Woe: Mental Health Tips You'll Hate From The Saddest Woman In the World

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Woe, #24: Losing Your Mind? I have advice.

Hello from day 8 million of quarantine. Are you worried that you might be losing your mind? I definitely am losing my mind. I’m out here over the edge of sanity on twice my usual dose of quetiapine, an atypical antipsychotic I have referred to lovingly over the years as that med that prevents you from tearing your face off like a rabid hyena. I lost my mind over the weekend, after I sustained a series of blows to my sanity (which is, let’s admit it, always precarious) that included multiple mental and physical health events in the lives of people I care about and need to care for, as well as the unending trauma of the quarantine itself, the way it has cut me off from some of the coping mechanisms I used in the past, and the deaths, and the isolation, and the homeschooling, and the masks, and the massive blood clots the loss of taste and smell the hairdresser care packages the plexiglass barriers appearing everywhere, the livestreamed dance parties I can’t bring myself to join even though they sound so joyful, the cocktail zooms I bail out of because I don’t want to be a party pooper, the people I simply stopped talking to because they were making everything worse, not better, the long shadows left by people I gave up before the quarantine, my mother’s sourdough starter I begged her to mail me but have not started, 50lb bags of hard red winter wheat berries because it’s hard to find flour and I have a grain mill, people, people I love and want to hold who live nearby but are not in quarantine with me, and the distance that every day is worse, is harder to overcome, my own walls, and the spring still happening outside as if to spite us, “I’m bigger than your plague” says the spring, or, when I’m in another mood, to comfort us “I’m bigger than your plague.” 

Hello from the other side of losing your mind. If you feel like you might be losing your mind, and you haven’t lost it before, you might be very scared right now. What if your mind, she leaves you, what if she never comes back? You may feel as if you only have fragments, that something has been shattered, that your plans were destroyed and that you cannot come up with new ones, that you see only this next moment, that there’s no thread, or too many. Perhaps you have run out of patience with living itself, not to mention the people or animals or objects with whom you live, be they only dust bunnies or house centipedes. You are falling, and you don’t know when you’ll stop falling. Maybe you are numb or maybe there are too many thoughts in your head, all bad, maybe you feel as though you have suffocated, that you’re on the other side of death, somehow, that none of this is real and all of this is sinister and terrible and you don’t know when it will end or how.

I’m familiar with the sensation, it happens to me several times a year. My mind is a rickety rube goldberg machine held together with a combination of duct tape, spiritual mumbo jumbo, and drugs that include more than just those prescribed by my various doctors, whose prescriptions are often as questionable as the unprescribed -- that’s all to say though that I am always reaching a point beyond which I think I cannot go -- my mind is too much in tatters, too many or too few thoughts, finding myself having to drop at least the “functioning” part of the “high-functioning” descriptor upon which my self-image and sense of value in the world resides. At first I struggle and worry. I think I will never put myself back together again. Too many fragments. 

Truthfully it’s April and right on time for me to lose my mind anyway. I was supposed to be on a Girlstrip this weekend, three seats in row three on a Jetblue out of Boston, three working moms finally free of obligations for a weekend meetup with their fourth, flying in from SF, like a superheroes club. Maybe we’d have planned a heist. But last year I remember also several days I took off work in April to wait through an antipsychotic haze until I had the opportunity to reinvent coherence for myself, and last year there wasn’t a plague. Heartbreak, but no plague.

#24
January 20, 2023
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Woe, #23: Learn to Manufacture Hope

So, sometimes I get stuck inside an apocalypse. Some headline gets inside my head and I spin out into a state where the only thing I can think about is the pure dystopian hell of it all. Because of the way my brain works, when it gets stuck, sometimes it gets really, really, really stuck.

The other day Max pointed out to me that I was extremely, extremely fixated on Elon Musk and I was like YES BECAUSE IT’S ALL INSANITY, just like I was extremely fixated on how John Yoo justified torture way back in the 2000s and on this or that injustice as it rises and falls in headlines.

This year there was a confluence:

“Silicon Valley leaders welcome Elon Musk’s management of Twitter.”

#23
December 11, 2022
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Woe #22: existence is devastating, but here's something for your anxiety, maybe

Today, as I went about my day, I felt anxiety chasing me, that crack in the world, the chasm, opening up behind me like a disaster movie. It came closer and closer, just as it did yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. Today I thought maybe I’d hold my seat for awhile, wait until the anxiety caught me, see what happened. I went for a walk on the roof. On the roof I walked a figure 8 over and over, looking at the ever-changing clouds, looking at the pools of water reflecting the sky above me, at the chimney’s bricks.

Then I began to feel a grief so large it was hallucinatory. The clouds and the bricks and the pools of water seemed entirely unreal. It was like being in a dream. I guess you could say that I fell into that chasm, like Alice down the rabbit hole.

The first time I received reiki, my reiki person said to me “you may find some grief.” “I always find grief,” I said in return.

Now I am falling. There is no ground, only grief. The anxiety has gone away, because I have stopped running. Now I am falling.

#22
November 30, 2022
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Woe, #21: Everybody hates gratitude journaling; here's why you should do it anyways

(I unearthed a fully-formed issue of Woe while hunting around for stuff that should probably end up in the book I'm writing. I wrote this in late September 2021. Here you go.)

This week let’s go deep into the realm of instagram affirmations and explore the practice of gratitude journaling. Why do we hate it so, but also, why should we do it anyway?

Gratitude journaling is easy to hate because when we close our eyes and think of it we see a lilac-covered journal with little flowers on it, and it says Gratitude Journal on the front in a flowery typeface, and then inside we use our journaling pen sets to write down, say, 3 things each day we are grateful. There are also inspirational quotes, inside curlicued boxes, from Mary Oliver or Maya Angelou or Oprah. Probably some Rumi.

We hate gratitude journaling because it seems like Basic Bitch stuff, and we’re not basic bitches. (I might be using the royal we here, but let’s just go with it). We’re dark complex people with dark complex meaningful tattoos and traumatic backstories and too many black clothes and we wear a necklace depicting Lilith, a she-demon. We have bad handwriting and we’re angry and depressed. We don’t want people telling us how lucky we are! We know it, we know we’re lucky, but counting our blessings seems so much like Saying Grace, so unpleasantly close to denying our trials, to photoshopping away the reality of our pain until we can no longer confront it ourselves, our smiling instagrammed selfies a flat and affectless surface that wipes our actual experience of the world away, erases it.

#21
March 16, 2022
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Woe, #20: Play the hand you're dealt.

CW: suicide. Further CW: If you are reading this and you used to work with me at a certain place at a certain time, it's not just any suicide, it's that one.

***

I just started a new job. I’m now the VP of Engineering at ConvertKit. So far it is awesome. Of course, as with any new role, I’m immediately beset by challenges, the solutions to which are not obvious. There are constraints. There are circumstances outside my control that I nevertheless have to respond to in the best way I can. I gather information about the realities of the situation at hand, I generate options, I seek counsel. And then I try to play the best hand I can. Then, whatever happens, whether I ‘win’ that round or lose it, I know I’ve done my best to play.

This isn’t any different from how the rest of life works. I think it’s a little easier to see it in the context of a business, for two reasons: the first is that when you start a new job, especially, perhaps, in a leadership role, you are dealt A LOT of new cards all at once. And the second reason is that it’s relatively easy to step back from a business context and see that you’re sitting at a table playing a strategy game. The stakes are not low — I don’t meant that — when you are part of leading a business you feel the responsibility to lead it well, for the sake of the business, for the sake of the people who work there, and the people who buy the product, and all the beings who might be affected by the product whether or not they buy it (I include here all life on earth). It’s a big responsibility, but also, we’re not running a nuclear reactor, or making an airplane, or starting a war.

#20
March 12, 2022
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Woe, #19: Thanks, I hate them all: 5 wellness tips you hated the last 1000 times you saw them on Insta and 1 tip that’s maybe useful

Woe, #19: Thanks, I hate them all: 5 wellness tips you hated the last 1000 times you saw them on Insta and 1 tip that’s maybe useful

Hello and welcome to Woe. It’s not Wednesday and I’m uncharacteristically... not full of woe. Yes, I know there’s a war in Ukraine and Texas is planning to steal trans kids from their accepting parents, and intellectually I think those things and many others are terrible, but I just started a new job so I’m a little hypomanic and, well, full of joy and excitement. This is a rare state for me and I know all too well it doesn’t last, and yet I also know that I need to soak up the feeling of feeling good, that, while I have to be careful not to let it get out of control, I also need to savor it. Like actually just sit here breathing deeply and experiencing something other than sadness. 

How rare is this? In 2021, out of 1003 data points in my mood tracker, on a 5 point scale where 5 is feeling awesome, which is what I feel right now, I felt awesome 3 times. In that whole year. I felt good (4 points) 119 times that year, and I felt bad (2) and awful (1) for a combined 538 times.

Anyways. I can and should write a whole issue about the phenomenon of hypomania, how it differs from mania, and why it’s very common for bipolar folk to get hypomanic when they start a new job (i.e. I knew this would happen and planned for it.) But that is not this issue.

#19
February 25, 2022
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Woe, #18: Several book recommendations, 1 discography, and some paintings on the topic of mental illness

You will hate this tip if you, like me, find it pretty challenging to get through even a short New Yorker article much less an entire book. "You're assigning homework??? In a pandemic???" I am not assigning homework. I simply needed a topic I could bang out in less than 45 minutes and I've been meaning to tell you about some good books for a while now, so here you go:

  1. Start with An Unquiet Mind, by Kay Jamison. Kay Jamison is one of the top experts on bipolar disorder in the world. She literally wrote the book (with a coauthor, but let's ignore him for the moment) on it -- an 800 page textbook entitled Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression. (The title of this book, I should note, has a massive claim built into it, that all recurrent mood disorders are linked rather than that there is a distinct difference between depression and bipolar). Anyways, An Unquiet Mind is her memoir about her own journey with manic-depression (what the DSM would call Type I Bipolar), and it's an incredible literary work as well as groundbreaking in the honesty she is offering as a clinician herself.

  2. Darkness Visible, by Willian Styron. Another classic. Styron is best known for his book Sophie's Choice. This is a memoir about his lifelong struggle with some really dark, really psychotic levels of depression.

  3. The Collected Schizophrenias is a collection of personal essays by Esmé Weijun Wang. One of my favorite things about this book is how much she goes into the sociology around mental illness -- the special stigma reserved for schizophrenia and psychosis, the blurriness of diagnosis, the ways in which privilege allows her to navigate mental health systems in ways that are not possible for those with less privilege, the various ways those of us with serious mental illness make our peace with our symptoms and live and function even in the face of psychosis.

  4. I'm Telling the Truth, But I'm Lying, by Bassey Ikpe, is a painfully detailed collection of personal essays about living with bipolar 2. As someone who shares that diagnosis this remains the book that actually hurt the most for me to read because it so exquisitely conveys the particular feel of my own mental illness: the disorientation, confusion, unreality, and enormous variety of pain and symptoms that someone might experience in the course of living with it, especially before diagnosis.

  5. Marbles by Ellen Forney is a wonderful graphic memoir about bipolar disorder. If you like it she has a wonderful follow up graphic self-help book, Rock Steady, for folks with bipolar which is full of amazing tips and tricks.

Don't want to read a book? Fair enough. I offer up Halsey's entire discography for you on the topic of bipolar disorder. (Yes, she has bipolar disorder). She has an entire album called "Manic", y'all, and she doesn't mean it like hair coloring. Check out "Gasoline" for depression and "Honey" for mania.

If visual art is more your thing, consider Mark Rothko's late work in the years leading up to his suicide. If you're ever in London visit the Tate Modern's collection of his late paintings or if you're ever in Houston check out the Rothko Chapel.

#18
January 26, 2022
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Woe, #17: Do something different.

So, this is the counterpoint to a previous Woe, Wait. Wait. Wait.

You might hate this tip because it’s annoying to be told to do something different when you feel like you can hardly do anything at all. It’s hard to do something different when you’re depressed or scared or stuck. You might not have any idea what different thing you could do.

The good news is it almost doesn’t matter what different thing you do. I mean, not heroin, that’s probably not the best choice for doing something different. But when you’re frozen, when you’re stuck, when you are locked up inside your own damn mind going in circles about why you’re bad, what you’ve done wrong, what you’re afraid of, how you’ve failed — what you need most in those moments is not to Think Different but to do something different.

If you’re lying in bed staring at that suit you left crumpled on the floor and you start to hate yourself for not taking care of your things and your mind starts to occupy itself with your self-hate and/or in order not to deal with the crumpled-up suit you distract yourself so you don’t have to see it or think about what a bad person you are for not hanging up the suit. I know this is not any idea you haven’t thought to yourself a million times before but you could, just a thought, just a small suggestion, you could just get up and hang up the suit.

#17
January 19, 2022
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Woe #16: Admitting you need help is not, in fact, the hardest part.

(This is a joint issue with Amy Writes Words. If you'd rather listen to this than read it, go there. Also, I thought I'd sent this last week but I hadn't. So if you read last week's Amy Writes Words this is not a new issue to you. Sorry, but at least you don't have more reading to 'put aside for later' and never get back around to reading. For those of you who are only subscribed to woe, here you go, brand new words. If you also would like to read about why I think the future must include a lot of Karaoke check out this week's Amy Writes Words, which also includes gorgeous owl photos. )

Sorry to be a bummer but for most of us it is simply not true that the hardest part of mental illness is the part where you admit you need help. This is a Hollywood storyline that makes great after-school specials and dramatic moments in gritty dramas, but it is not how things work in real life.

I know this because I have admitted I needed help about seven thousand times in my life and all of those times were easier than about seven million other things that have come with my mental illness. The time I lost a dear friend because I was absolutely bonkers nuts in their direction. The time I was involuntarily committed. Waiting two months for ketamine infusions through a fog of suicidal depression while working full time as a director of engineering, and then when I finally got around to the part where I paid six thousand dollars and got the damn infusions they helped, but they weren’t any kind of miracle, just like the ECT helped but it wasn’t any kind of miracle, just like all the meds have sometimes helped and never been any goddamn miracle, just like meditation helped and has never been a miracle and praying fervently helped but it did not bring about a fucking miracle.

Admitting you need help is not some kind of fucking miracle.

#16
January 5, 2022
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Woe #15: How to be creative when your back's against the wall, bell hooks tribute edition

It's 10 pm EST, and I already said I wasn't going to send a woe this week. I've had some intense meetings. My son is just home from college. I am busy preparing a two minute comment to my local school committee on the topic of how, seeing as we are all basically exhausted and all our kids seem to be pretty wrecked by this worldwide disaster we have been enduring together, perhaps we should not complain to our teachers that they are not doing enough for our kids but recognize that those of us still working from home in our million dollar condos should, rather, ask what we can be doing for our teachers. There is no more downhill for this shit to roll. Everyone is maxed out. We need to support one another, and in this instance that means me showing up for my child's teachers, the way they've been showing up for my kids for years and years now.

Anyhow, I did not decide suddenly to send this issue of woe in order to tell you about the 2 minute public comment I am drafting in support of the teacher's union.

Well, maybe I did.

I've been giving you many tips about how not to burn out the people around you with your despair. But the reality is that we are all burning out, even the people who started out kind of okay. And what that means for us as individuals and for us collectively as humans, in this very hard time with no end in sight, is that we need to figure out how to do some things that are not so easy, and they are especially not so easy for people who are by nature already in despair.

#15
December 16, 2021
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Woe, #14: Don't wear out the people around you, part 2: 5 tips to help people help you

tl;dr: the most hateful thing about this set of tips is not that most people do not know what to do about your pain but that being around your pain very likely causes them a lot of pain. This is deeply unfair but it is also true so we may as well face that and figure out what to do about the problem, because it is a problem. When the people around you are in pain because of your pain and they do not know how to help you, they are likely to behave in unhelpful ways or to flee or ignore your pain, and all of these things really suck for you.

So you need to help them help you. This is not so hard. There are 5 things you should do. 1. Assure people you are safe, if in fact you are. 2. Tell them what you need, and make as much of it as possible simple and concrete. 3. Tell them what you don’t need. 4. Expect that any particular individual can’t manage too much of your pain at once and distribute the burden. 5. If all of these steps seem impossible when you are in the darkest place, then when you are in a less-dark place plan ahead so that you and the people around you know what to do.

*****

What follows is an untidy rambling elaboration on both the problem and the solutions I offer:

#14
December 9, 2021
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Woe #13: Don't Wear Out The People Around You, Part 1: Don't Threaten Suicide

Woe #13: Don't Wear Out The People Around You, Part 1: Don't Threaten Suicide

This is the first in a series of tips about strategies to help the people around you deal with your mental illness without burning out.

You might hate this tip because it may sound like I’m blaming you when I tell you it’s your responsibility not to wear out your friends, family, coworkers, and lovers over the course of living with mental illness.

And I may sound exactly like that depressed voice in your head that says you are wearing them out, so much so that they would be better off without you, so you should disappear from their lives, one way or another.

#13
December 1, 2021
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Woe #12: I just fucking can't this week, okay. It's not a tip, it's just the reality.

I'm emotionally tapped out this week. I'm also logistically tired, as I've been working to monetize my instagram while writing two newsletters a week while launching a coaching business while doing photo shoots while trying to figure out what this book is I'm writing while working on a course about debugging product teams while managing a lot of complicated family health stuff while trying to put together a decent thanksgiving for my family while Hanukkah is way too fucking early this year while trying not to get demoralized politically while coming up against infuriating examples of sexism, racism, or some kind of ism every single day reported not just by the internet at large but also by my closest friends, so that I am daily filled with impotent rage on their behalf. While also dealing with my own shitty mental health which is just no good this time of year, no two ways about it, IT IS WHAT IT IS, I AM THAT I AM, WE R WHO WE R, I'm fucking exhausted.

So I really just can't. I got nuthin. I have so many ideas -- practice gratitude, recognize when you're overcommitted, stop talking, how to tell if maybe you're actually bipolar, a short history of lithium, who is kay jamison and why should you care, and on and on. I always have ideas. But it's just that time of year for me that the ideas are gonna have to wait some.

It hurts inside my head and I'm just gonna be over here breathing through that.

You're on your own this week, peeps. Best of luck out there.

#12
November 24, 2021
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Woe #11: You can only save your own life.

CW: LOTS ABOUT SUICIDE. REALLY. A LOT.

This tip fucking sucks. It sucks in all directions. If you can only save your own life, that means that you can’t save anyone else’s life, and that sucks, because there are probably some people in your life you would do almost anything to save. And, if you can only save your own life, it means that other people, no matter how much they love you, cannot save your life for you. It means you have to do it your own damn self, and that is absolute bullshit. I do not want to be responsible for my own damn life. It’s very very hard. 


When I say save your own life, what do I mean? I mean metaphorically, certainly. I mean in the way that Mary Oliver means it in The Journey, which everyone should go read. I have a copy of “The Journey” taped up inside my closet door so that when I’m locked in my closet writing and feeling like I’m neglecting other people I remember that I can only save my own life. 


It took me a long time to understand that. For a long time I hoped that somehow something or someone outside me would fill the hole in my heart, and I made some desperate, stupid, painful, hurtful choices trying to get that. After trying everything I could and a whole lot of pain I accepted that nobody can fill that hole for me and I can’t fill it for anyone else either and it totally sucks. 

#11
November 17, 2021
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Woe #10: Wait. Wait. Wait.

Everyone hates waiting, which is why you will hate this tip. 

And yet, when you’re mentally ill, you spend a lot of time waiting.

You wait at the pharmacy. You wait on the phone with the insurance company. You wait for a therapist or a psychopharmacologist or a new treatment. You wait to see if new meds will work, you wait for side effects to dissipate or not. You wait for the phlebotomist and you wait for the lab results. You wait for prescriptions to be pre-approved. You wait to get into the hospital and then you wait to get out. 

Most of all, you wait to feel better. 

#10
November 10, 2021
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Woe, #9: If the cat is curled up on your lap, just enjoy it

I want to say this is a cop-out of a newsletter that I’m typing out on my phone at 23:25 will only 35 minutes left to send this on Wednesday, as promised. But the whole point of this tip is that it’s okay to have spent my day writing stuff that isn’t ready to go out yet, eating Indian takeout with one of my closest friends, and looking at the cat. He’s kinda pinning me down. So fuck it, this tip is just to sometimes say fuck it, I’m just gonna hang out with the cat now.

You probably won’t hate this tip, since everyone loves cats. Maybe I should stop the gag where I tell you why you’ll hate the tips. Maybe you don’t have to hate all the tips. Hmmm.

#9
November 4, 2021
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Woe, #8: People with morning routines can go fuck themselves, but let me tell you about my morning routine

Hi so I have an incredible issue of Woe I'm working on that is some kind of wild ride through psych meds, Hamlet, Kendrick Lamar, and a grand unified theory of coping mechanisms, but it's turning out to be a bit of a week so this is not that.

I had this great morning routine going for a while. I thought wow have I nailed morning routines? Am I now that person who I can't stand? It was so healthy and productive and calming and grounding and all that shit. I was proud.

This was my great morning routine:

    #8
    October 27, 2021
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    Woe, #7: Respect Your Pain

    Here in Boston winter is coming. It’s cold and clear out and the light at noon is watery and weak. Facebook helpfully reminds me how I felt on this day two years ago, and it’s the same today. Fuck off, I wrote. Fuck off. 

    I probably shouldn’t give you a tip today, and not this tip. This tip isn’t even funny. This tip will not ease your pain. This tip is some dark shit and if you want to run from it I respect that. I would also like to run.

    What I hope this tip does do is help you honor your pain for what it is: trauma.

    ***

    #7
    October 20, 2021
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    Woe, #6: Meditation works, and I swear you can do it

    I hope it’s obvious why you will hate this tip. Everyone hates being told they should probably meditate. Most people will say “yeah I tried that and I just can’t, my head is too full of thoughts or I can’t sit still or it’s so boring.”

    And who doesn’t hate those people who have whole rooms devoted to meditation, with a lovely little Japanese screen and one perfect always-in-bloom orchid and a silk brocade meditation cushion they bought in Dharamsala when they were training under the Dalai Lama after they finished climbing Mt. Everest.

    And, further, who doesn’t resent the way that mindfulness has been co-opted by capitalism, packaged up into subscription apps, and sold to us as a method of increasing our resilience, our focus, and our productivity so that we may better serve Capital? What’s not to hate about that?

    Also mindfulness as it’s been repackaged is largely white, a product of white Western Buddhists.

    #6
    October 13, 2021
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    Woe, #5: A Full-Body Workout You Can Do Without Leaving Your Bed

    You will hate this tip because it's an actual workout that makes your muscles burn and it's not sex.

    As an aside, sex can also be a great workout if you can get it without leaving bed and can find the energy to get into the mood and not just lie there with the blanket over your head.

    #5
    October 6, 2021
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    Woe, Issue #4: Diagnoses are not Destinies, They're Just Numbers in a Filing System

    Hello, it's Wednesday, and my face is numb, for no discernible reason. I happened to be seeing my doctor yesterday for an unrelated problem (also has no discernible cause, haha) and mentioned casually about the numbness while also pointing out that most of my bodily sensations are unreliable, and he did a tiny bit of bloodwork which was all normal and now I've moved on. It'll go away. 

    I wrote a lot in connection with this incident about somatoform disorders, but it's long and not ready to be a tip yet, so instead you're going to get an also too-long ramble about diagnoses that has a kind of general tip that you might hate because it makes everything complicated and you might want things to be simple.

    Things are not simple. Among things, brains are not simple. Bodies not simple. If you run face first into a metal pole and your nose gets a little bit broken (true story), is relatively simple.

    #4
    September 29, 2021
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    Woe, Issue #3: If at first you don't succeed, try, try again

    hello! It’s a woeful Wednesday, and I’m here with another hateful, hateful tip.

    people are always saying this annoying thing, try again. In my industry this virtuous cycle of trying is called “test-and-learn”. At the very early stages of test-and-learn, you’re trying to find ‘product-market fit’. You test and learn forever or until you run out of funding, and then you sell all your expensive office furniture on craigslist. (Oh wait, that was in 2001. I don’t know where people sell their excess Aeron chairs now.)

    Here’s a thing people don’t much like to tell you though, because it’s both annoying and, frankly, in the short term, discouraging: whatever it is you are trying to learn to do in your own life, be it stop shooting yourself in the foot or start brushing your teeth every day or stop thinking your romantic partner or your job or your french bulldog can fill the void in your heart (okay, well, maybe the bulldog can), well, the test-and-learn cycle could take on the order of years.

    #3
    September 22, 2021
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    Woe, Issue #2: Leave yourself time to recover

    Yesterday morning I moderated a panel for the first time, in front of what might have been up to 6000 people. (Thankfully I didn’t have to see the people.) I had never moderated a panel before, and, of course, doing it remotely meant I was also going to be using a new system, one built for livestreams. Public speaking terrifies me, naturally, since it terrifies almost everyone and almost everything terrifies me. I spent days in advance being anxious about the panel, practicing my intro for it, etc. In the morning I had to medicate carefully - calibrating just enough Klonopin so I didn’t have a panic attack live, but not so much that I couldn’t like, moderate. Then the panel happened. It went fine.

    Then I didn’t do anything for the rest of the day. I did not expect myself to do anything. I mean, I did dumb stuff, unimportant stuff, or just nothing. I did not send useful emails or queue up insightful tweets on buffer or do an instagram photo shoot or organize anything. That’s because I understand that after I’ve done something that is hard for me (whether or not other people think that thing is hard is irrelevant), I need to come down from it, and coming down from it often feels like I have the flu. Last week I picked my kid up from college so he could spend Rosh Hashana with us, and it was four hours of driving, which is 3 hours and 30 minutes more driving in one day than I usually do in a whole month. Coming off of that was basically me lying in bed crying a lot for the next couple of days. But I was expecting it to be a challenge, and that made it easier to get through the aftermath of the challenge.

    So, the tip is to know what things are going to be challenges for you and to try your best to build in rest time after them. And, if you find you need rest after something you didn’t expect to be challenging, well, try to remember that for next time.

    Why you hate this tip:

    #2
    September 15, 2021
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    Woe, Issue #1: The Most Hateful Tip of All: You Have To Try

    Hello and welcome to the inaugural issue of Woe: Mental Health Tips You'll Hate From The Saddest Woman In the World.

    This first tip is the most hateful one of all, and I'm sorry, but it's important and we may as well get it out of the way now: you have to try.

    You have to try. Sure, you may get lucky and find a med or several that make trying much easier, and if so then count your blessings, please, I beg you. Sure it sucks to have to take a med, but lots of people have to take meds for lots of reasons; if you've found meds that make it easier to live your life well I entreat you to do whatever you need to get over whatever qualms you may have about taking psych meds.

    #1
    September 8, 2021
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