As you have no doubt already figured out, my blog is working again.
Turns out I didn’t need to contact the support workers at Fatcow after all. Imagine my surprise when I went to check my email last night and I had one saying that my payment for my domain renewal had been received.
Apparently whatever snafu was blocking my payment cleared up. Boffo. The disruption ended and now I am back, baby.
Please hold your applause till the end of the performance.
Today’s been less busy than my usual Friday because I did not get a community shower today. That’s because it is normally on Wednesday in the first week of the month and we completely forgot that.
But no harm done because Wednesday was New Year’s Day and I doubt any support workers would have been working anyhow. Which explains why we didn’t get a “where are you?” phone call on Wednesday.
For all I know, I was told there’d be no community shower for me this week at some point and I just plain forgot.
That would be very on brand for me.
It’s otherwise been an unremarkable day. My mood continues to be a lot more variable than what I was used to before the lowering of my Paxil dose, and while that does mean I am quite sad or frustrated or just plain pissed off sometimes, I still welcome this new breadth of emotional expression and I am confident that my mind will eventually wake up and use that extra emotional maneuverability to make room for a better mood.
I have thought for a long long time that healthy non-depressive people must have some sort of mood support system in their minds that adds just enough of an upward push to their mood in order to keep them from going below a certain healthy level of low mood.
A sort of “mood floor” if you will.
Admittedly, that sounds more like a carpet that changes colors according to how you are feeling when you walk on it, but you get the idea.
Anyhow, us depressives (sorry, us “people with the lived experience of depression”) do not have that floor and so there is no limit to how far down we can go.
Ain’t that a peach.
I would love to get a mood floor installed, obviously. I am quite thoroughly sick of languishing in an icy cell far below the sunlit lands above.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that vast tract of frostbitten land (my Midnight Tundra) that separates me from the rest of humanity like the air between the walls of a Thermos.
Well I am an urban hermit, so it would make sense for me to be hermetically sealed.
It’s now easy for me to see (and feel) the relationship between that distance and my withdrawing from the world.
That’s why the “turtle response” is so dangerous when used as a primary coping mechanism. The more I withdrew, the colder my world got, and the colder it got, the more I withdrew.
Talk about a negative feedback loop. Oy.
I am not going to claim this is something I can simply turn off in myself. This tendency to turtle operates on far too deep and fundamental a level of my mind for it to be that easy.
But I can at least contemplate resisting that urge now and then, and staying connected and present even when feeling scared and/or stressed, if for no other reason than to see what happens.
After all, I know that I’m in no danger. There is no real threat, I’m just scared. Any alarms that may be sounding in my head are patently false and express absolutely nothing about the real world.
So why not just wait it out and see what lies on the other side?
More after the break.
More mind-blowing AI
I continue to have fun with the horribly named Hailuo image-to-video AI.
Check out this august gentleman.
That my character Professor Scruff, delivering his TED talk to a pack audience of fellow academics who are hanging on his every word.
No wonder he is wagging. 🙂 The wagging makes me eeeee all over!
I’ve tried some other videos but they didn’t turn out that great, so, whatever.
Hey, I’m learning not to post stuff when it isn’t good enough! There might be hope for my sloppy genius self yet!
What can I say, I am built for brilliance not perfection. I’d rather make a messy masterpiece than a neat and tidy mediocrity any day.
Besides, cleaning up messy masterpieces is what editors are for.
I need to get me one of those.
Learning to fly
Metaphorically speaking, I kinda feel like I am learning to walk all over again.
What I am really doing is learning to feel, of course. My long winter’s nap is ending and I am emerging from cold storage and rubbing my limbs as the blood flow returns to them.
And this necessarily requires my learning to trust my feelings. The rational mind isn’t always right (especially mine) and gut instinct isn’t always wrong. And trying to live your life by rationality alone is both futile and insipid.
And a waste of effort. It is far more efficient to let instinct handle the low level tasks it can handle so that the rational mind can concentrate on its job.
This involves a deep and fundamental change of perspective, though, and those do not come easily or quickly.
So I am trying to keep my mind relaxed and supple so it remains flexible enough to make the kinds of changes I want to make.
I just keep reminding myself that there is nothing in my mind that is more precious than my journey to mental health and my long deferred emancipation.
I may have to go through a whole series of radical transformations before I reach my final form, and for those I will need to simply trust that my deep core self knows what it is doing so each transformation will bring me closer to my goal.
I will get out of this shark cage eventually.
And when I do, world, watch the fuck out.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.