April 16th, 2005

The initial horrors of cortisone are far outweighed by the effects; I can actually walk again without doubling over in pain. Fractures, ligaments, swollen joints and tissues can all go to hell ... I can walk goddammit, walk I say.

And I am the proud owner of a smart-looking pair of new shoes. Right on (man). New shoes to replace the old ones might even help to reduce the chance of this happening again.

* * *

There is at least one easy way to tell when someone has gone all dissociated on you. You can tell by just about anything they say or do, or even, often, by just the detritus they have left behind. You can tell by a certain feeling that starts to burn in you.

For example, you get an email from someone and you read it three times looking for what's wrong about it. Searching out the words and the meanings, the very punctuation, even. But you can't find anything tangible that's wrong with it ... except that you then sit and try to watch TV or read or go to bed and discover you are seething about that email. Or you find yourself ruminating about how stupid, awful, nasty, etc. that person is.

That slow-burn that you are doing is your physiological response to getting distorted static-laden dissociation vibes from that person or from the result of his actions.

At this point you can go one of three ways:

  1. Spread the love: Get all dissociated and flip the bird to someone in traffic for no reason ... or send out some stupid meaningless dissociated email all your own. Speak sharply to someone you love. Break something.
  2. Stew the prunes: Just absorb it and explode later--maybe a mid-life crisis or or deadly brain aneurysm. Perhaps die at age 61 with people muttering, "poor shmuck didn't deserve to die so young."
  3. Deconstruct: Well, of course I was going to wait until the last option before I got to the right answer :-) Once you start doing the slow-burn, it's time to break up the day into segments to figure out which event left you feeling this way. That is not always easy, but once you do, you can usually feel instantly better. If you still don't, then you may need to figure out what your own issue is that got triggered. See example below:

Example:

Bob goes to bed, but cannot sleep because he notices his heart is beating too quickly and he is too restless.

"Strange," he thinks to himself, "I only had about 4 hours of sleep last night, I should be exhausted and too sleepy to see straight."

At this point Bob could snap at his girlfriend/wife/cat/stuffed bunny that he can't sleep and it's all her fault. Or Bob could just lie there in quiet misery until dawn and get another crappy amount of sleep.

But Bob decides to think about the day: "Funny, I felt good until about 4:00 this afternoon ... Wait a minute, I felt good until Joe said that thing to me. What did he say? Oh yeah, he said '____.' That really pissed me off!"

Moment of truth: Bob rises above knuckle-dragger status and thinks one of the following:

And if Bob comes to this realisation ... and it is the real thing that he is feeling, he suddenly stops burning about Joe's comment and drops into a deep sleep.

Easy to preach, difficult to practice. And, once mastered, easy to forget. I know, 'cause I ain't perfect either.

But it is the moment when the focus of your slowburn changes from feeling wounded to identifying the thing that hurts inside you that the dissociation fades and you turn into a single solid person again.

OK, time to put my money where my mouth is. Why am I on about this? Well, I went to a website where they give you exactly one minute to write what you think about something, and I wrote the following:

Pile of crap that I have to put up with at work. It pisses me off that their stupidity and callousness threatens my very existence. P___ can sometimes be his own special pile of shit all in and of himself. When he is all bent out of shape he starts sending out in rapid succession his stupid weird and meaningless emails that somehow still demand my time and attention ... and some work that really turns into meta-work--a complete waste of my fucking time. And the hangers-on, the wanna-bes, the fuckwits like S___ and losers take that meaningless email and imbue it with their own little stinking private agendas ... ugh, which makes things that much less tenable for me ... oops, my minute was up a couple of minutes ago ...

So that's me with my knuckles on the ground. Here's how I get my sanity back:

"A series of emails came flying out of P___'s [ass] instance of Outlook that day. He was being just plain weird. So he was in his own little fugue state. Hmm ... he sent out one of those meaningless broad-strokes useless emails to me and some head case name S___ (who actually spends >90% of her life dissociated herself). No matter how I think about it, I just don't understand what he _really_ wants. On the surface, nothing seems wrong with it, but it still leaves me feeling stupid. Yes, well, I hate feeling stupid [who doesn't?] and that is what is bothering me about the email. So P___ can have his own little dissociation all to himself; I don't care. It made me feel stupid, but I know I'm not stupid. It was just the wording and imprecise nature of his email. [Sounds of snoring]"


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