Sunday, March 18, 2012

Personality

I've started to think of my personality as a medical condition. And that every thought and emotion is a symptom.

I hate that.

And all this I'm reading lately, about long-term memory being an imaginative reconstruction tinted with the haze of whatever current emotional filter you look at past events through, and Isaac Newton blinding himself trying to understand light, and the way PTSD shuts down the normal development of certain brain functions, and how attachment theory works and what happens when it doesn't work and how cognitive neuroscience is like marrying the biology of your brain with your thoughts, with cold hard physics serving as ring-bearer, it's all floating like boiling rotini through my head. Like that gorgeous perfect wheel at the bike shop, when I put my fingertip on it and gave it the slightest spin and listened to it, the faint sparkling silver titch of a sound like a miniature chocolate chip while the bike shop owner admired my LeTour and told me how much the rebuild would cost, and the conversation took a while, and when he paused to tally up everything that was wrong, the wheel was still spinning, its tiny sounds shrinking into nothingness but still going. I said okay to everything he said, because my mind was with the wheel. Like the wheel and the concept of entropy existed in two separate universes. That wheel, the wheel like that with no hitches in it, is the wheel that spins in my head. There is no physical force to stop it. An object in motion tends to stay in motion. Until it meets a force that stops it. Like gravity, or wind resistance, or the word "no" or the crackling electricity in the air just before a late-afternoon August thunderstorm.

What the hell am I talking about. I need sleep.

4 comments:

  1. It's not your personality, just moods. I feel that way too and have been reassured numerous times that the Jen I remember being is still there but when I'm manic/depressed/mixed it's harder to see.

    The link to that post about good psychiatrists is http://masterofirony.blogspot.com/2007/12/getting-good-treatment.html

    Although many things have changed and worsened in my life since that was written it's probably noteworthy that I'll hit 9 years with this psychiatrist soon, and hit 6 years with my psychologist in February. I also have a family doctor I've seen in 3 practices now because he works well with my psych needs. I actually caught him just out of residency and kind of taught him how to work with me. I think he's been my doctor for 7 or 8 years now. I take doctors' attitudes seriously. I got tired of it when I couldn't get a primary doctor who would see me locally because I was on antipsychotics. That was so dumb that I gave up on crappy care.

    And this reminded me I need to email that family doctor.

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  2. It really is hard to see. Half the time I don't even care, or want to see.

    Thank you so much for providing the link. I need to read this ahead of my next appt with my psych tomorrow, just to get pumped up about having the umph to make this happen. It's also prodding me to go see a therapist again in addition, since I quit doing that because I was so eager to chalk all my problems up to bad brain chemistry rather than more convoluted thought processes and life events. You are a great advocate for taking care of yourself. Which of course is made more difficult when you have a disease that more or less destroys a person's ability or drive to do that. You rock.

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  3. You're good. Real good. I don't even know you, but GODDAMN do I feel like I know you.

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  4. Dude that's awesome. Thanks :)

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