feeling my age
In 2011 in a desperate attempt to change my life I went on a trip to the US with only enough money to last me for a month there. I did not…
tags /anxiety /
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the beach
I’ve had an affinity with the beach since I was young. Every time I had the opportunity to take a vacation, it would almost always be the beach. My younger self would…
my mind, the invisible loudspeaker
Anhedonia. The inability to feel pleasure. I wonder if I have sort of been this way for as long as I can remember. Is that why I’ve always been somewhat reckless and…
the capacity to be flexible
I woke up yesterday with the intention to run, but the PSI had entered unhealthy ranges due to the seasonal haze that comes in from Indonesia. When I was younger I used…
these adult animals show lifelong changes in levels of neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine
Full-grown, these monkeys are living proof of limbic regulation’s enduring power: they are timid, clingy, subordinate, and clumsy in their efforts to establish ties to other monkeys. The brains of these animals evidence permanent alterations in neurochemistry. Just because their mothers once lived under a pall of uncertainty, these adult animals show lifelong changes in levels of neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine. With their vulnerability to anxiety and depression, their social awkwardness and failures to attach as adults, these monkeys exhibit a close animal counterpart to the multifaceted misery that in human beings is labeled neurotic.
when my body goes rogue
[cw: pain, death] Yesterday I started experiencing pain in my body again. It is difficult not to feel low when it happens. I think chronic pain snowballs into a form of ptsd,…
my mind is full of webs
I realised when I think of something it doesn’t exist as a single entity. A thought is linked to a million other thoughts, to the past and to the future. I remember…
we must choose between anxiety and repression
Evidently we must choose between anxiety and repression. If we cannot face the truth of our condition, which is mortality (or groundlessness, according to my Buddhist interpretation), we must forget that truth, which is to repress it. The difference between neurosis and normality — that undramatic, unnoticed psychopathology of the average, according to Maslow — is how successful that repression is. The neurotic has a better memory than most of us, so anxiety keeps breaking through into consciousness and must be dealt with more harshly in order to preserve some purchase on one’s fate, some circumscribed sphere of action.
the off switch
Sometimes I think it is somewhat of an evolutionary miracle that most humans can go on with life even with the world burning around us. Most of us just grow numb and…
every day now
This pandemic has not been good for my nervous system (I wanted to write “mental health”, but I think that is potentially a misleading term because it makes it seems like actual…