march 8
Perspective is kinda magical
Perspective is one of those things I think about a lot, not just in my writing but in my day to day. Perspective is honestly the key to PTSD, to surviving illness and trauma, and to just doing the same damn thing every single day and managing to love it anyways.
Yesterday I was feeling down, to put it kindly. I was kicking my ass about being stupid when it came to the website. In the moment, it didn’t feel stupid (I thought I was hacked and I was being damn brilliant) but after the fact once I realized the tech behind why it gave a false reading, I felt dumb. Looking back, all I could see was me fighting shadows. And it’s not like it’s the first time. This was everything when it came to having PTSD for over 30 years. You see these patterns that aren’t really there and then you reinforce them with what seems like rational data. I SHOULD be worried because being hacked means this and this and this for me and my users. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t hacked; as long as I believed I was, I acted as if I was. Perspective is amazing.
I once found myself in a used bookstore talking to a young man who, not too far into the conversation, revealed that the television and certain movies were communicating to him directly. He did not think this was out of the ordinary or irrational. No, to suggest that a bunch of actors came together to work on a set for months while a director and crew did everything to produce a movie that was not trying to send him a message was absurd to him. In his mind, of course the television was talking to him; he’s the only one there to hear.
Perspective is the difference of being a schizophrenic or being ‘sane,’ and yeah, sanity gets quotes because it’s fucking subjective. Perspective makes it subjective. The same way it makes a hardship feel bearable or impossible. Getting through mold toxicity and those horrible months of chemical sensitivity could have been the worst days of my life. Instead I chose to look at living out of my car as an adventure instead of as a curse. And hey, that positive attitude helped me see more positive things that eventually led me not only out of that situation, but also helped me regain my health. If I went in thinking that Parkinson’s was a death sentence, I never would have looked and found the awesome supplements that helped me regrow my neurons and dopamine receptors/transmitters enough to get my damn brain back.
I sat down today still feeling pretty damn dumb for chasing around my Cloudflare shadow for two days straight and felt even worse when I realized I didn’t have anything new written. I couldn’t write. Clearly, whatever the hell I was doing with my life was a fail if I could be distracted from work over something that didn’t even exist. I had lost my fun, and I was being an asshole in my head about it. I could have stayed there in that mental place–I have spent years in bad mental places and not tried to change a thing; I know how easy it is–but instead I decided to write about writer’s block and why it sucks and why I started writing in the first place. And I got to this point of realizing not only had I just written @2000 words when I had said I ‘couldn’t write’ but I was also looking forward to writing because I remembered all the reasons I love to write. I fucking love writing!
Perspective is this really cool bit of software in the brain that has so much control over what we do, and rarely do we give it the attention it deserves. Just like when you can trigger the survival instinct when thinking danger is there, or the hunger instinct when you smell food, you can trigger the ‘let’s write something fun’ instinct with the right thought. Perspective is the key to everything, an intentioned (hopefully) message to the psyche to get things in line and bring forth the needed behavior for the task. It’s freaking magic.