Lately, as in in the last year or so, I've been discovering that a lot of things I blamed myself for were baked in, part of who I am, probably physiological not psychological, and likely impossible to budge.
Not mind you that psychological problems aren't real, or easy to overcome, but that the things I've spent my life trying to brute force simply couldn't be brute forced. Things like ADD. I can manage some improvement, brute-force some concentration, but I pay for it, in the fact that I shut down afterwards sometimes for months, while I rabbit around doing crazy stuff that amounts to nothing. This is basically why my career had the iteration of a book in two weeks, then nothing for six months. And it wasn't some gigantic personal failing, though it felt like it. Still does.
Yes, ADD can be treated, and ... Look Adderal makes me borderline psychotic and has the neat side effect of shutting down the writing. Dan shouldn't have to live with me on Adderal, (I don't want to live with me on Adderal.) Vivanse (sp) works and I can actually sort of kind of get stuff done, except that.... so, I can sit down and force myself to write. Which I grant you is an improvement over sitting down and watching a youtube video, shopping for private planes or Persian carpets (no, I don't buy them. I just shop for them, price them and rank them as to which I'd buy. I mean, I am not, thank heavens, so insane that I will try to buy things I can't begin to afford. I just do a "the price is right" type of info-dive) or trying to establish once or for all whether dinosaurs were cold blooded. On the other hand, for whatever reason (and not a hundred percent sure so another test might need to be done. Might have been other factors) the gateway-in-head shuts down. So, you know, I can type whatever on command, I just can't "feel" the story or the words. If you think about it as clay sculpting while blindfolded and wearing oven mitts, you might have some idea what it's like.
I'm fairly sure my problem with Chapter House (link to it on the right side) and the novel serializing is exactly that. I'm trying to be regular and my brain isn't regular. In my defense Witch's Daughter really is almost done. My brain just got high-jacked by No Man's Land which is also almost done. Except that I might as well have flushed May down the toilet or spent the month sleeping for all I accomplished. That was, illness and recovering from illness, which probably has to do with being old, which I also haven't processed yet, and then this week trying to get the house's last nests of utter disorder fixed and triggering my raging household-dust allergy. (Which is why this post almost didn't happen.) Hopefully functioning by the end of the week, but there's not much use sitting here beating myself because it didn't happen. The result might seem like laziness, but the origin of the issue is very much physical and flattened me.
So, what is this in name of, other than making excuses for myself? Um... They're not precisely excuses for myself. They are "these are the limits of what I can do."
I don't like them. And they're perfectly insane compared to the "Standard issue human" our industrialized situation has convinced us we're SUPPOSED to be, but they are what they are.
The situation we're in as a country, or even if you prefer as a culture, for the entire west, is rather similar to me trying to navigate my body.
Just like 100 years ago, in complete ignorance of neurological weirdness, I'd have gone to my grave thinking I was incredibly lazy and couldn't be redeemed, we live in complete ignorance of culture, and the issues wrought by culture and how culture propagates/changes/is transmitted.
Today talking to a friend, she was amazed mules are still used to grade roads/landing strips in the rural west. And you know, it reminded me of things in Portugal that are still the domain of one family, for centuries and many millennia. And at the same time there are other things that have changed so completely since I lived there that my memories of childhood seem like an acid trip.
And that's physical processes/events. Beneath it there's .... buried stuff. Stories that kids get told and in some form tell to their kids, some of which I'm convinced has passed from brides that were kidnapped or captured in war when the rest of the tribe was killed and their whole culture destroyed to the point we don't even know it ever existed.
Our very languages have things embedded in them we're only partially aware of.
So as rational human beings, when we sit here and we watch, say, to use an example, our country shut down for a case of the common cold, or start to kill its dairy herds for fear of a bird flu that's completely treatable in cows and which has failed to kill a single human (though it allegedly infected one,) all under the impression it will have a 25% mortality rate because "the experts" say so, and feel we should do something...
For most of the insanity -- oh, including throwing things in the atmosphere to make the Earth colder, and other shananigans -- in this, the craziest of all timelines: there's nothing you, an individual human can do to fix it. It's not yours to fix, anymore than you can fix your ADD or my ridiculous auto-immune, or....
Does it mean it's all hopeless? Well, no. Humans do some pretty bizarre and irrational things over the course of history. The fact that all over the world, periodically, we've buried cities and walked away from them is one of those. And yeah we have tons of theories on those "It was ecological collapse" being the favorite, except that really, it's a just so story. We don't know, and it couldn't possibly apply in every circumstance. And given the material culture of various times, walking away from a perfectly good city made probably less sense than locking our entire culture down for the sniffles.
But there we are. We as a group aren't rational. We respond to deep set prompts, some of them from our very language. And we get panics and strange ideas about how things work.
But-- But, we survive.
So to cheer -- eh -- you up, here are some thing to keep in mind:
What can't go on won't go on, but there's no set timetable. Because people haven't yet, visibly, en masse reacted to injustice or abuse, it doesn't mean they never will. It also doesn't mean they aren't reacting, in subtle and yet paradoxically perhaps more effective ways.
There is nothing you can do that's a big hero solution, where you explain things, and suddenly "everybody" does thing a or b. That's not how any of this works. BUT that doesn't mean you're utterly impotent. Talking back still has value. Speaking up can slowly turn the culture. In fact, you can say that is happening, as mass media loses its grip. And if you can't do either, if in fact career and feeding your family requires you to stay embedded in highly leftist locations/jobs, I salute you. You know what you risk -- when the worm turns it will be sudden, and there will be friendly fire. And you're not stupid. You know that -- but you're doing something highly necessary. There's whole fields of human endeavor that might be lost or impossible to restructure, unless we have sane people among the Marx-insanists. Neither talking back in a small (in my case mediumish, but hey) way, nor educating are nothing. And staying embedded in enemy territory is certainly not nothing. You're all our advance troops, our culture sapper specialists. I'm proud of you. (Which granted won't buy you a cup of coffee, but is important.)
What you should do, in and around this: Stay informed. This is important, because it keeps you abreast of situations, and able to better:
Look after yourself. (Secure your oxygen mask before applying others, metaphorically speaking.)
Look after your family and those dependent on you that can't look after themselves.
Keep yourself out of catastrophic trouble.
You should also do things you enjoy. Yes, I know everyone is pinched, we are all enormously stressed. But that's the more reason to do things that bring you joy. Pick up a new hobby or an old one. Have dinner with friends, even if it's sandwiches in the park, go for a walk withy our sweety. Pet your cat or dog. Listen to a favorite piece of music. Build in something like that every day. You are not a machine. Don't treat yourself like one.
Be kind to yourself and others. Don't assume the worst. Don't assume someone is the enemy due to circumstantial evidence. (This is very important if things get spicy.)
Practice joy and mercy. And patience too. We're going to need all the patience, one way or another.
And accept, at a deep level that yes, the worst could happen to you or those you love as a result of your action (or inaction.) But that's known as the common flaw of mankind. You could die right now because a very small meteor drops on you.
Do the best you can. It might not be enough, but by definition no one, not even you, can require more of you.
And be not afraid.
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