lost trains of thought

At times, I've tried try to explain how aimless I feel.  I'm not sure there's a point to anything I'm doing.  I'm not talking existential angst, but literally, am I accomplishing anything, is going to school going to lead to a more functional life?  That sort of stuff.  Or am I just wandering in circles more vigorously than usual?

Or rather, I start saying something like that, forget what I was saying, go off on some tangent, or maybe just stare at the floor for a while.  My thoughts feel aimless too.  Much the way I have trouble sorting out where my life is going, I can't even sort out where my mind is going half the time.

It feels more accurate to say that I'm not a linear thinker.  I'm slow processing because I try to take every step from every direction.  I lose track of which way is forward.  What the hell do I even want? It's a matter of perspective.  I lose the continuity, my point, where I was going or where I started.  As I scramble to pull it together, my mind seizes up.  It doesn't work well under pressure.  Probably that damn corticotropin again #hypopituitarism

Writing helps on both levels, allowing me to organize my history such that I can look it up.   It also helps me organize my own thoughts, so that I can eventually get to a point.  I periodically have to remind myself of why I do this, too.  Making it public helps keep me honest with myself.

corticotropin

Anxiety for love of life, anxiety for pain
 Anxiety, a feeling that you know you can't contain
Anxiety destroys us but it drives the common man
 Foundation of society
  Anxiety
   Suppress it if you can.

~Bad Religion, "Anxiety," ©1989

Woke up this morning all stressed out, so much to do today and I was so tired.  Eventually got it together and replaced my broken bicycle chain.  Never had a bike chain just snap while I was riding before.  Come to think of it, this is the longest I've ever ridden the same bike, and I've never payed attention to what sort of condition the chain was in.

So, never had to replace one, either.  Nervous about what it would entail.  Maybe I should just buy a whole new bike?  Thought about taking to a repair shop, but decided to look into what it takes to fix myself.  Looked like it might be straight-forward enough to be worth a shot, and if I'm wrong, I'll take it somewhere.  Ended up taking all morning to figure out, in part due to lacking basic tools.  I had the special chain tool, but couldn't find my pliers anywhere.  Had to improvise, but I seem to have succeeded.

Now for all that other stuff I had to do.  I, uh, what was it again?  Some forms I had to fill out to mail tomorrow.  A cauliflower I'd planned on doing something with.  I didn't really have that much to do.    I do this to myself all the time.  I see one big thing I need to do, some other stuff looming in the periphery, and I'm clearly doomed.

Reminds me, got a very serious looking official letter yesterday, from CCV.  Probably to tell me that I failed all my classes and I owe them thousands of dollars.  Finally opened it this morning (another big thing I had to do, right?) and it's just this dumb letter of congratulations for being 15 credits in,  towards my associates degree.  As of last semester, I thought I was 23 credits in, and that I should be getting another 7 any day now.  All things being relative though, eh, whatever.

Wish my brain would stop doing this to me, all this pointless anxiety is kind of exhausting.

To be more precise, the part of my brain responsible could be hormones.  The pituitary produces corticotropin, which stimulates the release of cortisol.  Cortisol normally spikes early in the day, when we need to wake up and get moving.  I've always had a hell of a time switching gears.  The cortisol is there, but it takes a while.

Cortisol is also a response to anxiety.  Without cortisol, coping is much more of a challenge, both in terms of mental health, and in simply getting up and doing something.  More subtle than adrenaline, it helps kick us into gear to deal with the source of the anxiety.  Like panic is to adrenaline.  When the system is working properly, panic and anxiety are important and healthy responses to life's stressors, but it's all this elaborate chemistry in our heads.  Which part we identify with as our true selves is actually nonsense.  None of it, any more or less than anything else in our lives.

Maybe I is more of a reference point, for our awareness, our experience.  I doesn't need to be anything itself, to be a useful term.  The way you might describe the window of a room looking out onto the street, even if that room is empty.  Even if there is no room.  Even if there is no window.

going through hell

My sister and I have always had different approaches to mental health. Her approach was more along the lines of keeping moving, staying busy.  I still have trouble keeping busy even to the extent that normal people do.  Trying to deal with the world makes me feel like a sloth watching chimps shriek and jump around like lunatics.

As I push myself to keep going, doing so much more than I used to, I've been recognizing something else.  A desperation, a fear of missing a single step, on top of all the steps I miss for my own mental health reasons.  As I struggle to keep making progress, it feels glacially slow, while backsliding seems to be on the verge of constant avalanche.

It changes a person's priorities, making the goal oriented behaviour feel more important than everything else.  Everything else being essentially contingent on a presumption that I'm succeeding in this uphill climb, where the only alternative is tumbling backwards to my death.

"Growing instead of withering" also comes to mind, strikingly similar in binary choice.  Ideas, underpinned by this desperation.  To finally outpace depression, but just barely.  If I slip back into that, fuck everything.

summer break

Another semester down, a few weeks before fall starts.  I have less on my mind, so I guess I'm blogging and ranting about my country on facebook again.  Doing two classes instead of four has it's pros and cons, but I think it's a good balance for now.  It means that I have enough energy to spare for MMA and that might even be more important.

Had a great muay thai class last night.  My shins and forearms are all bruised, got some great sparring in.  Against a woman who's roughly my equal in skill and weight, and one of the BJJ instructors who's about six feet tall and really wanted to practice his clinch work.

Sparring is the first of anything I've been doing that's pushed me so hard I've literally worried I might vomit by the end of it, but I love it.  I want to get back in there and figure out how to counter that instructor's clinch.  Clinching back harder and faster doesn't work well against a guy that big who knows what he's doing apparently, but I have a few other ideas.

Sometimes it's a chore, I don't feel like going, I have to push myself and then classes are disappointing for one reason or another.  It all depends on a number of variables, but then sometimes it goes well, and I realize that it's actually making me happy.  I've had really hard time finding much of anything else that does that.

Maybe fighting with people satiates my need for human connection better than trying to have a conversation does.

fear and love

Nothing matters.  This is not how I feel, it's just the truth.  We can all agree on this, right?  I mean, I literally can't even fathom how it would be disputable.  The universe is vast and absolutely entirely indifferent.

Life is an amazing process that occurs when the right elements all exist on the same planet.  This "goldilocks zone" may turn out to be more wide or narrow than currently believed, but life will occupy that space as long as it can.  Countless cycles of not only individual deaths, but the deaths of entire species.  All species eventually die.  The planet eventually dies, probably even for reasons well before the sun goes, and then eventually maybe the entire universe.

We're talking about unimaginably vast scales of time and space, but this also means all the more time and space for other goldilocks zones, where life flourishes for a while before flickering out of existence once again.  Of course, all sorts of things move me anyhow, I'm human, but still.  It is what it is.

"It doesn’t punish, it doesn’t reward, it doesn’t judge at all. It just is - and so are we.  For a little while." 

~George Carlin, at the end of a bit that was honestly hard to watch.  He's merciless about mocking people for caring about stuff.  As if "bourgeoisie white liberals" means anything on a cosmic scale, either, but ok.  I prefer this auto-tune of how he ends the bit.

Bill Hicks, I'm less familiar with.  This choice we have "between fear and love," isn't much of a choice, even on it's face.  If one lacks the sense of self-worth that is typical of depression, I might wonder, what good am I to anyone else?  Honestly, depressed people are downers, we're lazy, we're negative, often we're not even nice.

I also need to break down the term "self worth," here.  It's not abstract, but literally, how much am I "worth" - to others?  It's right in the terms we use, when we talk about how much we "value" ourselves.

Value and worth are transactional terms, a process that goes on between people.  More intrinsic being our assessment of that.  This is simply having self awareness and consideration for others - before any number of neuroses take over.  Sometimes it can be a difficult equation.  I don't know what the hell people want.  They don't always make a whole lot of sense.

Doesn't matter whether I care about others, if acting on that means mostly keeping to myself, either way.  The thing is, it's an assessment that isn't necessarily wrong, and that's not depression, so much as just kinda depressing.

When we want to trade or purchase anything, there are multiple values at play.  How much can I actually get for this?  How much will it cost me to lose?  How much do I think it's objectively worth?  These concepts are all interconnected, like different axis of a graph, at the center of which one might find some vague notion of self esteem.  A complex process bouncing between internal and external circumstance, leaving very little room for much choice.

The world more broadly though, sure.  The universe is pretty awesome.

slow processing

Finally got some Muay Thai sparring in last Friday.  I'm rusty as hell, but it was great.  I have lots of bad point-sparring habits I need to break.  So, I was looking forward to doing some more of it tonight, but no luck, no sparring tonight.  I thought about asking, but didn't feel quite confident enough to risk initiating anything.

It was open mat after class, and in theory I could just ask if anyone wanted to spar,but I'm not actually sure the kickboxing works that way.  They don't do a lot of it.  I could ask about anything of this, but you know, I'm still working on this stuff.  The boxing people spar all the time, but I only take that class to round out my practice.  I don't want to do any regular boxing. 

I've been going to these striking classes again, Judo/BJJ once a week.  Jog about twice a week.  Meditate every morning.  Well, almost every morning.  Been biking all over the place lately.  Practicing the math a few hours a day, too.

Found a great web site that breaks any problem I plug into it down into all the steps required to solve it.  Gibberish like this? No problem.

I've been reading about what they call "processing speed" and how if it's "slow" it results in some awfully familiar symptoms.  In torpere, Latin for being slow. Ленивецa, lenivetsa, Russian for being slow.  It feels like I'm on another wavelength, I've often said.  All three might be interpreted differently, but just happen to technically refer more to being slow.  One study found that slow processing uniquely interferes with peer relationships; "they were surprised to find that a slow processing speed had a greater impact on peer problems than all the other subcomponents of cognitive function that they measured."

Maybe this is why I can't really follow what my teachers are saying, particularly when they're explaining complex multi-step problems.  They say math can be especially problematic.  I'm better at following the steps on Symbolab though, which is all the same stuff my teacher has been saying.  I recognize it. Seems I just need to go through it at a sloth's pace to understand and remember it, but I think I might actually get there before the final.

It is healthy having goals like this.  I'm going to need to figure out some new ones soon.