the old normal

Just got the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine yesterday. Second dose scheduled three weeks later. Then I'm supposed to wait another two weeks for it to count. My mood has been looking up, though fragile and fraught with anxiety. Sad thing about the pandemic making me miserable is that it's really only forced me to live the same way I have for most of my life. This misery is an awful lot like "who I really am." I'd spent the previous two years trying to get away from being me. I don't want to be me anymore.

I don't believe in that whole way of thinking about the self anymore though. There is no me. There are just neurological patterns I've become accustomed to over the course of my life, largely developed during childhood, and then all the environmental and physiological reasons those patterns developed, and continue to be reinforced. 

So, to change who we are is just a matter of figuring out which aspects of all that we can work with. Going to college was a dramatic shift in environmental factors, but our patterns don't change that quickly or easily. It's gradual process over the course of our lives. "Who I am" was not changed all that much. It was incredibly easy for me to go back to doing absolutely nothing. Back to reinforcing deeply entrenched patterns I'd been fighting for my life to change.

In retrospect, "I could have done this, I could have done that." I understand why no one understands. It's so difficult to see any actual impairment. "Just do this, just do that," makes sense until you're in the moment, not doing any of it. We think we're free to do anything we want, until we find ourselves doing no such thing.

It makes no sense for me to be all pollyanna about getting back to "normal." This is my normal. That's the problem. Covid was a setback, and I don't know how much of one. Getting off the ground the first time required the stars lining up in a particular way that won't happen again. I have to aim lower, just focus on MMA, see how that goes.

Local case numbers are plummeting now, so if that continues, I may go back to the gym early. I'm not sure though, and numbers may shoot back up. Seems dumb to go through all this, only to get covid a few weeks before being fully vaccinated.

aggression turned inwards

Throughout my life, I've oscillated between  approaches to mental illness; fighting it or accepting it. Some might say we need to find a middle ground, wherein we manage it, e.g. with medications, etc, and then accept whatever's left, but that's not a meaningful distinction. Of course we do what we can to manage it, but the question still remains, what do you do when you can't get out of bed? When you can't shower, or prepare a meal? When you're a painter who never wants to paint? When you can't meet responsibilities, or uphold a conversation? What do you do in these individual moments of dysfunction?

You accept it, or you fight it. These options are mutually exclusive. Whatever else we do, as far as self-care and treatment, we still need to face these battles over and over every day. Maybe we comfort ourselves and say that we don't need to get out of bed. We're depressed, we have an illness, it's ok. Or maybe we say no, that's unacceptable, and we fight tooth and nail to get the fuck out of bed, in spite of everything. So then, there's your "aggression turned inwards." Especially when we lose the fight.

That's an outcome of depression, not a cause. The whole framing of it implies that if we stop being aggressive towards ourselves, we wouldn't be depressed, but this is backwards. I have to be aggressive with myself to overcome these constant hurdles, and while that's a vicious cycle, so is laying in bed, trying to tell myself it's ok.

Depression is crippling. That is the worst thing about it. When I explain that I've been especially depressed, I'm not complaining about how I feel. I'm explaining that I've been especially dysfunctional. Try not to expect much. How I feel about it is beside the point, but suffice to say, of course it's not good.

Likewise with terms such as "learned helplessness" - that is what we learn from depression. Look at the list of symptoms holding a person down, and it makes total sense that such a person would learn that they've been rendered helpless by those symptoms. If someone with crippling mental illness wants to be a functional member of society, it can take years of baby steps and rehabilitation, and often that doesn't even work. It takes optimism, determination, a skillful approach, and luck. Just to make some modest improvements.

Learned helplessness sounds a lot like imagined helplessness, but you can't just learn the symptoms of biological impairment away. Being nicer to ourselves can make us feel better, but generally won't make it any easier to get out of bed. Depression is not something we do to ourselves, any more than cancer is. Lifestyle matters; how we eat, how we sleep, how active we are, what environmental risk factors we're exposed to. We can change some of that, but options can be limited, and we don't always have any. Sometimes there's a pandemic, and some of us have little choice but to sit alone all day every day, even though that's a huge risk factor for stress, depression, cancer, and blogging way too much.

In both depression and cancer alike, stress is a big one, but even stress - or maybe even more fundamentally and frequently misunderstood - stress is not something we can think away. A few deep breaths will only do so much. Working out for two hours every day can only do so much. Incidentally, stress is managed by corticotropin, a hormone produced by the pituitary. If you're lucky enough to have one of those. Without it, stress just burns through dopamine instead.

We're not the only species that can suffer stress and depression. We're just the only ones who make up nonsense reasons for it. How we think does not cause depression. How we think can not cure depression. It can help or it can hurt, but not all that much. People can certainly be impaired by bad ideas too, but that is a whole other subject.

never happy

I don't really agree with making such comparisons, one disease being worse than another. It depends on how much you choose to value this or that, and means nothing objectively. That said, Sapolsky does make all sorts of good points. It's a great lecture. Whether or not depression is the worst disease in the world may be pointlessly debatable, but he makes a strong case for it being a hell of a lot more destructive than commonly understood. I wasn't "catastrophizing" when I realized I'd have to spend the next year letting mine metastasize unchecked.

He doesn't even cover all the ways it cripples a person, and undermines just about anything they could possibly want to be or do. Even taking suicides out of the picture, it shortens lifespans and precipitates all sorts of health problems. The more severe it gets, the more impossible it becomes to have any kind of social life. Severity is always a huge variable. It can always get worse. It can be a difficult thing to quietly watch happen to one's own life. 

Sapolsky's opening point focuses on anhedonia, but I've never had trouble appreciating a beautiful sunset. Not to mention the beautiful rainy days that so-called happy people can't seem to appreciate. I wouldn't go to all this trouble cooking if I couldn't enjoy being any good at it. 

Does any of it make me happy though? Is that what he's really talking about? Is it supposed to? Is my confusion due to semantics? I can feel pleasure, but happiness and fun are like foreign concepts to me. It is difficult to find motivation when I know that literally nothing is going to make me happy. I'm not even sure my brain can do that sort of thing, but all my life, I've held onto this sliver of hope that I might figure it out eventually.

Sometimes walking home after an exhausting class or two, I felt like I was getting closer. Feels so long ago.

heaven knows

It's interesting, looking up novelty seeking and risk aversion, I find that in psychology, novelty seeking is tightly correlated with risk taking and impulsivity. It makes sense. I guess what's interesting is that this surprised me.

They're not at all the same thing. I find myself both novelty seeking and risk averse. It's just that our appreciation for new things can be eroded by fears of  risks involved. An impulsive person leaps headfirst, while a thoughtful person hesitates to think, and in so doing, realizes it might be a bad idea. All these things are connected, but often life comes along and throws a person headfirst instead, and the lessons we take from that depend largely on what happens afterwards.

Patterns like this begin in childhood and become self-reinforcing, as our brains strengthen connections associated with our behaviour, and atrophy connections that go unused. This pattern reinforcement is strongest during early childhood, but continues throughout the rest of our lives. Old dogs being the hardest to teach new tricks.

Ideally, we want a balance. Excess novelty seeking can mean never really taking the time to appreciate anything while getting ourselves and each other killed. Risk averse patterns generally start to grow out of control due to trauma. It's pretty straight-forward; the more we've learned that experiences can be painful, the less we want to try new ones. When such traumas occur during childhood development, neural pathways of risk aversion can grow very strong.

Trauma is not what happens to us, but what happens inside of us. Life is painful for everyone, but how we learn to cope with it is everything. Finding that middle ground of novel experience is important for living a life conducive to good mental health. It's also vital to neurological development and plasticity, as well as staving off the cognitive decline of aging. 

Familiar experiences can be safe, comforting, and that can be desperately needed, but comes at a steep cost. For one, it means largely staying away from other people, especially new people, as they can be hella unpredictable. Additionally, the more repetitious our lives, the less the brain even bothers remembering it, let alone learning or growing. I don't believe in any concrete notion of who we are, but changes can be rough. It's taken me years to even slightly unwind how risk averse my own life has taught me to be. 

I've had to fight with myself every step of the way, from doing kickboxing and taking college classes, to riding a bus and going to a grocery store. This past year fucked all that up. I haven't even cleaned my apartment since getting back from Hawaii.

"Depression is the worst disease you can get."

driven from distraction

I don't care all that much how I feel right now. I have had a hell of a time working out how to make this point. When someone says, "ow, I've broken my leg," you don't want to focus too much on how they feel - of course it hurts. It should hurt. They have a broken leg. If it doesn't hurt, that's even worse. The important thing is to fix the broken leg. If you're not doing that, addressing the pain will be woefully inadequate at best. If you can't help fix a broken leg, at least appreciate the problems such a thing will cause a person. Understand that walking it off is not going to work.

I often talk about suffering in terms of the conditions which lead to miserable lives. We can shore up our mental health such that we handle miserable conditions better, but if we're not addressing those conditions, the misery can grow increasingly unmanageable. Coping in the short term can be dangerously pacifying. I don't want peace. I'm trying to fight a war.

That is the point I've been trying to make. I've become wary of distraction and escapism. I'm afraid of being pacified. I don't want to feel better. It can become all too easy to get lost in our daily lives as it all goes increasingly wrong. Eventually, once it's far too late, that can have the sort of real consequences we all sympathize with. I remember trying to explain this to Jenny years ago. She thought it was just me being neurotic. The ways that we cope in the short term can kill us in the long run.

That I should "get a job" isn't entirely wrong. It's just so much more complicated than that. It's why I was going to school and everything. I was trying to change my life, because the way I live is killing me. This is why being forced to return to how I've lived has me freaking out month after month. This isn't something that I'm going to recover from, or ever feel better about. I am losing my mind to a war of attrition. I don't know what to think about anything anymore.

Right now, my plan is still to get back to kickboxing. I need to start with rebuilding a foundation. I don't know where I'll go from there. I don't feel happiness thinking about it. I feel dread and anxiety because it might not go all that well, in any number of ways. It might not be enough. I'm trying to survive, not get back to this fun thing I like to do.

I get my first dose of the vaccine on the 22nd. I'm not excited about that either. It's just another step towards trying to survive. Who knows what will be going on by the time I've got my second dose, another month or two from now. This just goes on and on.

existential angst

I think about the nature of suffering a lot, because I am suffering a lot. I can't seem to explain it or alleviate it, so I keep thinking, sometimes out loud. I do know all too well how to alleviate it in the short term, but I also know how that ends. The problem is much bigger than how I feel right now.

I am afraid of dying, but I'm also afraid of dying without ever having had the chance to live. The state I've spent most of my life in does not feel like living. Maybe this has more to do with dopamine and depression than anything else, but it can also look a lot like an indictment of how everyone else lives. I don't think much about that. If someone is happy playing video games their entire lives, or watching tv, drinking beer, collecting stamps, whatever, I have no problem with that. It's good that they seem happy, right? 

For me though, it feels like passing the time, distracted from pain and failing mental health. Now and then I look up, and hours, days, weeks have gone by, unlived. Months, even years. I just keep getting older. So what do I do instead? Pass the time in less engaging ways, bored, constantly thinking about how I'm not doing anything, and my life is getting away from me. Just the same, only more aware of every excruciating moment of it.

Not exactly an improvement, I know. So, for one thing, I'm sure as hell not judging anyone for how they spend their time. I've wasted my entire life one way or another. All this going on about it is me trying to figure out how to stop doing that. I'm trying to figure out what it means to stop doing that. 

The problem with relaxing, letting go, is that it means letting inertia take over, and in many situations, that is a horrible idea.

dopamine doctrine

The fundamental premise of Buddhism is the deceptive nature of suffering. The Pali word used for this is "dukkha," which is a little different than any single word direct English translation. I don't know anything about Pali, but that's what I've read. It seems to be a subtle difference. This difference though, mirrors the very lesson the word is used to teach. "Suffering" is considered a more objective state; we can all see when something is suffering, assuming we have some basic empathy and awareness. 

Dukkha points to a deeper truth; of course suffering is not an objective state. It is not the product of our experiences, but of how we process those experiences. Thus, the belief that we can work towards processing our experiences differently, such that they no longer cause suffering.

Buddhism generally teaches that it can take many lifetimes of devout practice to thoroughly achieve such a feat. What they mean by a lifetime, when they don't believe in a self though, makes it a little complicated. Suffice to say, it supposedly takes lots of time and dedication, as the Fourth Noble Truth is incredibly elusive.

The cause of dukkha is "tanha;" wanting, craving, needing. We don't need anything. We don't even need to exist. It's logical, but I struggle with the notion that giving up tanha would be a good thing. This point is often resisted in Buddhism for the same reason. Put another way, it feels good to want things. That's how dopamine works. When we're suffering, it can also feel like wanting our situation to improve is the only hope we have that it will. To sit in the proverbial burning building saying, "this is fine," you really need to believe that it is.

It's interesting that dopamine is not produced when good things happen to us, so much as when we think that good things might. Dukkha is caused by tanha, but so is dopamine. Dopamine is the carrot on a stick evolved to keep us going in a world full of suffering. Recreational drugs often hit dopamine, because dopamine itself is an addiction we can't shake.

Unless we can.. but why would we want to? Maybe when it really comes down to it, I choose the blue pill. The comforting illusion. The idea that things might get better is all that makes anything seem worthwhile at all. Maybe someday I will get something I want, right? It can feel like a lifeline, not something to let go of.

Buddhism teaches that this dynamic can be hacked, if all we want is to end the suffering of others, unbiased in any way; the suffering of all beings. If we can become entirely selfless in our tanha, it ceases to cause dukkha. This is nirvana. Harmful things will still happen to us and around us, but we can be indifferent to that. Life is suffering. It just is.

Without the impulse to help others, this just becomes nihilism. Life is suffering and nothing matters? What the fuck am I even doing here then? If you enjoy the craving, there's that and not much else. The distilled paradigm of addiction, desperately squeezing what enjoyment we can from our dopamine receptors as we circle the drain, ever closer to oblivion. Just don't think about it.

I'm not comfortable with any approach to life which involves not thinking about it. Enjoyment is meaningless when we don't even know what's going on. Enjoyment is meaningless, but it's a chemical reaction in the brain that feels a lot like we've suddenly got it all figured out. This feeling, this is what life's all about? A chemical reaction in the brain that has nothing to do with understanding anything.

I don't understand how we're supposed to live without it, though. Dopamine is intrinsic to the reward center, and when that goes awry, it becomes depression. It renders people unable to help anyone with much of anything and more selfish than ever. To shut down the reward center would lead only to greater suffering, as far as I can tell. 

I don't understand how altruism is supposed to bridge that gap. Keep the reward pathways thriving entirely by caring for others? I guess that takes lifetimes of practice, too. Practice, if I've got this right, which would require a well functioning self-centered reward system in the meantime. It would require wanting things for ourselves, enjoying things, believing life might get better. We need dopamine to do anything.

samsaric equillibrium

It is not that I've lost hope, per se. Good things are always possible. We never know what twists and turns the future holds. The entire planet could be wiped out by a massive gamma ray burst tomorrow. I try not to get my hopes up, though.

Life is suffering. That's the first thing in Buddhism's very first list of things. They focus heavily on the suffering of sickness, aging, death and decay. The suffering of wanting it to be otherwise. It occurred to me that what's almost conspicuously absent is the suffering of abuse; those with power brutalizing those without, from people, to chimps, to bacteria. All of existence is rife with greed, selfishness, and malice.

A major aspect of suffering, often the most upsetting of all, being that which we inflict on each other. I can think of a variety of reasons for Buddhism to shift focus in this way. Abuse is mainly covered from the opposite angle, discouraged by promoting compassion. Positive reinforcement. Basic psychology. Avoid the situation wherein people denounce you for suggesting we do any less than demand those with power stop abusing it, while those in power murder you for accusing them of things. We can accept the inevitability of aging, sickness and death, but what of the inevitability of organisms being shit to each other?

I'm just wondering what's actually true. Oppression and brutality, all sorts of ugliness may be a huge part of the equation. We can move the fractions around, but this is just the way it is. What if every step forward we've ever made has also been a step back? We ended slavery in the US, who would dare dispute the progress in that? Even as US imperialism creates more slavery around the world, while impoverishing, lynching, and imprisoning our citizens instead. Maybe this is just the macabre shuffle dance of samsara. 

There are layers upon layers of structural reasons things never change, except to always end up the same. The widespread altruism required to shift the balance isn't possible. Evolutionary pressures for kindness and compassion are such that it's the exception, at best. There are no beings to liberate. Just this grand equation.

I'm not even sure I consider myself a leftist anymore. It implies a belief that things can get better. I'm starting to think that fundamentally, and in brutally tangible ways, no.. they can't. It's just not how it works. The best we can do is try to take care of ourselves, those in our lives, and contribute to the suffering as little possible.