Archives for category: Logic & Reason
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Madness, Menopause, Magnesium

January 28, 2013 //
2

I’ve been told by more than one professional of one sort or another that I would “probably calm down after menopause”.  Glossing over how that observation always seemed to trivialize my experience, diminish me as a free will adult, and offer little present-day hope, it was also something I’ve held onto for a long time… it will be all be better…eventually… like magic… without effort.  Just a simple biological, chemical change in my reproductive functionality and I will be well and whole and somehow saner and more balanced.  Let’s be real – that sounds too good to be true, and even if it is true, wouldn’t it be a ludicrous failure to manage my affairs in an adult way to simply sit around throwing random tantrums and waiting for menopause? My hormones and I have put my loved ones through hell, more than once.  I’ve even dared to say, out loud, that I am ‘not high maintenance’ and even ‘not especially moody’. Wow.

I am… high maintenance, and then some. In spite of myself.  I’m moody, too – especially moody, and rather often.  I have indulged in tantrums that go so far beyond what could be considered acceptable from an adult I’m lucky I still get invited to parties by proper grown ups.  I can do better than this – can’t I?  I’ve read my share of ‘self help’ books, and mostly they haven’t done much in the way of help, because… ready for it? They’re just books. In spite of the lack of action on their part, and mine, a few outstanding books have stood out… and I go back to them again and again, to learn more than the words on the pages. Brain injury, PTSD, the slow march toward menopause… I still choose my actions, don’t I? Well, I guess I don’t always – but it sounds like a good starting point. (Do I get a ‘starting point’ at 49? Extraordinary!)

So, thoughtful, mindful, well-chosen action, considerate of my loved ones and associates and fellow-man – and doing my best to ‘take care of me’, too… it seems a good approach. It’s easy on paper – that’s what makes the ‘self help’ industry thrive. The ideas are so simple, so effective – and like fad diets, they probably all work.  If I do them.  That reminds me, a healthy diet, a good fitness plan, managed and adequate rest, harmonious healthy relationships all add up to thriving, don’t they? Does it even take money? Is a book even necessary? (Not always; this weekend I enjoyed the opportunity to share how helpful regular baths in Epsom salts have been for stabilizing my mood and helping me sleep. A man in line with me at the store could not resist asking what I needed all the Epsom salts for, and it was clearly on the order of a lifeline to hear something as simple and inexpensive as Epsom salts have given me so much relief; it was clear from our exchange that both he and his wife are suffering through her change.)

I did my best this weekend to choose my words and actions well, to nurture my loved ones and not take their experiences personally, to take care of my own basic needs, and where I could to assist my loved ones in meeting theirs, too. It was a pretty great weekend.  I suspect it makes for a dull blog post, but I feel pretty good today.

Happy Monday! Being nicer today feels easy…

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Categories Brain Injury, Epsom salts, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Turning 50, Words

My Eyes, My Camera, A Sunrise

January 22, 2013 //
8

I am having a very nice morning. I was musing about just how nice, and the feelings that gives me, and watching the sun rise, as I waited for my bus to work. The colors were amazing; crimson and scarlet and magenta and orange, pale streaks of mauve and a hint of lavender off to the edges, and in the foreground the contrasting darkness of the trees, bared branches of winter, reaching across those bold colors. I was struck by it and eagerly pulled out my camera (phone) to capture the amazing vista…but my camera will not photograph a sunrise. A little frustrating, but not a big deal. I keep hearing the phrase in my thoughts, though,  as I wait for the bus… “My camera will not photograph a sunrise.” I have the vague sense that as sentences go, it wants to tell me more, but I don’t find more there to know.

My brain injury is a frontal lobe injury. It effects memory and executive function, and likely has for the entirety of my adult life. I contemplate that a lot lately, and how that may have changed my experience of life, and how well/poorly I handle relationships and social interactions or make decisions. I have a lot to learn… having found out about my brain injury doesn’t change past behaviors or experiences, but it has serious potential to change my understanding of how my behaviors and experiences have evolved, what has driven my choices and decision-making, and why some things frustrate me so much (and I hope, also what I can do to improve on how I cope with those things).  I spent the solitary portion of my morning reading about memory over coffee.  I moved on to reading about executive functions while I rode in to work, and during my morning break, a short article about the frontal lobe. I read a lot. (Words work for me, mostly, although I have to read things more than once, take notes, cross reference bits I’m not sure about, and talk things through to gain an in depth understanding of a subject.) This morning I am a little awed at how easily the ‘issues’ I’ve had, challenges, bad behavior, and weirdness line up so cleanly with the information in my reading regarding frontal lobe damage and potential consequences to executive function and memory. I keep staring at the words and wondering why, if I can see these connections so easily here and now, no one looked at the list of shit I’ve been working through for so long and made the connection in the other direction? (You know… “Damn, considering X, Y, and Z, I have to wonder if you are suffering from some sort of damage that effects executive function?” I mean, seriously Medical Science, it actually seems that obvious in hindsight.)

It’s a lot to think about. I vacillate between feeling beat down to the point I can’t go on, overwhelmed to the point of giving up, and feeling like I do today; hopeful, and armed with new knowledge about how and why I am who I am, and where I can go from here with more appropriate tools.  I am hoping that gaining a deeper, more profound understanding of how my injury effects cognition, decision-making, and memory, that I can develop a better set of coping skills – more effective, more reliable, and less ‘guess work’. How do I change how I cope with my brain injury so that I am able to treat people consistently well? How do I make good decisions, and take care of me? How do I reduce the level of agitation and turmoil in my every day experience knowing now that much of it is born of simple frustration, fatigue, or challenges that are a by product of my injury? As is so often my experience, I have more questions than answers.

I need to paint – there are things I need to say that I don’t have words for; a sunrise, a memory I can’t quite remember, a portrait of a fracture I can’t see… I need to feel heard.

Categories Art, Brain Injury, Logic & Reason, Relationships, Words

Tear Down Your Idols

January 20, 2013 //
0

A Sunday evening before a Monday workday and I am contemplating what has been a very productive and pleasant weekend spent in the company of people I love, and thinking about the immense damage we do to ourselves over time, and how it becomes damage we do to others. Of course, a lot of the damage we do to ourselves has its origins in the damage done to us in life, and there’s that whole ‘choice piece’ to contend with, because once the damage is done, the choices are still our own, and then there’s the ‘accountability piece’ too, because whether we willfully choose an action or not, the ownership of the things we choose to do falls to us regardless of our choice, in all but what is forced upon us. It’s complicated to think about, sometimes, and recently I think about the logic of choice a lot. Choice works best when you know as many of the available options as possible, and for years I just didn’t understand how wide open the vista of choice really is. That has limited me more than I understood.

I’ve been searching all my life for ‘happily ever after’ – a fairy tale ending, more or less, I guess. Not reality; reality hasn’t always been good to me. Something hit me this week, sometime in the midst of tears, pain, emotion, and turmoil, both internal and external… maybe ‘happily ever after’ misses the point as goals go? Would I be more productive, more satisfied, and even happier if I turned my attention away from the goal of ‘happy’ and focused more on ‘meaning’? A mindful, meaningful, life… it’s a different idea for me. I’ve tended a bit more toward easy gratification of obvious desires, or needs that don’t infringe on other priorities (or do so in a way I can overlook).  I don’t have a lot more to say about that from the vantage point I have this evening, as I watch the sun sink low, and listen to the contented sounds of life at home; I just have hope.  Hope feels pretty good, and for the moment, good choices don’t seem out of reach.

I’ll admit that one thing that has been big for me lately has been ‘tearing down my idols’ – finding the bits and pieces of nasty leftovers in my basic learning of things that simply are not true, don’t actually reflect my values, or are remnants of assumptions, premises, and teachings that have been long over-turned but not corrected in my thinking and decision-making. It’s a slow process and sometimes quite sad; the discovery that some long held notion is a ghost in my machine, or worse still some malicious booby trap left over from some earlier time, place, and relationship…well, saying ‘it hurts sometimes’ doesn’t even begin to describe the quantity of tears or magnitude of disappointment.  It is worth it to make the slow steps to being who I most want to be.

Categories Logic & Reason, Perspective, Relationships

Perspective

January 9, 2013 //
6

Perspective is a funny thing. I’ve got some extra words laying about on that topic…how about an example to work with?

A. My partner wants to have sex constantly! I’m having to endure having sex every day.
B. I’m so lucky I get to have sex with my partner every day.
C. I hardly ever get to have sex with my partner. We only manage it about once a day.

The same ‘factual’ information – people who have sex daily – can be heard or understood very differently depending on the perspective of the person delivering the remark, and the person hearing it. The ensuing misunderstandings can create conflict, or rouse an emotional reaction that may not be relevant to the desired discussion. You may have already have reacted to a specific descriptive term, assumption, or implication of the sentences above. The meaning of each is relative to your experience, values, and knowledge.  ‘Right’, ‘wrong’, and ‘true’ get harder to define, for me, when I think about perspective.

Consider example A:
A. My partner wants to have sex constantly! I’m having to endure having sex every day.
a. My wife wants to have sex constantly! I’m having to endure having sex with her every day.
a. My husband wants to have sex constantly! I’m having to endure having sex with him every day.
a. My landlord wants to have sex constantly! I’m having to endure having sex to cover my rent every day.

More information can really change how that sentence feels, and what it means, but it also brings our biases into the mix.  I’m not sure that’s avoidable, because we each have our own ‘point of view’ that has a lot to say about how we see ‘reality’.

Maybe the sex imagery clouds thinking too easily? How about tailgating? This morning I saw a great illustration in commuter traffic.  A bus was pulling into traffic, and has the right of way to do so, locally. A car quickly pulled into the following distance between the bus and the car ahead of the bus in the lane the bus was entering, leaving no following distance, and ‘cutting off’ the bus.  Chances are good, the driver of the car chose to pull into that lane because the choice seemed safe, and necessary.  The bus driver, I can report first hand, did not see things that way at all based on the horn blowing, sudden breaking, and cursing. Traffic continued forward at the same relative average speed as prior to this event, and there was no accident. Is there a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ party? (note: I did not ask ‘Was one driver correct or incorrect according to the traffic laws?) I would be surprised if the motorist or bus driver have recollections that are even remotely similar, if they were asked to relate the morning commute, based on my own experiences with ‘eye witness’ event narratives, and they probably both think they are ‘right’.

…As an odd aside, it has been my experience that some people get agitated, even angry, at the suggestion that ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ could changed by perspective, or individual values and ethics. (It makes some conversations very challenging for me, since I’ve been unable to firmly ascertain a clear, fixed, unchanging system of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ to rely on, myself.)  If you find yourself becoming angry with the suggestion that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ may not be concepts of a determinate and infallible nature, please take a minute to chill out and come back when you’ve calmed down; this blog post is not worth being angry about.

Back to the sex… the example sentence really sounds different to me when I take out descriptive or limiting terms.
a. My partner and I have sex daily.
From my perspective that seems the most clear statement inasmuch as it is least complicated, but there is a lot unsaid that would clearly change the meaning for someone hearing it. Definitions of terms become enormously important when descriptive words are removed – the definitions of ‘partner’, and ‘sex’ now become critical to understanding the sentence. Does the speaker mean business partner, romantic partner, or some other sort of partnership, for example? (‘Daily’ is probably pretty clear, but has some room for improvement; does it mean once every 24 hours, or once each calendar day?)

I’ve got perspective on my mind today, because acknowledging the impact of individual perspective and point of view is important to a lot of communication processes, and a lot of people who matter to me are struggling with challenging issues of our times, each sharing their thoughts, ideas, values. There is a lot of emotion involved. Hell, ‘point of view’ is such a big deal it has it’s own porn genre! I’d like to find my way through the turmoil to a better understanding of my life and my world, and my own position on the issues. Issues that confuse me due to failures to define terms and acknowledge perspective right now include:

  • gun control – or is that the issue of ‘our failed mental health system’, the issue of mass murders, or the issue of ‘personal freedoms’? (the perspective of a person who owns a firearm and fears the loss of it is quite different than the perspective of the parent of someone who is mentally ill and potentially violent, or the perspective of a victim of gun violence)
  • ‘the war on women’ – or is that the issue of pay inequity, or women’s health care, domestic violence, the culture of rape, work:life balance, or domestic spending? (the perspective of a woman making a lower hourly wage than her male colleagues is quite different than the perspective of a man who is the CEO of a thriving business, and the perspective of a woman being stalked by an ex is likely very different than the perspective of a lawmaker hoping to reduce domestic spending)
  • the use of drone strikes in military conflicts – or is that the issue of military spending, the issue of defining a ‘combatant’, the issue of expansionism, the issue of cultural freedom, or the issue of the depersonalization of killing? (the perspective of a parent grieving a noncombatant child killed in a drone strike, is different than the perspective of a general hoping to reduce troop casualties)
  • birth control – or is that the issue of sexual freedom, health care, family planning, personal freedom, religious freedom, or reproductive freedom? (the perspective of a person committed to an idealogy that opposes pre-marital sex is different than the perspective of someone who chooses to be sexually active and non-monogamous)

So…who gets to be ‘right’? How do you define ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘correct’, ‘inappropriate’ or ‘true’?

My thought regarding perspective is that we suffer as people, and as a culture, as soon as we commit ourselves to being – or needing to be – ‘right’. Arguing, seeking to persuade, or pressuring others to accept or acknowledge that we are ‘right’ about something that is not clearly defined nor utterly factual is a fast way to prevent personal growth or new understanding of the world around us. Sharing perspective, as well as ‘facts’ is something I’d like to see more of people doing – and accepting (admittedly the harder piece is really hearing what someone else says about their perspective, when it differs from our own). It sounds pretty simple until  I get hung up on something I think I’m ‘right’ about… and find out, again, how very human I am.

Why does it matter enough to me to write a blog post about it? Because understanding each other is very much about perspective, and I want to understand the things that are important to me, and behave in a way that respects the values and perspective of others, at least enough not to hurt people I care about through careless insensitivity.

Categories Logic & Reason, Perspective, Relationships, Words
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