours, or understand the struggle of someone you love.

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Life before death

Strength before weakness

Journey before destination

Becoming A Burden

Thursday, June 01, 2023

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I’m making more active choices to push through the dark patches. They aren’t as difficult as they have been recently. It’s getting easier for me to stop and see the option to say yes to joy, or even just satisfaction. Happiness is, maybe, a habit that I need to actively cultivate.

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I continue to think about these ideas of self image. Who do I see myself as? What are my unspoken expectations for myself, the ones so deeply programmed into me that I usually don’t even know they exist.

I have the image of who I want to be. Stoic, capable, strong. Able to express myself clearly and accurately. Able to weather hardships without cracking under outside or internal forces.

I have the image of who I am. An intelligent man who nonetheless has little to show for decades of struggle. A person who has lost much of their physical and mental resilience. A type one diabetic who carries on, day to day, with the very real specter of potential catastrophe hovering on the other side of one incorrect meal or injection. I am a person who has let the struggle with my own mental health erode who I am and what I am capable of.

The other day I came home from work in a bad mood. Sometimes this happens every day. Sometimes only once a week, or month. But I know enough to see that when I get home I won’t be able to enjoy the companionship of my partner or my friends.

But I have expectations of myself. And my inability to engage meaningfully with those around me ran up against those things that I and others thought I needed to be able to do. Things I think I should be able to do consistently. And when I can’t, that subtle cognitive dissonance hits me, lost in all the noise I’m already dealing with in my negative headspace. And there are the external expectations placed on me, as well, causing similar discomfort every time I fail to live up to the needs and wants of those who count on me.

I think that’s that hardest part, the idea that I CAN’T be counted on. For the longest time I did my best to be reliable, dependable. It was part of how I saw myself. And now I hear people say they can’t rely on me to be there when they need it.

I’ve identified the problem. I’m doing what I can to increase my reliability, and that itself improves my disposition. It’s not perfect, and I’m terrified that one catastrophe, one medical emergency, will send me spiraling again.

And a loose thought that I don’t know if I’m ready to tackle is the fact that I am okay with OTHER people being a burden. I take it on gladly. I see it as a privilege to be with them. Why, then, do I refuse to give myself permission to be a burden to others? Why won’t I let them take care of me when I’m broken?

Still working on that one.

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What are my qualifications? None, except for my own experience and a desire to help. Going back to Doctor Who, “I am an idiot … passing through, helping out.” I hope my own struggle with my darkness can help you with yours, or understand the struggle of someone you love.

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Life before death

Strength before weakness

Journey before destination

Clashing Self

Tuesday, May 16, 2023

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The days are a fog, rolling past me, but I think I’m getting better. I just have very little motive force. I know what needs to be done, but I can’t make myself do it. But the horrible black mood has moved off for now.

I will see it again. I hope it will be on better terms, next time.

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Who I am as a person has changed drastically over the past few years. On top of that, my sense of self identity - who I perceive myself to be - has changed just as much. They don’t match what they were, and they don’t match each other.

Cognitive dissonance is when a person holds conflicting ideas about a thing - including the person themselves. And this clash of incompatible ideas can cause significant discomfort, or even pain.

I used to think of myself as reliable, hard working, tough. Compassionate. Patient. I can look back at a time when I worked two jobs and trained hard at the dojo, while being there for my family and friends and taking care of my share of the work at home. I remember a time when it would take monumental, concerted effort from someone to make me angry. I remember being helpful and considerate, extending respect to everyone, whether they showed it to me or not. And under it all I always, ALWAYS, wanted to get it right, to do it right, to be right for people.

Now I feel like I am unreliable, because of my failing mental and physical health. I feel like I can’t be hard working, at least not by ordinary standards, because my body and soul can’t take it. I am no longer physically or mentally tough. I am frail, slow, and inflexible. Lethargic, even on my best days, with short bursts of energy that leave me winded. I fail to be there for the people I care about, even when I want to. Birthdays, important events. Chores. Daily minimum. And I am so very tired of being patient, of having people treat me like garbage to be abused without consequence or regard for my humanity. I still try to show respect, but it doesn’t take much anymore to make me drop the gesture if it’s not reciprocated. And whether something is right or not, I find myself wishing I didn’t care.

It wouldn’t take a psychologist to see the markers. People pleasing. Savior complex. Overwhelm. Burnout. Hell, even ADHD markers are in there. But again, this isn’t even the real me. This is the concept of myself that I have. How much of it is true is hard to grasp. Plato’s cave and all that.

I have moments where I can see through the image, as if it were an overlay on the real world. I am hard working, but I have too many things to work on, so I fail. I am compassionate, but I get overwhelmed with all the things I want to be part of, to support, to help, and I feel myself breaking from the strain, and then I snap back into myself like an elastic. As a defense mechanism. To prevent me from tearing into pieces emotionally, which ironically lends itself to tearing apart anyway. I am tough, to have been through all the physical, mental, and emotional problems that have come my way, and I’m only seeing the outward cracks, not everything that’s still being kept together. I go to work or accomplish things at home even when I should be bedridden, or checked into a hospital. 

And I care. No matter how much I sometimes don’t want to, I care.

This last one is the thing I keep coming back to. Because when I go dark it becomes one of my intrusive thoughts. “I don’t care. I just don’t care.” But it’s not true. It’s a part of me trying hard to make me not care, because caring hurts too much. It’s self protection. And no matter how many times I tell myself to believe it, my actions and my feelings belie the truth.

The cognitive dissonance - the horrible action of these different conceptions of myself grinding themselves to pieces on each other - is painful. But when I see that for what it is, I can step back a little and let them be what they really are - ideas. And ideas can be entertained or left alone. They can be proven or disproven. Forgotten. Remembered.

I chose to remember who I enjoyed being. Who I am at my core. 

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What are my qualifications? None, except for my own experience and a desire to help. Going back to Doctor Who, “I am an idiot … passing through, helping out.” I hope my own struggle with my darkness can help you with yours, or understand the struggle of someone you love.

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Life before death

Strength before weakness

Journey before destination

Furry Little Life Saver

Wednesday, April 27, 2023

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I’ve had some okay days, and some terrible days. More or less together, making my bare minimum daily requirements. Surviving, and seeing reasons to survive.

I can smile and laugh. The pain is there, and sometimes it’s the only thing I can feel or see. But now it exists in a spectrum of emotion.

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Two days ago I had to say goodbye to my cat, Idris. She is alive and well, but there were allergy issues in the home and, after careful consideration, we had to give her up.

Idris came to me in a very dark time, soon after my ex wife left. Together we had two cats, Narknon and Jarvis, and when she left she took them, so they could be with the kids. After a few months of being on my own, I decided it was time to get a cat of my own. For seven years Idris was my companion, through the good and the bad, offering love and comfort when I felt like not a soul in the world cared.

It is no exaggeration to say she saved my life. I have never been prone to suicidal thoughts, but I am type one diabetic. I lived alone. In deeper points of depression it was hard to do anything, and my self care was always out of reach. A diabetic who can’t take care of their glucose levels is in danger.

Idris needed feeding, so I got up to feed her, and when I was up I would then take care of myself. She needed me to change her litter, so I would get moving, taking care of one small thing that led into another, then another, giving me momentum. She needed to be brushed, and when I brushed her she would be very affectionate, showing me that at least one person cared.

If I hadn’t had an insistent, furry little creature asking for food or comfort, I might not have taken care of my own needs. And for a diabetic, medical needs can mean either life or death.

Since she left, I have seen her in every corner of the house. I expect to hear her jumping up onto the bed when I lie down for the night. I hear her asking rudely for food, acting as if she was starving no matter how long it had been since her last meal. I can feel her lying on my arm as I drift off to sleep.

I’ve done some difficult things in my life. Saying goodbye to a beloved pet is one of the hardest, all the more so because they don’t understand why you have to part ways.

I’m going to miss her.

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What are my qualifications? None, except for my own experience and a desire to help. Going back to Doctor Who, “I am an idiot … passing through, helping out.” I hope my own struggle with my darkness can help you with yours, or understand the struggle of someone you love.

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Life before death

Strength before weakness

Journey before destination

No Good People

Monday, April 10, 2023

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I have said many times that I am not a good person. I self identify as an asshole who is doing their best not to let other people realize that I am, so I lean as hard in the other direction as possible.

I talked with a good friend recently, during a crisis of mine. I told her I was not a good person. She disagreed vehemently and said that she should know because she’s known me for about thirty years. She’s also an ex, and if our friendship has lasted that long AND survived a breakup, there may be something to her claim.

More importantly, she said that the idea of a good person is a bit of a myth. There may be one or two genuinely good people out there, but most of us are kind of selfish, kind of greedy, and kind of mean - qualities that can very easily tip us toward bad under the right circumstances. No one is good. No one is evil. We’re just people trying to survive.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn probably said it best.

“The line between good and evil runs not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.” 

Touching on Doctor Who again, in the Matt Smith episode A Town Called Mercy, an alien known as Kahler-Jex - a known war criminal - has settled in a human town on Earth. He has done everything he can to improve the lives of the people around him. The balance of his past sins and his current service are the crux of the episode and acts as a sharp parallel to the Doctor himself, whose hands are certainly not clean. While it is a simplified view of our own struggle, it is apt. Our lives don’t keep the good and the bad so neatly separated and defined.

Does the good Jex has done erase the bad? Does it tip the scales for him toward being a "good" person?

I’m not religious. I don’t believe in absolute categories of good and evil the same way a person of faith might. But I do believe there are good things a person can do, based subjectively on what will benefit themselves, their circle, their species, and their planet. Likewise I think there are less than ideal things that people can do - that we ALL do - that detract from those same goods. And maybe I believe in evil in the sense that there are some people who are aware of the horrible impact of their actions and choose to persist in them.

It’s good to be proactively aware of someone’s peanut allergy.

It’s dangerous but not evil to give peanuts to someone you didn’t know was allergic.

It’s evil to leave peanuts in food knowing that the person about to eat it is allergic and do nothing to stop them from eating it.

We’re all kinda shitty. Being aware of your own failings and actively trying to fight them and improve as a person is, perhaps, the closest thing we can get to being truly “good.”

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What are my qualifications? None, except for my own experience and a desire to help. Going back to Doctor Who, “I am an idiot … passing through, helping out.” I hope my own struggle with my darkness can help you with yours, or understand the struggle of someone you love.

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Life before death

Strength before weakness

Journey before destination

Self Loathing

Sunday, April 9, 2023

More and more I identify with Vincent van Gogh, or at least how he is portrayed in the beautiful Doctor Who episode where Matt Smith’s Doctor and Amelia Pond visit the painter. The good that I experience in life, big or small, doesn’t detract from the bad. And vice versa. My highs and lows don’t get flattened into a line of okayness. They come and go, and I know that I will get to enjoy them, in a sense, no matter what came before or after.

The world is full of unbearable pain and suffering, and yet we find a way to bear it.

The world is full of incomprehensible beauty and joy, too.

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Sometimes I still hate myself, although I’m beginning to see how much of a mistake that is. Not a mistake because it’s not “good” for me. A mistake because it is a misunderstanding of the things about me that I have trouble accepting.

My negative emotions are all ways that my body is trying to protect me. Interestingly, even my “self-destructive” or “self-sabotaging” behaviors are actually self-defense mechanisms that are misfiring, or being misused. Push people away so that you can control how they enter and exit your life. Hurt yourself so that you know when the hurt will come and not be surprised by it. These are misapplications of a desire to keep you safe, keep me safe.

But do we hate the thing that’s trying to help? If a loved one is doing their best to be on your side and protect you, do you loathe and despise them? Even if they are actually making things worse, you thank them and then tell them they don’t need to do what they’re doing anymore.

I’m trying something. Not sure how it will work. I absorbed it through social media, so I can’t even say where it came from. But it goes something like this:

1. Identify what it is about yourself that you hate.

2. Identify what that thing is doing - the negative impact.

3. Identify what that thing is trying to do - the protective intent.

4. Try to feel it inside your body, as tension, heat, cold, pain, etc.

5. Acknowledge the behavior and thank it for trying to keep you safe.

6. Thank it and tell it that you’re safe now, and it can rest.

7. Feel around to see if the thing is still there. If so, gently repeat the process.

We have to feel the feelings or they remain inside us, messing us up in unexpected ways. I have trouble feeling them in my body, so that’s a challenge for me, but it’s an interesting exercise.

I’m trying not to hate the things about me that are less than ideal. I still do - I have a lot of misunderstanding to undue - but I think this is helping.

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What are my qualifications? None, except for my own experience and a desire to help. Going back to Doctor Who, “I am an idiot … passing through, helping out.” I hope my own struggle with my darkness can help you with yours, or understand the struggle of someone you love.

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Life before death

Strength before weakness

Journey before destination