kaberett | Entries tagged with brain rewiring

Today I have been mostly alternating between Science Words: The Manuscript Revisioning and reading Demonology and the Tri-Phasic Model of Trauma: An Integrative Approach, as recced by

rydra_wong, with occasional forays into "sleeping a lot" and "whoops I did a cooking".

(I am reasonably impressed with the extent to which I'm managing to go "huh, guess spending 15 minutes playing a visual game is useful percolation time I get to count as billable hours" and "huh, guess it's actually okay I'm not going to have completely done this by the time of my meeting tomorrow, I've been doing A Heck Of A Lot of other work, my supervisor can probably deal with the bit where I'm not going to be in a position to recirculate this round co-authors til Monday, I'm doing good.")

I am still a little surprised every time I remember that, these days, I don't wake up every two hours like clockwork, every night, for the first two weeks I'm sleeping in a new place. Like: I went to the house convention in August and in spite of a Wide Variety Of Stressors, including sharing a room with two strangers, I actually slept through the night, rather than waking up fully at every microarousal. Sure, some of that is having A there, but the part where I trust him enough to interpret even that kind of environment as safe is... still substantial progress.

Though, mild amusement: even as I am talking about my reduced hypervigilance, it turns out it's still occasionally a superpower. Super-bonus-packing-question, said B, where did [Item] end up? "Pretty sure it's in such-and-such a box," I said. Came the response: ... any idea where that box is in the car?

A, who'd actually loaded it up (it was down stairs, I was Not Doing Stairs), had no idea. But I knew it had gone in late, and that it was relatively small, and not terribly flat on top, and therefore knew that it was near the top of the stack in the car, possibly at the back but probably at the side underneath the parcel shelf that'd been put in last. Three minutes later (and approximately fifty miles away), [Item] was in hand.

I'm a little baffled by how impressive this apparently was, but then I suppose that's the nature of superpowers.

1. I've been complaining a fair old bit, over the past few months, that I've been feeling very resistant to writing up therapy notes but I couldn't tell whyyyyyyy and it didn't make any seeeeeeeeeense. It turns out that, as ever, brains are sneaky little buggers, particularly in self-defence, and the reason I was so reluctant to engage with therapy notes is in fact exactly the reason I go to therapy. Which is: I want to have a responsible adult around to spot me while I do a bunch of emotional heavy lifting, and as it happens part of why I find writing up therapy notes so useful is that it makes more stuff cohere, i.e., it's more emotional heavy lifting. Only I try to do it all in one chunk without a spotter. And over the past few months, when the reluctance has really set in, I've by-and-large been stable enough that I've actually been digging into long-term change, which is much more intimidiating than short-term fire-fighting when it comes to looking at it solo. Well done, that brain, but it's okay, I promise, we got this.

( They get less ambivalently positive! )

Hi, I'm Alex, my pronouns are they, I have hilarious boardgame-related trauma; I'm going to want five minutes to read the rules in silence before we start; and if I ask a question about gameplay that isn't addressed to you by name and you're not me_and, please pretend I didn't say anything.

As I periodically mention, mostly whenever I make notable progress of any kind, for a variety of hilarious reasons I find the vast majority of boardgames intensely stressful, and this gets worse the less I know the people I'm playing with. Like I said in my previous post, over the past two years I've gone from "cannot even start to play a game I've had long-term interest in, in my own home, with my partner, who I trust, with no-one else present, without bursting into tears twice just reading the rules" to "getting a bit of an adrenaline kick when I start my second new game of an afternoon with strangers, in a pub, when I was already primed for social anxiety for reasons that do not need exploring at this juncture".

( Read more... )

1. Yesterday afternoon, at 4.30pm, I sent off the latest draft of the current paper to my co-authors in advance of our meeting on Tuesday. I had been working at it steadily, in small chunks every day. At no point did I stay up past midnight working on it. It isn't perfect, partly because it can never be and partly because most of the outstanding stuff relies on getting input from a co-author who's been avoiding my e-mails since April; I'm very pleased with myself for maintaining sensible sleep cycles, and for sending it off "unfinished", because I don't think there is actually much to gain from me carefully polishing the presentation and formatting of an appendix that is not yet complete.

2. The casserole my mother bought me (I think when I started the PhD) is currently full of apples I brought home from my parents' on Saturday evening; I've done about half the bag, and everything smells correct. (It's James Grieve; they're mostly not available commercially, but they're what I grew up with, and I'm always faintly disappointed by apples that aren't them. So: I gathered up a quantity of them, and I'll gather up a quantity more when I go for dinner tomorrow, and I'll jar them, and I'll have enough to put on yoghurt and in crumble and in cake for the next year, I hope.)

3. Passing a pound-a-bowl market earlier today, it transpired that the cardboard crates of two-or-so kilos of blueberries really were one quid each. So I got one of those (I was not going to buy more, to get home on public transport), and I need to decide how many to freeze and whether o jam any and if I want to make clafoutis happen, and so on and so forth. This is a lovely problem to have.

4. Shortly afterwards, while poking around charity shops looking for yet more tablecloths (pace the Graun), on my way home from a hospital appointment that was uninspiring but unproblematic, I found a pasta maker for fifteen quid. Nobody I asked said it was a bad idea quickly enough, and that's how I ended up heading home on public transport with a lap full of pasta machine and two kilos of blueberries. "...", said a friend. "How does this stuff even happen to you so much" "I really don't know how you live like this" "But well done" -- which I will take. (This also, conveniently, provides me with My Next Cooking Goal. I think I probably don't care about the spaghetti attachment but I am eyeing up the ravioli one...)

5. I am sitting in the corner of my sofa, facing the French windows, looking out on the grass and the sunshine. (I love this house.)

6. I am now, after today's adventures in public transport, most of the way through CN Lester's book Trans Like Me. I keep crying over it in public. I have been earwormed with a song off Come Home, Not Again (and have just put it on: I'm used to breaking - but not this time/Of all the things you've taken, I'm not giving me from mine/I know I'm better lonely but alive).

7. On which tangentially-related topic, I recently got my act together to actually listen to Jesus & His Judgemental Father's latest, It Might Get Better, and I just absolutely adore the lyric my breakfast is an existential crisis. And I have a whole pile of books to curl up and wallow in, which I'm very much looking forward to -- Provenance, which I haven't yet had brain for, and the new Max Gladstone, and the new Nnedi Okorafor along with some of her back catalogue, and all the Kai Ashante Wilson I just acquired, and...

8. Board games! On Sunday I went to a board game social being run by my BSL-teacher-now-friend (having been a longstanding friend of A's)! I negotiated social anxiety in the run-up! I played two new-to-me games, with one person in the group each time that I didn't previously know, and it... worked? I didn't cry? I panicked a bit at the start of the second one but actually it was okay? I did the thing? I won one of them? I... am really, really proud of myself. I am so aware of how much progress this is: eighteen months ago, or thereabouts, I finally finally managed to persuade myself to sit down with a rulebook and an Adam in our living room and have a go at playing Thud!, which I'd wanted to basically since I saw it being play-tested at a Discworld convention. I think I ended up crying twice just reading the rulebook, while A was in the kitchen carefully giving me space to have a panic? I ended up crying a bunch more over the course of our couple of experimental collaborative games? ... I just played two new-to-me games with strangers, on no more prep than breezily informing people that I have hilarious boardgame-related trauma, would want to spend five minutes anxiously reading the rules in silence before starting, and that if I asked a question about game mechanic and it wasn't addressed to you by name then pretend I didn't say anything and let A answer. I... am so pleased with myself.

9. ... slipper socks. I sort of resent that I like them so much, and they are the precise opposite of what the podiatrists I was seeing wanted me to do for wearing around the house, but fundamentally I really hate slippers and would by defaul be barefoot but also my feet get really cold really quickly. So now I own two pairs of ridiculous slipper socks, and I wear other socks underneath and slouch around in them, and I spend much less time with my feet painfully cold?

10. ... and on Thursday I'm heading down to Brighton for The October Ritual, an aquarium trip, and Terre á Terre, which I've been curious about for a while.

There is lots that is good that is going on. I'm spending the weekend in Cornwall (well, driving to and from -- a lightning visit is To Be Made), and while there will be Wrangling To Be Done I am also, very much, looking forward to going (however briefly) home.

( Read more... )

Includes current politics + mental illness, HURRAH.

( Read more... )

OKAY THAT WILL DO FOR NOW.

1. A remarkably efficient trick to stop me neg-stimming over People Who are Wrong on the Internet, particularly on Facebook: message whoever the host is, and ask if it's okay to continue to respond or if they'd rather I dropped it, making very clear that my default course of action is to drop it. (Their space, their rules, their capacity to moderate, etc.) At the point at which they say "actually I'd rather that thread stopped there" I feel basically completely fine about not continuing.

2. Minor hand injury, everything is fine, I'm just amused. ( Read more... )

3. Oh also: I got an e-mail from the Irish government today! ... I submitted the wrong form of my birth certificate and need to submit a different form within 21 days. I have made this my mother's problem. And they didn't specify any other issues with my application, so...? Maybe Irish citizenship soon.

( food )
( Also food. )
( Still food! )
I am still chewing over last week's Elementary, and redemption arcs and chosen family and boundaries and necessities and narrative imperative in tension with multiple kinds of emotional satisfaction, and the things I find myself wanting -- superficially -- from the story, given points-of-view, and the odd and bittersweet relief at instead getting what I need. The murder plots make no sense, but then they mostly didn't ever; I am still very much here for the characters.
My new CEA card arrived in the post yesterday, which means I will stop feeling faintly guilty about "wasting money" every time I go to the cinema. This is a Good Thing, given how much I'm looking forward to Hidden Figures.
I'm having a really tough time writing an abstract this week, for a variety of reasons, but in the face of that I got a draft in more than 18 hours before the deadline that I was actually reasonably happy with, via the iterative-improvement approach to writing. It needs substantially rewriting, but I've demonstrated that my techniques work, and I've got reasonable confidence that the substatial rewriting wasn't in fact me wildly misinterpreting what was going on.
I said no to someone, and it was fine. (And indeed several other someones, which was less fine but which left me feeling better than I would've if I'd stayed silent.) I told someone I'd screwed something up, face-to-face and more-or-less straight away rather than stewing for six hours over sending an e-mail, and it was fine. Both were really difficult, and I did them.
I appear, via UCH, to have found a sustainable set of strength-building exercises to do that are resulting in measurable improvements. I'm dealing with a lot of complicated Feelings about this pretty well.
Some stripy tulips were much reduced in the supermarket last week; they've been sat in a glass jar on the dining table slowly drying out and turning interesting shapes ever since, and they make me feel soothed and safe and at home.
I am forever gently amused by the thing where, when A is around, we sleep under a single lightweight duvet and are frequently too warm. When he's away, I end up nesting in a pile of that duvet, my three-season much-larger covered-in-dinosaurs duvet, a weighted blanket, and a big soft non-allergenic stripy blue blanket -- and I end up comfortably warm, and with a lot of weight on me, and it's very nice to have occasionally.

-- two ways to break a world.
The first: an end by force; to grind to dust
and scatter to the heedless brilliant stars.
The second: love, and warmth, and gentleness.
This time an egg: the smooth horizon's curve
that shelters and thereby defines your dreams
will unchecked choke: a softer, smaller death.
Instead: take heart and hope; so startling bare
your fresh-cut teeth, and stretch across the shards
of every fear that held you small and close.
Bewildered, daring, raise your face anew
to unimagined unexpected skies.
If this is breaking -- oh, then let me break
and, having broken, break, and break again.

(CN abuse.)

( Read more... )

A concept I've been playing with over the past few days runs a little like this: you are the protagonist of your own story.

What's your character development?

-- simultaneously and consequently, I've been thinking harder about what constitutes character development. Where I am at the moment is at trying to tease out the difference between how one thinks and what one thinks; I suspect I would more reliably consider changes in or to the former character development than the latter.

(So what's my character development? Thought branches down two paths: the first, of internalities versus externalities, and legibility in each; the second, that an awful lot of CBT is aimed at facilitating what I've here described as character development, and the most obvious example in myself to me is, well, nobody has to be wrong, and the associated reduction in splitting.)

(or, Alex reinvents entire subfields of psychology in an extremely half-arsed fashion, Part N in an ongoing &c)

( Read more... )

First, a poem I keep coming back and back to through the years:

( Between | Michael O'Siadhail )

Second, the thing I'm playing wall with most this week (and for the past few months, to be honest) appears to be the concept of desire. I'm tangled up in finding it hard to treat wanting as anything other than binary: something one does or doesn't, in effect, completely divorced from emotion (so "I want to, but it's impractical" is something I interpret - and to some degree experience as - "I don't want to"). Which - isn't healthy, but is also a very typical set of experiences/behaviours/beliefs/systems for people I shall euphemistically class as of my background.

( Read more... )

It's clearly being brought to the surface by the current round with depression (about which I am feeling less immediately despairing this week, between no longer being in a high-progesterone stage of my cycle and working myself to pleasant physical exhaustion and having just spent three-four days in close proximity with one of my best friends), but this is an ongoing issue I ought to work on, sigh.

In Hugos news, rushthatspeaks takes an entirely serious look at what actually makes puppies sad.
khronos_keeper has written some truly excellent Jupiter Ascending meta. It's negative - KK is not exactly super fond of the film - but it makes a lot of excellent points & I am super-grateful to them for writing it up.
issendai's written some stuff that's deservedly doing the rounds at the moment - some more development of the concept of sick systems (updating the post from back in the day), and then a fascinating but not exactly pleasant look at extranged parents' forums.
staranise has written up a quick hit on EMDR therapy, and in particular gives some details of what the therapy looks like these days and how it's thought to work (spoiler alert: it no longer involves moving objects in peripheral vision!)
azurelunatic wrote me a thing, after a fashion: Barrayaran Rituals: severance of armsbearer status in absence of the responsible Vor

1. Yesterday's sudden ramp-up in crazy did have a specific trigger, when I went looking for it, and was my brain shouting at me that something specific was wrong and I needed to pay attention to it. Hurrah that the escalation-wossname still works.

2. I worked out why it escalated that rapidly, too, from a fairly innocuous starting-point.

3. It is still the case that when I work out What The Problem Is the screaming crazy deescalates pretty rapidly.

4. In point of fact I had spent several days beforehand feeling mildly uncomfortable about tangentially-related-thing, which is probably a sign that I need to pay more attention to mild discomfort rather than assuming it'll go away (or arises because of Me Being Unreasonable as opposed to Me Pattern-Matching Subconsciously).

5. I've still got the baseline mads going on, but they're much more tractable baseline mads.

6. It wasn't sulking about not-a-PTSD-diagnosis; it didn't feel right, it didn't fit right, and it wasn't right. Which suggests that the baseline mads are also not about that.

7. I have mitigated the worst of the cause of the Screaming Crazy and am thinking about how to address the outstanding bits of it.

<3 Sorry for worrying you!

(Internalised ableism, capitalism, etc.)

( Read more... )

( Some good things. )

Jumping-off point. Content notes for abuse I suppose? Some discussion of self-injury.

( Read more... )

I'm reading this self-help guide about panic attacks by the Clinical Centre for Interventions (.au) and it's just so... alien to so much of my experience?

( Read more... )

1. So I was saying that I hoped my supervisor was suitably pleased with my pile of data from this run? SHE WAS. She was, by her standards, extremely effusive; I am basking gently in the glow of having been told that I made the right judgement calls about the slightly difficult mass spec session, that I got a significant amount of good data, that the reproducibility of results was great, that I've done really well with my standard deviations given how low the concentrations I'm working with are. She was just really really nice about my dataset just being... really good work. Basking.

2. I crashed out at 9pm and woke up spontaneously at 6; I had a nice relaxed morning pottering about (packing bag for tonight, eating breakfast, making hot chocolate), got into work at 8am, had my supervisor tease me gently about it (she normally gets in around 7 but today I beat her...), faffed with some more data (including fixing the problem in my 'orrible plotting script that I identified last night after I'd put computers away to sLEEP), tidied my desk, replied to some e-mails, ... yeah, pretty pleased with myself. And I slept super well, so.

3. Help help I am seriously considering setting up a side-tumblr called "kaberants" for the sake of engaging with irritatingly wrong text posts without having them clutter up my set of nice pretty pictures??? (Today's discovery-via-tumblr of the morning: Emily Blincoe's photography.)

4. It is a source of great pleasure to me that it's now light at 7am; soon I will start getting the District line into work again (because it runs aboveground for most of the trip, whereas the Piccadilly is underground for this section). Also, I tamed my hair.

5. Indelicates gig tonight! And I have reason to believe they'll be playing lots of stuff from the upcoming album, which appears to be about SPACE SCIENCE and SPACE ROBOTS and CHOICES and consequently I cry everywhere at it every time :D :D :D :D

(and 6: facesfriend points out to me that if I think he is being ludicrously indulgent of me because he adjusts the toaster to provide me with toast slightly burnter than he prefers it, this is possibly an indication that my perception of myself as Really Difficult To Deal With and Always Making People Go Out Of Their Way is skewed.)

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who only by moving can balance

only by balancing move

hello world

moments of perspective

some things make a post

Variations on a theme (the Great Board Games Desensitisation Process post)

ten good things

[mental health] I wish to note for the record...

In which I grouse about some of the superficial shit that's stressing me out

Two quick things

the best people I know are looking out for me <3 // ten good things

[poem] Sonnet III: To make the dawn

... and spoil the child.

{my story is not done}

Working definitions of optimism

[counselling log, I suppose] To be found wanting

[linkspam] Bits and pieces

Hello folk this morning I am saner!

{though there are days that I don't think of you they rarely outnumber those I do}

Notes on distress tolerance (v stream-of-consciousness)

Okay so like

:-)

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May 2025

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