Posts in category "Thoughts"

Awakening: Cause

Worry does not emp­ty tomor­row of sor­row — it emp­ties today of strength.

—Corrie ten Boom

It start­ed with a sin­gle pan­ic attack, at work, in the mid­dle of the day.

Heart rac­ing, dif­fi­cul­ty breath­ing, par­a­lyz­ing ter­ror, fear that I was about to die.

If you’ve ever had a bad trip off psilo­cybe, or mag­ic mush­rooms, the effects are very sim­i­lar. Not that I’ve ever had a good one. Half an hour into inges­tion, I start to feel nau­se­at­ed. At the back of my head there’s a creep­ing sense that some­thing is wrong. My hands start to trem­ble, my mind feels like it’s shud­der­ing. Eventually, there’s a com­plete uneasi­ness in the body, both phys­i­cal­ly and men­tal­ly. Around that time, the body reacts quick­ly to rid the stom­ach of what­ev­er is caus­ing these symp­toms, and vio­lent­ly ejects them in the form of vom­it­ing. Stems and caps come out as dark brown flecks, and you won­der how eat­ing some­thing so small thing can make you feel so ter­ri­ble.

But with a pan­ic attack, there’s no expla­na­tion. No sense of pre­ven­tion. No float­ing fun­gus in the pool of your toi­let you can point your fin­ger at and say, “I’m nev­er doing THAT again”.

It comes with­out warn­ing, with­out obvi­ous rea­son. All you want is to end the attack. To crawl into a cor­ner and hide. To tear off your stran­gling clothes. To die.

Afterward, you’re not won­der­ing what you’re going to lis­ten to on the way home, or how to get the atten­tion of that cutie in the porce­lain depart­ment, or when you’ll have time to go buy more sham­poo. All you’re think­ing about is when the next one will hap­pen. All you’re left with is a bunch of ques­tions and a sense of insta­bil­i­ty. I have my sus­pi­cions, but I’ve cho­sen not to write about them until I’m cer­tain, some­thing which I believe will come in time. There’s no sim­ple diag­no­sis, no easy answer.

Recently, sci­en­tists have dis­cov­ered that the word “wheeze” can acti­vate asth­ma attacks in asth­mat­ics. The mind trig­gers an asso­ci­at­ed emo­tion­al response, and the body man­i­fests the reac­tion. It’s the same after a pan­ic attack. Sometimes, peo­ple with pan­ic dis­or­der can bring on an attack just wor­ry­ing or think­ing too much about it.

Not that I have a dis­or­der. The fear of an attack isn’t detri­men­tal enough to stunt me social­ly, and does­n’t pre­vent me from func­tion­ing as what the DSM IV would con­sid­er “nor­mal”. It was only a sin­gle episode, but habit of con­stant self-eval­u­a­tion means that the threat of it hap­pen­ing again is always there. It’s in the back of my mind whether I’m at work, or play­ing games, or cook­ing din­ner. Every minute of every day becomes a strug­gle not to think about it. And when you know you feel like dying dur­ing an attack, you start to won­der whether it’s worth liv­ing at all.

People face this ques­tion when they’re diag­nosed with ter­mi­nal ill­ness­es. Told that they have only have a few years left, they live more in those num­bered days than they do in their entire lives until then.

They awak­en.

The Awakening Series

  1. Introduction
  2. Cause
  3. The Reborn Dreamer

Awakening: Introduction

Sharpen a blade too much
  and its edge will soon be lost
Fill a house with gold and jade
  and no one can pro­tect it
Puff your­self with hon­or and pride
  and no one can save you from a fall

—Verse Nine, Tao Te Ching

Every time I start to write, I’m led back to this. It would appear that it’s time to express myself. Perhaps I’m ready. It feels like I’m only scratch­ing the sur­face, try­ing to cov­er aspects of some­thing that I have yet to under­stand. In the show­er I decid­ed to split this into sev­er­al entries of a series, and in my room the lights are all on.

There’s been more insta­bil­i­ty in the last month than in the last three years of my life com­bined. Everything I knew, every­thing I believed in, has been turned upside-down. Although I’m still try­ing to fig­ure out what hap­pened, the fact of the mat­ter is that there was a long, drawn-out cri­sis. This cri­sis, which appears to have passed, still affects my thoughts, my actions, and my beliefs.

Even though I don’t com­plete­ly have my feet on the ground, it feels like I’m com­fort­able enough to explore what’s hap­pened now. This is not an easy task. A sin­gle, seem­ing­ly innocu­ous thought can end up break­ing the strands of the del­i­cate web I’m tread­ing.

If I can get it all down, I’ll know I’ve gone that far at least.

The Awakening Series

  1. Introduction
  2. Cause
  3. The Reborn Dreamer

The Power Of Freedom

I have an extreme­ly dif­fi­cult time deal­ing with peo­ple who choose to com­plain about some­thing and do noth­ing about it. These are the peo­ple who gripe about the jobs that feed them, decry the rela­tion­ships they’re too scared to leave, pine for bet­ter lives when a bet­ter life is only a few steps away. Religious doc­trines of pre­des­ti­na­tion aside, as humans we’re the mas­ters of our fate. We con­trol what hap­pens, because we have the respon­si­bil­i­ty — the response abil­i­ty — to make change hap­pen.

When the bad starts to out­weigh the good, then it’s time to shut the fuck up and be active in chang­ing the sit­u­a­tion. When the good is still greater than the bad, then it’s time to shut the fuck up and deal with what­ev­er minor prob­lems there are.

And when life hands you lemons, make lemon­ade, try to find a guy whose life has giv­en him vod­ka, and have a par­ty.

Damn The Consequence

One of the keys to blog­ging is to nev­er give a shit about what any­one else thinks. Never write for an audi­ence. Never cen­sor one­self based on what oth­er peo­ple may say. Never be embar­rassed or ashamed to admit any­thing.

Otherwise, one isn’t being true to one­self. If there are those who are nosy, those whom we’d rather not have read­ing, that should nev­er be an issue. I may have my fair share of creepy inter­net stalk­ers (one is already more than enough), but I refuse to let that stop me from say­ing what’s real­ly on my mind.

It may be dif­fi­cult to let go, but it’s worth it. The free­dom is com­plete­ly empow­er­ing. Blogs are a per­son­al space, as pub­lic as they may be, and should be treat­ed as such.

Expression is an act that should nev­er be hin­dered by some­thing as harm­less as opin­ion.

The Next Level, Part 2

It’s get­ting eas­i­er to write again. Ideas are com­ing a lit­tle more flu­id­ly, and aren’t quite as strain­ing to devel­op any­more. Perhaps there’s been an excess of inspi­ra­tion in the last while, from the music that keeps me mov­ing, to the peo­ple I inter­act with, to the tem­per­a­ture of the sea­son, to the words in the books that I’ve been read­ing with rel­ish.

Life is a series of sen­sa­tions that gal­va­nize, encour­age, pro­voke, and teach.

I can nev­er seem to get it all down.