The earth to humanity, so entangled in our own nets.
Category Archives: About Me
Nothing | Doing
It’s been awhile since I posted an update, so here one is. After several years of reading, participating in online support groups and re-evaluating my personal history, it seems highly probable that I have ADHD. I have adjusted my expectations and strategies accordingly.
That is, I set procrastination to offset impulsivity, sneak up on tasks without letting myself know so as not to awaken overwhelm, and various other tips and tricks, workarounds and reframes, that are helpful. Somewhat. Not as helpful as family support, well-informed friends and/or expert healthcare would probably be, but one works with what one has.
Between Seasonal Affective Disorder (which is not, despite the name, limited to a specific season) and ADHD, it’s still a daily struggle to get things done. This impacts just about everything in my life – income, relationships, health, home.
Plus, all this new self-conception is taking place against a backdrop of highly unsettled times. Denial, and the deepened retrenchment into dysfunctional behaviors that it brings, are everywhere I look. While I uncover answers to “why am I like this?,” answers to the larger question, “why are humans like that?,” are harder to come by.
With zero safety net, and a high risk of developing a hereditary condition I have thus far avoided should I contract even a “mild” case of COVID, I’m still masking and avoiding shared indoor environments. Happily, I live where this is accepted without comment or harassment. But it further limits my already limited life.
The thing is, I don’t necessarily experience these limitations as a restriction. In many ways, I live as most people lived only a century or two ago, rarely leaving a well-known local environment.
Many people still do live that way, and there’s something to be said for it. I haven’t owned a car in decades, as I wait – and wait, and wait – for an EV I can afford. So I was accustomed to a limited range of travel long before getting on a bus became a serious risk to my health. I wish my small range was rural rather than suburban, and there weren’t SO. MANY. NEIGHBORS. SO. CLOSE. But accepting that, as I must, there are still a lot of flowers and beautiful clouds and a surprising amount of wildlife where I live.
When I had a car, it felt like a shell. I passed through environments without touching them, or being touched by them. Some days I miss that of course, when the weather is rude or my heart is bruised. But lacking the shell imposes a sort of involuntary mindfulness. I wish for filters when the yard services descend, with their ear-racking, fumacious motors. But then again, when my neighbors pop out of their morning doors into their morning cars, intent upon not spilling their morning coffee and keeping to their morning schedule, never noticing the wild turkey on the lawn next door or the rare luminescence in the sky above, I’m thankful for my wide open brain.
So, my journey continues, as journeys do, and just when I think I know where I’m going, I find myself somewhere else. But home, age has taught me, is inside of you. So that’s OK.
The Tedium is the Passage
Browsing through old drafts, I came across this unfinished post from 2016. I present it here as a prequel to my May post, Isms. More at the end…
I found this book in my neighbor’s little lawn library, but did not notice the subtitle until I got it home. Buddhists again. What is up with that? Everywhere I look there seem to be Buddhists, or Buddhist practices. Am I resisting some inner calling or something?
I ponder that question. I am not a huge fan of organized (or even disorganized) religions. With the best of intentions, religions try to institutionalize direct experience, at which point it is no longer direct. Thus, self-contradiction is built into their foundations from day one.
I see spirituality as primarily a private, internal experience. Certainly spiritual inspiration can come from many sources, but overall, looking outside to better know yourself seems to me like a step in the opposite direction from where you are trying to get. (Of course, that perspective may be colored by the fact that I’m an introvert).
I think it’s just that Buddhists and I are often interested in the same things. Continue reading
Isms
Just a quick post (am I really capable of such a thing? We shall see) to update followers on the issues I was wrastling with in February. I quit the Yale “Science of Well-Being” course after a few weeks, as it was targeted primarily towards those who had bought into competitive materialism all of their lives, which has never been me. Also it was a little too mechanistic in its attitude toward brain science. Research is good, but not everything can be measured. Identity, for example. But hey, go Elis. Really, go. You will probably be much happier away from Yale and its ilk.
Building on the theory that procrastination was a manifestation of crippling yet unconscious anxiety Continue reading
Remind Me Where I Know You From
As if there wasn’t enough weirdness in my brain, I live with mild prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness. I recently came across this great podcast on the subject, that updated latest research findings, as well as providing a few facts I hadn’t known.
I first heard of prosopagnosia about a dozen years ago, in a documentary about a woman who couldn’t recognize members of her own family, with whom she lived. I watched it for the same reasons anyone would – curiosity, and wondering what her very different life might be like.
However, as the documentary described how people with less severe cases of the condition may not even be aware of it, and instead think they have trouble with names, or just need to pay more attention, it began to sound unexpectedly familiar. Continue reading
Can Positive Thinking Be Negative?
Here’s another Scientific American article. It turns out there are risks to optimism and benefits to pessimism.
When Opportunity Knocks, but It Isn’t Looking for You
How about those women’s marches? I feel better about my country than I have in months.
As it happens, I didn’t attend one. Pop-up protests over the past few years have been a major source of stress in my life, and I’m pretty angry about that. The same few demonstrators show up to anyone’s march, looting, breaking windows, vandalizing random cars, and stoning police. Not a constructive way to espouse a cause. I depend on public transit, and a few dozen demonstrators can close it down for hours. As I result, I have often been stranded far from home, in the middle of a very tense situation, lugging 30 pounds of perishable groceries.
Because of this, I am on alert lists for the bus company and police department. Which is how I heard about the women’s march – the bus company sent out an advance email about expected service disruptions. Other than that, I saw only a TV commercial, which surprised me. Protest marches advertise? That’s new. But given aforementioned experiences with protests, I wasn’t intrigued enough to find out more.
But on the day of the march, when texts from the police department started coming in with massive numbers, I realized something different and historical was happening. I briefly considered going, until I got a text from the bus company saying they had completely closed down bus service to the downtown core. I texted back “completely unacceptable!,” but I was relieved from the decision of whether to enter an intensely crowded, noisy situation where my ability to retreat would’ve been severely limited.
Maybe I would’ve risen above the limits of sensitivity on the group high. Then again, I tend towards disturbed-hibernating-bear syndrome in January, so maybe not.
But even from my armchair, it was pretty cool. And the more I learned about it, the more amazing it got. It wasn’t just the massive turnouts in major cities. There were also hundreds (not an exaggeration) of marches in smaller towns, and even tiny villages, some of them in very bad weather and/or unfriendly environments.
I’m something of a coward about putting myself physically and visibly on the line. I’ve found some peace with this reluctance, now that I understand it’s a pretty natural reaction for an HSP introvert. There’s more than one way to be an activist. Still, I respect people who expose themselves in that way, even if it feels less risky to them than it would to me. If you participated, thank you. A lot. Thank you for showing me I wasn’t alone.
But this post isn’t about that. The rest of it isn’t, anyway :)
What’s New – or Not – with Me
My self-employed career isn’t going well. It turns out there is a fatal flaw in my business plan (this is a figure of speech. If you happen to be comparing yourself with me, I don’t want to deceive you into thinking I have anything as organized as a written plan). I’ve done a really excellent job at finding people I emotionally resonate with as clients. Over and over, they tell me they chose to work with me because they felt I understood them.
And I do. They are people who are going it alone, carving out their own career niche, plus a few passionate bloggers who just have to write. Like me. Most of them are struggling financially, also like me, with a very limited budget for things like… my services. I have done an excellent job of finding my peers. At creating myself an income, not so much.
Continue reading
Dance Me to the End of Love
This is the first record I ever bought with my own money. That was 44 years ago.
44 years. So endless. So fleeting. We don’t know where that time goes, but we know this: After awhile, this week, too, will go there.
Quiet Revisited
Jenna, my comrade in bloggery over at The Wishing Well, just published a post about Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. To my great surprise, her reaction to it was very different from mine. Since I had recommended it to her enthusiastically, I started out writing a reply in a comment, but it became way too long, so I’m publishing it here.
Wow, did we read the same book? Before I read Quiet, it had literally never crossed my mind that I was an introvert, much less an HSP (which Elaine Aron believes Susan Cain also is). I thought I was an extrovert inhibited by a tendency to isolate. I defended this, extolling the joys of solitude, as I still do. However, before I read Quiet, those joys were seriously undermined by my secret fear that solitude was an unhealthy indulgence, an escape from my shameful inability to interact “normally.” Whether it was my failure to produce extroverted bubble and bounce on command, or my persistent inclination towards behavior I had been taught was dysfunctional, I was coming up short no matter what I did. Continue reading
SensitiveType on Facebook
My brain is abuzz with all of the things I read and see that I want to share with you. The backlog is getting too huge to ever catch up, though, so I set up a Facebook page where I can post things that don’t make it into a SensitiveType blog post. Check it out (there’s also a link in the right sidebar).
sensitive type 