The Difference in Charge

I'm not a smoker, yet I'm on my second day of Nicotine patches. Maybe if it worked for you, it will work for me too. A whispering communal hope that each of us will pave our losses into something for one another. We are playing the relief lottery, except despite what we are told and sold, even money and fame can't afford what we seek.

I'm not sure how much I slept. I nodded off only to need to get up to take Pepper Ann outside. I was already stumbling in some figuring-it-out thoughts. I give in, I give up, I give it my all. It's almost a reassuring process, unless I've decided I'm going to figure me out. I scrape at bones in the dirt and convince myself it's an excavation. It's worse when the bones are yours. And when you're disabled, they usually are.

Which figuring was I chasing tonight? I will list all the ways my authentic self mismatches my life's context and why I can't move forward. My incompatibilities with survival and societal pressure. Then I will diagram it. Then I will show people. And someone will know, if not for me then maybe at least for them. Maybe for all of us, one day. But I fell asleep writing the list. So I took a shitty half-shadowed picture of the scribbles in a graph lined notebook an ex gave me that I didn't even like. The person or the notebook: too many unnecessary lines so I only use it as a holder and board for blank sheets of used paper that have printing on the other side. Paper I save from the bureaucracy that pervades us, like the thick stacks of medication side effects the pharmacy mails every month even as my meds never change.

When I got back inside, I continued on my phone. Collect and connect to form context. What am I missing?

I start to think about my Enneagram type or at least the part of me that sticks out more than the rest. Type 8w7, the maverick or nonconformist. An assertive, protective, intense person. Full of energy and drive. Where are they? So I went digging for a mapping of Enneagram types to astrology, my main flavor of self analysis lately. And I debated the one I found. No, a Gemini is more likely to be a type 7, not a 1. Wouldn't a Virgo be a 5? If I had real data to analyze instead of hunches, what would I find?

I have 2.5 main obstacles right now. How do I participate in capitalism enough to survive while living in total isolation? Why does every remote job insist on some travel, even when it's pointless for the work? Like lifting 25-50 pounds overhead.. What is leading me to avoid obligations, especially when those obligations could pay me? The root of everything is the pandemic and it's also not. It's all me and my responsibility. And it's not. It's still something.

One of the books I cracked after I decided to get up at 3 AM and brush my teeth for the first time.. in time, was a book about coaching questions. Change those why questions into what, so people don't feel defensive. I've read this before somewhere, to ask how or what questions because they inspire action over analysis. Where, when, and who got lost somewhere, too. It all seems like an allistic preference.

I love asking why. Do I feel defensive towards my own why?

I caught an echo of a part today. This absolute dread that the rest of my life will be alone in my apartment, sitting in front of a computer screen. Scraping out what's left of the power of my intellect for profits. Even if they were my profits in my bank account, I'm not sure it's worth what it will cost me. What it costs the planet and people I will never know to use and create these devices. What the polarization and mis/disinfo costs us.

I used to be willing to trade almost anything for money, it felt unspoken and understood. And now I'm not. It seems like this could be my resistance to capitalism until I hold it up to the timeline of my life and any chance at survival and then it crumbles. It seems like it could be self-destruction, a desperate attempt at a sense of control that I can't find anywhere else. But surely there are easier ways than starving myself of money, like all the other ways I've harmed myself. Maybe this is the last firefighter left. Maybe this is the one that counts. Maybe I finally know what I am or am not willing to lose or attempt to trade for stability. Maybe I'll just eventually become hooked on something else.

I'm sober. I'm celibate. I'm sick. I'm poor. What will be next?

The part that gurgled a little clue, it said: isn't it enough? Isn't it enough that I have to be alone and everything I've given up? Isn't it enough that I did everything I could to avoid infection and still I'm here, trying to troubleshoot yet again? Buying supplements and nicotine patches, giving it a go even after my own doctor said she didn't know? Wondering how much of my own dysfunction or mismatch or resistance is in my own hands? Or mind. It's all the same bodymind, but we are taught to ask about it separately, as if that would change what's now or what's next.

I mostly healed my past trauma. A decade of therapy, culminating in weekly EMDR and some psychedelic integration therapy. My psychedelic guide was also my tattoo artist and I have an unfinished leg tattoo of sacred geometry to go with it. I balked at the second session after they had a covid exposure. That was back when an app told you if you were close to someone who had it. This was 9 months before I suspect I got covid outdoors at the dog park and my health declined. Now I can't afford to finish it. Maybe I shouldn't have even started it. Maybe my broken self was better at coping than this partially healed, checked out version. Maybe I would have ended up here either way. Whose to say.

I thought I would remember more things with psychedelics, but instead I only had peak experiences. I processed everything I could remember in EMDR and all my partial foggy memories. I approached from different directions and jumped between tangential points in time, unraveling and weaving slices of myself. I rewrote cognitions. I spent hundreds of hours doing somatic and visualization meditations and yoga. I practiced affirmations. One more habit in my chaotic habit tracking practice. I even invented my own affirmations technique: zipline affirmations. A path from a negative to positive thought, unhelpful to helpful.. neural platforms to catch you wherever you are on a spiral. Affirmations that feel more authentic, that are closer to your actual mental state instead of being full of friction and toxic positivity.

And it often works. These little mental seeds pop up in my thoughts, bouncy leaves I slide down like I'm in Fern Gully. "Emotions are a gift and I will take care of them." But still it doesn't fix my problems. It doesn't ease the mismatch of my disabled bodymind. The burden of feeling like a burden. It doesn't erase the comments from strangers saying we should be euthanized. It doesn't answer the lukewarm question I asked my doctor about sterilization with any real details about the procedure instead of them immediately trying to schedule it. It doesn't change the cumulative risk calculations of forced infection, which a tubal ligation in a maskless hospital would only add to.

I have to separate my uterus from being trans from being immunocompromised. Just floating biological parts, lacking composition. Unless they are in a song about someone else's fear of me or being like me, because they are actually the only ones who get to live in it.

My problems are only our problems when the solution is to disappear us.

Scientists knew smoking caused cancer in the 1950s. In 2010, smoking was banned in bars and restaurants in my state. I was there when the ban went into effect. The bartender had to shut the music off and threaten to kick people out to get them to stop smoking. A childhood friend of mine died from lung cancer in our late 20s. Here I am, a nonsmoker, drowning my hopes into my second nicotine patch because our latest wave of denial damaged my body. It continues to damage our bodies.

The 1st patch went well. The 2nd patch not so much. The nausea is worth it though, after weeks of trying to crawl to the surface of myself. Feeling like any words were too heavy and just disintegrated before they could even form thoughts. I had the energy to do my dishes and a few other chores. I am even writing this. For a moment I'm here before sleep and symptoms pull me under again.

When you've been hanging on to the edge of a cliff for years, what difference does it make that someone is coming to stomp on your fingers? Where are we supposed to find the energy for our fears?

This audiobook I was listening to today, a robust history of climate denial, said our use of positive and negative to describe people arose with the invention of electricity. I didn't fact check that, but maybe it applies to our feelings too. In our quest for power and dominance over nature and ourselves as part of nature, we forgot that electrons flow because of the difference in charge. While we ignored what that would cost us.

I made a battery once for a class project, analytical chemistry in undergrad. I remember feeling clever, puffed up over my willingness to chase my own initiative and curiosity. I remember the praise of my professor. The value others saw in me and that I was able to see in myself. Where is that version of me now?

Where are we now?