7/23/23

I am driving myself from Los Angeles to Fort Collins -- ALONE. It's been fine so far. Whenever I feel fine, though, I have this ironclad optimistic sense that I will feel fine forever, and when I have another one of my spirals it takes me completely by surprise. This morning, in a hotel room in Beaver, Utah, I was reflecting on how it's going to be important for me to keep doing the things I do in crisis mode to make me feel better. Keep getting enough sleep. Keep stretching and exercising. Keep free writing or blogging. Keep working on my projects everyday to keep me grounded and distracted in something outside myself. The work to stay well is kind of a drag, even when it's nice. But yeah... I'm going to go back into the dark places a lot. So I can't just assume I'm free and clear and drop all the things that seem to help. 

The other night, like I talked about in my last post, was a bad spiral. At one point, I was crying and lying in bed with Joe. I had felt a little better, but I could feel my mood crashing again. That feeling of the bottom dropping out invading my chest and the lightheadedness in my um, head. I spasmed and grabbed onto Joe. (The spasming sometimes happens, like an electric shock has run through my body.) I was on my way down. Joe said it was okay. I could hug him as hard as I wanted, that he was going to lay there and I could do whatever I wanted to him. I hugged him tightly. And then I thought about kneeing him in the balls. Would that help, kneeing him in the balls? I had never kneed anybody in the balls before. I asked him about it, "What about kneeing you in the balls?' The thought of it was cheering me up. It made me laugh. It was actively pulling me right out of my downward spiral - the slapstick, the forbidden. I forget what he said about it. I kneed him in the balls. 

I tried to trust the triangle.

I feel terrible today. I hit a crying jag last night. I didn't know it was coming. I felt like my whole life had been pointless. Like I really made a bollix of everything. Of everything! (Bollix because I've been reading a lot of Roddy Doyle books.) I had to get to a research study at UCLA at 8am this morning. So between waking up early and staying up late crying, I feel horrible today. Like shit. 

The research study was for PTSD. It was one of the ones that pays alright. $245 all in. All you have to do is tell them about your traumatic history, your symptoms and then come in for a lab visit. They took some blood and some pee. They gave my arm a sonagram while using a cuff to contract my blood vessels. (The study is about what stress over time does to your veins.) Then they followed my eyes while I looked at different faces with different expressions. They definitely didn't hire actors or photographers to get those. I didn't believe the people's emotions for a second, and the lighting was shit. 

Lastly, they hooked me up to a bunch of wires. An ECG and another thing -- FRM maybe? -- that measured my heart rate, my movement (breathing, eye twitching) and the sweatiness of my palms. They put headphones on my ears-- I keep saying "they" but it was a lovely woman just out of undergrad named Kim who had immaculate eyebrows. Anyway, Kim put headphones on my ears and a camelback on my front. The task was a "startle" task where they unexpectedly played a loud sound in my ears. Mostly the screen was white (I was sitting in front of a computer monitor), but sometimes a blue square would show up on the left side of the screen. Other times it was a maroon triangle on the right. Part way into the first session a poof of air was shot at my neck. (It was like an intense version of being in the Indiana Jones ride. Or it was like getting hit in the face with a squirt gun.) It wasn't very painful, but it wasn't nice. 

What was happening was that every time the blue square showed up, I'd get shot with air. When the triangle appears, no air. The weird thing was that I started to resent the triangle. I mean, don't get me wrong, both shapes were absolute cunts. But the square at least had the decency to be a mean bully to my face. The square was consistent, always shooting me with air. The triangle never did, but I was always waiting for it to. The triangle could change its mind and turn on me at any moment. The triangle was shifty. At least with the square boy, you knew what you were getting. 

I mean, the way this ^ maps to my relationships -- or relationships in general -- is... you know, bad. The poor person who never does anything wrong but gets leveled with heavy suspicion because other people in my life have been cunts. (Again with the reading Irish author Roddy Doyle. Now I say the c word, I guess.) Towards the end, I was trying to actively trust the triangle. Like, I was consciously trying to relax my body, open my throat to the air shooter, to show it that I was capable of being loved. 

7/13/23

Yesterday, I walked in the evening over to the Alamo Drafthouse. On the way, a group of men were causing a commotion on the sidewalk. I crossed the road in the middle of the block in order to avoid them. 

Two or three men were yelling at another, who was sitting on a low wall attached to the fence around the park. They were middle-aged, 30s-40s, maybe homeless or if not just in the position where you take care of your business out on the street. The sitting man was not shouting back, just sitting there. One of the aggressors grabbed a bottle of Jameson and started to walk back over to the sitting man. One of the guys in the group, part of things but on the periphery, took the bottle out of the man's hand without saying a word. The man returned the bottle a bag some steps away from the conflict. 

The man gave up the bottle without protest. It was like he was considering taking things to the next level. The level where someone gets beamed with a 750 ml glass bottle. The kind of thing where someone could die. The deescalator made no big deal of it. He was just like, "Nope, that's not what's happening." I wonder how many lives have been saved by some small action like that.