12 december 2023
This is somewhat of last night's feels, but still something I wanted to write about.
Last night I felt off, and was really struggling to figure out what was going on with me. This happens a lot, and I've never been quite sure how to handle it. One of my favorite books for attempting to deal with self-crisises is Kate Bornstein's 101 Alternatives to Suicide. While I was definitely not suicidal, it's still a useful reference for what to do when I just... don't feel right.
One of the things that she talks about is doing a diagnostic. That's usually in the sense of something that can tell you about your current state -- a tarot reading or some other kind of self evaluation. Last night, I took the idea of a diagnostic literally.
I think of myself sometimes as more technology than person. It's an abstraction -- I don't literally think of myself as technology, but I understand and identify sometimes more with technology than I do with people. One of the things you can do with technology is run a literal diagnostic -- in the 80's and 90's this was often in the form of a "Diagnostics Diskette". You'd put this diskette in the machine, turn it on, and it would run through an analysis of all of the component systems of the machine. RAM, CPU, Disk, Video, Keyboard, Serial interfaces, etc, etc.
So last night I divided myself into a variety of systems. I went with the following list:
Cognitive, Emotional, Gastrointestinal, Endocrine, Sartorical (clothing), Physical Plant (the body), Social, Belief
and I went through each trying to discover in a brief sentence or two what the operational status was of each. I think it exposed that there are a lot of complex reasons for how I'm feeling lately. A lot about how I'm feeling has nothing to do with mysel per se, but more about how I'm relating to "the state of the world". In short, a lot of systems are currently strained or taxed, and that means that they are often having erratic behavior or other symptoms of being overloaded.
With that data, I was able to write out a "repair plan". It's going to take a while, as most long-term repairs do, but it at least gives me something that identifies the problem and comes up with something I can actually do about it.