Temperance

[nyuanshin]

"You know how I tend to go around giving the impression of being pretty much okay most of the time?"

"Yeah?"

"Well, most of the time I'm actually really really okay or really really not."

"Are you not okay now?"

"[shrug] Just found it odd that I've built a persona around equilibrating."

* * * * *

The shrug was genuine: when you combine

Comments

[e4q]

did you pick up a copy of the kindly awareness meditation i posted earlier in the week? i think you would find it helpful. i do.

i already knew we had some overlap, but reading this is uncanny for me. i am still processing the stuff about reading. i could already read before i went to school, but i had a terrible time at school and spent a lot of time staring out the window.

do you know about scotopic sensitivity/irlen syndrome? i have yet to look into it properly (that's a sort of pun...) but will be getting the test in the new year. apparently this 'sensory overload' syndrome can leave people with a wide range of behavioural symptoms as well as fatigue. it is particularly associated with reading issues, though it can be associated with autistic type behaviours, particlarly rage.

[nyuanshin]

I didn't, but I'm on a kick about the control of attention lately and open to suggestions.

I looked into Irlen once and found it sort of interesting but not compelling. Might be worth exploring again with fresh eyes though (har).

Neurologically, my half-baked idea for what might be going on here is that the weird way I learned to sort visual information led to some funny wiring in my inferior parietal lobe, which is a high-level associative hub for sensory processing across all the major modalities (visual, auditory, somatic). If we think of pain as the somatic version of noise, then chronic pain could be an outcome of the same kind of foreground/background segregation problems that make it hard for some people to focus on a conversation in a loud party or ignore irrelevant aspects of a cluttered scene. Proneness to anxiety/irritation might be the somatosensory version of what gets called ADD when it manifests in the other two major sensory modes.

[e4q]

interestingly, fibromyalgia, http://homepages.sover.net/~devstar/phsympt.htm which is my overarching diagnosis, has as part of it a 'misinterpretation' of sensation, light, and sound *as* pain, which, unsurprisingly, overlaps with the migraines i get anyway. naturally, the psychiatrists think it is psychosomatic, and the idea that i could simply decide not to have the pain by going to a few psychotherapy sessions strikes me as hilarious.

getting this dog has brought up a lot of anxiety for me, but if i keep her i already know that she is going to allow me to have less overload, since i will 'have' to get back to the dog.

[nyuanshin]

Man, what a crappy kind of synaesthesia to have. Thanks for the thought-spark, BTW.

In a sense the psychiatrists are right, but like most medical professionals they can't think integratively about it: trivially, any perceptual symptom (including pain) is "psychosomatic", but that doesn't say much about the process generating it, let alone how one might fix it. e.g. it could be "top-down" or it could be "bottom-up", but unless you take both possibilities seriously you can't diagnose or treat sanely.

Psychotherapy is another one of those things that falls under the heading of "good idea, too bad almost nobody gets it right". Don't get me started.

[e4q]

i hadn't thought of it as synaesthesia, but that totally makes sense.