Tag: Mental Health

Politics, Etc.

Now is not the time to panic.

by Life With InterestLeave a Comment on Now is not the time to panic.

It has been 18 or so days since I woke up feeling like I was coming down with something that turned into nothing except the feeling of my chest being pressed in the center by a 50lb weight. It has been 18 days since my sore throat has come and gone, along with it occasional sniffles. It has been 14 days since I contacted my doctor and she told me that I couldn’t come in to be seen, but my symptoms were concerning enough that she would preemptively treat me for pneumonia and give me a strong antibiotic and an inhaler. 10 day for so since I developed a cold ice gel sensation in my lungs that burned a cool burn and tingled through my entire body, waking me up in the middle of the night. 3 days since I thought I was getting better, but the sore throat and bruised lung sensation returned. 1 day since I realized I’m not getting better.

It may well be that I have a new poorly timed allergy after years of suffering no such symptoms come spring. I’d like to see my doctor in person and be checked out properly. This cannot happen, of course. Not in the age of coronavirus. My lungs are sore and likely inflamed. I have shortness of breath when I walk and sometimes I need to sit down to catch my breath. It’s terrifying. And it’s probably not Coronavirus. It’s especially terrifying if it isn’t Coronavirus, because I may have some undiagnosed Asthma or something that would make getting actual Covid-19 really, really bad.

Today, for the first time in two weeks, I went to a store. I really wanted eggs so I ventured into Whole Foods and tried my best to remain 6 feet from everyone, but that was impossible. I found one empty aisles and made a beeline for the back of the store, switching into a different aisle half way to avoid someone who turned the corner. I kept my face down while peering up to identify the eggs. Found them. Grabbed two boxes of eggs. Then a few other things. Grabbed two cans of pinto beans then immediately regretted it as I didn’t have a cart and I was well on my way to dropping two dozen eggs and acquiring a virus that may in under a month take my life. I felt I had to buy everything I touched, so I did. The two dozen eggs, the two cans of pinto beans, the sorbet bars that turned out to be ice cream bars with sorbet in the middle, a tea, and a dark chocolate coconut bar at checkout.

I failed miserably at checkout. But they didn’t make it so easy. There are blue x’s on the floor but the people behind me came up too far and I went up too far and then it was all over. I was panicking and accidentally put my chocolate bar on the pile of food that the people behind me were purchasing. I apologized and kept my head down. I felt horrible for the woman checking me out who must have at least been 50, and probably in her 60s. She had gloves on, but surely she was at high risk for being infected. Given the situation, I’m shocked that grocery stores aren’t turning into order ahead and pickup or delivery only. Maybe that’s not financially feasible, but it would be safer.

The grocery store shopping expense was surreal with the barren shelves and the people shopping all either clearly trying to avoid being anywhere near another human and then others prancing about and walking past me at full speed, way too close. I couldn’t hold my breath the entire time as I did when I went to the post office to drop off a letter the other day, so I just gave in to get my eggs. If I’m going to die, I at least need to experience the delicious fluff of a few more good homemade omelettes.

This will all end eventually. We all know it will. I’m not even really anxious anymore. I mean, I am anxious, but that’s not the predominant mood of the week. I’m just sad. I’m so fucking sad and I don’t know how to process it. Because it’s not like the depression I’m used to which is largely just a self defense mechanism to keep disappointment at bay, this is a true, raw sadness that brings me back to the months leading up to when my father passed away and the weeks after. It’s this emptiness. This being stuck in limbo. Especially while others act as if everything is ok (even though in this case everyone is actually experience the same loss of normalcy) and I know everything is not ok. It may be ok for me, personally, but the world is not ok. There is so much broken in the world and especially in this country. We all need a wake up call but the saddest part of all is that even a pandemic will not wake people up. How many fucking people approve of how Trump is handling this mess? How many fucking people think he’s doing a great job despite lying over and over again how this wasn’t a big deal? You know what’s sickening? That no matter what he does, his supporters don’t care. And people think he’s doing a good job when his actions (or lack of action) is literally killing hundreds of people, if not thousands of people. Yea, great job.

I don’t think the problem is capitalism. Or socialism. It’s people. People are pretty horrible, when it comes down to it. I can’t say I’m better than the average anyone. We’re all in it for self preservation and survival. But our drive to self preserve is our downfall. I’ve tried to explain to conservative types that even rich people are better off if people in their society are not left to suffer in poverty. We don’t have to bring the top down to bring the bottom up. No one gets it. Here is a real example. We give everyone healthcare. We make sure that everyone can have paid sick leave and see a doctor and not spread a virus so quickly because people refuse to stay home from work when they are ill in fear of losing their jobs. Our country is ridiculously wealthy and yet look at us. Doctors. Nurses. Those on the frontlines. Having to reuse masks and protective gear. What the hell is wrong with us, America?

This morning I read an article that has been circulating about how what many of us are feeling is grief. It’s not just about the loss of life, or even the momentary loss of our way of life. It’s knowing that our world from before has forever changed. That we may move on but we’ll never forget. We’ll be a little more nervous about things like hugging friends and the germs we might acquire touching anything in public. It’s this deep sense of loss. And I was thinking yesterday how what I really feel is mourning. Mourning the loss of the early childhood I expected for my son, mourning that I may not be able to have another child if I responsibly wait until all of this has passed to try, mourning that even though I’m incredibly socially awkward I was just in the past year starting to make a few friends at work who I hung out with in person once in a blue moon, which made me incredibly happy, and now that’s all over too. Or, at the very least, on hold for who knows how long.

Sure, we may be allowed back into the world sooner than later. But the virus will still be lurking. I won’t want to go out to restaurants or bars or anywhere. I’ll drive to work, take the steps without holding the railing, sit at my desk, try to find a seat on the far end of the table in meetings, and immediately drive home without stopping along the way. Just weeks ago I was thinking of all the classes and activities I would enroll my son in over the coming years. How fun it would be to take him back to the zoo now that he knows animals and would recognize them. How we would go to the aquarium a few more times this year, every few months watching him grow into being amazed by the schools of fish swimming by and glowing jellyfish floating about on display.

There will be memories made at home, too. I get to see my son much more than I would otherwise while working from home. Not much during the day, but at lunch I can see him, and then after work I don’t have to spend 45 minutes in traffic waiting to get home, exhausted. Instead, I have more energy to be a mother. Which is nice. I mean, outside of my lung problems, and finding it hard to breathe and have energy for much at all these days.

I’m definitely trying to focus on the positive here. Trying to connect with friends who I unfortunately lost touch with, because we’re all so busy but now we’re all stuck at home (though some have quite an active virtual social life!) I’m trying. Like we’re all trying. But I’m sad. And I just have to say it. I’m sad for all of the people who are losing their lives in Italy because there are not enough hospital beds. I’m sad for my friends stuck in New York City who are terrified of going out to get food because few are taking the shelter is place seriously there and the hospitals are overwhelmed. I’m sad for my son who cannot go on the playground that he finally has gotten brave enough to climb on. My son who can’t see his grandmother or grandfather in person after seeing them very frequently for his entire life to date. My husband who misses his parents. Myself who misses being around people and the things I’d do to calm myself like window shopping at the mall and going to a coffee shop and listening to the cacophony of conversation around me. Everyone who has an ill family member, or who worries they soon might. I mourn a time of not having to think any of this. It was only a few weeks ago. And if turning 36 didn’t make me feel like I’ve turned the corner into my mid life, this sudden shift into calm chaos certainly does.

Politics, Etc.

It’s all going to be ok. Right?

by Life With InterestLeave a Comment on It’s all going to be ok. Right?

People who do not have anxiety disorders may understand a smidgen of similar panic these days—that deep sense of dread that no matter how hard you try and plan you just are not in control of anything in this rabid little big giant world of ours.

I know I ought to stop reading the news, devouring every qualitative and quantitative data point about this virus. I hadn’t spent a single minute becoming the world’s expert on the flu or other causes of death at scale so why do I find it so impossible to look away from the many articles about infection spreading across the world?

Maybe it’s the tightness in my chest that hasn’t fully dissipated for two weeks despite a full course of strong antibiotics. Maybe it’s knowing that many of my loved ones—my mother, in-laws, and grandmother—are in the at risk category which means things could get very scary if any of them got infected. Given worst-case projections that 75% of us many get sick it’s hard to not worry.

There is also a chance this will all blow over fairly quickly. Maybe the rates of death are much lower here than they have been in other countries. Maybe medicine will soon keep the worst of the disease at bay. It doesn’t help much to be a pessimist, though I wonder how much it helps to be a realist in this situation. I mean, it is important to take necessary precautions and isolate, but beyond that what can we do? How panicked do we want to be?

I don’t understand those who don’t feel the heavy weight of anxiety right now, but I envy them. Those who are in the what will be will be camp seem to accept this may get pretty ugly, but they aren’t particularly worried about it. Then there is the camp that thinks the entire situation is being hypersensationalized. That the media is playing up our fears when the data is not yet available to get an accurate analysis on what is really going on. That this is all not worth shutting down our economy over, despite acknowledging that some people will die from this who weren’t otherwise ready to meet their proverbial maker.

But it’s challenging to pretend everything is business as usual when it so clearly isn’t. Ignore the news—fine. Don’t engage in conversation and social media chatter about hospitals becoming overwhelmed and people of all ages becoming critically ill and unable to breathe. Got it. I just don’t know how to tune out how dramatically life has changed, in an instant. How we can no longer see our friends, or anyone really. We go for walks and sprint to the other side of the street when anyone heads our direction. We do not have a moment to look a stranger in the eye and exchange a friendly silent hello or an awkward accidental glance in anyone’s direction.

Two weeks of this is certainly survivable. It may be longer than that. How long? So many think it won’t be long at all. It doesn’t make sense for this to be a month or two and then we return to normal. To defeat this thing it seems we must accept it will seriously disrupt our lives for quite some time. Months? Years? Certainly not weeks.

There are positives to the isolation as well. It forces us to return to simplicity, in solitude or with our close family. We cannot go out to be entertained, we must entertain ourselves (or at least cozy up on the couch while watching Netflix.) It provides pause to a modern life that sprints ahead with no retrieve, and gives us the opportunity to think, create, and, if we can quiet our minds enough, sleep. So I’m trying, I’m really trying, to focus on the positive and not expect the worst. The focus is to keep loved ones safe, keep ourselves safe, and take everything one day at a time.

Isn’t that what the non anxious folks do?

Politics, Etc.

And So. We Wait.

by Life With InterestLeave a Comment on And So. We Wait.

The lights go out, one city, one county, one state at a time. That’s how I envision it, a rolling blackout overtaking the life we once knew, just days ago. Sitting in a coffee shop and enjoying the soft buzz of conversation is somehow a memento of life before, a sweet memory of last week, tinged with the eerie, stomach-churning nostalgia of something that happened far too recently to qualify as nostalgic.

Yesterday, son in car seat, husband in driver’s seat, we set out to find an empty space where we could all run and forget the surreality of our reality. Park number one was too crowded, and the field at the local school packed with a handful of people, far too many to qualify for frolicking and social distancing in tandem. So we drove on, to another park, one that I thought might work. We found an empty soccer field and jumped and skipped and threw frisbees and although I was there with my family never had I felt more alone in the world. I felt grateful for having my husband and son, and sad for friends I know who must truly socially isolate, without others to run with or laugh with or hold into the darkness of the many nights ahead.

Our world is indeed upside down. It is incredible that so many in this country don’t know it yet, but it’s coming. Those rolling blackouts, each light of the life we have come to assume to be the only life we’ll ever know is put out, twinkling bright until it’s not. We are breathing fresh air and then sucked into the depths of the sea, suffocated with little warning.

But this isn’t a death sentence–for most of us. This too shall pass. We’ll dig out of this darkness at some point–in 3 months, in 6 months, in 18 months–but soon, soon enough, the lights will flicker on again, and there we’ll be, expected to move on and forget about how we’ve all drowned and resurfaced in our own reincarnation. Those of us who make it. The many of us who do. As we mourn those who did not. There, on the other side.

The darkness is upon us. It is not as scary as a tsunami or hurricane or tornado or earthquake, but with it is the same danger, at far greater scale. We see the waves pull back from the shore and stare out at the sand admiring the vast landscape of emptiness and loneliness. We take a breath and it feels like the waves will forever recede as we walk six feet apart from each other and question our agreement to not embrace or come near each other. And then, with the rumbling of the angriest gods, a tidal wave so big comes racing to shore, to us standing frozen still, staring at it in denial it could ever tackle us down so viciously.

How many of us believe it will come? It doesn’t matter. For it will.

Politics, Etc.

Life in the Time of Corona

by Life With InterestLeave a Comment on Life in the Time of Corona

50 minutes until we go on lockdown. It still seems like we’re all living in the middle of a movie, instead of real life. We slowly–very slowly–start to accept that things aren’t as they should be. Some of us by choice, other’s, force. Our self-promoting everything-is-dandy-and-I’m-perfect President finally admitted that our situation is “bad, very bad.” Yes, it is Mr. President, it is.

Today, the stock market dropped 3000 points. Everyone is panicking. The fed dropped interest rates to 0 and eased some quantitativeness but no one seems to care. The world is ending (it’s not ending)–the stock market is certainly acting like it is–because EVERYTHING is impacted by this little bug. As others have written, it’s like a silent tsunami. It’s a natural disaster of epic proportion but we can’t see it. We’ll only see the carnage in hindsight.

Today, the President asked people in our country to avoid gathering in crowds of more than 10 people. Today, the President admitted that this is a serious issue. Today, in California, in the Bay Area, six counties are, as of midnight tonight, on full lockdown. For the next three weeks we can go out only to get groceries and to visit the doctor in an emergency. We’re supposedly allowed to go for walks, as long as we remain six feet away from others. Police are supposedly enforcing all of these rules and at least in San Francisco it’s a misdemeanor to go out for reasons that aren’t allowed.

Despite my lingering chest tightness, I decided to go for a walk this evening to get some fresh air. I first brought my son in his stroller, then eventually made a few more loops around my apartment complex solo. The way people darted across the street when I walked by, you’d think I had developed a case of toxic B.O.–but one quickly remembers it’s just Corona Etiquette–walk briskly and deviate from your path if needed to avoid any and all social contact. Everyone has the plague. Act accordingly.

I managed 11,000 steps this evening, which is more than I’ve gotten in the last week since my company went work from home and I’ve opted to mostly shelter in place as my lung issue worsened. I had a phone appointment with my doctor today, which was as surreal as anything else going on these days. Dear doc: do I worry, or not worry, about this chest tightness and cool liquid sensation in my lungs? DOC AM I GONNA DIE? TELL ME LIKE IT IS DOC, TELL ME LIKE IT IS.

Doc: well, your symptoms are a bit concerning, not particularly because of Coronavirus, but typically with chest tightness that isn’t getting better I’d have you come in to get checked out. But since, well, things are, different these days–because shortness of breath is a symptom of, Corona, if you came in we’d have to suit up and it would be a whole thing and… I’m just going to prescribe you drugs for pneumonia, which I wouldn’t normally do without seeing you, but these are different times… and, uh, you won’t be able to get a test because, uh, you don’t have any exposure to someone with Coronavirus or severe symptoms so…”

Me: thanks doc. I know it must be, uh, crazy these days. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me. So, uh, if this doesn’t get better, uh, when should I be worried, like, uh, where I, you know, contact you, before it’s really bad, but not before it’s like, not really bad, because I know you’re busy dealing with people who are, uh, really bad…

Doc: if it gets worse and you have pain in your chest, if the medicine isn’t helping…

Me: Ok, doc. Thank you. doc.

Doc: oh, it would be better to send someone else to pick up the medicine since you, um, have some symptoms…

Me: uhhhhh…

Doc: have your husband pick it up for you.

Me: um… (thinking: husband doesn’t want to get sick) …um, ok. Thanks doc.(click.)

A Week Ago…

A week ago we just got sent home from work and told that we would be working from home for two weeks. Then everything in the world fell apart. The time between last Monday and this Monday may as well been the length of a thousand Mondays. I’ve aged too many years with worry in such a short time because the rawness of life, the vulnerability of humanity, the weakness of all of us and our mortality is there, in front of all of us, like a raw beating heart that is pulsing to the rhythm of some childhood joke “nah nah nah nah” beats the heart, pouring blood everywhere, squirting up to the moon–there’s your rotten humanity for you. There’s all the control you’ve tried to obtain fucking painted red across the stars, a sky dripping with maroon rain all over our faces, yet most people somehow don’t even notice it yet, don’t taste the blood there, slipping slowly down to their lips, smelling like salt and old copper pennies.

We control nothing. Nada. Not when a little tiny virus can slip into our throats and nostrils and lungs and take over our bodies, our poor little weak bodies that try to wage war against against these intruders and yet eventually fail in 2 out of 100 cases or maybe 3 out of 100 or 5. There is nothing we can do when the army of our white blood cells can’t take on the enemy. And when hospitals no longer can give our army the backup needed to fight the good fight to keep us alive, we’re on our own, and on our own, we are alone in the fight.

This is happening. It’s not an overreaction. It’s not an anxiety-induced prophecy. Look at Italy. Italy is in chaos. And we are 10 days behind. 10 days. A lifetime. A lifetime of 240 hours where in this horror movie some percent of us know the plot and we’re saying nooo, wait, stoppppp, don’t open the dooooorrrrr and you’ve got people still having birthday parties and gatherings and choosing not to pay attention to the inevitable because it’s too hard to admit how little we control in this world for ourselves and yet how much we DO control if we work together to stop this thing. But we’d never do that.

So every country goes and does their own thing to try to stop the impact of the virus. Italy goes on lockdown. Every state in the US has some different rule, some with curfews, some not, some with no events, some with any event, who knows. The UK says fuck it, let the young folks get sick now, so when winter comes the old folks can be less likely to get infected (yes, my friend, winter is indeed coming–though it’s hard to imagine winter and the Return of the Corona (in theaters this December) while spring has barely sprung and the virus has barely, well, viraled.)

Tomorrow morning, I will go to the pharmacy to get my steroid inhaler and antibiotics, and I will pray to the gods I don’t believe in that I don’t catch this virus at the pharmacy with all of the other sick people to get medicine to treat what may be this virus or may be something else that is still causing some serious issues with my respiratory system which probably makes me more at risk for serious complications from this virus if I was to get it if I don’t already have it. And so. Anxiety amplifies. I try to breathe. To remind myself that most people my age do not die form this thing. That I am doing the right thing and staying inside and in a weeks time this should all pass.

But in the back of mind I’m also thinking–we are 10 days behind Italy… we are 10 days behind Italy–and what if, what if in 10 days, or 5 days, or 7 days, my lungs take a turn for the worst? What if, whatever it is I have, I need to go to the hospital in the thick of it. What then? What can I do now to prevent that? Take my medicine, I guess. I can’t get an X-ray, they won’t give anyone X-rays for pneumonia at this time. I just have to take my medicine and hope I get better. Stay home. Stay home and hope. That’s modern medicine for you.

Why are my lungs so cold? There’s ice liquid in there. Liquid ice. Pouring in. I can breathe. And these days, breath is our most valuable asset. So, I remind myself, just breathe. Just. Fucking. Breathe.

T-10(?).

Politics, Etc.

The World Catches Fire

by Life With InterestLeave a Comment on The World Catches Fire

It happened in the blink of an eye. Like in the movies. One day, we heard about some people in China getting infected with some new virus from–rumor had it–a live bat sold at a market that someone possibly made into bat soup. It was there. Then everywhere. Then here.

Wuhan, China. The epicenter of the virus. A city that I, like many Americans, had never heard of until this sudden onset of illness that immediately sounded the alarms of potential pandemic amongst those in the know. I wasn’t in the know. I continued my daily routine and tried to take comfort in the vast distance between my Silicon Valley California home and the horror that was unfolding in China.

Then came Italy. And the rest of Europe. And the first cases in America. The moment I saw the headline about a nursing home outside of Seattle my heart sank. I tried not to obsess with the latest news article and statistics on this virus, but it was clear that a nursing home would not fare well with an infection that was slaughtering the frail and most vulnerable. Then, the first cases popped up in my own backyard. The first official cases. It seems the virus may have been here already for weeks. We don’t know yet. A patient was transferred to a hospital 10 minutes from my apartment. A few days later, that patient died.

Our offices closed their doors. All of the tech offices across Silicon Valley (well, most of them.) Offices full one day–full of meetings and water cooler chatter and open office chit chat, dark and silent the next. Slack and Zoom made the transition to work from home smooth logistically, but the social and mental impact of this sudden shift was jarring to all of us. We are moving forward as if the world is the same as it was, yet, suddenly in the middle of a global pandemic. We carry on because life goes on, as I imagine it did in the times of all the pandemics of the past. With our highly connected world we have the luxury of social distancing without full on social isolation, but also the continuous spread of real and false news which fuels necessary awareness as well as anxieties and misinformation. We wonder–can we go outside to get our mail? Can we take a walk around the block? Can we visit the local cafe? Plan a vacation for this summer? Will we be able to visit loved ones in assisted living facilities? How much toilet paper do we need to prepare for the apocalypse? And, most importantly, can we convince our stubborn and aging parents to take this risk seriously?

It is not as if some bomb dropped on our heads. We are not at war. Yet in other parts of the world, in the hospitals where doctors are forced to decide who to save based on their predicted outcome, it sure looks like it. Those amongst us who believe in statistics and trust statisticians fear that we are not doing enough to mitigate overwhelming our own fragile health system. That we are days behind Italy. That so many here will soon suffer. We secretly hope that our friends on Facebook posting that this is all a hoax are right, though our friends who work in healthcare and respond to their posts to inform them of how wrong they are remind us that this is all real. All too real.

We wonder if the cold we have is actually this infection. How would we know? There are no tests available unless you’ve been traveling to another country or have clearly been near someone who has tested positive. A week ago I felt a slight chill and my lungs, lungs weak since a bout of pneumonia years ago, started to tingle, then burn into a throbbing soreness. But, a week later, with no fever and cough, only sore lungs that make it slightly hard to breathe, I assume I have one of the thousands of other illnesses one can get this time of year–not Coronavirus. I still scan hundreds of articles to try to find a case similar to mine in case this might be a mild form of what I’m reading about, though I’m not sure how that would help anything at all other than in increasing my anxiety. I’m already home, already trying to not go out much, and trying to do my part.

But it’s difficult to suddenly shift into a safe set of processes in life even when one moves to isolate themselves and yet maintain an otherwise normal cadence of life. For those with children who are able to work from home, we face unplanned challenges with childcare.

My son, 19 months old, is watched daily by my 76-year-old father in law who prefers to continue his routine of taking the train from his town to ours. I am very concerned due to his age that he is putting himself at great risk doing this. But he prefers this method of transportation and I’ve yet to determine if I ought to ask him not to come at all–for we still need someone to watch our child while we work. Others face similar situations as many workers now have their children home with schools closed for weeks to try to slow the spread of this (hopefully) little plague of 2020. What do we do? There are no rules written for how any of this plays out. We can only do our best and support each other through the unknown to come.

I haven’t yet written about any of this as it has all been quite overwhelming. But I think I’ll try to write a bit more as I read earlier some recommendation that we ought to journal through this time which likely will be remembered in the history books (we can only hope not.) So I’ll write here as I do, with no particular purpose other than to share what it’s like to be alive through all of this. How one’s world, chaotic as it felt before, can be so rapidly upended that all prior chaos, from just a week earlier, mind you, feels quite quaint.

And my 19 month old with a fountain of energy to match his fountain of hair, who now says “thank you” whenever handing you an item and who yells at our Echo to play “Janis Joplin” and “Bad Guy” all day long, has no idea what is going on in the world. And for now, he doesn’t have to. Thank god that this virus is not harming children. I am terrified for our elders and the vulnerable amongst us, but I am so relieved that children are not severely impacted. The thought of living through a pandemic wiping out our youth, especially as a mother of a young child, makes me want to hide in a dark cave with my family and never come out. So, I feel grateful that of all the plagues to be unleashed into the world this time around, my son should be ok. But many others won’t be. And I think of my mother who refuses to change her behavior to try to mitigate her chance of infection or infecting others, whose doctor told her (shockingly) that this is no worse than the common flu. And all the people I know who are forced to make decisions on whether to come together to mourn the dying or to avoid further spreading of the disease. I think of all the stories coming out of Italy and the rest of the world where people are dying not because they have to die but because there aren’t enough hospital beds and ventilators and I see the charts that show we are slipping day by day closer to this exact scenario and I worry. I feel, for once in my life, my anxiety levels match the actual rational amount of anxiety for the situation at hand.

And yet, anxiety helps no one.

I told my husband, as I was trying to spin up positives for the horror unfolding int he world, that there is something beautiful about all of this–not the people dying part, of course–but how pandemics reveal that no matter how much we have or don’t have, whatever our political affiliation or ethnicity or nationality, we’re all equally vulnerable because we’re all equally human. At that moment, he let out an accidental sneeze to punctuate the statement with the most perfect unplanned comic timing possible. Even though it hurt a bit to laugh, my lungs as sore as they are, I couldn’t help but break into a deep bellied chuckle for a good minute in tandem with my husband who found his sneeze equally hilarious.

And that’s life. Nothing makes any sense and yet it all does. Sometimes it takes a disaster to pull ourselves out of the dirt so we can again see the sky. But now we’re still in the dirt, deep in it. As an atheist I’m not one for prayer, but since it’s officially our national day of prayer I’ll throw one prayer out that maybe this will all blow over and soon we’ll be making “too soon” jokes after the fact. But I have little faith my prayer or anyone’s prayers will do much of anything. Our government officials are, not surprisingly, failing us. I don’t want to get into politics here. Not in this post. But it is terrifying how this crisis is being handled. And I sit here, as if watching a horror film, waiting as the next weeks unfold, with my lungs burning and throbbing with something, and my mind racing through what might be coming a week from now, seeing how much has changed from a just a week ago.

Mental Health

Restraint.

by Life With InterestLeave a Comment on Restraint.

Inside our skulls we are wired for pleasure. Robotically we seek out these highs which do their best to ensure both our survival and the survival of our species.

But, what if we can actively retrain our minds to no longer seek pleasure?

This is a central theme to my 2020 and my immediate consolidation of all of my resolutions—pleasure, in its simplest form (all and any comparable to ingesting refined sugar) is hereby and as of 1/1/20 banned from my existence. Dopamine and serotonin will no longer control me. I will have as much free will as a human can have, and that starts by releasing oneself from the chemical desire for a momentary high of any sort.

Some who I have shared this idea with have said this seems unhealthy (everything in moderation my dear) but as I’ve learned with intermittent fasting and a strict 1400 calorie diet with 1-2 high calorie days a week followed by a restricted 500 calorie day, I have the ability to retrain my mind (and quickly) to no longer seek the quick and empty pleasure of a morning muffin or secretly eating a dozen candy bars because they simply exist.

In removing simple pleasure, all that refined sugar, from my existence, I can retrain myself to experience pleasure from subtlety and perhaps heal my addiction to it and replace it with something far more productive and positive.

For example, when you stop eating refined sugar, the natural sweetness of vegetables is much more noticeable on the tongue. We need to eat but we do not need ice cream or chocolate bars or muffins to survive. And, by removing quick highs from our palate, we can eventually taste so much more.

I am applying this to my entire life this year. Yes, it is a drastic shift, but it is much needed. This will help me stabilize this year, simplify and repattern my values. Pleasure is a vice and one worth experiencing but not necessary to repeat or desire. It sounds very Buddhist of me, I guess, but I’m not here to be one with the world. I’m here to teach my mind and the chemicals therein that they do not own my actions. They’ve had 36 years to prove themselves worthy of this power and have only led me into the darkness. In taking away that power, I am here, ready to lead myself into the light.

Mental Health

It would be nice.

by Life With Interest2 Comments on It would be nice.

There are people in this world who do not feel like they are walking on a fragile tightrope everyday, always on the verge of disintegrating beneath their slippery feet. It would be nice to know what that’s like.

It is difficult to be simultaneously grateful for all the wonderful everything that is my life and terrified of losing it all–knowing how easy it is to fall. I can’t imagine feeling confident enough to live life without worrying every single day–to be able to commit to something like a mortgage and not be one failure away from losing everything.

Maybe there’s a life out there where I don’ have to live in a constant state of panic. Maybe it’s the life I live today with a much more positive outlook and repatterning the way I think. There has to be a better way. Mentally, I’m sick, and physically, well, I’m certainly not healthy. I’m committed to fixing all of this in 2020 and yet here I am, eight days into it, and unsure how, and falling back into making the same mistakes. It’s not only embarrassing, it’s frustrating to feel so out of control when all I want is to be in control.

It’s that death spiral I know so well. Down, down I go, accepting my fate without it being necessary. Being sucked into a whirlpool of catastrophe that isn’t even there and kicking harder than anyone would ever know just to stay afloat. The tragic thing is that I fail to, at a bare minimum, be a likable person. The few people who give me a chance give up on me eventually and again I’m alone to pick myself up from the bottom of the ocean, drifting in the dark, my flesh scraping against the forgotten sand.

It all needs to stop. It needs to start being sustainable and routine and productive and stable. It can’t be a life trying to stay afloat in a whirlpool and swirling and swirling and swirling until I’m so dizzy I can’t think straight and my actions are the result of confusion and fear and a deep self hatred that stems from the earliest days I can remember, when I learned that I’d never be good enough. That I was broken and annoying and needed to stop being so sensitive and hyper and sad and scared.

How much have I really changed these last 36 years on this earth? Not much. But maybe I can change over the next 36. I have to keep the hope alive that I can. It seems like it should be possible with the right tools and tricks. The appropriate guidance and people who understand that I don’t mean what I say or do sometimes and I regret it immediately and I’m working every day on being a little bit better until I’m acceptable. I have to believe that somehow I can get there.

Random Musings

2020.

by Life With InterestLeave a Comment on 2020.

Maybe I’m just in an uncharacteristically good mood today, or my post-massage “toxins” are intoxicating my mind, but I have a good feeling about 2020. I know the change from 12/31 to 1/1 is an arbitrary a delineation of time from one period to the next as any, but for some reason, everything feels different. I am thinking in five year chunks right now, and 2020 is the beginning of this chunk. A new beginning.

2019 was the end of trying to be something I’m not and letting that turn me into someone even worse. I am still scared but I am accepting now that failure is not only ok, but that it no longer means getting on the same horse and expecting not to fall again. I am not meant to ride a horse. I’m maybe meant to surf on starlight or fly a rocket ship. The world is full of possibilities and I’ve been so limited by fear. Fear is there for a reason but I’ve realized what is really terrifying is that 15 years into “adulthood” I still feel as lost as I did in 2005. Maybe more so, in some respects. For someone so lost, I acknowledge I’ve managed some level of achievement in all areas of my life—but everything is slightly off kilter.

The next five years are about finding my balance. Split nearly in two, the first half is dedicated to simplification and productivity. Semi-minimalism, reduced social media use, sleep, intermittent fasting, pescatarian mostly plant-based diet, daily movement, high-value time with my family, saving (not spending), and focusing through stretches of time are the themes of these 2.5 years. At the end of this time, I will be 38.5 and prepared for the next phase, the entry into my 40s. For the second half of these five years, I will add to the now-routine simplicity and healthful way of living and add substantial change. This change will lead to a 40s of fulfillment where I can build and create on a daily basis (exact meaning of that is unclear, but through phase 1 I will identify my objective and work towards acquiring knowledge to empower this transition.)

Everything starts with simplicity and sleep, starting tonight. Starting now with these “toxins” sweating out of my flesh and breathing in the fresh air of one of my favorite Bay Area towns as I take the time to walk around and fully reset. I became toxic in 2019 and there is no going back to undo my thoughts or actions. But I can change everything going forward. I can stop projecting my own lack of control into trying to (and failing to) solve everyone else’s lives. I need to love myself, as cheesy as it sounds, and truly accept the things she isn’t good at, and provide room to grow where eventually she can add the most light to the world. That light is there, at the end of the proverbial tunnel. She sees it. She feels it burning hot on her flesh. The warmth embraces her with possible possibility.

creativity

I should probably

by Life With InterestLeave a Comment on I should probably

Think of a character and plot so unlike me they would be both interesting to write about for hours on end and intoxicating to escape into. Escape is what I need, not from any one location, but from this mind which is like a forward-loading washing machine churning the same load of clothing over and over nonstop for eternity.

There is really nothing more to be said about *me* as much as I’d like to imagine my life is so interesting millions would gather to hear me read a few pages of a memoir I’ll never write — the one titled “I’m not funny. I’m hilarious.” Or my very-far-into-the-future best-selling self-hurt book “fuck zen: embracing your inner and outer anxiety.” All the books I’ll never write because I really don’t have much to say and what I do have to say is not as interesting as what everyone else has to say and so I might as well not say it.

But I still dream of figuring out how to write fiction. It seems awfully delightful—as one flings from childhood and its imagination allowance its easy to forget how to think up all the things that could be while buried in trying to resolve the things that are. Maybe in that imagination somewhere is a story that is meaningful enough to make readers gasp and sigh and feel and understand their own behavior and wants and needs a bit more—it always astounds me how little most people think about the whys of everything. So stories gently remind them of themselves and prod at those ignored vulnerabilities. The sore spots festering beneath fresh cookies made for bake sales and their accompanying smiles and social niceties and hiding behind office desks and in conference rooms where people turn into robots to perform their roles to find some meaning in all the meaninglessness, as well as to pay rent. I’m not very good at *that* kind of pretend so it would be helpful if I could find some talent for the other kind.

But alas, I too have no imagination. Or, I lost it a long, long time ago, somewhere in the fading wallpaper of my childhood home. I think it’s there somewhere, in me too, still. I’m curious at the least. So maybe there is a story in me, somewhere. The world has millions of books written and many are horrible and many have only been read by the author and her mother and her two best friends but they at least are books that were written!

This writing of fiction requires empathy not just for real people but for fake people as well. I’m unclear I have either. Though instead of loving my protagonist(s) I think I’d be served better as an author to hate them, or have a cold indifference to their choices, irregardless of how kind or evil they might be. The empathy of not judging ones behavior in knowing that all action is in reaction to something that at some point one had no control over. A general acceptance of the philosophy that free will is an illusion and we are all a chain of dominos tipping over in the direction we ought to, in response to other dominos tipping over on us.

If one day some critic writes about my writing, it should say something like this—she writes of humanity’s ugliness and beauty through the lens of sociopathic wit. No person’s vice is judged by the author, and even the reader finds themselves relating to the darkness of humanity, seeing how we all slip sometimes, at least mentally, into places we prefer not to admit even to our therapists and diaries. Not necessarily to the depths of her complexly fractured characters, but in their thoughts and impulses which seem to translate somehow to all of us in a personal way which guts us reading any of her many works — she will go down as one of the most prolific and thoughtful authors of the century.

Or, perhaps, she will go down as the woman who never accomplished more then blogging about all the things she would like to accomplish because her only talent in life was coming up with ideas of things to accomplish that she never would.

Oh well, maybe 2020 will tilt me towards prolific productivity or, at least, a plot, or person to write said plot about.

Random Musings

Spilled.

by Life With InterestLeave a Comment on Spilled.

If it was the cancer, I’d be devastated, still, but not living with this dripping open wound. When someone is so stubborn, it’s nearly impossible to change their behavior. Maybe entirely impossible. But still, his cause of death does not sit right with my heart, and it certainly didn’t sit right with his.

With a pacemaker put in just a week or so prior, and a box not set up properly by the rehab home that was supposed to notify the hospital in case of any problems, and a man alone with no one to help him, screaming deliriously into the night. How fast did they go to him? What happened in his last hours? He called my mother and told her how frightened he was, they were taking him on a ship. She told him to go to sleep, he was just having a bad dream. It wasn’t a bad dream. It was the worst dream. The end dream.

In my own deliriousness just a week after having my son and pumping all hours night and day to keep my milk supply alive I received a call at midnight—a few moments after going to sleep for my needed hour—that my father was dead.

All the calls and trying to coordinate doctors and convince him to accept treatment when he wasn’t in the right state of mind and beg him to eat a god damn banana to increase his potassium levels were useless or maybe caused more harm than good. I was the one who recommended the rehab by his mother’s home—I should have instead pushed for one closest to a hospital.

And yet rehab was a joke in that he was not being rehabilitated. His heart was failing. He couldn’t stand up without his blood pressure dropping to dangerous levels. I couldn’t go see him in my third trimester. I knew the end was near but did not think it was quite so near as his cancer was not spreading so fast and maybe we at least had a few months left—some time to say goodbye.

He pushed himself too hard in physical therapy to stand and no one stopped him. The last video of him my mother sent was him standing and smiling and taking a few steps. He thought he was getting better. Getting out. Maybe that’s a good thing. But if he hadn’t pushed himself so hard that day… if it wasn’t a Friday and then the weekend with less staff… if the rehab wasn’t in the middle of a big move to an entirely new building distracting the workers from their other duties… if we pushed to figure out how to get him seen by a specialist even though insurance wouldn’t cover medical transport and he couldn’t sit up… if we had yelled at the specialists to see him now not in a month and yes we know they are busy but this is an emergency… if we listened to him about not trusting the doctor at the rehab who was changing his blood pressure mediations… if he ever had a primary care doctor instead of only cancer specialists… if only healthcare wasn’t so disjointed and managed as if our bodies were one connected system instead of parts to be managed by specialists who don’t speak to each other… if only doctors at hospitals who changed out on shifts understood what the doctor on the prior shift said or recommended. It only there was some consistency and sanity in all of it.

He was a very sick, dying man. No one would question that. In his delirium his worst cake out—and the nurses and doctors did their jobs as they do, but their empathy if they had any drained with their patience. But after all of that… from the first day in the hospital in June until his passing in August and my body aching with third trimester pains and heart aching wondering if I’d ever see him again and if he’d ever meet his grandchild then breaking when I was told at midnight that horrible night that he never would… I’m a mess of a human. Crippled, more than before. It’s not like I had such a perfect relationship with my father, but I felt a responsibility to him, to hear him, to help him, to ensure he had the most peaceful death possible when it had to happen, and I achieved none of that.

Some nights he shows up in my dreams. I don’t believe in an afterlife, they are just dreams. But still, they are so real. He is there with my son and they are so happy together. And then I wake up and I remember reality. My mind slips to imaging his corpse, nearly two years buried, and the moment at his funeral I saw him dead, though I shouldn’t have, as it isn’t something Jews do, but my mother had to identify the body and my non Jewish aunt recommended I put something of my sons in his casket to bury him with. So I put the frog hat that I took my son home from the hospital in on his shoulder and looked at him dead for a few seconds but those seconds etched themselves into my mind for a lifetime and I see them each time I awake from these all-too-frequent dreams.

But death impacts all of us and we all lose our parents sooner or later. And other loved ones. And ourselves. So I try to lift myself out of this broken state and use it to fuel a drive to make the most out of every moment. I’m trying. But failing. Maybe now, nearly a year and a half later, I’m starting to truly dig out of it. To accept he’s really not coming back. That time is never enough. That memories fade no matter how hard you try to cling to them. And no matter what freezes your heart, life moves on, cold and emotionless. It doesn’t wait for you or anyone.