Sunday, September 15, 2024
rest
k
Grimes was exercising poetic license when she said that she was so heavy she fell through the earth.
curricula
Saturday, September 14, 2024
vocab
Wednesday, September 11, 2024
winds of change
Tuesday, September 10, 2024
real lies
synesthesia
Monday, September 9, 2024
damage
Depression is not like, here's that pain again - the same pain that I've experienced many times before. It seems fresh every time, as is the case with any kind of pain, but also, you think about all the years that this has been going on, and about the future and how it's going to be part of your life all the time, every minute of every day, for the foreseeable future, and you think that it's really breaking you down.
One helpful thing I've learnt though is that that sense I have that I'm breaking down and sustaining damage from all these years of mental pain, is not true. It's a story. An illusion. How do I know? Because my brain was made to do what it does. If we think of depression, anxiety, fear, worry, and the like, as involving different liquids flowing through pipes, and your fear and sadness and hurt are liquids that are unpleasant, painful and unwanted....the thing is: that's all they really are. That's all that can possibly be in your brain - stuff that belongs there. And the good news is that that cannot do permanent damage.
I guess different drugs and chemicals can do damage, or some external stimulus, like a head injury, or when your brain is deprived of oxygen, but your thoughts and the stories you tell yourself, can't hurt you, even though it feels like they can.
new
Sunday, September 8, 2024
the mystery of healing
circles
Saturday, September 7, 2024
narratives
Something that really helps me is reflecting on what I actually have to do and the situations I'm actually in. I ruminate and catastrophize a lot so I get stuck in a loop of feeling completely trapped. I'm weighed down by all these thoughts about my life, and it's like a panic attack.
Lately I've been able to break that loop by thinking about what I actually have to do and how it's not actually that hard. Yes, there is fear. The fear is real, but my fear is a thing on its own, divorced from reality. So, when I can affirm that the things that I have to do are not actually that hard, it's reassuring.
permanence
I hold onto my pain really tightly - holding it to myself. My attention is riveted by it and I daren't look away.
I'm learning to let go though, somehow.
The great thing about this process of positive change is that it's all one way. Like with my taper for example, I keep reducing and reducing, and each reduction is permanent. I'm never going to increase my dose ever again. Even aside from the formal reductions I'm making in how much valium I'm getting and taking, there's a process underway whereby I'm becoming less reliant on it. The reductions are in increments, but the process is always going, and I'm always pushing myself.
An analogy that I heard about recovery and withdrawal and sobriety and all that kind of stuff is that it's like chopping down a tree. It may be hard work, but once you get to the turning point and the tree falls, that's it. You don't need to work on it anymore.
blessing
Friday, September 6, 2024
struggles
Tuesday, September 3, 2024
prescription
Monday, September 2, 2024
instructions on the pack
Life is like workplace training. You do the training and then when you go (back) to work, the work is different from the training. In the same way, I've always found that life is not how it's 'supposed to be'.
understanding
In some ways I can understand why some people argue that critical theory or literary theory is fundamentally opposed to Christianity, but as a student of English literature and a Christian, I strongly disagree. Most academics are not primarily concerned with agitating for social change. Their interest is in studying texts and literature and formulating theories about how texts work, and all of those theories also apply to the Bible, so they can enrich our understanding of it. It's not subversive. I think it can be, but that's a different issue. It's not fundamentally subversive.
I'm not an academic by profession but if I was, I can imagine going to a church and hearing that my profession is fundamentally opposed to Christianity and hearing that I would not go back to that church because what they are teaching is untrue.