tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-71264463944820121232024-03-05T19:53:57.255-06:00Srito Wobbles ForwardAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.comBlogger36125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-32611772493588493512017-07-31T15:28:00.000-05:002017-07-31T15:28:19.411-05:00Widget<iframe frameborder="0" height="422" scrolling="no" src="https://www.namiwalks.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=widgets.200x420thermo&participantID=94957" width="202"><a href="https://www.namiwalks.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.participant&participantID=94957">Make a Donation!</a></iframe>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-88770260156921530842014-05-01T12:18:00.001-05:002014-05-01T21:41:53.964-05:00Wish I'd known: Accepting<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">In an earlier <a href="http://sneadspaisaudela.blogspot.com/2013/10/wish-id-known-making-limoncello-out-of.html">post</a>, I wrote about the many things I wish I had known that <i>could have </i>kept my breakdown from wrecking my life so thoroughly. I was incapacitated for over a year while my marriage shredded to rags in a wood chipper of depression, like the one they used to pulp dead bodies in <i>Fargo</i>. Doing the simplest things—getting out of bed and trudging to the shower or standing back up from the shower floor after I'd laid down hoping a stream of warm water might bring peace—felt like insurmountable obstacles. It's unpleasant still even fully recovered today to create the scroll of those shitty memories. Slight echoes of yesterday's desperate gasping awaken in me when I record the past that I hated. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The people we've been at different points in our lives sleep within us. They can rise and radiate out of the gut where they slumber, fanning up in smoke through our torso, seeping into our mind. They can precipitate and calcify, solidify and become us again. Right now when I think about those shit days, that guy who couldn't hold his head level walking down the street because it was physically too painful, whose belly thrashed, whose throat filled with a nauseous choke of impotence at the thought of getting in to work, this guy who I hate and hated being is only a wisp of fumes. He puffs and passes through me and then quickly passes on. These days he doesn't have any grip to take hold. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Again, I'll harp on it like I have in other posts. Simple daily tasks like getting out of bed or walking a block with your head straight are easy when you are healthy. When I lost my mind, those things were literally more difficult and painful than running a marathon. I return often to this comparison because I think it gives the best glimpse of how hard and devastatingly real of a problem depression is for someone who hasn't lived it. The comparison is also useful for newcomers who are plummeting through the horrors of melancholia for the first time. If you've been highly functional and successful, it's hard to understand why all these stupid goddamn trifles are suddenly next to impossible challenges. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">To take depression seriously and to fully acknowledge what it's done to your abilities you have to wrap your head around swirling counterintuitive thinking about success and failure. In the early days of my crash, I had a very scrambled grasp on my condition. There are different levels of knowledge and understanding. On an immediate level in the bone and gut, I knew exactly how hard everything had become. I was the one calling in sick when I couldn't get out of bed and canceling my classes pretexting stomach illness when I couldn't think of anything to do with my students. I could <i>feel</i> that something was terribly wrong, but I couldn't explain it to myself clearly like I can now. My brain had put me in a place where teaching a class or planning a lesson was almost unbearable. And I do not say "my brain put me in a place" without realizing that many of my own dysfunctional choices and thinking patterns contributed mightily to get me into that terrible place. From the bottom of that stupid hole, I would compare my sluggishness to how I'd felt the year before when I was excited about teaching my first poetry class. I got to design my own syllabus and talk with intelligent young people about the poetry I love: Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Yeats, Whitman, Ginsberg. But when I started back to work at the beginning of the 2010-2011 school year, my attitude about work had changed utterly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">To get past this terrible slothing, you have to acknowledge and accept your condition, lower your standards and admit that something real is keeping you from performing the way you'd like to. There's a sliding scale of accomplishment at play when you get depressed. Healthy people don't have any problem walking two blocks to get on the metro to ride to work. Healthy teachers are able to plan the next day's lesson without feeling like their entire world is caving in on their airways. But judging yourself when you are sick based on what you can accomplish healthy is a recipe for a dysfunctional thinking disaster. Thinking this way creates added pressure and obstacles that make recovery harder. To get out of the hole, you have to find ways to feel good about the tiny things you do manage to do. Once you've gone through the fall and climb back out to normal healthy living, you might understand that daily tasks when depressed were harder than running a marathon healthy. When you're in the shit, especially the first time, it is very difficult to realize that you've accomplished something difficult by making it to the shower. Good therapy often works to restore a sense of self-worth attached to these miniscule accomplishments, but it is very hard to build confidence when you can so readily compare your sick and healthy selves. If you can acknowledge and appreciate how depression changes degree of difficulty, you can perhaps avoid the counterproductive stress of feeling like you should be able to charge full speed like a healthy man. If you accept, you might cut down on the useless railings at yourself about what an unproductive asshole you've become. These railings only set you back. But it's not an easy shift to make in the way you think. I mean I've run a marathon (twice) for Christ's sake. And I'm supposed to pat myself on the back for taking a damn shower? Fucking absurd. Absurd like the irrational attacks of the beast that's trying to crush you. </span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-53637622830474668542014-03-17T10:52:00.004-05:002014-04-20T00:26:14.374-05:00Tottering with Demons<div class="MsoNormal">
This essay could also easily be called “Concerning Effort.” It likely would be if Montaigne were writing it, though every once in a while my renaissance mentor did go hard off the rails and write something that had practically <a href="http://sneadspaisaudela.blogspot.com/2012/11/concerning-automoblies.html">no connection at all to his title</a>.</div>
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From fourth grade through my senior year in high school, I played football—minus one year when my pediatrician didn’t want me exposed to contact because of a rare kidney condition called nephrois. My football coaches at every level taught me to give 110% maximum effort on every play. As an undersized linebacker and guard, I relied on being mean, being smart, and my coaches’ balls-out though mathematically dubious work ethic to became a decent player. Getting older (and smarter?) it’s sometimes tempting to dismiss high school sports as meathead nonsense. That, though, would be elitist, intellectual nonsense in turn. I don’t discredit my football experience today. And I don’t want to shit on sports culture. I liked playing football, still love watching football, and learned a lot about effort when I played. But the 110 effort mentality useful for a 3–10 second burst of a football down can work against me as a mediocre long distance runner trying to get better in my mid-thirties—yeah it’s true, mid-thirties, I’ll own it. </div>
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Two cartoon style demons hover above my shoulders next to my ears when I run. I’ve recently named them Lucretia and Jackson. Jackson and I have known each other for a very long time. This all-American speed demon fought welterweight as a freshman on his high school’s varsity MMA squad. He’s had his nose broken twice, and 3 of his incisors are now made of state of the art bio-tech composites. This absolutely ingrained monster stokes the urge to always hurry, bellowing at me to go go go go damn it go and when the pinch in your side and the burn in your lungs start to feel like too much, go anyway for fuck’s sake. He is an utter and all-time badass, though unconfirmed rumors have swirled for years about his crossdressed Karaoke at a backwoods dive bar off a dirt road somewhere between Hazel Green, AL and Fayetteville, TN.</div>
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Jackson’s counterpart Lucretia is a bawdy harlot who only wants to lounge on her hand made leather couch that someone else paid for. Lucretia snoozes dreary all day in and out of consciousness at her opium-sloth house. Everything bores her. Her distorted perceptions of reality arrive refracted through the light waves bouncing around the glass and smoke of her water pipe. She would sit and watch, yawning out passive indifference, while her whole world was swallowed up and drooled into useless piles of debris. Jackson screams you scared and gets you to push. Lucretia is crafty. A skilled rhetorician, she persuades with tender words. If you don’t defend your ears against her, she’ll have you wallowing in bed over Dorito crumbs and watching SVU reruns on Netflix quicker than you can say “maybe I’ll wait and do my long run tomorrow."</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="st"><i>GNOTHI SEAUTON</i></span></td></tr>
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Patience is a marathon runner’s friend. If you learned how to try as a scrapping high school football OG, it’s easy to burn out when you hit the pavement to build long running endurance. The fall I turned 22, I made my first failed attempt at running Pheidippides’ race. I knew very little about pacing, fueling, hydration, tapering, inflammation, wicking fabrics, or chaffing. I didn’t talk to anyone who had done a marathon for advice, didn’t take fluids during my runs, didn’t stretch, didn’t eat for energy, didn’t carbo load, or gel. Because I just didn’t like the feel of a cold against my skin, I would have never iced joints to control inflammation. The ice bath has now become a nearly ritualistic part of my long run routine. </div>
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My ignorance eventually led to injury that fall. And yet, as I sit here wanting to show why it’s helpful to understand different levels of pace and effort, a haunted ache rises, a semi-sweet morsel of lost time and blurred rustlings of vehement late afternoon fights with dear shithead friends over the significance of wisteria vines, all washed down by the burning allure of bourbon drinks under fading November dusk in front porch rocking chairs. Part of me misses the guy I was then, so free of theory and so much closer to the immediate experience of the body running, the guy who could throw on a pair of shorts and cotton t-shirt, nipple chaffing be damned, and charge out into the streets of Athens, GA to just run unprepared for hours.</div>
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That was the year I discovered iliotibial (IT) bands. The IT band is a tendon that connects one of the shin bones (tibia) to the muscles in the hip. It crosses the top of the knee joint on the outside of the leg. Back then, I didn’t know that these bands existed in our bodies, that they need to be stretched, that they are one of the most common sources of overuse injury for runners, or that if you run all the time without the right preparation and aftercare they become enlarged and press against the knee.</div>
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My goal race that year was in January, and I made it all the way to a 20 mile run in late December. That run went well. Blissfully ignorant while home from school over Christmas break, I mapped a course to a spot 10 miles away from my parent’s house. I ran to that spot and back—without drinking any water!—and felt good the whole way. A few days later there was an immediate sharp pain in my knee when I tried to run again. I thought at first that I’d be able to run through the pain. But before I reached the end of the block, I was convinced that I had blown my knee joint and that there was no way I’d be able to continue running. More or less ready, physically prepared for my target distance, I scratched on my first marathon attempt that day less than a month out from the race.</div>
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When I think about that scratch, my ignorance transforms from a blissful, immediate connection with my body into an unsettling churn of regret. There was no major damage to my knee. I could have easily run on it. I didn’t know that though. I stayed off the knee for a while and then began running shorter distances again several months later. The following summer, I went running one afternoon and made it about half a mile before I felt the same pinch in my knee. I tried again to push through it but didn’t make it very far before the pain shut me down. I walked home frustrated and fuming, an immature and nauseous sense of injustice hounding me with questions about why this unfair knee problem was happening to me. When I got home, I was so choking mad that I paced around the house furious for a few minutes and then kicked a hole in the wall. But I also finally decided to get my knee looked at. Later that week, a sports med specialist at the University of Georgia student clinic explained what was happening. She taught me a simple stretch that I have done ever since, and I’ve never had any more trouble with IT band pain. What if I’d gone in to see her in December and learned the stretch before I dropped out of my race? Back when I could run a sub 6:00 mile, would I have notched my four hour marathon on the first go round? The <a href="http://www.mcmillanrunning.com/">McMillan calculator</a> says I would have run 3:24:05 based on my 10k PR from the same year. Could I have qualified for Boston? Ohhhh tense and mood. Ohhhh sacred <i>could have</i>.</div>
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Ever since my days as a kid with nephrosis, I’ve hated going to doctors. There’s a residue in me of a half-articulated error connecting doctors and limitations. I do not readily see them as healers who will alleviate my pain and help me fix my physical ailments. When I was a kid, a check-up often meant going back on a Prednisone steroid treatment that made me want to eat all the time. It meant worrying about high cholesterol as a fifth grader, months of peeing on these goddamn sticks every morning to find out whether my kidneys were flushing all the protein I needed out of my system, occasional 24 hour urine collections where I kept all my piss from the day in a bottle in the fridge to send away for lab analysis, and the afore mentioned and bitterly hated ban on contact sports. I saw all these negative side effects instead of the miraculous science that had transformed nephrosis, a potentially fatal condition, into just a series of moderate nuisances for an elementary school kid.</div>
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After writing all that out I have a penetrating flash of compassion for my parents—and any parent who has to make a sick child stick to a treatment regiment with unpleasant side effects. Understanding the give and take of side effects and benefits of a wonder drug doesn’t come easy when you’re ten. I was learning to misinterpret the doctor’s white coat and loading it up as the symbol of everything I hated about being a puffy, swollen kid with raging spikes of steroid emotion who wasn’t allowed to play football. It must have been difficult for my parents to make me keep taking Prednisone, the medicine I hated even though it was saving me.</div>
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Playing football as a kid, I drew on my roid-rage style temper to compensate for being smaller than most of the offensive lineman who tried to block me. If you explode nastier than the guy coming at you, you can beat him a lot the time even if he is bigger and stronger. But if you explode nasty like that during a long training run, you can catch iliotibial band syndrome, patellofemoral pain syndrome, planter faciaitis, shin splints, pulled hamstrings, and the like. </div>
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Twelve years after my doomed marathon attempt, I joined a training group at a local running store. We met on Saturdays and gradually built our distance starting with a 7 mile run 18 weeks before the race. Early on in this program, one of the coaches told me that he rarely sees people fail for lack of effort or determination. The most common failure he sees is from overtraining, people who push too hard too early and injure themselves. I’ve slowly started to understand the need for patience in training, and I’ve learned a lot of times to differentiate between the type of short burst effort I learned about in my football days and the slow and low sustained and almost gentle push of a long run. But still, those demons die hard, and with a vengeance. I know on an abstract level that during a long run it’s best to run steady and 1-2 minutes per mile slower than your marathon goal pace. Knowing this though doesn’t always prevent me from pushing too hard. I ran a 15 mile training run in early December. I started out steady at the intentionally slow long run pace. Four miles in and feeling absolutely great, my body takes over and wants to kick. You lose site easily of what your mind knows when you are elated by your legs feeling stronger and swifter than you expected them too. When you’ve got the energy to bound a little bit and you’re feeling crisp early on, you’re body goes unless you make a real concentrated effort to hold back. I didn’t hold back the urge that day, and by mile 12, I was blown up and dragging on fumes not sure I would make it all the way back in. Runners often tell each other to listen to their bodies to prevent inury. But much like Apollo’s cryptic pronouncement carved above the the temple doors at Delphi, it’s hardly ever half so simple as it sounds to fully know yourself as a runner.</div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“Labour is blossoming or dancing where<br />
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.<br />
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,<br />
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.<br />
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,<br />
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?<br />
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,<br />
How can we know the dancer from the dance?”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">W.B. Yeats – “Among School Children”</span></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-42530175194323357752014-02-27T21:27:00.001-06:002014-02-27T21:34:20.113-06:00Race for Your Mind Deux: Finish Line and New Beginnings<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="en-US">You did it. I did it. We did it.</span></span></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I'm indifferent to race medals unless they have Willie Nelson on them.</span></span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="en-US">I have a confession to make. When I set up my marathon fundraiser page several months back I didn’t think I would reach my goal of raising $1500 for the Huntsville affiliate of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (<a href="https://www.facebook.com/NamiHuntsville">NAMI Huntsville</a>). This is the second time I have done a running fundraiser. The first—when I ran the Rocket City Marathon in December 2012—brought in just under $700. When I launched the second round for this year’s Austin Marathon that I ran on February 16th, I set a publicly high bar while secretly hoping the higher goal would bring in $1000. You all showed me. And I thank you with most sincere gratitude for your powerful show of generosity. The morning after my race, an anonymous donor made a $35 gift to push me to the goal I didn’t think I’d reach. Since race weekend, a few more donations have come in and the total is currently at $1776.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="en-US">Hitting the number that I didn’t expect to reach felt great, but reaching that goal takes on a much fuller meaning when I stop for a moment to think about what it really means. Teaching and taking <a href="http://www.nami.org/Template.cfm?Section=Family-to-Family&Template=/TaggedPage/TaggedPageDisplay.cfm&TPLID=4&ContentID=32973">NAMI's Family-to-Family</a> were life altering experiences following some of my <a href="http://sneadspaisaudela.blogspot.com/2013/06/being-yourself-again-pt-1.html">lowest moments</a>. The course, designed by Dr. Joyce Burland, gave me grounding insight into my own crash into depression and the struggles of my family members. I am well today, in large part because of the NAMI members and volunteers who brought me into the loop. And I know looking forward that soon NAMI newcomers will find the same crucial support and guidance thanks to the compassion you have expressed in your giving. That push forward to keep the cycle of NAMI support ongoing and expanding in North Alabama is what matters most about my run. By providing that collective boost, you enriched the solitary marathon experience with a profound sense of connection. Thank you.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Never to late to contribute to a good cause. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.crowdrise.com/" id="crowdriseStaticLink-fundraiser-131934" title="Fundraising Websites on Crowdrise">Fundraising Websites - Crowdrise</a></span></span><script src="https://www.crowdrise.com/widgets/donate/fundraiser/131934/" type="text/javascript"></script><br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-36164838703462929162014-02-16T15:50:00.004-06:002014-02-16T15:50:51.282-06:00Austin Marathon Race Report<div class="padL10">
<span style="font-size: large;">Suck it </span><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Pheidippides! I ain't dead like you.</span></span></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-45389240672796518032014-02-13T09:16:00.000-06:002014-02-19T10:23:05.485-06:00Race for your Mind Deux: West Bound and Down<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">Well almost...</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-size: large;">9:14 AM</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Huntsville, AL</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-size: large;">Travel, running, writing, <i>ce sont là les choses que j'adore.</i> The snow pushed back the trip a day. I'm still at home for another hour or two of melting and then <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHZJej98_T0">hammer down off to Texas</a>. Debating right now whether to take I-20 through Jackson and Shreveport or I-30 through Little Rock and Texarkana. This is my road log that I will update periodically throughout the day from my pit stops.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">10:40 AM</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Huntsville, AL</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Ready to blaze hell-fire out the door onto the road. Patience can be as much of a challenge as endurance or toughness during a long haul. No bonk! If it feels slow out of the gates, you're doing it right.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I've decided, after some consulting with my brother, I'll be smokin' up through towards Memphis here in a bit.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">11:32 AM</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Huntsville, AL </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">As it tends to sometimes, my soul has deviated. I'm going to Jackson after all. Route downloaded. Near time to roll. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">12:31 PM</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Huntsville, AL</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Filled with Kerouac and Easy Rider Americana travel lust, brimming over with memories of this same drive from the last 16 years, I'm headed out the door. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">9:34 PM</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Monroe, LA</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">It's not nearly so easy as I'd expected to take breaks from driving and write. Mississippi dusk light friscalted hard on me most of the afternoon. Darkness brought welcome relief to my eyes. Wi-fi less abundant on I-20 corridor than anticipated.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Luck, MS smells very much like cows. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Chasing after bed time, torn between </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">jumping back in the car to move and</span> sitting a while to sift out buried threads running hidden to fried chicken and potato wedges warming in glass cases in late 90's gas stations in rural Alabama. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">In honor of Bob, my dad, turning 64 today, I searched fruitlessly for hours for the next Waffle House on the left. Finally broke free of the compulsion and rolled into the bayou Five Guys from whence I write. Happy Birthday Bob.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Resisting urge to develop overly detailed allegory connecting Marathon race pace and all day driving. Miles to go yet, moving towards the far off country before me. From here, that place bears striking resemblance to weathered recollections of livestock trailers rolling through the streets of Claude, TX. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">10:50 AM</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Austin, TX</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Many a driving memory teased out and then faded due to the extreme and ill-advised challenge of typing behind the wheel. Two omens to report. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">2:37 AM blue lights swirling behind my <a href="http://sneadspaisaudela.blogspot.com/2012/11/concerning-automoblies.html">VW Jetta</a> at a standstill on the side of I-35 in Hillsboro, TX. On this evening, 83 in a 75 + 1 non-functioning tail light merits no more then a gentle warning from the cordial and kindhearted female peace officer, who seemed to believe immediately that I indeed had no weapons or contraband in my vehicle. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">5:03 AM pulling to a stop in front of my friends' house where I finally found the bedtime I'd tracked most of the night across a large fraction of Dixie. Patsy Cline's version of "Crazy" playing on the classic country station my radio seek button had found. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Clearly portent though as of yet ambiguous signs. Out to find a local oracle who will interpret what the gods have announced about the race on Sunday.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">"He rests. He has travelled.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">
With?</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">."</span></span><br />
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<a href="http://www.crowdrise.com/" id="crowdriseStaticLink-fundraiser-131934" title="Fundraising Websites on Crowdrise">Fundraising Websites - Crowdrise</a><script src="https://www.crowdrise.com/widgets/donate/fundraiser/131934/" type="text/javascript"></script><br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-1853428781384585332014-02-10T10:46:00.000-06:002014-02-12T19:47:50.239-06:00Race for Your Mind Deux: Crests and Valleys of Preparation<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The physical challenge of running 26 miles reminds me often of cognitive principles needed to recover from depression. I learned through therapy how to manage unreal expectations of success. I’d like to run three times weekly and have every run be a little bit stronger and faster than the last. But human progress and healing advance at non-linear paces. Some days you’re exhausted from work. Some days you’re sore. Some days you have to skip the run because of minor injuries. Training for the Austin Marathon, I've had to miss three of my scheduled long runs because of a nagging knee problem. </span></span><br />
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</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When you don’t run as well as you’d like, or at all, it’s easy to let mental pressure build. But cultivating a reasonable attitude about setback keeps that pressure from exploding to crush you. A very good therapist taught me how to accept a single day’s disappointment and still return with resilience for the next challenge. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span> <span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">My training is done for the Austin race. I've been tapering and cutting distance to stockpile energy the past few weeks. From here it's simple. Show up and run until it's over. I'll leave for Texas—winter storm Pax not withstanding—on Wednesday. On Sunday during my roughly 4.5 hour trek, I’ll be thinking of the meaningful connections I've made at NAMI Huntsville, grateful for so much running strength this organization has helped restore.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span> <span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To donate visit my online fundraiser page (http://www.crowdrise.com/raceforyourmind2) or send checks to </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span> <span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">NAMI Huntsville</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">701 Andrew Jackson Way</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Huntsville, AL 35801. </span></span></div>
<br />
<a href="http://www.crowdrise.com/" id="crowdriseStaticLink-fundraiser-131934" title="Fundraising Websites on Crowdrise">Fundraising Websites - Crowdrise</a><script src="https://www.crowdrise.com/widgets/donate/fundraiser/131934/" type="text/javascript"></script> Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-6038845462329197562014-02-03T10:28:00.000-06:002014-03-25T08:13:39.354-05:00BCS Fail and Anhedonia 2: BCS Fail<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>This is the second part of my experience with anhedonia, the loss of my ability to feel pleasure. Part 1 is <a href="http://sneadspaisaudela.blogspot.com/2014/01/bcs-fail-and-anhedonia-1-anhedonia.html">here</a>. </i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">“I didn’t want to do any of the things I had previously wanted to do and I didn’t know why.” — Andrew Solomon in a recent Ted Talk on depression</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Cam Newton shredding the LSU’s defense to bloody scraps was a joyless spectacle when I watched it live on the internet in Paris. That game should have been doubly thrilling. A big Auburn win + handing the corndogging faux-tiger Acadians their own asses. Life for a Barner doesn’t get much sweeter. Today my healthy brain delights watching the youtube replay of Cam Newton running nearly fifty yards for a score against LSU.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">These were the worst days, just before rock bottom and my irrational <span style="color: red;"><a href="http://sneadspaisaudela.blogspot.com/2013/07/breakdown-empathy-and-guilt-2-guilt.html">fugue</a></span> run from Paris back to Alabama. The following Saturday, I watched Cam catch a touchdown pass on a <span style="color: red;"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp4339EbVn8">trick play</a></span> against Ole Miss at my parents in the States. Absolutely depleted from weeks of outrageous, illogical emotion, I was on a wretched brink I never want to see again. Sunday night with my parents’ and ex-wife’s vital support and guidance (THANK YOU!), I went to the ER where I was admitted for a week stay in the psychiatric unit.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Anhedonia is “the reduced ability to experience pleasure” (<span style="color: red;"><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181880/">Gorwood 2008</a></span>) or the “loss of interest or pleasure in all or almost all activities.” (<span style="color: red;"><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22177980">Der-Avakian and Markou 2012</a></span>). I won’t get into the brain science in detail, in part because I don’t fully understand. Even the doctors and researchers who study the neurology involved in pleasure can’t explain exactly why and how it happens (Support brain research!). But it’s important for everyone to know that depression and other psychological disorders cause physical changes in neurons and the neurotransmitters that flow around us to create what we feel. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">You don’t fault a basketball player for coming out of the game when he shatters a tibia. The gruesome replay is so disturbing that CBS will only show it once. You understand immediately that something is terribly wrong. When someone struggles with depression or schizophrenia or Parkinson’s or substance abuse or eating disorders, there are invisible stress fractures throughout the mind that make dragging yourself back to the land of the living a thousand times harder than you feel like it should be. I snapped my thumb in half in the first quarter of a football game when I was 15 and didn’t come out of the game. I played three quarters with a broken hand. The next day, I listened to the nauseating crunch of the orthopedist re-breaking the bone to set it back in place. Nothing ever hurt nearly so awful as being sad everyday and not knowing why.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Just pull yourself up by the bootstraps. You simply have to snap out of it. If you don’t want to feel better, nothing will ever change. I think you just want the attention. Please, please, please, please nobody ever say these things to a depressed person. I thought about saying here that if you do someone should tear the veins slow and barehanded form your throat. But I am a rampaging advocate for two-way empathy between people who are depressed and their loved ones who want to help. I see the fraught desperation in your eyes, family members, you who are spooked by the zombie metamorphosis of your sons, daughters, spouses, parents, lovers, friends, and siblings. I acknowledge your sincere desire to help through tough love. And I know from experience that you are right about how activity helps beat back depression.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Tough loving care givers, your heart is in the right place. And I thank you for your concern. But I’m begging you to consider very carefully the way you phrase your encouragement. Remember the person on the other end listening to you has a severe physiological problem that squeezes out the ability to feel pleasure. There is no “just” or “simply” involved. Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is part of beating depression. Feeling worse than you’ve ever felt in your life, you have to find a way to say goddamn it all I’m getting out of bed and dragging my ass to the shower anyway. It’s a death march to lumber those 4 meters to bath. You get there by some small banal miracle—that you’re too sad to appreciate or even notice—and you immediately lay back down to hide beneath the stream of warm water. Rest on your back. Close your eyes and let the heat from the current dissolve the tension like in one of those mindfulness cd’s where the sveltey voiced lady helps you blow all your negative energy into an imaginary cloud on the exhale. Sounds relaxing?</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">It’s not. With anhedonia, your brain doesn’t respond to things that should feel good like a long warm relaxing shower. In a recent <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_solomon_depression_the_secret_we_share.html">Ted Talk</a>, Andrew Solomon has described these moments of stupid, daily struggle with his typical breath-taking eloquence. You know all this effort for tiny things is absolutely ridiculous. If you usually have a good sense of humor, you might try to make a joke about how dumb it is for everything to be this hard. You won’t laugh though. Jokes aren’t funny with anhedonia. Can you think of anything more fucking wretched in life than losing your ability to laugh at jokes? Remember this when you are trying to motivate someone who is depressed. Jokes have stopped working because of abnormal neurology. I'd rather snap my thumb in half again.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">If you can help someone be active anyway, those pleasure circuits eventually kick back to life and start firing again. But to support effectively you must first acknowledge how hard it is to do anything at all in this state. Rhetoric matters! <s>Just </s>pull yourself up by the bootstraps needs to go for good. Revise the good intentions of those words and tell someone who’s depressed that you imagine it’s hard to keep active when you feel like that, when your brain prevents you from enjoying things you typically love, when JOKES AREN’T FUNNY for fuck’s sake. Tell someone you want to do anything you can to help them back to stability. And if you’ve been a tough lover on someone who was depressed, forgive yourself and move on. I’ve learned slowly teaching <span style="color: red;"><a href="http://nami.org/Template.cfm?Section=Family-to-Family&Template=/TaggedPage/TaggedPageDisplay.cfm&TPLID=4&ContentID=32973">NAMI’s Family to Family course</a> </span>that “you can’t know what no one told you.” Let the past regress soft away from you. It will not help you or anyone else to dwell on what’s over and gone.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">It wasn’t just football that I temporarily lost in those days. Cam Newton’s run, going to the movies at Opera, the Musee d’Orsay. A collection of paintings that has moved me and moved me every time I’ve gone back since I first saw them in the summer of 2000. Manet’s <i>Blonde aux seins nus</i> and <i>Dammes aux eventails</i>. I took a group of American high school students to see the art I love the most, and all I could think of while there was how much time I had wasted learning French language, literature, and culture. I had nothing to say about impressionist painting, never would again, and only wanted to race home and crawl back in bed. Everything felt lifeless. Running on the Champs de Mars, teaching, writing, reading, steak, pizza, duck confit, Proust! Montaigne, cooking, trips to the market, the Kaiser bakery around the block from our apartment and their almond croissants. Every morsel tasted like another endless helping of the same empty, stale mud.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">If you know how I love running my mouth for vicarious War Eagle Tiger Glory, you might think I was relatively tame during the run up to the BCS Championship Game.<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="background-color: black;"> </span><span style="color: white;"><span style="background-color: black;">I assure you I wasn’t</span></span></span>. My brother, the bammer, recently introduced me to closed and hidden social media pages. Doubtless, I was more crass and obnoxious then I’ve ever been about a football game. I just took all my obscenity underground to a place of mutual consent where everyone had freely chosen to be part of a no holds barred trash talking group. Though even there, we briefly debated whether or not the cops should get involved monitoring the content of our posts.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Bama Bro and I have long had a very deep connection through humor, stretching to at least the mid-eighties watching and endlessly rehashing scenes from <i>Pee Wee’s Big Adventure</i>. I know you are but what am I? Oh! Our poor parents. We can go for long stretches without talking much, and we often did when I was out trying to conquer the world of Proust scholarship. After these long stretches though, our personal banter clicks back on instantly as soon as we speak. I know where he’s headed with his next crack before he hits it and vice versa. I haven’t had so much fun consistently interacting with him in a very long time. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">The jokes are funny again. Auburn came within inches or seconds of the Mount Cam Pinnacle they summited in 2010, back when I was hell-plummeting through severe anhedonia. But for a blown hamstring on a kickoff coverage play and we might be talking about two national titles in the past four years. It didn’t go down the way I wanted it to, but, man!, I sure had a hell of a time coming in First Loser. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b72pX4NwZ2w"><span style="color: white;">WFE</span></a> anyway.</span></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-9187450392797070952014-01-13T09:05:00.002-06:002014-03-25T08:15:31.691-05:00BCS Fail and Anhedonia 1: Anhedonia<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Early in the third quarter in a tie game against sixth ranked LSU, Cam Newton
takes a snap near midfield. He puts the ball in Mario Fannon's belly headed
left. Newton, who gets little credit for being a very intelligent athlete,
looks left to see what the defensive end is going to do. If the end stays to
the outside, Newton will leave the ball with Fannon. If the end crashes down to
tackle Fannon, Newton will pull the ball back out and run it himself. Watching
youtube replays, it has taken me ten minutes to write this up. For Newton, it
all happens in a lighting flash while some of the biggest, fastest, baddestass,
young athletes in the country chase him and try to rip his head off. For
anyone who thinks football is a sport for idiot meatheads, I guarantee
you’d have trouble learning the zone read and deciding in half a second whether
to give or keep on this option.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">The end crashes. Newton pulls the ball and heads right. Six yards up field,
the first LSU defender gets a hand on him. A defensive tackle, a giant, a man who
weighs 300 pounds but who could still out sprint most anyone reading this post.
Newton runs through him and makes him look tiny. He cuts toward the boundary
and runs through a defensive back. He’s doing this against a top 10 defense
loaded with NFL talent. Ten yards up the field, he’s left about half of them
groping for air on the ground.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Newton heads back towards the middle of the field. Two more defensive backs
have a chance to make the play. Newton cuts twice. Both DB's graze him with a
fingertip and flop to the turf. The last man with a chance is future All-Pro Patrick
Peterson, who ran the 40 in 4.34 the following spring at the NFL combine and
tied the NFL record for punt return touchdowns in a season as a rookie.
He is a very, very fast man. Newton
accelerates and sprints away from the defender, and Peterson rides into the end zone piggyback on the future Heisman winner. Touchdoowwwwwwn Auburn.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">I fell in love with sports at a very young age. Jim Fiffe screaming out each
Auburn score was a familiar thrill before I went to elementary school. I
remember arguing with a kindergarten friend about whether Bo Jackson or Mike
Shula was a better player. Think I won that one. That same year, my older brother and I sent little kid drawings we'd done of Bo and Tommie Agee playing football to their
dorm in Auburn, in the last days of my brother’s stint as an Auburn fan. He
flipped, turned his vest on us in the second grade, and became a lifelong Bammer. For a girl! Oh the betrayal. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">The world made sense to me, even as a very
small child, in terms of football. I amused preschool teachers with my specialized approach to learning arithmetic. 30? Yeah I know what 30 is. That’s four
touchdowns and a safety. 23? Two touchdowns and three field goal. Or a field goal, three touchdowns and a missed extra
point. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Cam Newton’s run against LSU in 2010 is probably the most exciting football
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjydOI4MEIw">play</a> I’ve ever seen. I’d waited nearly 30 years for this championship run. It
was finally happening. Auburn was beating great teams with stunning feats of raw
and beautiful athletic talent. There’d never been a greater moment in my
lifetime to be an Auburn Tiger. Seven hours ahead of the 2:30 Alabama kickoff, I was up
late watching Newton’s run live on the internet in my apartment in Paris. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">I felt absolutely nothing.</span></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-52079697975271750912014-01-02T12:05:00.001-06:002014-05-01T22:43:35.992-05:00Babysitters of the World, Roll your Eyes!<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">"[Elle] me le paiera! Je lui passerai ma plume au travers du corps!" —Balzac responding to Sainte-Beuve's review of <i>La Recherche de l'absolu. </i> </span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">The other day I was procrastinating and trolling around the internet looking for nothing in particular that might satisfy my moderate epistemophilia. Somewhat distracted by the Dollar Tree Ode to Mediocrity Bowl playing in the background, I planted ankle deep in Jan Franciso's flaming dog turd of an <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jan-francisco/paying-the-babysitter_b_4145546.html">article</a> about the going rate for babysitters. My soul in a flash bubbled over with piss and vinegar as I read astounded the Huffington Post would print such tripey drivel. This Mother/Blogger/Hack wants to pay your kids 5 bucks an hour so she and her husband can share a Blooming Onion and catch the latest installment of the <i>Lord of the Rings/Hobbit </i>sextilogy. She is upset that some neighborhood teens rolled their eyes at her when she recently attempted to shake them down.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">I won't even bother taking down the specious reasoning of a statement like "I expect them to watch a movie with my kids and feed them a little
pre-made dinner. Probably almost exactly what they would be doing at
home for free;" or the ridiculous extrapolation that gets us from "My father-in-law is a remarkably tenacious worker. When he was ten, he decided that he wanted a horse" to the stupid back-in-the-dayist claim that these damn kids nowadays are ruining everything. A single workaholic pony lover does not a solid inductive argument make. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">This post is for my nieces and nephew who I love dearly. Because I never, never, ever want them for a single second to consider believing or even listening when someone with more power and more resources than they tries to convince them that their limited time on this planet isn't really worth all that much. I wish there were a <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/exploitation/">word</a> in the English language to describe a <span class="tlf_cdefinition">fundamental socio-economic relationship where those with limited means, like teenage babysitters, have to work for reduced wages for the benefit of those who possess greater resources. KIDS! YOUR TIME IS PRECIOUS! DEFEND IT WITH TENACITY WHENEVER SOMEONE TRIES TO TAKE IT AWAY FROM YOU! </span><span class="tlf_cdefinition">And while I would never condone teen on teen
violence, it might be worth knowing—when Suzy the kissass accepts Ms. Francisco's substandard wage—that sometimes scabs get bricks put through their
windshields. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span class="tlf_cdefinition" style="font-size: small;">When I was a teenager, I got my first job
at a notorious chicken sandwich chain restaurant. I spent hours breading
chicken breasts, scrubbing disgusting flowery milkwash gunk off giant
sifting baskets, and cleaning women's restrooms. I made $4.75/hour while
a reprehensible homophobic family lined their pockets off my time and
effort. I could have been learning Spanish, woodworking, or auto-repair.
I understood nothing about the value of time.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span class="tlf_cdefinition" style="font-size: small;">I think back to my good old teenage days as beer-funneling, whipit-stealing, pot-smoking, mailbox-bashing, meathead, and I watch in awe as my niece spends hours on a Sunday studying for Algebra exams. She finds recipes on the internet and makes delicious deserts for Christmas dinner. She swims competitively, gets up at ungodly hours to go practice, works on her high school's yearbook staff, drives herself to church on Sunday mornings, works two jobs during the summer, puts her money away responsibly, and brings much joy and vibrance to our family. My blood boils at the thought of Ms. Francisco reducing such a beautiful young existence to "well kids just sit around watching movies and making pre-made food these days. I wish we were back in the day when everything was still great."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span class="tlf_cdefinition" style="font-size: small;">Babysitters of the world, roll your eyes! Roll them in unison and with gusto! You have nothing to lose but your time. Which is to say, you have everything to lose. Eyerolling is the proper response when the old hag down the lane tries to trick you into believing your time doesn't matter simply because you are young. Hold out when you get offered shit wages. Play the long game. Stay home and study your SAT words. You'll get more out of it in the end.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span class="tlf_cdefinition" style="font-size: small;">And if a mother/blogger/hack really wants to have a serious discussion with you about value, ask her how much her child's safety and well-being should cost. Surely the 9 bucks she might save by low-balling adolescents on her kids' behalf can't actually be worth it.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-21603810217963503342013-12-16T08:20:00.001-06:002013-12-17T20:24:50.879-06:00Triptych Series 6: Holiday Spirit <span style="font-size: large;">There are 3 irreverent things I love most during the holiday season</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br />
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<ol><li><span style="font-size: large;">A friend taught me several years back how to make something called "three day candy." These things are deadly delicious little turtle like chocolate treats with an oozing caramel-pecan center. The recipe is a tri-generational family gem that my friend learned from his mother who learned it from her mother before her. And, as the name indicates, the process takes three days. Day zero of the process for me is the festive trip to the grocery store where I find a stock person and with a 110% dead pan straight face ask "Hey, can you tell me where your nuts are?" This tradition was established ca. 2011 and so far no one has laughed. There is usually an instant's facial glitch, while the stocker mulls whether I actually just said that, and then s/he directs me to the aisle where pecans are stocked. Friends and family who will be tasting these sweet nutty treats in the coming days, please know they were prepared with love and inappropriate humor. Savor accordingly. </span></li><br/>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">Another grand yule tide tradition near and dear to my heart established ca. a couple weeks ago: running my smart ass mouth to the Alabama fans in the family when Auburn stomps wild over the tide <i>en route</i> to an SEC championship and a ticket to the all the marbles big dance in January. I'm not trying to rub this in or anything (#preterition), but, seriously, how many fantasy points do you get for a field goal return td? Please comment here if you know the answer. I do really want to know. Is it advisable to weigh field goal coverage ability when selecting a def/special teams unit? WFE. </span></li><br/>
<li><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://pitchfork.com/news/53324-watch-iron-wine-calexico-and-kathleen-edwards-cover-the-pogues-fairytale-of-new-york-on-fallon/">This</a>, always and already <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv0hlbWpa1w">this</a>, forever. HAPPY CHRISTMAS YOUR ASS FOLKS!</span></li>
</ol><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-size: large;">If you think laughs could be worth money, consider supporting my <a href="http://sneadspaisaudela.blogspot.com/2013/12/race-for-your-mind-deux-pheidippides.html">marathon fundraiser</a>. 'taint no joke. Thanks to everyone who already has.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-34654605872593658182013-12-09T15:51:00.000-06:002014-02-12T12:38:09.721-06:00Race for Your Mind Deux: Business Partners<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: red;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Special thanks to these businesses for contributing to my <span style="color: #ea9999;"><a href="http://sneadspaisaudela.blogspot.com/2013/12/race-for-your-mind-deux-pheidippides.html"><span style="color: #cccccc;">marathon fundraising project</span></a><span style="color: #999999;">.</span></span> I encourage you to support them with your patronage. For information about becoming a sponsor please contact me at njs2g@virginia.edu.</span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://namihuntsville.org/">namihuntsville.org</a></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://softbottomsdiapers.com/">http://softbottomsdiapers.com/</a></span></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.behavioralsciencesofalabama.com/"><span style="font-size: small;">http://www.behavioralsciencesofalabama.com/</span></a></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5I4LawCtKmUYqIg7WTt4PRXsgX68gaP2ZehTXUBEDzB-U_ZUjjIHP7eOdMAyqw28HX8RqCPHrdR8D5PK51hjjsxC3-5UlRxYBsnXdSlSCyhRKjAVJnjHr_chhsSonFiPL6nn8eWVdB2E/s1600/Vetter.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5I4LawCtKmUYqIg7WTt4PRXsgX68gaP2ZehTXUBEDzB-U_ZUjjIHP7eOdMAyqw28HX8RqCPHrdR8D5PK51hjjsxC3-5UlRxYBsnXdSlSCyhRKjAVJnjHr_chhsSonFiPL6nn8eWVdB2E/s1600/Vetter.jpg" height="320" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/TheVetterTeam/info"><span style="font-size: small;"><span itemprop="name">The Vetter Team, Real Estate Professionals at the </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span itemprop="name"><span data-measureme="1"><span class="null">Morley Real Estate Group</span></span></span></span></a></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2TL70JA1DNzwuy8LljA9D6ImQ6HwyaNeWtmLXhZ0FG6J3Fg0vKljFFUQA2V7FAn8irnyUNky3L5BJZqKRWDL0lGJgfqZC0ngmHcn7yw6KkusK_90rySHhyNVAKQlNwHc6VgmwKWSJhS4/s1600/Signe_Sc_037_Thumbnail.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2TL70JA1DNzwuy8LljA9D6ImQ6HwyaNeWtmLXhZ0FG6J3Fg0vKljFFUQA2V7FAn8irnyUNky3L5BJZqKRWDL0lGJgfqZC0ngmHcn7yw6KkusK_90rySHhyNVAKQlNwHc6VgmwKWSJhS4/s1600/Signe_Sc_037_Thumbnail.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><a href="http://www.rocksinmypocketsmovie.com/">Rocks in my Pockets</a>—</i>A funny film about depression by Signe Bauman</span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.allisonjansenphotography.com/"><span style="font-size: small;">http://www.allisonjansenphotography.com/</span></a><br />
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<a href="http://www.crowdrise.com/" id="crowdriseStaticLink-fundraiser-131934" title="Fundraising Websites on Crowdrise">Fundraising Websites - Crowdrise</a><script src="https://www.crowdrise.com/widgets/donate/fundraiser/131934/" type="text/javascript"></script><br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-51785728100149959702013-12-03T13:30:00.002-06:002014-02-12T12:59:50.195-06:00 Race for Your Mind Deux: Pheidippides Runs to Texas<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Last December, I competed in the Rocket City Marathon here in Huntsville. As runners often do, I used my race as an opportunity to raise money for a cause, the Huntsville chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illnes (<a href="http://nami.org/" target="_blank">NAMI</a>). I reached out to friends and family and asked for donations of a dollar for each mile of the 26 mile race. I had wonderful response and even received contributions from friends of friends, strangers I had never met.<br />
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On February 16, I will be competing in my second marathon, this time in Austin, TX. Again I will be using my race as a fundraiser for <a href="https://www.facebook.com/NamiHuntsville" target="_blank">NAMI Huntsville</a>. For those who can, I would like to ask again for suggested $26 dollar donations to help us continue providing mental health educaion, support, and advocacy in our community. Donations of any amount are appreciated. Simply spreading the word about this fundraiser and our organization is a valuable gift. In addition to individual donations, I will be looking this time for businesses interested in sponsoring our mission to sooth some of the pain wrought by psychological and emotional disorders.<br />
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For me this is personal. After <a href="http://sneadspaisaudela.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-world-before-us.html" target="_blank">serious mental breakdown</a> in the fall of 2010 and <a href="http://sneadspaisaudela.blogspot.com/2013/06/being-yourself-again-pt-1.html" target="_blank">many painful months</a> for my family, my friends, and myself while I battled severe depression, racing is a celebration of mental stability regained. I don't believe it's possible to separate emotional and physical health. They are not different issues to be treated by isolated specialists working in unrelated branches of medicine. Psychological and physical health work best when they work in tandem towards complete, overall well-being. Get your mind working well and your body naturally tries to follow along. Get your body firing healthy and your mind begins to fire with it (that's a chiasmus for my <i>rhetoriquer/quese </i>buddies out there).<br />
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NAMI Huntsville helped me trek back from the mouth of hell during the worst of times. Returned to stability, volunteering at NAMI Huntsville keeps me steady and upright, providing purpose and a sense that my pain can now be useful to others in need.<br />
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If you would like to donate, you can make contributions online at my <a href="http://www.crowdrise.com/raceforyourmind2" target="_blank">crowdrise</a> site or send checks to NAMI Huntsville; 701 Andrew Jackson Way; Huntsville, AL 35801. If you are interested in adding your company’s name as a race sponsor please contact me at njs2g@virginia.edu.<br />
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<a href="http://www.crowdrise.com/" id="crowdriseStaticLink-fundraiser-131934" title="Fundraising Websites on Crowdrise">Fundraising Websites - Crowdrise</a><script src="https://www.crowdrise.com/widgets/donate/fundraiser/131934/" type="text/javascript"></script><br />
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Donations help us provide:<br />
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*<a href="http://www.nami.org/Template.cfm?Section=Family-to-Family&Template;=/TaggedPage/TaggedPageDisplay.cfm&TPLID=4&ContentID=32973" target="_blank">Family-to-Family </a>Education Courses. A free, 12-week course for family members of individuals with severe mental illnesses. Times and days vary and courses begin two to three times annually. Those interested can contact the NAMI Huntsville office for information about upcoming courses. Registration required. 256-534-2628.<br />
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*<a href="http://www.nami.org//template.cfm?section=NAMI_FAMILY_SUPPORT_GROUP" target="_blank">Monthly support group meetings</a> for family members of people with mental illness. First Tuesday of the month @ 7:00 p.m. in the United Way Board Room. 701 Andrew Jackson Way; Huntsville, AL 35801. 256-534-2628<br />
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*<a href="http://www.nami.org/template.cfm?section=nami_connection" target="_blank">NAMI Connection</a> a weekly recovery support group for people living with mental illness in which people learn from each others’ experiences, share coping strategies, and offer each other encouragement and understanding. Thursdays @5:30 p.m. in the United Way Board Room. 701 Andrew Jackson Way; Huntsville, AL 35801. 256-534-2628<br />
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*Monthly education meetings on varying topics related to mental health. Third Tuesday of the Month @ 7:00 p.m. in the United Way Board Room.<br />
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*A mental health library of over 200 titles in our office at the United Way Building. All are welcome to use our resources on site. NAMI Members can check out books from the collection for at home use.<br />
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*Compassionate empathy and information from experienced volunteers about local resources and navigating through the complexities of the mental health services system. 256-534-2628Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-88632258396578878712013-11-23T09:26:00.001-06:002013-11-26T09:02:40.770-06:00NAMI Gratitude, a Growing Holiday Tradition<style>
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<i>This is an article I wrote for the December issue of </i><a href="http://www.nami.org/MSTemplate.cfm?Section=Newsletter11&Site=NAMI_Huntsville&Template=%2FContentManagement%2FContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=162118" target="_blank">Grassroots</a><i><a href="http://www.nami.org/MSTemplate.cfm?Section=Newsletter11&Site=NAMI_Huntsville&Template=%2FContentManagement%2FContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=162118" target="_blank"> </a>the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/NamiHuntsville" target="_blank">NAMI Huntsville</a> newsletter</i>. <i>Without consciously planning it this way, it is the second year in a row I've written a <a href="http://sneadspaisaudela.blogspot.com/2012/11/gratitude.html" target="_blank">Thanksgiving gratitude post about NAMI.</a></i></div>
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I am a somewhat shy person. When I’m in a good mood, approaching
strangers to ask them for favors is already a mildly annoying challenge. When
I’m depressed or particularly anxious, this challenge becomes an outright mind gauntlet—imaginary
demons of impending doom, absolute certainty that something is about to go
wrong and that just after that everything will. My natural predisposition to
leaving other people alone has been an obstacle I’ve had to confront while
serving as 2nd Vice President and Education Program Coordinator for NAMI. When I’ve
called people to see if they would like to do a presentation, I’ve often been
filled with distorted, exaggerated worry that I’ll be bothering them. What if
they say no! Everything will go wrong, and nothing ever again will be right.
The horror.<br />
<br />
But confronting shyness to schedule our monthly speakers has
repeatedly been a rewarding experience. I thank all of this year’s presenters
for bolstering my faith in NAMI’s mission to help relieve the pain of mental
illness: </div>
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<a href="http://research.hudsonalpha.org/Myers/?page_id=223" target="_blank"><br /></a></div>
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<a href="http://research.hudsonalpha.org/Myers/?page_id=223" target="_blank"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Dr. Kevin Bowling</b></a>-HudsonAlpha
Institute </div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="http://research.hudsonalpha.org/Myers/?page_id=227" target="_blank"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Dr. Marie Kirby</b></a>-HudsonAlpha
Institute </div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="http://www.behavioralsciencesofalabama.com/david-l-barnhart" target="_blank"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Dr. David Barnhart</b></a>-Behavioral
Sciences of Alabama</div>
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<a href="https://www.facebook.com/NamiHuntsville" target="_blank"><br /></a></div>
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<a href="https://www.facebook.com/NamiHuntsville" target="_blank"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Jacqueline Wilson</b></a>-NAMI
Huntsville President </div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="http://www.mhcmc.org/site/article/49238-mental-health-first-aid-offered" target="_blank"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Rita Limbaugh</b></a>-Mental
Health Center of Madison County </div>
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<a href="http://www.huntsvillerecovery.com/" target="_blank"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Clete Wetli</b></a>-Huntsville Recovery, Madison
County Democrats </div>
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<a href="http://www.huntsvilleachievement.com/staff.html" target="_blank"><br /></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.huntsvilleachievement.com/staff.html" target="_blank"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Richard Reynolds</b></a>-Huntsville
Achievement School</div>
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<a href="http://www.mhcmc.org/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=24671" target="_blank"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Brian Davis</b></a>-Executive
Director, Mental Health Center of Madison County </div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="http://stores.homestead.com/JHickman0/StoreFront.bok" target="_blank"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">James Hickman</b></a>-Mental
Health Center of Madison County, NAMI Huntsville 1st V.P. </div>
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<a href="http://www.uabhuntsville.com/psychiatry.html" target="_blank"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Dr. Tarak Vasavada</b></a>-UAB
Health Center Huntsville</div>
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I’ve contacted you fretting you would say no to my requests,
afraid I’d be a thorn in your side by asking you to do free work for NAMI. All
year long though, I’ve heard <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you </i>thank
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">me</i> for providing an opportunity to
speak. Your commitment to service is remarkable, and I’ve been blown away by
your kindness and generosity. Thank you all for smashing my fears to pieces. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Nick Snead-2013 2nd V.P., Ed. Program Coordinator</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-81775979574645669092013-10-17T16:36:00.001-05:002013-10-19T09:01:59.670-05:00Wish I'd Known: Making Limoncello out of the Past Conditional <i>This post originated as part of a presentation I did recently at </i><a href="https://www.facebook.com/NamiHuntsville" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"><i>NAMI Huntsville</i></span></a> <i>on mental health support and education programs. It was my soapboxy lead in for discussing the possibility of starting two new NAMI education programs in our area, <a href="http://www.nami.org/template.cfm?section=Schools_and_Education" target="_blank">Parents and Teachers as Allies</a> and <a href="http://www.endingthesilence.org/" target="_blank">Ending the Silence</a>.</i><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Cambria;">In the fall of 2010, I crashed hard with <a href="http://sneadspaisaudela.blogspot.com/2013/06/being-yourself-again-pt-1.html" target="_blank">my first episode of major depression.</a> From roughly the end of October that year until the winter of 2011-12, I was more or less incapacitated. The simplest daily tasks often felt like arduous, insurmountable burdens that I would never overcome. Breathing was a chore, and on my worst days, getting up out of bed and walking 20 feet to the bathroom to take a shower was more difficult and more painful than running 26.2 miles with a healthy mind and body. I am not exaggerating at all here. Taking a shower when depressed sometimes literally hurt worse than running a marathon. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Cambria;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Cambria;">There were moments of absolute hopelessness where I didn’t think I would ever feel normal again. Eventually though with a lot of help and support from wonderful family and friends, with good therapy and after finally finding the right meds, I made it back to functioning like I did before my crash. NAMI Huntsville was instrumental in the process, and I’d like to thank everyone involved in our organization for their help and support.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Cambria;">Once I was stable again, I began looking back on the dark times with a sense of regret and frustration about how ignorant I had been. There were so many things I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">could have</i> done differently to avoid sliding into a life and death struggle with my mind. So many things I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">could have</i> done better to accelerate my recovery. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Cambria;">I try not to dwell too much on the errors of the past because focusing incessantly on the things you could have done can drive you nuts. But I don’t want to completely forget about my previous ignorance of psychological disorders either. I’d like for the memories of what I did inefficiently to be an example of what others might avoid. So I’ve compiled a brief list of things that I wish I’d known about mental health treatment before I learned them the hard, shitty way through stupid, bungling experience.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Cambria;">I wish I’d known that any given anti-depressant has roughly a 50% chance of working, that finding one that works takes trial and error, and that if a medication isn't working you don’t need to wait 7 months for an emergency hospitalization to ask a doctor if there are other options.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Cambria;">I wish I’d known that unexpected verbal aggression and sudden unexplained anger can be an early sign of depression, especially in men.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Cambria;">I wish I’d known about the physiological changes involved in depression and hadn’t spent so much time berating myself for being weak and unable to simply snap out of it. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Cambria;">I wish I’d known not to expect a smooth, quick, easy progression towards recovery, that I hadn’t pushed so hard to get better as soon as possible, and that I hadn’t fallen so hard so many times into an engulfing discouragement when I met with minor setbacks.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Cambria;">I wish I’d known how to let a bad day be simply one bed day and not a definitive sign that things weren't getting better and never would.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Cambria;">I wish I’d known the very simple and basic difference between a therapist and psychiatrist and hadn’t spent so much time huffing over why my doctors weren’t doing what I expected them to do... <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Cambria;">I’d like to see my regrets and the things I wished I’d known become standard knowledge incorporated into the education we offer young people about how to take care of themselves. I dream of a world where this is the case, where people get help for emotional problems as easily, as quickly, and as readily as they do for a broken arm or a case of the flu. I want our schools to teach young people how to care for their minds and help defend preemptively against the ignorance that lead me down so many waste of time dead end paths before I finally found the right resources to drag myself out of an utterly wretched hole. <o:p></o:p></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-83576870646545340192013-09-04T13:12:00.002-05:002015-06-03T14:10:34.418-05:00OuInPo<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>FoE20 the angleheadedest hipster I know</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Georges Perec’s absence from our world makes the planet just a tad darker. He really should be here to play along as technology explodes and creates all these new forms of poetry and prose for us. We now have a global talk board system that allows no more than 144 characters per statement. Just one man’s thoughts on the subject, but we are worse off because Georges Perec never got to use those boundless talents he possessed to tweet. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Perec might have invented Twitter if he’d lived long enough (he died of lung cancer in 1982 at age 45). For those not familiar, Georges Perec was a French author and a member of the literary movement OuLiPo—which stands for <i>Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle</i> or <i>Workshop of Potential Literature.</i> Writer Raymond Queneau and François de Lionnais, a mathematician, created OuLiPo in 1960. The group produced literary works by creating and applying arbitrary constraints to inspire, guide, and form their writing. Coming up with constraints can be a very jocular process. For instance in homage to Perec, I once challenged a budding literary scholar to include an implicit reference to the <i>Karate Kid</i> in the first paragraph of the piece he was working on.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Perec pulled off some of the more acrobatic feats of constrained writing. He wrote an entire book without the letter e. This is particularly impressive (nuts?) in French since the majority of feminine adjectives end with e and since the most common class of verbs in French, er verbs, have e’s in most of their conjugated forms.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Je dans<span style="color: red;"><b>e</b></span> Nous dansons</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span> <br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Tu dans<span style="color: red;"><b>e</b></span>s Vous dans<span style="color: red;"><b>e</b></span>z</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span> <br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: red;"><a href="http://www.unjourunpoeme.fr/poeme/elsa-valse"><span style="color: white;">Elsa vals</span><span style="color: red;"><b>e</b></span></a></span> Ils/elles dans<span style="color: red;"><b>e</b></span>nt</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Writing an e-less book, Perec would not be able to use the most common French wording to say “I dance”; “You dance”; “She dances”; “Y’all dance”; or “They dance.” If he wanted to include present tense dancing in his book, he would either have to adapt and write from the “we” perspective (“nous dansons” would be permitted), or he would have to find a synonym from one of the other verb groups. (I’ve just looked in a French thesaurus, and all 15 synonyms for “danser”--including “twister” (really France?)--were also “-er” verbs. So it looks like a present tense dance scene written without e would have been a serious challenge.)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Constraints like these might sound annoying, but they can also stimulate artistic creation. An arbitrary limit shuts down the most common way of expressing an idea, so you are pushed toward new and different ways of formulating a thought. Writing a dance scene from a "we" perspective might lead to beauty or truth that you wouldn’t have found if you were free to write however you wanted. In this <span style="color: red;"><a href="http://sneadspaisaudela.blogspot.com/2013/07/breakdown-empathy-and-guilt-2-guilt.html">post</a>, </span>I self imposed the arbitrary task of spelling "empathy" with the first letter of each paragraph. I had to begin the post with an e. Searching for an e word related to empathy and guilt, I remembered <i>Ecclesiastes</i> which reminded me of Montaigne’s writing on vanity and a comment a friend had made about repetitive thinking involved in guilt. The constraint helped me bring together ideas about the ceaseless and pointless mental work of shame that I might not have otherwise connected—like “the tyranny of rhyme forces [poets] to find their greatest beauty” (Proust).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">******</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The unlimited potential of language is one of the fundamental principles of Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theory. According to Chomsky, every language has a finite number of words and other meaningful elements (like prefixes “re-", “dis-”, “quasi-”). But you can create an unlimited number of statements by changing the way you put these building blocks together. Language is a gigantic set of Legos that you can always build into something slightly different from anything you’ve ever made before</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To test Chomsky’s principle, I have launched my own linguistic project similar to <i>OuLiPo. </i>I call it <i>OuInPo.</i> “<i>In</i>” stands for “insult”, and this is how it works. I send a text to the same friend about once a week to call him a new insulting name. The one constraint is that I can never repeat the exact same insult. Science drives my quest to verify the endless expressive potential of the English language. So far, so good. I have had no trouble creating original profanity, but as the experiment has progressed, I have discovered an unexpected memory challenge. Sometimes I can’t remember whether I've used an insult already or not. Have I already accused my friend of carrying on Miltonic conversation with livestock? I'm not sure.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A situation like this calls for some creative fixes to ensure I don’t accidentally repeat myself. When in doubt, I look for a more specific and more bizarre version of the insult I'm considering. I’m not sure about livestock, but I know I’ve never sent a text about llamas or wildebeests. And llamas and wildebeests come in all different sizes, shapes, colors, and political affiliations. So many potential variations on a general idea, and the beat goes on and on and on. With a little caution and critical thinking, I'm able to maintain the integrity of my findings. Right now the experiment is still ongoing, but it is looking more and more every day like Chomsky was right.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And you know, I guess maybe I could have accomplished the same thing coming up with different ways to tell a friend I love him, but it’s too late now to reverse course and start over.</span></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-73058087039739736532013-08-05T11:23:00.000-05:002013-09-12T09:48:40.245-05:00Breakdown, Empathy, and Guilt Epilogue: Comic Relief <div class="MsoNormal">
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--</style><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">My last two posts on <a href="http://sneadspaisaudela.blogspot.com/2013/06/breakdown-empathy-and-guilt-1-empathy.html">empathy</a> and guilt have been pretty heavy, so I thought I'd do something a little lighter today. Back in Alabama two days after my fugue from Paris <a href="http://sneadspaisaudela.blogspot.com/2013/07/breakdown-empathy-and-guilt-2-guilt.html">described here</a>, I was hospitalized for suicidal depression. My parents and my ex-wife convinced me to go to the emergency room around 10 or 11 on Sunday night where I spoke at length with an on call therapist. I was admitted to a psych. unit just in time for an inauspicious Monday morning breakfast where I learned that in this facility--home to a medical team charged with reminding me again why I wanted to go on living--they served only decaf coffee.</span></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-65184562606612286882013-07-22T13:42:00.001-05:002014-01-09T12:05:02.713-06:00Breakdown, Empathy, and Guilt 2: Guilt<div class="MsoNormal">
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--</style><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ecclesiastes</i>—and then Montaigne centuries later riffing on the ancient preacher’s wisdom—delves into the terrifying possibility that human effort, all striving and toil carried out in the light of day, will ultimately become yet another gloss on the collective and never ceasing epic of earthly futility: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?” Rhetorical question implying it’s own answer in the asking: nothing. We get no return on the time and pain we invest in our vain attempts to turn a profit. All is futile, pointless, without recompense. In the opening of his essay on vanity, Montaigne applies the preacher’s notion of pan-pointlessness to his writing: “There is perhaps [no greater vanity] than to write in vain on [vanity].” And yet, he does not abandon his labor. Montaigne states that he will go on writing as long as there is ink and paper available to write with. Both he and the ancient preacher challenge a very ingrained way we tend to think about work. Work now in the present, do something here in this moment that requires pain and difficulty, and in the future, we will reap pleasures and enjoy our due rewards. Not so according to<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Ecclesiastes</i>. We will work and toil, but the ir-reciprocal future mocks our simplistic ledger sheet balances and refuses us the gains we are expecting.</span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Mountains of guilt form slowly through the ceaseless toil of mental repetition, returning and returning in my mind forever in vain to a mistake I made in the past, working pointlessly deluded by half-formed, inarticulate belief that if I just think hard enough and long enough, I’ll figure out my absolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Son of a bitch of all futility! I shine rational hindsight on my errors hoping to deduce away the fault, wipe out my culpability, and undo the pain I caused for people I loved who also loved me. At times I realize there’s nothing more to explain or figure out <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAS5sbt-8yE" target="_blank"><span style="color: white;">no solace to come from reexamining one more time why I did the things I regret</span></a>, and yet even while knowing it pointless, the desire to look back again rises over and over. A distorted belief that there is still some mystery to be solved locks me into a vainly repeating cycle of willful déjà vu.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Perhaps a concrete example will clarify these largely conceptual abstractions. Depression struck me with stunning speed. In roughly two months time, the secure mental footing of early September 2010 softened to pieces in an irrational torrent of emotion that I didn’t understand and didn’t know how to control. I was married then and living in Paris with my now ex-wife. The first decisive explosion came late in October while my ex-wife, who taught English then at a high school in Paris, was away chaperoning a school trip with some of her students in Boston. God I hate the memory of that week. Though there isn’t a whole lot that I recall. Recollections are spotty of the worst times, in part because I was drinking heavily, in part because the shock of breaking down wipes out a lot of memory. A friend has suggested that it is a blessing not to be able to remember too many specifics. Forgetting is a shield from guilt. The less you remember the fewer psychic devices for wracking yourself with remorse. Still though, there are plenty of moments I’d like to redo and things I wish I hadn’t done and said. Even when specifically searching the concrete example, it still takes me some circling and indirect approach to finally arrive at the point. Swept under by rip tides of grand significance and transcendent meaning, of which there is plenty here, I have trouble with solid objects and descriptions of simple action. I left. The week my wife was out of the country for work, I disintegrated in fear and confusion. I felt awful all the time. The initial counseling sessions I’d been going to for several weeks were not working. Wildly impatient to feel better, I fell into unclear thinking patterns about what I needed to do. Returning to the States started making sense to me. My ex-wife was the only one who really knew how bad I’d gotten. We were communicating regularly by phone and I told her I was feeling like I needed to go and considering buying a plane ticket. I don’t recall the specifics about how that discussion went, just telling her beforehand that I was considering it and then that I had done it once I bought the plane ticket. I scared the shit out of my co-workers that week when I stopped showing up without giving any notice. Instead of getting out of bed and going to work that Wednesday, I holed up all day in the apartment drinking shots of rum until I threw up. And I didn’t respond when they called and sent messages to find out if I was okay. Close friends, a couple living with their children in Lyon, were expecting me for a weekend visit. That Friday, I sent them a brief text to tell them I was having a breakdown and headed to America from the security line at CDG Terminal I.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">All these steps in my breakdown return from time to time and raise questions of motive, justification, and responsibility. I wonder about proper verb choice for telling this story. I got depressed. I was overcome with depression. Depression took hold of me. I gave in. I gave up. I quit. In nearly synonymous statements, different levels of activity and passivity nuance my responsibility for the pain my wife felt that week. I do not know which is most appropriate, or even if it is possible to capture these events with a single verb conjugated in a single tense. Perhaps the truth lies in a hypotactic structure that properly combines and subordinates the light and shadow of the varying tints of blame. Or perhaps searching complexity here will only set off a confused, nightmare strobe light hell.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Theoretical writings on empathy and depression—and other mental disorders—focus largely on how supportive friends, family, and therapists need to show a suffering person that they understand, at least to some degree, what s/he is experiencing. The general thrust of most empathy writing places the burden of empathy on healthy people. With my ex-wife and me, this sort of writing would say that she needed to work to imagine what depression was like from my perspective. Monumental task that is rarely an intuitive response to the crazy shit people can say and do and think when they are depressed. Imagine. You are a woman, newly married, with a clear idea of where you and your husband are headed in the future. Your dream in life for as long as you can remember has been to have children. After the high of the wedding and the honeymoon season, your husband shows irrational signs of agitation and anger for about a month and then starts swinging between lethargy and panicked desperation. Worried about your husband and whether he will be all right while you’re out of town for a week, you leave to chaperon a school trip. And then while you are away he reaches crisis level and tells you over the phone without being able to really explain why that he’s drinking heavily, stopped going to work, and decided that what he needs to feel better is to buy a plane ticket on a whim to go back to his home town in Alabama. Through the daunting waves of fear and helplessness and confusion and frustration stacked on top of the demands of chaperoning an international field trip, empathy writing calls on you to listen to your husband’s irrational fugue plan and express a compassionate understanding of what he is feeling. Tall fucking order. Empathy in times of crisis can be overwhelmingly difficult.</span></span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Hurt from depression fans out like flaming disease from the person directly affected to the people around who want to help. It’s commonplace to say that depression is contagious, and I’ve seen first hand how friends and family suffer the pain of what their loved ones are going through. Empathy for someone who is depressed is important, but efforts to understand what someone else is going through need to run both ways. Caregivers need to know that someone else understands their struggles and fears and frustrations. Just as we long from the inactive depths of lethargy for the kindly ear of someone who gets it, our wives, friends, husbands, mothers, and fathers need compassion for the difficulties they face living with a body-snatching invader that transforms the person they love into a ghostly stranger. It’s hard to live with depression. And it’s also hard to live with someone who is depressed. The imaginative burden of seeing the world from another’s perspective needs to be shared. If someone suffering from depression can show family and friends that the situation is hard on everyone, we stand a better chance of creating supportive relationships that foster healing.</span></span></div>
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<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Yet this empathy for caregivers is likewise a tall order. When I started working on this post, I
thought that there was a great lack of understanding about how and why
depression is hard on the people around us. Writing about my ex-wife’s
experience of my breakdown however, I’ve realized that, at least for me, the
major problem was not a lack of understanding. I knew my condition was hard on
her. But I’m not sure I ever expressed that understanding in a productive way. Guilt
slams our ability to say we know that depression hurts our families
too. I could slip out of my body and float out several feet to look back at
the situation from the outside or float a little farther and glimpse through my wife's eyes. But these are scorching images uncomfortable to behold and even more uncomfortable to discuss. Looking at someone else's pain can quickly push you back inside yourself behind a wall of silence meant to shield you from awareness of another's suffering. Talking about someone else's pain trains your eyes on the scalding picture you'd often rather look away from. It was hard to acknowledge my wife's pain without being swallowed up by a nauseous sense of shame for causing that pain. It was easier sometimes to say nothing than it was to confront that sense of shame. When I did talk about this with my wife during the roughest times, I’d often slip into melodramatic expressions of my own culpability that didn't communicate an understanding of her position. I’ve been a terrible husband
(guilt) <span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">≠</span>
I see that you are frustrated by my inactivity (empathy). These statements are close in meaning, but the subtle difference in perspective is crucial. The expression of guilt focuses too heavily on what the person speaking thinks about him self. The expression of empathy (I + you)
reminds the person listening that she counts too and breaks open the isolating movements of guilt. And so this becomes a rhetorical challenge of the melancholic. Show the world you see how your pain hurts them too but do it without submerging into the self-focused, isolating hyperbole of shame.</span></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-212603914805449032013-06-24T22:18:00.001-05:002013-09-10T10:13:20.560-05:00Breakdown, Empathy, and Guilt 1: Empathy<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><style>
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</style> <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Empathy, the concept comes back again and again in my thoughts. I try to see
the world as you. You try to see the world as me. Before ever really
concentrating on the term “empathy” itself, I’d long thought of reading and
writing fiction as two powerful ways to loosen the hold of our own self-focused
perspective and get a glimpse of what it’s like to be someone else. Or at least
I hoped they might be.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Empathy, though, has at times seemed an idealistic dream to me, or a gift of the
uber-talented privileged few. We can’t possibly understand everything about
someone else’s experiences of the world. Virginia Woolf’s <i>To the Lighthouse</i>—where a narrating voice hovers around a summer
vacation home able to slip in and out of the minds of the people gathered
there—was an exception. And so was James Joyce’s “Molly” chapter at the end of
<i>Ulysses </i>that traces in minute detail
the insomniac movements of a women trying to fall asleep one early morning in turn of the century Dublin. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Empathy writing is tricky. Having never himself experienced a sleepless night
as an insomniac wife, Joyce could be way off in his “Molly” chapter. And when
she created Charles Tansley, what did Virginia Woolf actually know about being
a young common born philosophy student, with a chip on his shoulder about his social standing, vacationing with his
famous mentor and his mentor’s upper class family? I pose skeptical questions
about whether character creation tells us much about what it’s like to walk in different shoes and feel the world from a third person perspective, and yet, without
any precise explanation at the moment of exactly how the process works, I do
still believe that Joyce and Woolf’s imaginative ventures gave us valuable
insight about living in the world with other people.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Empathy reading can also be tricky. We can easily over-generalize and arrive
at erroneous conclusions about what an author has done when writing about the world
from someone else’s perspective. With Joyce, I’m tempted to
overreach and say he has written an account of what it’s like to be a woman
from a man’s perspective. But he hasn’t. He’s written a very specific
fictitious account of a small slice of time for one woman living in a very specific time and place in history. The “Molly” chapter has not captured
the essential experience of womanhood. It’s simply a hypothesis, one
possibility, postulating how one made up woman might feel in one limited context.
And having stumbled across that term “womanhood,” my head begins to spin. So
many different possibilities, so many different contexts in which to be a woman,
could there possibly be a way of defining a condition that encompasses them all
and conveys to us men who do not know firsthand what it’s like to be a woman? Time transforms every situation, and the possibilities for framing another person's place in the world seem nearly infinite. We can always add, expand, narrow, or remove
an element and create a new and slightly altered place to understand. What is it like to be
black? What is it like to be a child? What is it like to be an 8-year-old girl growing
up in an advanced technological information saturated era ? How does it
feel to be a young black girl living in an affluent suburb of Atlanta where 75% of the students at your school are white? Relating to others would be
simple if there were a stock set of 4 or 5 different types of people to
understand. But in the detailed experience of day to day living, we slip fluidly
in and out of 100’s of categories, 1000’s of overlapping, concentric, and
entirely separated circles in the ever shifting Venn diagrams of our identities. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Empathy’s hard because it takes constant reassessment of the endlessly
complex and rich experiences that add up to make us who we are. This post has
been rather slow in developing, and along the way, I’ve done a little bit of
reading about fiction and empathy. There is an expansive academic literature on the
subject. In her article “Empathic Engagement with Narrative Fictions,” Amy
Coplan provides in one of her footnotes a workable solution that addresses the
complexity of empathic thinking: “Rarely, if ever, would we be able to
imaginatively experience everything that the other experiences since it<a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="10"></a> would be virtually impossible to have awareness of all of the
target’s unconscious thoughts, desires, beliefs, and so on. This does not mean,
however, that we cannot imaginatively experience a close approximation of the
dominant thoughts and feelings that the target experiences at a particular
moment in time.” I had a strange and revealing reaction to this footnote,
conflicting emotion that clarified for me some of my own expectations about how
I want to relate to other people, a blend of hope and disappointment. Coplan
reassures with her insistence that empathy is possible despite the complexity
of other people. But her affirmation is only partial. Empathy is limited and
temporary. We get only a “close approximation” at “a particular moment in
time.” And something in me demands more. A low whispered taunt tells me this is not enough, that I’m settling if I accept these limits. This reaction seems a
strange manifestation of perfectionist thinking, and in a leap that is not fully
articulated, I wonder if my disappointment is somehow linked to possessive
desire (Help! I'm an epistemophiliac!) A question for another day. No place here to delve into musings about how we know what we know. This prologue has gone on long enough, and
I’ve not yet arrived at what I’ve really been wanting to address: the ways
guilt obstructs empathy and prevents healing relationships between depressed
people and the friends and family who support us when we’re down.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://sneadspaisaudela.blogspot.com/2013/07/breakdown-empathy-and-guilt-2-guilt.html"><i>A suivre…</i></a> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-37532416866084639782013-06-12T13:09:00.001-05:002013-06-13T09:46:07.270-05:00Chasm<style>
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<br />
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Seeping lava oozing and solidity of the surface beginning to
dry and harden into place. Several billion years of earth always shifting. A
life. An eye blink. A single instant of stillness. A snap shot a mere 80
years wide. Permanent light written onto silver bromide plates objectively
captures the whole picture. <i>Ca a été. </i>Motionless and complete. Save the
blurry splotch down at the bottom. And the unnamed forms halfway jutting into
the upper left corner. A half road towards virgin forests unexplored? What lies
just beyond the frame? A life that could have been? A cosmic finger slipped accidentally in front of the lens? The angle of the shot, some say, makes all the
difference.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A river centuries deep cuts the banks steadily migrating
several feet to the left over 20 years, steady drift that never arrives.
Unnoticeable change finite and constant where billions of years ago a dry
colossal mass of rock and dust hover in space and time. A hot loud bang diced
the rock. Jagged, two parts slipped to either side of a miniscule fissure, at
first imperceptible, separating what heavens vault had originally cracked.
</div>
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<br /></div>
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Time passes. With cartoon like fluidity, the fissure yawns
apart. Two sublime and daunting stones repel each other and float divided by
emptiness out further and further towards opposite ends of existence. Slowly
the momentum dwindles and eventually comes to a full stop. The rocks spin
wildly in place, out of synch, unguided, heads flipping and rotating, pointing
sometimes up or down or backwards, momentarily towards and then back away from
each other. A blade of grass dwarfed by light years sprouts from nothing. Faint
sounds of water trickle intermittently.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The rocks are still and nearly aligned, several inches
closer to each other maybe, but on this scale, it’s hard to tell. The blade of
grass lengthens and several others appear. Sounds grow louder, some
indistinguishable, potential signs of animated life or simply expanded notes of
the mineral stream passing. The rocks are closer—it is clear—and moving again,
slowly accelerating back towards their starting place. Several drops develop
scattered with large empty gaps between them. Elements on mismatched scales are
converging, negotiating the steps of coherence. Drops expand into puddles their
blurry edges filling up the blanks between them, and pushed by the force of
approaching stone, puddles find each other and flow together. Things are moving
fast now. Lush vegetation bursting open. Rocks lengthening and flattening.
Distinct rustlings in the brush. A steady rush of water audible as the stream shades in a final remaining hole at its center.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span> </div>
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The edges of land and river are close. Water spills outward in all
directions, an uneven ameba-like advance searching for a barrier. A first foot splashes
aground and fills up the stone's outer contours. Then another upstream, and
another and another. All along the shore where water touches rock, the flow
recedes back towards the river’s center, spinning as it retreats coloring in
the last remaining gaps to form unbroken contiguous banks fixed and
reestablished back where we know them.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-57328894532672127372013-06-05T00:18:00.002-05:002013-09-10T10:12:58.936-05:00Being Yourself, Again<style>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
We lose parts of ourselves when we get depressed. Things
that we enjoy when healthy become bland, insipid, slightly nauseating
counterfeits that no longer light us up the way they did in the past. The late
fall arrival of the Oscar contenders in the theaters. Talking about fascinating
books with friends over filet mignon at our favorite restaurant. A bike ride
through the Bois de Vincennes. Auburn wins the national title we’ve waited 25
years to see. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">C’est tout un. </i>A
resoundingly indifferent and drained<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“whatever” supplants the joyful responses you’d expect in these
situations. The clinical term for this condition is “anhedonia.” On a neurological level, we
lose our ability to feel pleasure, a condition that makes it considerably
difficult to do anything about depression. It’s very hard to stay active (a key
component of fighting depression) when the things that should cheer you up
don’t.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When I crashed in the fall of 2010, I forgot how to teach.
Before my infernal season, I had taken great pride in my work as a language
teacher and my efforts to plan creative, engaging classes that prompted
students to practice their language skills while also allowing them to express
things that were important to them. I transformed very rapidly that fall from a
proud, inspired, and aspiring educator, to a shelled out vacancy sloughing
through everything half-asleep and gasping. I no longer felt I could motivate
or connect with my students, and a disturbing fog of loss and inadequacy
latched tight around me. Every step felt 30lbs too heavy, like I was carrying a
log pressing down hard on my neck. Every breath felt like I was only getting
half the oxygen I needed. (Recently, I heard a man on television say that this
feeling is like wearing a lead trench coat all the time.) I sat for hours stiff
and empty in front of a blank computer screen searching for the next day’s
lesson and producing nothing. At times, my mind swung from that stifled,
lifeless stare into accusing recriminations, asking what the fuck was
wrong with me and why I couldn’t just get my work done. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Things got really ugly for me at work that semester. Several
days while trying to work on planning in my office, I punched myself in the
head over and over progressively harder towards a deranged frenzy thinking that
the blows might somehow free me from the breathless stagnation I was wading
through. I locked up completely several times unable to speak in front of my
classes. Something like a panic attack. Not the heavy breathing and heart
racing feeling exactly, but long physically painful silences where my brain jammed
and struggled to find every word, where I had to fight hard against my mouth
and throat and lungs that defiantly resisted making each sound. One day in the
language lab, the state of the art West German cassette equipment bugged
during a lesson—yes the machines were marked “Made in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">West</i> Germany,” in 2010. I had a moment of panic; seized, immobile,
pressure jam clogging of the brain, and then dreadful relief. Relief looking
out the window over the dull grey mediocrity of the Paris suburbs and the once promising
social housing cabbages telling myself the chaos of equipment malfunction
didn’t matter because as soon as the course was over I was going to climb up to
the top of the building and jump. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_UXGh6xreh4adqnjvboKFgYFlh28uOKFsjt0_UEtu5KA62ot38OM4qfjc4GUA_DFkya7em6hWKMmrEDlqbfw6w-oPFZcUUwsKvlGABepl3nVRJQvwsuhFSQ_lCRGkHg_udq4s73sJ-go/s1600/creteil2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="260" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_UXGh6xreh4adqnjvboKFgYFlh28uOKFsjt0_UEtu5KA62ot38OM4qfjc4GUA_DFkya7em6hWKMmrEDlqbfw6w-oPFZcUUwsKvlGABepl3nVRJQvwsuhFSQ_lCRGkHg_udq4s73sJ-go/s400/creteil2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
This is an example of the gruesomely
ridiculous logic of suicidal thinking. Tiny insignificant things, things we
have no control over and that aren’t even our fault, come to hurt so badly that
our clogged and distorted reasoning, corrupted by pain, tells us that death is
the only way to stop hurting. Gruesomely stupid indeed, but in the moment
it makes absolute sense.</div>
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</div>
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<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
*****</div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
A year and a half later in January 2012, I was not fully
healed but much better. I had limped most of the way back from my most terrible
and desperate state. I had recently gotten involved volunteering at my local
chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and the office director
suggested I do the training to become a <a href="http://www.nami.org/Template.cfm?Section=Family-to-Family&Template=/TaggedPage/TaggedPageDisplay.cfm&TPLID=4&ContentID=32973">Family
to Family</a> instructor. This training session ended up being a most valuable
gift of experience after my bout with depression had convinced me that I no
longer knew how to teach well like I had loved doing before;
like the day a group of French 18 year-olds got excited talking in English about whether poetry
makes anything happen and decided that it can but must adapt to the times and
ever changing audiences in order to do so. That old self (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">moi d’alors</i>) that could run a discussion like that had slumbered
invisible and homeless hidden deep inside me for over a year.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Our trainers Sue and Linda were complete strangers at the
beginning of the weekend and good friends three days later. Thinking about our
interaction over those three days has lead me to an unexpected meditation on
generosity and empathy, one of those suprise tangents of an idea that isn’t planned when you begin writing and that wells up along the way. Montaigne taught
me it is worthwhile to veer and find out where these paths lead.
Sue and Linda did not know specifically what a pleasure teaching had been for me in the past. But even without knowing me they gave me something very specific
that I had been missing and needed for a long time. They were there sacrificing
an entire weekend away from home and family, giving away their time and energy
running through 30 exhausting hours of emotionally exacting course material.
They were passing along information and technique that we trainees took back to our homes across the state and used to help hundreds of people
hurting and looking for solace to calm their pain. Sue and Linda shared their
own sadness and vulnerability telling of tremendous loss in the face of mental
illness, but their sense of loss was tempered throughout by the example of hope
they showed in their actions, their patient and loving strength in confronting
hardship, and an implicit assurance that life was not over and that joy was
still possible, a joy they exemplified in the abundant flow of humor in their
absolutely hilarious banter all weekend. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There is a fascinating relationship here between general and
more specific forms of generosity. Sue and Linda made their general disposition
towards the world one of giving, and in doing so, they hit upon a very specific
need that was crucial to my recovery. I tend to think that understanding what a
person is going through needs to proceed acts of kindness, that we have to know
someone’s situation before can do unto them, that empathy makes generosity
possible. I wonder presently about the value of reversing these terms and
exploring the idea that generosity makes empathy possible. We may not
understand precisely what people are needing, but by adopting a general
disposition of kindness and giving away our time, our resources, our energy, we
might hit the mark anyway. Empathy is a wonderful thing. Maybe though it isn’t
always a necessary part of helping others. An act of kindness might be the
exact response someone else longs for even if we don’t know the details of that
longing before we make the gesture. Or it might be a bridge into a more
intimate and detailed understanding where empathy can take root. You may invite
me for dinner, and while talking during our meal, we may stumble together onto
the solution for a problem that’s been plaguing me for months. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sue and Linda gave me the opportunity to present part of a
practice lecture on our first day of training. When I stood up, a little nervous,
and began to read, I discovered, with delight, that I could still project my voice like I had in
front of a classroom. The old aspiring educator roused and
steered up slowly to dock in the forefront of my mind. A refreshing light
penetrated the hall dimmed by dreary silence for so long. The subtle possibility for banquet renewed
and stirred up into my words. And as I came to the end of my section and reminded my fellow trainees that they had not caused the battles
raging in the minds of their family members, an older, better
version of me, that I’d once abandoned and left for dead, sat again welcomed and
laughing at the head of the table. With their dedication to
a cause and general disposition towards kindness, Sue and Linda had helped me
recover the teacher I wanted to be.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-79728679297264610622012-12-11T14:34:00.001-06:002012-12-17T08:50:10.054-06:00NFL Murder-Suicide 2: Jovan Belcher and Junior SeauIt has been a little over a week since Kansas City Chief's linebacker Jovan Belcher killed his girlfriend Kasandra Perkins and then committed suicide in front of two of his coaches and the team's general manager. Belcher's death was the second high profile suicide by an NFL player this year. Linebacking legend, Junior Seau also shot and killed himself on May 2nd.<br />
<br />
Following Seau and Belcher's deaths, loved ones have expressed awful shock about being clipped out of nowhere by egregious violence. Given what they knew prior about Seau and Belcher, these deaths don't add up, don't make any sense because the person they knew would never have done this. The man that surfaced ugly in the final hours bears no resemblance to the person that teammates, coaches, friends and family loved up until then. Eternal ache! Disparate, shattered memory forever out of sorts never to be stitched again into cohesion! <br />
<br />
Junior Seau was known for being cheerful, generous, outgoing, and generally fun to be around. Belcher was a perpetual overachiever, a doggedly studious and attentive success story who clawed his way into the starting lineup and a major contract after going unselected in the 2009 draft. Both men did exceptionally difficult things with their bodies. Most of us accept very early in life that we'll never see the athletic pinnacles they reached.<br />
<br />
While it's hard to imagine a suicide that isn't a shock for family and friends, Junior Seau's end clanks irrational against the conquering dominance we saw from him for so long. And Jovan Belcher killing his girlfriend and mother to his infant child makes even less sense. Before the fact, we don't readily ingest any idea that goes against that display of strength and power. After the deed, we're left with mismatched pieces that won't reform into any coherent unity. What could possibly press down so heavy to snap these giant shoulders that meet everything head on and only overcome?<br />
<br />
The potential for weakness was always there even if we don't take much time to acknowledge or articulate it. It's not that we really cover it up. We don't actively deny the possibility of falling down when looking up to professional athletes. The vulnerability of Jovan Belcher and Junior Seau simply doesn't occur to us very intuitively, and they become imaginary heroes lacking the human imperfections that plague us all. But Junior Seau ran up against something he couldn't handle. The impressive physical stature and cheerful disposition crumbled beneath unchecked, hidden sadness. And Jovan Belcher snapped in desperation or anger or drunkenness or fear and jealousy or some lethal combination of them all. Neither man was supposed to be the kind of guy to do something like this. Both did.<br />
<br />
Our conventional notions of strength and toughness are flawed. The idea that there is a certain type of person who commits suicide needs to disappear for good. The assumption that the strong won't succumb does unthinkable damage. It reinforces sport culture that prizes quiet self-reliance as the noble way to deal with adversity. And if you assume you can't slip and if people praise you your entire life for taking your lumps like a man, you never learn what to do and how to get back on track when the mind derails into distorted and dysfunctional thinking about all being lost. You never even learn that going off the tracks is possible. How could you be prepared to right yourself? Powerful, swift bodies do not automatically make you mentally strong, and physical prowess does not necessarily prepare you to confront all of life's difficulties. What do you do when, like Jovan Belcher, your financial situation and love life feel like they are collapsing in on top of you? Toughing it out and balling up alone and silent with your inner struggles are rarely productive ways of coming through that sort of difficulty.<br />
<br />
Coaches and players at all levels in all sports across the country need to take notice of these things. They need to be talking openly about Jovan Belcher murdering and committing suicide. More broadly, they need to discuss how and why the exceptionally strong among us can sometimes end up so far gone. Playing sports we aspire to the type of toughness that Junior Seau and Jovan Belcher displayed for so long on the field. We want to imitate them when they keep working through difficulty, play through pain, and smash life's challenges flush on the mouth like fullbacks attempting to make a lead block. But we need more than all that if we want a functional model of what it means to be strong and tough. Mental toughness in the athletic world often means that you keep going no matter what, all the time, no matter how bad it hurts. This sort of toughness can grind you into rigid brittleness. I want coaches to talk differently about toughness, especially mental toughness to their players. I want them to encourage young people to work hard on understanding their weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and soft spots. Going ninety miles an hour even when it hurts is a difficult and sometimes very useful thing to know how to do. But so is knowing what sets you off, knowing yourself well enough to keep from derailing when things fall apart. Admitting that you hurt and looking calmly and closely at yourself to figure out why and how to fix it takes a lot of work. If playing sports is really to be a practice run that prepares young people for life in general, athletes need to come away from their experience with more than just the ability to play through pain. They need to hone their skills for self-understanding so they might see more clearly and then root out the sources of their own potentially fatal pain, frustration, and sadness.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-56026599335653069752012-12-03T11:59:00.003-06:002012-12-12T12:40:06.629-06:00NFL Murder-Suicide 1:Coach CrennelOn Saturday morning, Kansas City Chief's linebacker Jovan Belcher killed his girlfriend Kassandra Perkins. A short time later, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head at the team's practice facility. The couple leaves behind a three month old daughter Zoey born on September 11th.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/sports/football/police-chiefs-player-shot.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&hpw">http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/sports/football/police-chiefs-player-shot.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&hpw</a> <br />
<br />
The situation is overwhelmingly awful in all directions. The families and friends of both victims face unimaginable challenges that they surely never fathomed confronting before Saturday morning. I wish them every ounce of impossible strength and wisdom they will need to go forward. I wish the same to the Kansas City Chiefs and everyone connected with the team.<br />
<br />
When I read or see reports of these killings, I can't stop thinking about Chief's head coach Romeo Crennel. Crennel, defensive coordinator Gary Gibbs, and Chief's general manager Scott Pioli witnessed the suicide and spoke with Belcher right before he shot himself. Coach Crennel had to continue in his role as team leader hours after he watched a young man he admired and respected violently take his own life right in front of him. I don't see how he was able to do anything at all after such trauma (and the word "trauma" doesn't feel like it's enough for how terrible this must have been). Survivor's guilt after a suicide can be crushing, and Coach Crennel hinted that he is susceptible to this common emotion during a press conference yesterday when he spoke about his final conversation with Belcher, <a href="http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2012/12/02/crennel-i-wasnt-able-to-reach-the-young-man/">"I wasn't able to reach the young man."</a> Belcher's suicide was not Crennel's fault, but it can be extremely difficult for someone in his situation to get over all the "what if's." Crushed by witnessing death and potentially swamped beneath regrets and doubts about how it could have maybe gone down differently, Crennel still had to lead his team through the weekend. The decision about whether to play on Sunday was ultimately his, and he has had to remain in the public spotlight while he works through his own reactions to a gruesomely hollowing loss. I admire his strength and composure.<br />
<br />
Trying to image how difficult and terrible this all must be for Crennel hits me very deeply on an emotional level. Here, I hesitate feeling like I might not have any right to connect myself to these people I have never met and their unspeakable pain. I honestly don't know if I'm doing the right thing by adding this last paragraph. I have wanted to end my own life, and so when I think about Romeo Crennel watching Jovan Belcher commit suicide, I drift towards harrowing thoughts about what would have happened if I had, about who would have made the terrible discovery, who would have been left to wonder "what if" on my behalf, about the amputated hopes and shattered lives left in the wake. And even though it didn't happen and even though it could have been worse, I know that for family and friends, particularly my ex-wife, living with the possibility and fear for months was scarring and shattering enough. I am sorry for putting you through that.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-69306577552370430472012-11-29T14:22:00.001-06:002012-12-03T08:47:04.214-06:00Concerning Automoblies <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3600/3600-h/3600-h.htm#link2HCH0099">A tribute through form to an old dead white dude from France who shared beautiful, hilarious insight into human folly and weakness...</a><br />
<br />
Though I'm not a car guy really, I do very much love my 2004 Jetta. 1.8 L turbo. Tight and sensitive steering. 30 mpg highway. It's fun to drive and hasn't ever caused me any problems (<i>je touche du bois</i>). It is particularly thrilling to downshift (of course it's a five speed!) and zip by clunkier heavier cars going up a hill. On my way to my gym there is a fairly long and steep incline where I sometimes indulge the traces of Alabama car driving machismo that I couldn't help but incorporate growing up here.<br />
<br />
I was driving over that hill a few days ago thinking about how much approaches to exercise have changed in the past fifteen years or so since I first learned to lift weights for football in high school. Back then nobody talked about metabolic confusion, functional movements, mixing cardio and strength training, or elevating your heart rate when you lift weights so that you burn fat and calories more quickly and efficiently. Cross fit didn't exist, and I don't think the core did either. Sometimes we did sit ups or crunches, but we didn't have any concept of getting gut, back, and upper leg muscles to work strong together. At least I didn't. Bench press was king, and we--okay I--fantasized about hitting the 300 lb max. My best was sadly 15 lbs short.<br />
<br />
Back in the good old days when we lifted, we did a fixed number of sets of a fixed number of reps for each exercise (3x10 and 5x5 were common) and then moved on to the next exercise. There's nothing wrong with this approach and you can get stronger doing it. But kids these days have it so much easier because trainers and coaches have found so many adaptations and tweaks for getting into top shape fast.<br />
<br />
One of these new techniques that interests me for both psychological and physical reasons is something trainers call "going to failure." On the last set of an exercise now, athletes often have no fixed number of reps that they are going for. They go to failure, meaning that they simply push until their muscles give out and they can no longer lift the weight they are working with. I like this approach, especially the name "going to failure."<br />
<br />
It does, however, take some mental work to get used to the idea. It's scary facing that last set when you're used to having a specific goal for the number of reps you want to do. You know that it will hurt for a little while at the end of the set. You know also that you might not hit the number of reps you have in mind as being a good result. Sometimes I'd rather not do one of these types of sets because the possibility of a letdown performance disturbs me. I'm afraid that I'll feel like shit for failing when it's over while my arms burn from working to physical exhaustion. <br />
<br />
Of course you can't push yourself this hard all the time. If you do, you'll likely get injured or burned out or both. But it's good for us, I think, to expose ourselves to the fear of finding out just where our physical limitations are. Americans are obsessed with success and terrified of failure. It's easy to slip into patterns of avoiding all difficulty because the thought of not winning is too overwhelming. And it's also easy to drive yourself nuts thinking that you always have to succeed balls out 110% of the time in everything you take on. Going to failure every once in a while promotes a much more realistic attitude. Maybe I'm beginning to stretch now, but I think that experience from the weight room can make us healthier and stronger mentally beyond the gym doors. We have limits. We can't do everything, but there's rarely anything all that catastrophically wrong when our efforts aren't quite enough. The muscle burn cools off quickly, and the angst of wondering if you'll do enough pull-ups to satisfy your image of the ideal strong man you hope to be is gone before you leave the gym. You're left knowing that you did all you could and bolstered for your next attempt, where after proper rest, you will doubtless fail better. <br />
<br />
I thought about all this driving my Jetta over that hill the other day. The heated seats are a dream and if you have the means I highly recommend picking one up.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17535918793237966320noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7126446394482012123.post-80299365017289431542012-11-21T15:37:00.001-06:002014-03-27T07:54:33.378-05:00Gratitude This post is dedicated to all the Family to Family participants and teachers I've encountered over the past year. To the class that has just finished, thank you for your commitment and enthusiasm over the last 11 weeks. Teaching this class, I learn new things from the people who come to NAMI Huntsville looking to learn from us. At risk of slipping into terms of cheesy pedagogical sappiness, I have to say that I emerge stronger and better informed from this experience because the education that happens is really not a one way process. I can't say enough about how well Dr. Burland designed the program.<br />
<br />
I found the organization in early December last year when I was looking myself for help getting back to mental stability. I'd spent nearly all of June 2011 hospitalized with severe depression and was slowly finding my way back. An internet search led me to a page about a monthly support group meeting. I attended apprehensively with my mom. I remember that it was dirty cold and rainy. But there's a plunging gulf now between me and the bone chill of that wet December night. Looking back, it almost seems like it happened to someone else in a different lifetime. A little less than a year has passed, but the memories of how stupidly hard things were then have started to fade. I got involved volunteering for NAMI, and now I work to provide the same boost I found last December to others who are struggling. <br />
<br />
In NAMI parlance, I go both ways or switch hit, meaning that I've
suffered from depression and have family members who have as well. In
olden days, they would have said I was a "family member" and a "consumer."
But NAMI has dropped that second term and now I'm an "individual living
with mental illness" (a clunky term but warmer I think than "consumer"). I do most of my volunteering from the family member perspective addressing other struggling family members. But this work is certainly one of the most powerful methods I've found of maintaining my own stability.<br />
<br />
In discussions of mental illness, people claim frequently that no one can really understand it unless they've experienced it first hand. In my hardest luck times living as a sort of emotional defeatist, I identified strongly with this idea that no one else could possibly get it. It was just futile to try to explain anything or even talk about the problem much at all. But this common place assumption that no one else can understand isn't true. Understanding is a great challenge that demands imaginative effort from the people on the outside and rhetorical work creating clear explanation from folks on the inside. But people can understand. I've seen it over and over in four sessions of Family to Family when eyes light up in compassionate moments of piercing insight into what a sick family member struggles with. The families I've met desperately want to get it, and thanks to the twelve weeks of effort they put in coming to and participating in this course, they do, not exactly as if they'd lived it but well enough to assist someone who is. Misunderstanding and breakdown in communication between people suffering and their families is just the starting point. It doesn't have to be a permanent affliction. This is perhaps the best thing I've learned in Family to Family. Knowing that depression is often a recurring condition is terrifying. But after my time teaching and taking this course and seeing that it is possible to talk about depression even with people who haven't known it first hand, I can't imagine it ever being so hopelessly difficult as it felt a year and a half ago. And for this I have an abundant--we're talking <i>cornucopia</i> style overflowing bounty of natural splendor--sense of gratitude.<br />
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