Sunday, July 31, 2011

Hello from Montreal!

It's definitely a good thing that I haven't written in here in a while, but I'm clearly not completely cured, as here I am again.

I'm going to try to organize my thoughts around some key words (as inspired by a book on science research that Katgor and I found in a bookstore yesterday).

1. Self-Awareness
I think I've always had a bit of trouble recognizing what's going on with myself as it's happening. It's not that I let things happen around me; rather that I immerse myself so fully in whatever is going on that I forget to check in with what my body is doing. This has shown itself in the past with sometimes accidentally not realizing that I'm hungry or that I need to stop walking or that I need some alone time. All of these things would help me recharge, but I can't do them until I realize that I need to do them. After I really crashed for the first time and every time since, I tell people that I don't know when it's going to happen until it's already happening. However, I'm sure if I tuned in to what my body is doing, I would be better at detecting when I'm crashing. Or, even better, if I can acknowledge that whatever I'm doing at the moment will probably cause me to crash, I should have the insight and self-awareness to determine that I need to stop, even if I'm in the middle of doing something really great (more on this later).

2. Control
When I was in the midst of a period of crashy-type feeling, I tried to pinpoint why I do what I do as a person, including why I put myself into so many new situations, like travelling, meeting new people, and trying new things of all sorts (besides for the merit of the new experiences themselves). Control was the one thing that I kept coming back to. I have always had something wrong with my body in terms of sickness, and it seems like every time I thought I was cured of one thing, another thing came along. I think the way that I escape from my own body is by involving other bodies with me to help me get out of myself for a bit, which is not really the best way of dealing with things, even though it's definitely ingrained in my personality to be an explorer of sorts. I do hope that I can manage to strike a balance between having all of these wonderful adventures and keeping a regard posed inward to figure out what my body is doing.

3. Wants and Needs
Once I had had a couple months to deal with the fatigue, Ceilidh told me something that stuck with me. She said that if I wind up crashing after doing something that was extraordinarily, amazingly something fun and something I very much wanted to do, then I need to recognize that it will be worth the days of recovery that follow. This is excellent advice, but I know I've been following it in the wrong way. Ultimately, I've resigned myself to the fact that I might crash anyway, so I may as well do all of the things that I love and throw caution to the wind. Thinking back on the past couple months, I can only think of a handful of times when I turned down an opportunity to go out or hang out with friends as a precaution and not when I was already crashing. In fact, even during those rare times, I probably was in the midst of crashing downtime anyway and just didn't want to acknowledge it. As a rule, I give myself what I Want and not what I Need (or I confuse them, which is just as bad). My real problem is that not only do I strongly dislike not giving myself what I want, I also strongly dislike having to tell someone that I can't do something that's sure to be extremely fun, only to instead spend that time in bed or reading a book or just generally being immobile because I don't want to let myself get down to my bare essential level of energy. This is something I definitely need to work on.

And so, from that, let me work out what I actually need to do:
1. Check in with myself more often (in practice- stop whomever I'm with so I can reel myself in and figure out where I'm at; or stop whatever I'm doing to feel what my body is doing)
2. Stop feeling down every time I need to spend a couple hours or days of down time, since I know that it will ultimately spare me a bigger crash later.

As I'm sure you've probably worked out by now, I wound up crashing pretty bad today. It was definitely a matter of time, and as much as I felt that I was fending off the crash and that maybe it just wouldn't happen this time, if I had really been honest with myself and Katgor, I definitely would not have let us walk those 5 (or 8...) kilometers to and around the Parc du Mont-Royal. And I probably would not have gone out last night to go dancing after spending a rather full first day in Montreal wandering around, seeing the Parade of Twins as part of the Just For Laughs Festival, walking on the Rue Ste-Catherine to the gay district, and watching the International Fireworks Festival display from the roof of a lesbian bar. However, back to Ceilidh's sound and useful advice, I do feel like doing all of these things was worth my inevitable crash, even though I do feel bad for Katgor for having to deal with me after the fact (travelling with people after my initial crashings last March have led me to perhaps write a User's Guide to Jamie. Maybe that'll be my next post!).

It really doesn't take much for me to recover/preserve my energy, so I think it should be reasonable for me to get better at actually doing it and being honest with myself about what I can do, especially since I really do feel like I haven't been crashing as hard as I had been. Whereas I used to have crashes where I couldn't move without crawling, couldn't talk without heavily stammering, and couldn't be awake without sleepy tears falling from my face, my pre-crashing and crashings have been more like walking sleepily and slowly, talking rarely and enjoying silence (which, after the fact, I realize made for some awkward social interactions), and only crying from frustration when I realize that I've gotten to the point where I really should have stopped hours ago.

I know I'd been frustrated at all of the doctors for not having any answers, but now that I've worked out some answers for myself, fingers crossed that I'll actually learn to be good to myself!