12:56pm March 18, 2012

In which I ponder out loud my lack of self-awareness in a pretty critical area and what to do about it.

So yesterday, I also barely ate anything because I didn’t feel well. Which made me feel worse. And then after my last post last night, I go on to forget to take my meds even when told to on the phone. Which will have negative effects for days at the least. This is exactly why not feeling well can snowball.

And then two separate really close friends tell me they’ve been concerned before this, that I’m literally going to work myself to death. What I wonder is how the fuck I manage to overwork without noticing that I’m working at all, yet everyone around me can tell that I am and get worried. I mean I’ve known for years I have workaholic tendencies, but WTF.

And I only figured that out because a bunch of people told me too. It’s like my self-awareness in that department is really awful and all I ever do is convince myself I’m the laziest person that’s ever existed (therefore work even harder until my body gives out). But these are people I trust with my life, so they can’t all be wrong about this. Especially with consequences like yesterday, where I actually felt the barest edges of that gravitational field death has, that I mentioned in an earlier post. And then went “Oh shit this is serious.”

But it seems to take getting to that point before I realize what’s happening. And that’s really not good because I could easily, like my friends seem to be warning me, drastically overshoot and either die or end up in the hospital again with breathing problems or infections from trashing my immune system or whatnot. Like what happened this summer where I got no less than four infections, possibly more, after working myself into the ground. I don’t know how the fuck I convince myself over and over that I still have the kind of body that can take this kind of thing, even in the face of that mess.

How on earth do I convince myself that my health is actually fairly fragile? Without needing to hit a wall first? I suppose it has to involve silencing all those internalized voices that say things like “You’re just lazy” and “You could do this if you wanted to enough” and “You’re really kind of worthless anyway so who cares what you do to yourself?” But I think it also involves something more tricky. Which is all these hidden assumptions about my abilities.

Like… when I was eleven years old is probably the peak of my health and ability to move. Back then I could literally walk indefinitely if I paced myself properly. This was right before I hit my first major wall and my movement disorder became progressive instead of mostly static.

And some part of me thinks I’m eleven years old. Even though I often have trouble getting to the bathroom and back. Even though I’m in bed all the time. Even though every signal my body sends tells me that just carrying out its normal internal processes, like digestion, is exhausting. Even though those normal internal processes don’t work right and would land me in the hospital in a week’s time if I didn’t constantly and explicitly monitor them and adjust medication accordingly. Even though doing that still isn’t enough to avoid hospitalization sometimes. Even though if I weren’t wearing myself out coughing all day and doing breathing treatments, I’d have a lung infection in a heartbeat. Even though my blood tests frequently show abnormalities. Even though exhaustion means I can’t fully breathe on my own and getting to exhaustion means doing less than most people do in a day. And that’s just a fraction of it. In other words, even though every single piece of evidence tells me that my body is often hanging by a thread, my first assumption is that I’m still where I was at eleven. (Which, mind you, still wasn’t normal. But it was the closest I’ve ever come.)

And writing it out like that it seems ridiculous to think of myself this way. But I never experience myself the way I write it out, until I actually do have an infection or a blockage or have turned into a noodle or fallen and seriously injured myself or whatever. I wonder if it’s partly because I have such terrible body connection.

And this fall, when I started explicitly connecting myself to my body several times a day, a lot of things changed. Things you wouldn’t expect. My self-respect went up. A lot of lifelong character flaws were diminished. A lot of things that went far beyond just monitoring my body to make sure I didn’t kill it. It was weird.

But I haven’t managed to stay connected like that. Especially in the face of recent pain levels, which induce automatic disconnect procedures just to be able to function at all. And it takes a good deal of concentration to pull it off. But maybe I have to try anyway.

…and then I try, just now, and find that I feel like someone beat the crap out of me, and am working on yet another migraine. Great. I don’t know how much of this kind of connection I can handle. But I don’t know how well I’ll survive without making this kind of connection. Disconnection gives me an extremely good pain tolerance at times. But it also means I don’t react to pain by backing off, even when it’s fairly severe. I can’t figure out a good answer, especially since I suddenly am having a lot of trouble thinking straight. (And connecting to my body tells me this is because I’m something beyond exhausted.)

I wonder how to change assumptions that are so ingrained that they’re not even visible as thoughts. It’s just invisibly implicit in every decision I make about myself. And yet it’s so obviously damaging that it has to be removed. Along with the assumption that I am “doing nothing” just because I’m doing far less than the average person does when they think they’re doing nothing. (Since their “nothing” involves a lot of daily living stuff that I either can barely do, with help, or can’t do.)

But I have to learn to do this or I’ll keep doing this stuff until one day I screw up even worse and then I’m screwed. And I’m not the only person that’s really bad for.

ETA: Great. If I don’t force myself, my brain idles and has no thought or anything else. Maybe better to let it for awhile. Maybe not. But I’ll try and see if that helps with resting.

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