How are we?

[Vivia]

Sorry to hear you didn't get it, on the other hand, that's the best attitude, Pyro.

Talking about positive attitude, I'm trying my best to do that. After two months of intensive therapy, I'm feeling rather lost. The first weeks I felt the therapy was doing much to improve my life. Now that it's over I'm feeling ennui, I know this is because I have made drastic changes in my life, there is a transition phase for things to settle down. The good thing is I'm so much calmer, but teaching my brain to change patterns is work, I have to train my mind again (doing exercises using both sides of my brain). I try to tell myself that this is normal, this is how it should be, there are no dramatic ups and downs, and apparently that's such an alien state that I'm feeling lost. Calm = normal = I don't know who I am. Sometimes it's like I don't have a personality left. I know this is a phase, though.

[Major Rawne]

I was super awesome till it took me all day to a report that used to take me a couple of hours, and I have become exhausted. My colleague has really made a mess of reports. No wonder I have been sent back to sort it all out.

[Rob P]

Relatively pleased today. Was on the decline health wise the last 2 days but feeling better. Also passed an exam that I thought I'd fail, so might reward myself with a couple of books.

[Vivia]

For the third time this summer a man tried to sexual harass me on the transit. Whut. Well, this time I called the SL customer service to make a complaint and I'm considering following their advice to call the police.
I don't how this is happening, last time was the mid-'90s, and never this frequently and almost always in the night. And the flashers are back too in new odd ways, in the day no less. My concern have been about protecting my wallet.
Is it the social economy? Is this the new world? It would make sense since the early '90s were dark in many ways and we live in a similar era. Maybe I have been lucky.
Omg, it's like a xoJane/Jezebel article coming to life. Noooo!

The great cleansing continues in my life, post-therapy. First it was the friends, now it's the relatives that are blocked left to right. I thought it would be difficult, but it's been very uplifting. Goodbye, toxic waste.
I think it was very telling when my psychologist said to just let them go because it would never improve. My new motto in life is to let it go.

[Rob P]

Sorry to hear that, Viv.

If you feel comfortable doing so, you should definitely report these things to the police. There are some vile people around who probably think there are no consequences to any behaviour.

Glad to hear the 'cleansing' is working for you.

...

I'm back in work after a week off. Feeling a little drained and bored. Need a new hobby or something.

[Vivia]

Thanks for the support, Rob.
These life changes I have been making lately are putting a strain on me and I have to choose my battles, pursuing this isn't one. I'm feeling so good right now and frankly, I'm not even shocked, more like perplexed about being harassed (it isn't harassment on an international standard, like in Japanese transit, it's discreet in true Swedish style). I'll be more vigilant and report everything from now on, though. Storstockholms Trafik takes it seriously and the public pay extortionist prices as it is.

Work is going very well and we are testing new flavours, I'm reaching sugary overload. And I can carry a sugar sack of 25 kg without much effort, the sack with 30 kg is another thing, heh.
I have to take up my knitting again for relaxation purposes. I need to keep up with the rules of "well-being" my therapist gave me.

[Mossy Toes]

Quite well, actually! Finally breaking ground on a novella I've been logjammed on for the past few years and damn if it doesn't feel good to finally be writing again. Having a regular writing structure (wake up for an hour and write as reinforced and prompted by my father before going to work on a construction job with him) that gets me putting down words every day and thinking about the work constantly... well, it really helps. Also just to be doing a physical job and using my corpus in meatspace after several months of slack torpor idly surfing the web... yeah. It feels good to go to sleep tired.

[Rob P]

That's excellent to hear!

Having never done a day of hard labour in my life (well nearly) I've always wondered if it's potentially easier to get into the mood for reading and writing compared to a job where you're reading and writing all day.

[Vivia]

There are indications that hard labour does a lot of good for the brain.
The following is seriously simplified.
My psychologist is an expert on stress related problems, she talked a lot about physical activity as a form of relief. If you're in a state stress or anxiety, in normal or extreme forms, the best way to break the pattern is to change environment and perform any kind of physical activity, like seriously anything, but the best is tough physical movement. Force your brain to make the left brain do the job. The thinking process is in the right part of the brain and when that part is over-stimulated that's when things go sour, looking at the computer isn't left-brain activity. She said this is something EVERYONE has to do on daily basis, like until death (it's SFB!).
One exercise to check your activity is to cross your arms and touch your earlobes simultaneously. Do they feel odd? Well, they aren't suppose to. Move that body!
There is a lot of info online about this as well as books. Mindfulness is another part.

Don't give up or you'll become this:

[Therion]

There are indications that hard labour does a lot of good for the brain.
The following is seriously simplified.
My psychologist is an expert on stress related problems, she talked a lot about physical activity as a form of relief. If you're in a state stress or anxiety, in normal or extreme forms, the best way to break the pattern is to change environment and perform any kind of physical activity, like seriously anything, but the best is tough physical movement. Force your brain to make the left brain do the job. The thinking process is in the right part of the brain and when that part is over-stimulated that's when things go sour, looking at the computer isn't left-brain activity. She said this is something EVERYONE has to do on daily basis, like until death (it's SFB!).
One exercise to check your activity is to cross your arms and touch your earlobes simultaneously. Do they feel odd? Well, they aren't suppose to. Move that body!

I have found physical work, walking, etc. to create a lot of space for anxiety and all sort of negative thoughts and feelings. What helps me the most is diving into gathering some kind of interesting knowledge, reading good novels, etc.

[Vivia]

Actually, that has happened to me as well. It's a good way to get lost, and when it was really bad I took the wrong bus or train by error and ended in weird places (one time in another municipality at the border of Stockholm county. Took me two hours to get back.).

The ideal thing is that after a brisk walk to the park or a long workout it'll help clear your mind, but it also depends on your state of mind. If things are that bad then I have to make a conscious effort, it's either walk or talk, not both at the same time. In general the opposite of a mind that keeps going in circles is doing physical activity. Mental training is just the same as physical training, it takes a lot of practice. Some days it'll feel like nothing has changed, but you have to keep trying. I suffered a knee injury from overexertion, but after that I had to dust off and keep going.

Reading is great to free the mind, knitting is my thing for the moment. For me playing The Sims games can do this as well, it's a game that doesn't rush the player. Some days I only build and decorate in the game and it's a lot of fun.

[Xisor]

It's an interesting one. I find the... oddness or novelty of the activity is pretty much the important thing. A long stroll is immense for thinking and reflection - perhaps on thinking it out, but a recipe for tremendous moodiness and brooding too. A tougher, mountainous walk or adventure into somewhere quite new has a very different effect.

Similarly, my regular swimming recently has been a great wind down and aid generally, but I rather expect that'll change when I eventually get used to the damn thing again. That certainly happens at the gym. Hard exertion -yay. Routine, becomes a recipe for annoyance.

But that's by the by.

I'd be cautious of the literal quality of the right brain left brain stuff,but the more general point of 'serious, physical change if location and activity' is pretty compelling, regardless of the specifics of mechanism. Has a great... 'disruptive' quality.

---

Really enjoying the swimming, but missing my unemployed post-first-year days wherein I had the luxury of staying up 'til 4am getting stuff done, sleeping 'til noon, going for a swim, a run, a (bicycle) ride and/or a long walk and then having a pleasingly social or anti-social evening as it plated out. Shame it was unemployed and had the associated baggage and lack of money... but hell's bells, I actually got other stuff done. Probably at my most prolific on fledgling Warseer, Specialist Games and The Conclave at that time.


I devised a lot of Demiurg stuff during those heady days. Fun times.

---

In other news, I may be taking up a sids career in tutoring a foreign doctor to improve their English shortly. Hopefully they don't pay too much attention to my use of commas, semi-colons and brackets in governing my own speech!

[Therion]

Actually, that has happened to me as well. It's a good way to get lost, and when it was really bad I took the wrong bus or train by error and ended in weird places (one time in another municipality at the border of Stockholm county. Took me two hours to get back.).

The ideal thing is that after a brisk walk to the park or a long workout it'll help clear your mind, but it also depends on your state of mind. If things are that bad then I have to make a conscious effort, it's either walk or talk, not both at the same time. In general the opposite of a mind that keeps going in circles is doing physical activity. Mental training is just the same as physical training, it takes a lot of practice. Some days it'll feel like nothing has changed, but you have to keep trying. I suffered a knee injury from overexertion, but after that I had to dust off and keep going.

Reading is great to free the mind, knitting is my thing for the moment. For me playing The Sims games can do this as well, it's a game that doesn't rush the player. Some days I only build and decorate in the game and it's a lot of fun.

Well, in my case walking just gives me a lot of time to brood and sometimes get anger to the boiling point. In really bad times, like last few months, I'd end up attacking some inanimate objects during walk.

[Mossy Toes]

Erp. Meant to reply to this well earlier, but my post was via phone and got eaten by the nether when trying to post.

My rhythm while working is/was to get up early, do a quick 5-min workout to make sure my brain gets some blood, make a cup of coffee, then write for an hour. That way, when I'm doing physical stuff that's repetitive, isn't too dangerous/demanding, later... well, I'm free to spend time dwelling on the scenes I was just writing earlier in the day, and where to go from there, and what to edit. It's a lot of subconscious and semi-conscious bandwidth just spent processing jigsaw puzzle pieces so that when I sit down to write the next morning... well, I'm eager to put down the next scene or scenes.

I generally consider myself pretty grounded and centered, so I don't have the issue of feedback loops making dwelling on a thing dangerous or upsetting, but--I can't help but think that it helps that I cram my brain full of story, so I'm not just free-associating based on mood as I keep myself physically occupied. Instead I'm setting my brain specifically to handle a specific task while my body handles another.

Another element of what makes it work for me, I think, is being yoked to somebody else's system and being accountable to them--in a benign, or indeed symbiotic sense, since I've accomplished so little when not under direction these past few years! Being woken up by my father with whom I am working, and being supported by him to write--rather than writing being an arduous chore I need to drag myself to do to check off my mental checklist for the day, it's a way I can harness my skills to make him excited about what I'm doing. I suppose a large factor of that is having a genuinely helpful coach who is interested in me pursuing my passions, and who for that couple week period was working closely with me, in my father. But... well, I do my best to appreciate what I have, and recognize that isn't an option or an opportunity most get. There are other methods of structure, buddy-systeming, and mutual accountability though, among writers, I think.

And additionally, I think, there's some merit to cutting myself off after a set amount of time spent writing. Rather than writing until I'm glutted on writing, spending several hours to get 2-3k words out and ending on a logical stopping point, well, instead I get ~700 words over an hour and have to cut myself off. I mean, it's less words per day, certainly, but the upsides? I am able to drop right back in when I come back the next morning, and I still have more I want to get out and onto the page. Rather than exhausting myself, I'm coming back to the page hungry to get more out. If I'm having a bad day, I know there's a finishing line in sight. And quite importantly, I am regularly getting that 700 words just about every day, rather than the 2-3k words in rare bursts as inspiration strikes.

Honestly, I don't know if there's a secret sauce here I can bottle and repackage. I'm just finding something that seems to work for me, and am going to have to do some testing to see if I can make a self-starting, regular habit of it--can I push for longer sittings at a time? Can I manage to do it myself, rather than under the aegis of a coaching figure? Etc. Because these stories are itching to get out, but while I'm not writing, they just plain can't!

[Xisor]

In the manner of journals, I've wrote a good bit more than I've done in a while, thanks mainly to having been in holiday!

A proper holiday, at that.

And off the damn island to boot.

Not just to Belfast or Shetland - those still don't really scratch the itch of being stuck on Britain for just under six years.

Such as it was, I went to that most exotic and unbritish of places: Germany. Totally alien world.

(My girlfriend is self-avowed 'not a good traveller', so we had to stick to somewhere Christmassy and relatively affordable, in addition to being not too anxiety-inducing.)

Berlin it was. And it was great. So much fun to be out flexing the traveller-y muscles. Exploring an interesting city, doing weird and new things, misspeaking German - all that jazz. More soon, buy very reinvigorated for all that!

[Therion]

Not good. Very not good. I have last 10 plans to draft. Then nothing again, void again. Dread is almost unbearable. Staring into the abyss. Is it the end or not? How much more will I stay alive? 2 months? 3 months? Half-a-year? A year?
Everything focuses on that single point. The matter of life and death.
I know that they are planning to starve me as soon as I will stop being necessary. It's just a question when. There isn't enough purpose for us all. At some point someone else will be lucky and we'll be finished. The question is when?

God, it's all so sick. All those sick games. I remember going through the city a year ago, face a death mask with serpentine eyes. I remember the hatred I felt towards all these soulless creatures walking through the city. So smug about being allowed to live when I'm condemned to death.



When? When? When death? Mind absolutely on point focused on this single threat. Bracing, preparing to stand my ground for the last time. For that final conflict in which I would certainly fall. Standing my ground, without hope of rescue or relief. The constant strain is almost unbearable. But I'm holding on. Standing on this final watch.

[Athelassan]

Alright, I think that's enough of that.

While it isn't entirely off-topic, these rants are rather disturbing and unsuitable for the forum atmosphere we seek to maintain, leaving aside that some of the vocabulary used would not be acceptable in any context.

If these posts are really reflective of how you are I recommend seeking professional help.

I have removed one post. Please refrain from posting along these lines again.

[Therion]

Alright, I think that's enough of that.

While it isn't entirely off-topic, these rants are rather disturbing and unsuitable for the forum atmosphere we seek to maintain, leaving aside that some of the vocabulary used would not be acceptable in any context.

If these posts are really reflective of how you are I recommend seeking professional help.

I have removed one post. Please refrain from posting along these lines again.

The only professional help I need is a guarantee that I'm not going to get starved.

It's the world of fanatics of starvation that needs psychiatric care.

[J D Dunsany]

I'm doing well. The drugs are working.

JDD

[narrativium]

The only professional help I need is a guarantee that I'm not going to get starved.

It's the world of fanatics of starvation that needs psychiatric care.

What you may be failing to consider is this: while you avoid the professional help, you rely on the care of the unprofessional help like us, and we're neither equipped nor qualified enough to help you.

My colleague has advised you. Take his advice to heart. We will delete further posts of this nature. Find a more appropriate outlet for these outbursts.