i can feel the edges of where i could tip over into a weird and yawning sadness, but i’m not doing it! everything is fine. today i have lain on the grass both productively and unproductively, and consumed a lunch without repercussions. i am very much inside my body, but that’s okay, it feels all right in here. not great, but just fine. i am writing a poem that can seem to trap the reader in a loop, but actually there’s a way to get out. that’s the feeling for today: you can get trapped in a loop, but you can also get out.

anyway bragging. so the volunteer thing i do, i’ve maybe mentioned before, is for high school & college students, selected on various axes including being underrepresented in science, to do a summer cancer research project in a lab on my campus; and my role is to act as a peer mentor, meaning for ~¼th of the students i’m their most direct contact on the program side/a general reference person for issues w their research, or anything even vaguely associated such as college apps etc, incl after the program ends if they want to stay in contact/most specifically there to help them learn to present, publicly, about science. i also was in this program the summer before i started college, and my peer mentor was useless– i saw him once, got like two emails, received functionally no support. (he is no longer a volunteer). since then i’ve been a mentor every year so this will be my third.

and anyway, i was at the start-of-program meeting, and we were discussing the role/expectations for volunteers for the new people, and the longest-running volunteer, who started the year before i was even a student in the program, said that last summer he had shifted from emailing his group of students once every week or two to check in as he’d been doing in years previous, to instead having lunch with them weekly. and that they had had dramatically increased engagement/attendance/had been more likely to come to him with their issues in the program, and done it sooner, than when he’d just been contacting them by email.

and the thing is that, as he actually mentioned in passing, i’m the one who started doing that– bc of the time commitment involved, weekly meetings were never pitched to us as an expectation of the role or even really suggested as a way of doing it; i introduced that, in my first year mentoring, because i remembered how hard a time i had not being engaged/comfortable bringing up my problems in my lab in the program, and wanted to be way more hands-on and more of a resource for my students than the suggested level of contact seemed to involve. so: i, an at the time 19-y/o w no formal teaching or mentoring experience, tried a thing, it worked well, and the highly-experienced late-stage grad student picked it up from me the next year, and now has decided to continue with it and recommend it to the organizers & other volunteers as the best way to do things.

i feel so good about that! i feel so good about that. i am not only above-and-beyond engaged/committed to this thing i care about, but i figured out a better way to make it work, and now other people in the program are also doing it so that it can succeed more and be more helpful overall. what an uncomplicatedly good thing!

feeling weirdly– idk tired of myself? desiring-to-disavow myself. not strictly mad at myself, that was earlier, just like…. wishing to escape the self somehow. i’d like to move out. this is partly weird bc bulk of today was spent in 1. lecture for class i’m good at 2. preprogram meeting for my summer volunteering gig, which i love most of all the things i do and the organizers of which think i am a perfect genius. actually more on that later i have bragging to do 3. with @biosweg and wisely tumblrless friend drinking the tea of moral corruption and chatting/watching in terror as they planned mcat study. none of which should really come with an especially strong version of my sometime self-image as a golem, or a robot, or some polyhedra, or something. but that is absolutely where i am

weirdly this came with and feels linked to having a lot of especially medium-uselessness high-compassion emotions– eg worrying about a dramatic appearance change in one of the volunteer organizers that could indicate she’s sick, even though i am unable to do anything about it even if our relationship was not high-mutual-affection but extremely-low-intimacy professionalism and she were not you know an administrator nearly 2x my age; though of course the inappropriateness of me even considering asking her if she’s ok is probably part of the lasting power/compassion/uselessness of the whole experience

or, idk, watching [friends] plan out weeks of literal nonstop test prep misery and being able to come up with only “… if u let me know a few days out when your extra-miserable days are i’d love to make you dinner so you don’t have to work for 7 hours and then study for 5 hours and then cook? or spend a ton of money getting downtown and back for an 8 hour practice test and then cook or have to buy food?” which is like. very high uselessness even if it is also probably the literal most materially helpful thing i can come up with to do, at least rn

doing a hideously-pointless-but-satisfying/nonarduous assignment for my fellowship that basically just boils down to recording myself verbally flexing about my own science communication skills/the Central Importance of the Questions of My Narrow Subset of the Field, etc

so that’s not all that bad; and i spent rather longer than i should have this evening with someone i like a great deal, consuming the bubble tea of inevitable sin and talking, which is not good for my work schedule but was excellent for my emotional well-being

and i’ve finally sketched out a viable plan for the large and terrible assignment for the class i don’t care about, such that i will have something to actually latch on to in order to write it tomorrow afternoon, in the span of time that just opened up from the cancellation of my 3-hr work meeting; it boils down to a few thousand words but i can definitely manage that in that span of time even though i still have a lot of the research/source assembly ahead of me as well (”in that span of time” here meaning “in that span of time, plus the whole evening before/after Pointless Fellowship Assignment Discussion Activity, because i will need at least half of those three hours to go on tumblr in.” but that’s still workable.)

so that’s all fine. i thought maybe i was going to be totally fucked at this point in the week, but it’s okay, it will all be okay, i will get through to the other side of the week surviving it

also uh on a different note my therapist thinks i have adhd??????? which. i’m not. unsympathetic to, as an interpretation of my chronic, constant, and inevitable procrastination, and incredible difficulty paying attention to anything uninteresting without active outside pressure making me do it and often not even then really? also i need constant sensory stimulation to focus on things and can’t stay on one task for any length of time longer than half an hour to maybe an hour, and have never continued to own a piece of paper for more than a day in my whole damn life unless it goes in the Only Notebook and i never ever take it out until the exact moment it is needed again after which all bets are once again off

on the other hand i almost always eventually do things, and am good at calibrating my expectation of time needed for tasks to avoid working past ~1am, and can keep track of things in a calendar now. and it all causes me much more internal distress/inconvenience than it does actually disrupt my ability to deliver on my responsibilities anyway, w limited exceptions such as uh…my job, and also like, i am maybe just lazy and possessed of inherent moral rot and unconsciously gamed the diagnostic questionnaire on which she is basing part of this belief out of a desire to find a semi-external/treatable locus for my points of personal weakness. so you know. who’s to say

NO clue why i feel sad/wanna float out of my body. doesn’t make sense. some hypotheses:

ate fried rice (??)
tired
don’t want to go to this lecture/exhibit for class (i love exhibits but im terrified of actually encountering an artist, especially a real good political activist genius artist when i am an extremely stupid baby)
alone in room
not getting my work done (more likely a symptom)
not actually a very interesting person; unsatisfied with own efforts at “art”
can’t have $6 bubble tea with almond milk in it every day of life
lonely again but a weird subset of it where i miss having crushes
lonely but because i can’t have that one thing that i should never try to have again anyway
tired

idionkisson replied to your post:
who wants to rec me relaxing/distracting things to…

ANYTHING i read rewires my brain, that’s just like. literally what reading is to me. it’s like a magic charm that wears off after only a little while, and the only way i can back to it is to read more of whatever the thing in question is…i have no idea if this makes ANY sense, it’s super hard for me to articulate bc it’s so innate

garden-ghoul said:

ugh what DOESN’T completely rewire my brain. I literally can’t even listen to music 95% of the time for this reason. the one thing I read specifically to rewire my brain is “If I” by psilent on ao3, which is a story about rocket raccoon escaping from a torture facility and trying to make a life as a guy with OCD. it’s very cathartic for me because of the progression from terrible to okay
when I was younger I’d read YA books and especially if they were written in first person I would spend like half a day legitimately thinking I was the protagonist? I think this is a DID thing

yeah i get very– i think of it as an altered state of consciousness almost, it’s more dramatic than being drunk and… ok probably not actively more of a change than being full acute sleep deprivation depressed, but i notice it more bc it’s a non-habitual thing/has an obvious external source.

at its most dramatic i feel like i’m both talking differently and processing emotion differently; i associate it with being almost manic/euphoric, funny in even weirder and more high-concept ways than i usually am, and sometimes with phrasing emotional and social concepts in a technical/unecessarily sciencey way if what i was reading leant itself to that. these are all states i can kind of access/behaviors i have regardless, but it feels qualitatively different and is clearly induced by what i was reading. i usually really enjoy it, though sometimes it totally rearranges my priorities in ways that– don’t usually have significant repercussions, but certainly can be inconvenient if i’ve just rewritten myself to be very strongly into manic makeup experiments and sweeping statements about the structure of reality, and what i need is to finish my dev bio assignment.

mostly it happens to me with fiction, especially fiction with a really strong, distinct, unusual diction, especially funny/witty diction. it’s happened with nonfiction pieces, more rarely, partly because standard science writing is a mode of thinking i have to engage anyway and so it doesn’t feel distinct i think in the way . it happens with long backreads of people’s blogs pretty frequently, which is actually my easiest go-to if i want to create specific aesthetic/subject-matter interests in myself: i have a mental list of people whose blogs to backread if what i want is “very funny, smart about character-driven fiction” vs “significant introspective access and high-vulnerability lyricism” vs “highest-integrity art opinions and mean jokes” vs “quantitative interests and gender shitposting” vs… etc. it’s actually super useful, or would be if i didn’t occasionally derail myself from actually writing the thing i wanted to write (or whatever) because i got distracted by the thing i was reading to put my brain in the right mode.

relatedly, if you (general you, not just you two) see a chicago ip address reading 20-200 pages of your blog, it is very plausible that it is me, doing that. pls feel free to let me know if i should stop, i absolutely will. i try to limit myself to ppl who seem to have a more archival/backread-encouraging ethos anyway, but it’s possible i’ve misread someone’s blog intentions and if so i am genuinely sorry

journaling time is the loneliest number

stacking/the word almost:

– something that didn’t used to be a problem becomes a problem: or rather, it was always a problem, but it used to come from many directions at once and in ways so difficult to prevent that it didn’t seem worth it. and now it’s narrowed to a single source and that’s still so difficult to discontinue that it’s not worth it; the problem is still not large enough to tip the scales to “fix problem” over “maintain thing that also causes problem”. but having experienced what not-problem could, theoretically, be like unto (since of course i still haven’t ever not-problem just not-omnidirectional-problem), it becomes much more difficult to deal with this single source of it than it was when that source was just one of many. it’s still right not to fix problem, but i am having many more emotions about it because i can almost see how it would be fixable: how i could just stop thinking about it. imagine not thinking about it!

-the above was written several days ago; the problem is– okay, not fixed, no material circumstances have changed, i just got a single additional point of reassurance that someone besides me knows the problem exists, but apparently that was enough for me to be nearly calm again. i have returned almost to emotional baseline– the baseline being my highly anomalous time of like-unto-no-problem, even though it should really be the state of high-octane fear. this is in itself embarrassing: that i’m apparently so focused on the one aspect of the problem that i can actually be reassured into less anxiety. this is idiotic; the promises i was made will probably either not be kept or not do the job, which will not be anyone’s fault, barely even my own. but at least half of what i wanted was to be allowed to see the problem, i guess, to think it was there and worth worrying about, to have someone (“someone”) say i see you, problem haver, and i’d like you not to have it either. hideous. hideous. but an unutterable comfort all the same.

– i am developing a new problem, on purpose, almost-on-purpose. this is an (almost) entirely different kind of problem from the above. i can feel myself leaning in to the problem. courting it, almost. (ok sorry i’ll stop doing that.) this is of course the kind of problem i (think i) want, the kind of problem the other problem was like before it stopped being like anything at all that i knew how to use. and i do know how to do this, if i decide to commit. but it’s bad. it’ll be bad for several reasons. motivational, useful, distracting, but bad. i might start doing it anyway.

the prelude/disclaimer to this post is that it’s very specific to myself and my own skewed expectations, for me only, of how things like ambition should work. i’m comparing myself to my own perceptions of other people who are also doing the exact same study/career-path thing i’m doing, but [better] or [with greater focus or passion or certainty].

puzzlingly, i really do seem to totally lack any inbuilt/innate passion: as u know, i’m studying biology, and everyone i know appears to be either driven by the pursuit of knowledge qua knowledge, the desire to alleviate suffering on the medical/biomedical level, or a passion for environmental/biodiversity preservation. meanwhile, my attitude toward biology is 1. i enjoy and am good at learning the material [which is a necessary condition of ‘my field’ for preserving my emotional well-being] 2. i find it satisfying to gain expertise with research tools (primarily imaging). but none of this is necessarily MORE satisfying to me than, say, successful execution of a poem, i just have other intellect-based concerns that make me prioritize . i do kind of care about reputation, but “positively maximizing other people’s opinions of me” just seems like a worse drive than pursuit of knowledge on the levels of controllability or ethics as well as, ironically, in terms of other people’s regard. and most of the really universal signals of/for regard from others [prizes, extremely high-prestige jobs] are roundable to unattainable and the process of acquiring them doesn’t necessarily sound like it would make me happy (where i am evaluating happiness more as “positive self-regard” than “active hedonia”, although both count i guess).

if the end goal of my life is just “establish the conditions that make me like myself the most” [“/hate myself the least”]– like, sure i guess, but shouldn’t i be more than that? shouldn’t i be anything more than that? do i just make a precondition of not hating myself be that i contribute notably and materially to [others’ lives/“knowledge”/“the world”]? that… would work….but feels like cheating???

i don’t know. i guess i believe that science is important, and i’m at least approximately smart enough to be useful to science somehow, and it’s ok for me to attach myself to “science is important” as a driver and then back into reasoning for it……. but i think something’s wrong with me, compared to others who are in the same field/type of field, doing the same kinds of things. i think something’s missing.