the power of apathy

With depression and anxiety, the more you react to them, the more imposing they become. You have to learn to say, yes, I feel this way, but it's OK, and also, over time, I will feel better. There's no way you can feel better immediately, but you can work on thinking in a healthier way, and in time, your feelings will follow. 

What happens is that we get distressed about how we feel, and we dwell on it and our fear and aversion of how we feel, and the way that we feel trapped with it, makes something out of it. For example, say you get pins and needles and a feeling of numbness in your hand when you get anxious. That's actually something I have experienced. So, I notice that my hand feels numb, and I'm like, oh no, here comes a panic attack. That anxiety and the fact that I'm hyper focused on the symptom makes the symptom worse, or seem worse at least, and then other symptoms pop up, which causes more anxiety which causes more symptoms which causes more anxiety, and it just spirals. 

One of the main things that helped me get my panic attacks under control was learning not to react. Panic attacks rely on your fear. They're so horrible that, at the first sign of one, you freak out and your system is flooded with adrenalin, which fuels the panic attack, but as you begin to get your anxiety under control, you learn that you don't need to fear panic attacks. So, when you feel one coming on you say, ok, I'm going to slow down my breathing (which is another powerful way of treating anxiety) and I'm just going to push through it. The first couple of times may still be difficult, but if you keep practicing this you will overcome panic attacks. Basically, when you feel a panic attack coming on but it's not a big deal anymore, it's not a panic attack. 

AI use and abuse

People were pretty critical and mocking of the segment on CNN where the presenter interviewed an actual AI actor/ person, through a screen. It's easy to make a joke of it or say it's 'cringe' but there's a more serious critique to be made about AI replacing people and replacing thinking. Just with education, I can't think of any good use for AI. Every use of it seems to be about cutting corners and avoiding the challenge of thinking and learning. 

At the same time, I'm pretty impressed with what AI can do. It's really useful for some research tasks and also, it's really good for clarifying legal, financial, tax, business issues. I think the best approach to take is to use it for tasks that you could do yourself but that would be laborious and time-consuming but never use it to think for you. Don't ask it to analyze, summarize or reword. 

genius working holiday

I've only read one of D H Lawrence's books. He was absolutely a genius. The book of his that I read is Kangaroo, which is regarded as an Australian classic even though Lawrence wasn't Australian. That tells you how good it is. It's such a masterful evocation of Australia, and more specifically, Australia in the 1920s. I read it for a course on Australian modernism. 

It's all the more impressive considering how he wrote it. He wrote it in Australia. He completed the first draft in 6 weeks while staying in Thirroul, on the south coast of NSW, and then revised it over a few months. A lot of the reflections on the Australian landscape in the book are fueled by Lawrence's experience of the landscape in Thirroul and the more political elements of human interaction come from conversations and interactions Lawrence had with people in Sydney. 

being mean

You can change the meaning of your thoughts and experiences by recontextualizing them. 

telling the truth

Is there a kind of writing that is more suitable than others for expressing the truth? Wordsworth probably would have said poetry meets that standard. In his 'Preface to Lyrical Ballads', he wrote:

The Man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude: the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.

I wonder if anyone still thinks like that. I think a more modern view would be that the novel is the best way to express the truth, or maybe creative non-fiction. 

their own language

Out of all the different theoretical approaches we learnt about in first year English, the one that interested me most was post-colonial theory. Later on, I had other interests....Harold Bloom and the psychoanalytic approach, Bakhtin and his ideas about discourse, structuralism, post-structuralism and semiotics. 

The unit we did about Marxism was interesting. It wasn't what I expected. By saying that everything is political it eschewed any discussion of political ideology - in other words, any discussion of Marxism. The idea was that all of our interactions involve power dynamics. 

What interested me about post-colonial theory was the idea that power is at the margins not at the center, and then it was also fascinating learning about creole languages and how they represent the subversion of power. To write serious literature, the colonized have to write in the language of the colonizer, but informally, a creole language develops which is a fusion of the two languages. Then, at some point, people begin to write literature in the creole language, which is empowering because they are writing in their own language rather than someone else's. 

progress goals

My time in detox coincided with a realization about my need to change. Not just change in ways that related directly to my addictions but changing the way I went about my life - changing from withdrawal, rumination, and catering to/cultivating my anxiety, to engagement, activity and cultivation of my life. 

One of the first things I did was to start making a list of goals. These were a different type of goals to any I had made before. They were extremely achievable, but they represented the choice of engagement and activity over withdrawal and rumination. They were a way of moving in the direction that I wanted to go.