#so a lot of things on a test for cognitive functions were pretty high that I thought wasn't

[crimson-synths]

okay took fukin ages for me to figure it out and I finally did decent cognitive function stuff, and it took a LONG TIME to realize i'm an enfp

[copperbadge]

Hi! I suspect this question may sound sarcastic or asshole-ish, but I promise it's sincere. And I realize that you're not a doctor, so feel free to ignore or tell me to DMOR, but you seem to have looked into this pretty extensively, so I thought you might have some thoughts. If you take ADHD meds and they work (that is, you don't feel any different but you can actually Do Things, which maybe gives you really positive feelings, which is not how you usually feel about yourself), how do you know that it's actually ADHD and not that normally you're just lazy, but now you took meth and you're hyper and euphoric or whatever it is that it does to non-ADHD people? Asking for a friend.

I...hm, layers to this one. First, thank you for offering a tone note because on the one hand, without it I definitely would have felt a bit hostile, but on the other hand it's very difficult to ask a question like this without sounding like you're trying to get a rise, when you really are just trying to get information. I'd struggle with that too. So thank you! I believe you are in earnest :)

I'm going to try to dig through this by levels rather than go through the question chronologically, that might cause the least amount of confusion and crosstalk. This is going to get long and quite rough and I’m going to address a lot of tender subjects including drug use, addiction, and self-esteem issues, so please read with care for yourselves. 

(I’ve tried to add in bolded topic headers so if you have ADHD and get bored of reading about one thing you can skip to the next!) 

So to start with -- and this isn’t particularly satisfying as an answer, but well...I know I have ADHD because I’ve been evaluated for it, twice now, and the doctors said I did. 

I fit a lot of the classic symptoms on the usual checklists, and while I’m smart enough to game those checklists, I tried to answer as honestly as I could. I wasn’t especially interested in getting Adderall for its intoxicant properties, since I’ve got plenty of access to other, arguably much easier to obtain intoxicants. I also, because I know myself to be someone who enjoys gaming tests for the game’s sake, made sure that at least one of the evaluations had cognitive tests that were harder to fuck with, like tangrams and memory tests and such. On the very top level, I know I’m medicating my ADHD because the tests say I have ADHD. 

But say we don’t trust the tests, or say I’m not as honest as I claim. On the next level down, but still quite near the surface, let's talk about "how do you know you're medicated and not high?" 

I've been in several kinds of altered state -- concussed, runner's high, stoned on weed or opiates, drunk -- and very occasionally I’ve been around people on coke or meth, though I’ve never done those myself. It's usually not difficult to tell that you are not functional on a normal level. It's difficult to describe how to someone who hasn’t experienced it, but for me being in an altered state like that is very evident. The first time I got a runner's high I was absolutely terrified because I knew something was wrong with me cognitively, but not why it had happened. When I woke up concussed, I knew immediately that something was wrong, but it was all I could do to get dressed and go across the street to a clinic, I was so fucked up. If you’re in an altered state and suddenly need to do something complicated, you're aware you would very much like not to be in that state anymore.

I've described Adderall as being like the most functional high you've ever had, but there are differences. If I've had, say, a weed edible, I feel calmer and happier and I'm also aware I'm stupid. I'm impaired and I can tell that. If I've taken an Adderall, I feel calmer and happier but not nearly to the same level, and there's no impairment to my intellect. Part of the calm is that if I think of something I need to do, I can immediately get up and do it, competently -- or I can decide not to. I control my impulses and actions. With street meth -- which I should note is much, much more potent than a low-dose Adderall -- compulsive behavior and lack of control are much more evident. Even if you are getting a lot done while on meth, you’re not necessarily in control of what, or how many times you have to do it to get it right. I'm told this is also often how people who don't have ADHD react to Adderall -- they’re not efficient as much as they are manic, particularly at stronger doses, which is why a) a good test of “do I have ADHD” is “How do I react to Adderall” and b) they start you on a super low dose.

When my psychiatrist and I meet to discuss how the medication is going, he asks me stuff like, do you feel you're in control of yourself? Are you having hallucinations? Do you find yourself craving a dose even when you know it would be detrimental? Do you feel your performance at work has improved, remained the same, or fallen? Do you find yourself able to focus but not able to control what you focus on?

On Adderall I do feel like I'm in control of myself, I do better work, and while I'm still learning to aim that focus, I am capable of doing so. I don't take it after 1pm because I know that'll fuck up my sleep schedule, and truthfully I don't want to. The one time I’ve taken Adderall after 3pm was because I was going to an art museum and I wanted to see how that would alter my experience, being able to focus more fully on the art and the person I was going with. And while I did have a great time, I wouldn’t make a habit of either taking the drug late in the day or taking it purely so I could have An Experience while on it. It’s fine, it’s fun, but it’s not so much fun I’m willing to mess with my sleep over it. 

I also have zero desire to drink (for the best, given alcohol and stimulants are a no-no) and a much decreased desire to get high. I don't need to self-medicate because I am actually medicated. I wasn't doing a shitload of self-medication before, but I was undoubtedly doing some, and more during the pandemic, and I can see how it would have become unhealthy had I continued. Do I still occasionally take an edible in the evening to unwind? Yes. Do I do it at the level I was doing it earlier this year? Fuck no. And I take half the amount I used to when I do, making sure I’m doing it well after any Adderall has worn off.

The question of "medicated or high" can still be a little difficult. What I said above is also what a lot of addicts say. They believe they are in control, they are better when they're on their intoxicant of choice, etc etc. "I can stop anytime I want" is like, the number one way to quietly tell someone that you, in fact, can't. Addiction's simplest definition is "loss of control over behavior" and addicts will do a lot to convince you that they haven't lost control over their behavior. (For more on this, Caustic Soda has a great episode about addiction in which Dr. Rob discusses how addiction and physical dependence differ.) All I can really say in response to this is that Adderall improves my quality of life in ways external to my emotional state -- yes, it helps emotionally, but that’s small potatoes compared to say, weed or opioids (opioids -- now there’s a drug I could get into trouble over) and weed’s way easier to get these days than Adderall. Weed does not, however, help me cook healthful meals and clean the bathroom. Adderall does.

So let's talk about the deepest part of this -- "How do you know you're not just lazy?"

Increasingly we are coming to an understanding of human behavior that informs us that laziness doesn't exist. What we think of as laziness can be caused by a number of factors: failure of executive function, fear of failure, exhaustion, avoidance of the unpleasant. Humans want to experience pleasure, it's a fairly strong primal drive, and we do not experience pleasure purely through inaction. If you should be doing something but aren't, that's not pleasurable, it’s stressful and boring. Lots of people will tell you “I fucking love to sleep, sleep is the best thing” and I’m sure they truly feel that way, but it’s not because they’re lazy, it’s because they have a sleep debt they’re banking against or paying back. There’s a lot of debate about laziness right now, but even as I refer to myself as one of the laziest people on the planet, I know laziness doesn’t exist in the way we conceive of it. When I call myself lazy, I’m using it as shorthand to say “I will find the most low-energy way to achieve something.” Because I am tired, because I have ADHD. (And also because I’m not twenty anymore.)

With exquisite timing, @thebibliosphere has very recently written an essay on this situation called “But You’re So Successful Without It”. Joy can’t take any of the medications available for ADHD, and the essay talks about what it feels like to have ADHD and to burn out because of it, which is where I was about to hit earlier this year. There is no way to call Joy lazy and absolutely no way to hear what she has to say and think that she would choose to go through what she has if she had an alternative. Nobody with any compassion would force her to. 

And here’s how I know I am not actually lazy: like Joy, I want to be doing the thing. If I need to do dishes and laundry so I’m not eating with my hands and wearing smelly clothing, but I’m not doing them, that’s not laziness. I know that my life is less pleasurable, indeed very unpleasant, if I don’t do those things. If I’m still incapable of doing them, it’s not because I Don’t Wanna. It’s because I am too tired, because I don’t feel like I can deal with unpleasant sensations on top of forcing myself to do something, or because my executive function isn’t functioning. If you aren’t doing something you should be doing, there’s usually a reason beyond “I’m just lazy” and it’s helpful, in breaking out of the mindset of “I’m a lazy (and therefore bad) person”, to ask yourself why. 

If there’s a reason you’re not doing it, even if that reason is simply “I’m so tired”, then you’re not lazy. You’re tired. If it’s because it’s unpleasant, then you’re not lazy, you’re avoiding pain. If you want to and just simply can’t, you’re dealing with a loss of executive function. 

Sometimes there are nonmedical workarounds. I wear gloves to do the dishes, I bought a cordless stick vac so my back wouldn’t hurt because I was constantly holding the vacuum cord in one hand, I blast podcasts when I’m doing something boring so my mind is elsewhere. I used to run at 3am because at any other time I was too fucking tired and I hate being out in public around strangers.

But, well, the best workaround for wonky executive function for me is Adderall. It’s not for everyone, it’s not an option for some, but for me it is one more tool -- admittedly a pretty spectacular one -- to manage a difficult life. 

All that said, the idea of being a Bad Person for Not Doing A Thing is a knot that it takes a long time to unpick. It is very freeing, and certainly less stressful, to both acknowledge that some things are beyond us, and receive help that brings them back into the realm of our ability to do. But it’s a process, and nobody can hustle anyone down that path faster than they are capable of going. So, all I can do is offer my personal experience. 

Even if this shit does kill me eventually, I’d rather have thirty more years where I am the person I’ve been in the last two months, than have fifty more years where I am the person I was in 2021. And even if I eventually have to go off it, what I’ve learned will help me not to hurt myself for something beyond my control. 

[nanapandaz]

Cognitive Impairment in Schizophrenia

Disclaimer: I am not a mental health professional, I can’t diagnose you. If you think you have a mental illness please reach out to your doctor or a mental health professional.

For schizophrenics like myself, some of the most stigmatized, and sensationalized symptoms are the positive ones, meaning delusions, hallucinations, and movement disorders to some extent. You see them in textbooks and in the media; seeing, hearing, smelling or feeling things that aren’t real. Believing strange ideas, and this is my own example, like that the alien government lizard people are coming after you. These draw the most attention from the public eye, and I can’t blame them, alien government lizard people is pretty out there. But what about the less talked about symptoms such as negative and cognitive symptoms? Well, this essay will examine the cognitive side of a schizophrenia diagnosis.

According to Columbia University (2016), “many people with [Schizophrenia] also have cognitive deficits, including problems with short- and long-term memory.” They go on to say that cognitive factors can be the most disabling for people, leading to difficulty holding down a job and maintaining social relationships. They don’t have many answers as to the cause or cure for memory problems. Sucks to be us I guess. I personally have a plethora of issues with memory, short term and long term. I find myself lost when the dialogue of TV shows gets even slightly complicated because I immediately forget what was said, maybe that’s just me but it takes a toll on my self-esteem when I can't follow slightly complicated dialogue. But anyway, back to memory. Apparently when a group of healthy controls were compared to a group with schizophrenia, the healthy group, unsurprisingly, did better at memory tasks. In fact the health control groups brains showed increased brain activity the tests got harder and decreased activity when it got easier while the people with schizophrenia showed significantly weaker activity across the board.

According to Bowie and Harvey (2006) cognitive symptoms are the central feature of schizophrenia. As well as that these impairments may even present before the emergence of positive symptoms. They also found that there were “moderate deficits in attention, verbal fluency, working memory, and processing speed, with superimposed severe deficits in declarative verbal memory and executive functioning.” What is executive functioning? Well to quote Goodman (2021), “[e]xecutive functioning skills help you get things done. These skills are controlled by an area of the brain called the frontal lobe.” Things executive functioning helps you do is “manage time, pay attention, switch focus, plan and organize, remember details, avoid saying or doing the wrong thing, do things based on your experience, and multitask” (Goodman, 2021).

I’ll cover some ways to deal with executive dysfunction in a later essay.

Most people with schizophrenia will show some kind of cognitive impairment, but the severity will vary across different people. One interesting thing about these cognitive impairments is that they will remain relatively stable over time. There are some different types of impairments that I will summarize.

General Intelligence

I take some offence at the description that all people with schizophrenia have lower IQ’s, I mean there are/were some very smart people with it, like John Nash, or the people Cernis, Vassos, Brebion, McKenna, Murray, David & MacCabe (2015) studied, finding that there is “a high-IQ variant of schizophrenia that is associated with markedly fewer negative symptoms than typical schizophrenia” However the science seems to be overwhelmingly favourable in the direction that people with it have lower IQ’s as a group. On the other hand, I don’t know what kind of people they picked for their healthy control group, because if they were all university grads then it’s not really fair. So take this with a grain of salt. While the tests say that we are as a group, less intelligent than the “general” population it doesn’t mean you specifically are not intelligent. We can be just as successful as anyone else.

Attention

This one is simple, people with schizophrenia have a deficit in their ability to maintain their attention, this occurs even before the first psychotic episode.

Working memory

I have a terrible working memory, bad enough for it to be considered a learning disability. However I’m not alone in this, many people with schizophrenia have some kind of dysfunction in working memory, and apparently specifically verbal working memory. Bowie and Harvey (2006) state that “Working memory can be conceptualized as the ability to maintain and manipulate informative stimuli.” This is in contrast to attention span, with working memory being more cognitively challenging and attention span being more simple. In working memory, “The information must be held online for processing, but does not necessarily transfer to long-term storage, unlike episodic memory” (Bowie and Harvey, 2006). And poor memory can even affect social and interpersonal relationships because of the inability to pay attention to “multiple streams of information” Bowie and Harvey, 2006).

Verbal fluency

People like us sometimes find it rather difficult to speak in a coherent fashion, I remember many instances where I’ve tried to speak only for word salad to spill out of my mouth, and the looks of confusion and worry on other peoples faces is just great, really what I wanted to happen, not embarrassing at all. This inability to speak is due to “poor storage of verbal information as well as inefficient retrieval of information from semantic network” (Bowie and Harvey, 2006). Furthermore, "information that is stored is not always retrieved as a result of this inability to properly access semantic networks” (Bowie and Harvey, 2006).

Verbal and learning memory

A main impairment of schizophrenia is the difficulty of retaining verbal information. From what I understand, recognition memory seems to be able to work well in most cases, but “the pattern of deficits in schizophrenia tends to be reduced rates of learning over multiple exposure trials and poor recall of learned information” (Bowie and Harvey, 2006). So basically it takes a while for us to learn something but once we do we have good recognition memory. Now, recognition memory is the ability to recall something when you’ve seen it before, so I think what happens is if you’re able to process the information into long term memory you’ll be able to recall when you encounter that information again. Maybe I’m totally wrong, I don’t know.

Executive functioning

Now most schizophrenics have difficulties with most of all of the processes involved with executive dysfunction. Bowie and Harvey (2006) say that “schizophrenia patients have trouble adapting to changes in the environment that require different behavioral responses” which is directly due to issues with executive dysfunction. Furthermore, this “inflexibility” is highly associated with what Bowie and Harvey call “occupational difficulties.” This makes sense, when someone can’t plan, practice self-care, engage in social and interpersonal matters or participate in community functions, it’s gonna take a toll on your work life.

Treatment

Atypical antipsychotics seem to be the best treatment for cognitive impairments, though the results are sorta weak, Bowie and Harvey (2006) admit that “they have had very limited, if any, success in producing cognitive improvements. However, the search for new compounds designed specifically for cognitive enhancement in schizophrenia continues to be a promising area for future research.”

However there is also behavioural treatments, but there isn’t a lot of research on this topic. On the other hand, what little research there is, is very promising. “These strategies include training on computerized tasks similar to existing cognitive tests, teaching new learning strategies, training on novel tasks, and/or performing tasks repetitively” (Bowie and Harvey, 2006).

In the end, it seems that a combination of medication and therapy is the key. On the other hand, research by Everding (2005) states that “memory problems in schizophrenia can indeed be reduced and suggests that helping people use the right memorization strategy is critical to success.” The right strategies seem to be to remember more ‘deeply’ or according to Jantzi, Mengi, Serfaty, et al., (2019) to engage in retrieval practice, also Antzi, Mengi, Serfaty, et al.’s (2019) study is “the first to demonstrate that retrieval practice is also superior to restudy in improving later recall in patients with schizophrenia presenting with episodic memory impairment.” This is great news for us because it presents a real way of improving our memories, which apparently most of us need.

REFERENCES

Study finds brain marker of poor memory in schizophrenia patients: possible key to understanding and treating cognitive symptoms of the disease, (2016). Columbia University. Retrieved from https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/study-finds-brain-marker-poor-memory-schizophrenia-patients

Bowie, C. R., & Harvey, P. D. (2006). Cognitive deficits and functional outcome in schizophrenia. Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment, 2(4), 531–536. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2671937/

Černis ,E,. Vassos, E,. Brébion, G,. McKenna, PJ,. Murray, RM,. David, AS,. MacCabe, JH. (2015). Schizophrenia patients with high intelligence: A clinically distinct sub-type of schizophrenia? Eur Psychiatry. (5):628-32. Retrieved from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25752725/

Gerry Everding (2005). Memory study shows brain function in schizophrenia can improve with support, holds promise for cognitive rehabilitation: need cues, memory aids. Washington University. Retrieved from https://source.wustl.edu/2005/07/memory-study-shows-brain-function-in-schizophrenia-can-improve-with-support-holds-promise-for-cognitive-rehabilitation/

Jantzi, C., Mengin, A., Serfaty, D. et al. (2019). Retrieval practice improves memory in patients with schizophrenia: new perspectives for cognitive remediation. BMC Psychiatry 19, 355. Retrieved from https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-019-2341-y#citeas

Goodman, B. (2021). Executive function and executive dysfunction disorders. WebMD. Retrieved from https://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/executive-function

[r0h1rr1m]

rambly inception thoughts p.3

bc it got too big in this post i’m gonna start another one of these, ostensibly about my unified theory on what will or won’t fly in dreamshare, tho i’m almost guaranteed to go a little off-topic

the movie says the tech was originally developed as a training tool for the armed forces, and i don’t want to pretend any real knowledge of the american military but i’ve always thought that there’s no way they were there from the beginning unless the very genesis of the idea was already intertwined w the notion of eventually using it to train soldiers. and the tech is so outlandish in premise and would take so much time (even by accelerated movie standards) to become viable and like, there’s an easier way. in the history of dreamshare that i js made up right now, there are 3 main eras. pre-military, where the scientists figured out how not to send ppl directly to limbo immediately upon putting them under (we’ll get there), military, where a lot of the roles/frameworks were discovered and solidified (i will explain what i mean by this, too), and post-military

the last thing i want to add before diving in is a disclaimer. the precise details of how exactly dreamshare works are almost entirely irrelevant to understanding the movie, and so they weren’t included! which means that the beginnings of this will be based in canon, but as i go on, the logic of my worldbuilding increasingly depends on context i js.... made up. so if u wanna go on, js buy into it and bear with me if u like worldbuilding i hope it’s worth it

so i said that before anyone had the genius idea of using dreamshare to let soldiers kill each other over and over and over, it had to exist. which like, duh, but the reason i bring this up is tied into my thoughts abt what limbo is, why it’s possible to go more than one level down in a dream, and why dying would wake u up. come yell at me for refusing to learn anything about lucid dreaming/sleep science, but i’m gonna say that limbo as dreamsharers kno it is the closest a pasiv will get u to natural dreams. “unconstructed dreamspace,” pure subconscious. and it seems like the movie was treating it as an actual place? that would be the same for every dreamer? and u could access it and alter it like a public minecraft server. here my thoughts diverge a little bit into 2 possible scenarios

scenario A) Minecraft Server Limbo: it is an actual, internally consistent entity and not dependent upon each dreamer. which means that the pasiv technology for accessing it isn’t even about shared or lucid dreaming at all, but accessing another sort of other plane/dimension beyond the physical. think cognitive realm a la cosmere, if that reference means anything to you (if not, i’d love to hear what ur analogy would be). this idea is a lot of fun, but doesn’t rly allow for the levels between waking and limbo, or explain why those have to be created new every time.

scenario B) Actually the Subconscious: the way i think about limbo kind of begins w the ideas in this fic, where limbo is unique to everyone. i’m gonna start here in era 1 of my history of dreamshare, by saying that the first experiments w whatever prototype eventually became the pasiv went v poorly bc scientists were js immediately chucking ppl into limbo. like, that’s the default state of dreams w the pasiv, and all the rest came later. so. in a natural dream, ur brain rationalizes anything, and u get the most vividly detailed backstories and explanations for stuff that makes so much sense until u wake up, which is all also true for limbo. this is the reason limbo is so dangerous, is because ur brain’s working overtime to make u forget u’re dreaming and dying to wake up doesn’t work unless u’re absolutely sure u’re dreaming. so the 1st major breakthrough in dreamshare was being able to remember that u were dreaming when u went under.

the first thing the scientists figured out how to do was hold a setting in their head as they were going under so that they could go there in the dream. at this point, they don’t distinguish between settings out of memory and completely original settings bc it hasn’t occurred to them yet. they just knew that trying to imagine a place instead of diving right under puts limits on the dream that help to keep u from getting dragged under and away by ur own subconscious.

to some ppl, the natural thing to do is access a memory. this does interesting things to the makeup of the dream, because memories of places, depending on the person, are constructed from a bunch of different combinations of sounds, smells, visuals, and indefinable ‘feel’ of the dream. to other ppl, the natural (most interesting) thing to do was invent an imaginary setting--mbe a place from a book/movie/tv show (if u don’t watch them closely u js get star trek all the time. so much star trek) if they’re a little creative, or a brand-new fantasyland if they’re a lot creative. these dreams tend to be mostly visual in makeup, since their inspiration is mostly visual. it takes a lot more effort to add details like sounds and smells bc those aren’t instinctively/automatically part of the way the dreamers are used to experiencing, say, the bridge of the enterprise. It’s harder to make imaginary settings feel real, and this is why it’s comparatively more dangerous to dream from memory. the problem is that the way ur brain interprets and stores select information about a place is more concerned with gathering a coherent narrative of the place than with retaining any objective details. recalling this narrative is a subconscious act/uses ur instinctive mental processes while building a new scenario requires ur higher functions. letting ur subconscious run the show instead of staying consciously in charge urself runs the risk of lapsing into natural-dreaming confusion and falling into limbo.

this is the early days of the technology, where scientists didn’t have the expertise to make dreams stable, and the somnacin formula was still crude enough that u could drop from a structured dream into limbo pretty easily, no sedation required. dying in a dream, for example, had about a 50/50 chance of waking u up or sending u to limbo. the brain has no frame of reference for how to experience dying, so it’s completely disruptive to the plot of the dream--it has to end. so depending on how much the subconscious--as opposed to active cognition--was in charge of the dream, either u wake up or ur subconscious takes over completely to smooth over the confusion and u’re lost in limbo. dying wasn’t the only thing disruptive enough to destabilize a dream in those days either, tho. shock--ranging from injury to just surprise at something bizarre--and high emotion could also do it. this happened a lot bc those early dreams were still p close to natural dreams and rly weird shit happened all the time.

as somnacin got more sophisticated, it got better at suppressing the rampant subconscious and putting the rational mind in charge. constructed dreams left some of the psychedelic weirdness behind and started playing by logical rules, but that was still the given value of ‘logical’ that meant whatever the dreamers understood to be true, regardless of how that matched up w real-world physics. also, dying became the only thing disruptive enough to throw u out of a dream, because the somnacin, by reassigning the lion’s share of the mental processing work to the slower, more effortful systems of reasoning, dampened emotional responses a little. it forced the mind to extrapolate how the situation--usually an injury or smth--would play out instead of js panicking and slamming the eject button. the last major effect of the new somnacin was that waking up was now almost the guaranteed effect of dying, and u only went into limbo if waking up wasn’t an option. almost guaranteed, bc it wasn’t perfect yet, and how could it ever be when it comes to messing around w brain chemistry. but almost was enough for the military and they offered funding and soldiers as test subjects in return for use of the technology as a training tool.

this is the end of era 1! and the post is getting big enough and it’s been in my drafts long enough that i want to end this here. i’ll finish later, probably by reblogging this instead of making a new p.4 post, so check the notes!

[zoxprotraining]

Problems with Technology and Your Brain

S: That’s a double-edged sword, don’t you think? In our, in our realities today, we all need technology in order to do what we need to do. And as long as we use them as tools to accomplish what it is that we need to accomplish, especially if you use it for your work, then that the right thing to do.

On the other side, there’s so much that is going on today where people are not able to live without their mobile phones. People are walking out in the street and getting run over because they’re too busy absorbed into their phones. There are all different sorts of things that people are doing that just aren’t smart with technology. And whenever you

take a look at how much time people spend on technology compared to actually living in the world that they’ve created, you find that they are coming under deficit.

This phenomenon has been mentioned in the book “Digital Dementia”, and it talks about what you lose after using the technology-based devices, you start to lose your cognitive

abilities to the point where you could be having the same type of brain activity as somebody that has had a head injury or brain injury.

I take breaks away from the technology so that I can see pretty sunsets and many other wonderful things. I can experience the world in the fullness that it really is, and I recommend that you spend some time smelling the roses. See what it is that you have built for yourself.

N: So you are saying it’s okay for some technology, but not completely all the time living desktop technology.

S: Let’s go back to the fact that you are a school teacher. If you are a school teacher, and you’re holding class, and the people in your classroom are getting text on their

phones and everything else happening on their phones are playing with their apps. What are they learning? Are they learning what you’re teaching? No. So what they’re doing is they’re literally bypassing you for their own entertainment.

That’s destructive because they are there to do their job and that’s to learn. We are missing out. It becomes clear that we don’t see the obvious we should see. Consider the television. Television has been taken over into a digital platform. We have been told it is to give us better programming. We get much more than that.

Sure, digital TV gives you big screens with all the great programming on it, and you can see a lot more of whatever the programming is. That’s great. But in reality, what the digital community does is, while you’re watching these great things on your digital TV, you’re being fed all of this extra information, programming you to do certain things.

Perhaps those things are not in your best interest. This is how you are controlled.

So when you watch TV, there is no free ride out there. They’re going to get their money’s worth it one way or another. That’s how the TV works and works you over.

You are being programmed underneath whatever you’re watching; simply because it’s a digital format, and they can do it.

About those iPads for Students – Apple into Meltdown

A couple of years ago, here in Australia… All of the private schools used to require students to get the new version iPad each year so that they could have their syllabus and their assignments delivered on their iPad. So every year, they would have to get a new iPad, and the parents had to pan out for those new iPads.

Suddenly, a number of the schools were no longer requiring the children to get the new iPads. Apple went into meltdown over this, because they thought had a sustained, guaranteed market for all these iPad sales that they can no longer count on. The market was flush with new iPads. Apple never thought that the demand would run dry.

To further amplify Apple’s frustration, there were students refusing to use any sort of technology, and reverting to ‘reading a book, where you could turn pages. They were

choosing to go back to the old ways of doing things to get their head out of the iPad, and it makes their brain work better. It makes them have the ability to think and use

their cognitive ability. We want to restore this because this is what makes us great.

N: Definitely. Okay, so this is definitely what makes us great. So let's talk a little bit about, you know, why technology hurts? What kind of symptoms do you see, for people

that overuse technology too much.

S: One of my favorite symptoms that I like to point out, is people that do an excessive amount of selfies. The person might be just really photogenic and loves to see pictures

of themselves, maybe they’re narcissistic, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. But whenever you have people, no matter where they go, no matter what they’re doing, they’re constantly taking selfies.

If you cross-correlate their ability to have memory, their memory is very, very poor. Because they’re not exercising their memory. Because I use my photographic memory

and I use my memory very well. I can remember things from my childhood, I can remember things from yesterday, I can remember them in high detail. The same thing

with you. You can remember things in high detail for yourself, simply because you are using your brain to do so. You can test people that take a lot of selfies, to find that they have poor memory.

Normally, if you’re involved in a conversation, and somebody says, “What did I just say?” Typically you’ll be able to pull that up within two to three minutes. You have

a normal automatic recall. If you can remember a conversation that you had with somebody a week ago or two weeks ago or a year ago? Well, that’s pretty important.

If you look at how the established governments look at you today, they count on you forgetting. If you forget what has happened before, you’re easily manipulated into how they want you to think today. This becomes a big thing. Does that ring a bell with you?

N: Completely? Okay, I just, I like to know if I’m making sense. What other things like too many selfies, would be red flags?

S: Here is a good one. It used to be whenever you were being terminated from a job,you would go in, you’d see the boss and the boss would say, hey, Jim, you no longer have a job here. We’re making you’re redundant. Today, you get a text.

What about relationships? Some people never discuss things face to face with people that count to them. They’re always discussing things through texts these days. While it’s easy whenever you’re texting back and forth, but you’re easily misunderstood because you cannot hear or see what you, the other person, are thinking while you’re getting texts back and forth. So quite often, you find that relationships come and go through text. And that’s not the right way to do things.

Regarding good communications, my rule of thumb is, if it’s important enough, you will have a conversation, you will have a discussion. This is something that is lost today.

Through my mentoring, all of my mentoring takes place through discussion. I don’t have automated mentoring, because whenever people come to me, they come to me for quality. Not some pre-recorded jargon that they have to fall into. I do things a little bit differently from other people in a similar position. I specifically enjoy the quality that I am able to deliver. Neil, when it comes to you and your tutoring, whenever you were doing a lot of heavy tutoring, how did you deliver it? Did you do it in person? What were your results like? Much better than online?

N: In-person is the best way to get results.

S: Essentially, it comes down to this. We have phones, iPads, Notepads, digital TV, and more going on. We have all these different things that need to be moderated from overexposure. We really need physical stimulation. So if you’re in front of the computer for an hour to get up and walk around, This is basic to keep your blood system going.

You want to have your blood pumping through your system a little bit. So get away from the computer, then come back to it and when you start again, you’ll feel much better.

N: Agreed!

S: Okay. Now, this is the Photographic Memory Podcast. And photographic memory stimulates people to have better brain function overall. This is also the way that you can recover yourself from all of the outside manipulations. You can use this to gain your cognitive skills back.

Whenever you’re dealing with all these devices, including the computer, you’ll start to develop, and probably have already developed a certain level of tunnel vision. In ZOX Pro Training, we have the eye chart which allows you to expand your awareness and perception, and thus, you break through the tunnel vision that you have incurred. It is rejuvenating your mind.

One of the key things here is concentration. Now, do you feel that concentration techniques are properly taught in school? No, not at all. Not at all. Well, I give people a free concentration technique that was invented by Albert Einstein. All they have to do is go to ZOXpro.com and sign up for it. They get the free technique that they can use forever to enhance their concentration. And things like attention to detail become second nature instead of something that is not what they need to be doing. The level of attention that people have today is very, very poor. I aim to elevate that to a whole new level. But there’s a little work involved. It’s okay. You become better.

Great Things Happen Here!

Get your FREE Concentration technique at ZOXpro.com now.

[mr-entj]

Brain-Based Descriptions of the 8 Jungian “Types”

A piece my former professor published on MBTI, cognitive functions, and his study I participated in 10 years ago.

____________________

By Dario Nardi

This is based on the blue “Brain Basics” foldout by Radiance House. (Www.RadianceHouse.com)

In his seminal work, Psychological Types, Dr. C.G. Jung described 2 attitudes (Extraverting and Introverting) and 4 “mental functions”: Sensing, Intuiting, Thinking, and Feeling. Together, they give what he called 8 “Types”. Today, we can use more appropriate terms like functional patterns or cognitive processes. Notice the terms are verbs. His is a process model, not a trait model. Since then, people have offered many variant definitions and created assessments, most of which are peculiar to the creator, speculative, and not research based. In my own work since 2006, I have correlated the Jungian processes to biases and patterns in neocortical (brain) activity using EEG technology. Subjects complete a 1-hour protocol of 20 diverse tasks (meditating, math, memory, etc) while monitored by EEG. And of course, we do our best to confirm their best-fit personality profile using common definitions. Here is an overview of the neocortex and definitions of the 8 cognitive processes.

BRAIN BASICS

Your brain consists of many small modules linked in networks. Each module is a neural circuit that helps you do a task. Some tasks are concrete, such as recognizing faces, hearing voice tone, and moving a hand. Other tasks are abstract, such as evaluating ethics, adjusting to others’ feedback, and mentally rehearsing a future action. There are easily five-dozen modules just in the neocortex, which is the brain’s outermost, thick layer and seat of consciousness. The big figure below is a bird’s eye view of the neocortex. It highlights key modules. We each prefer some modules over others. We differ by the tasks we enjoy and how well we do them. You might take a moment to explore the big figure to identify aspects of yourself.

We enjoy different competencies. For each of us, modules activate with a different degree of stimulus, competence, motivation, and energy level. If we look at the average brain activity of two people over an hour, you may see that their favorite modules are similar, near opposites, or somewhere in between! When different, those people’s personality profile, behaviors, and self-experience differ greatly too. In fact, we can dig deeper to look at underlying brain networks (using computer-aided analysis of EEG data), and confirm the biases are longterm rather than a result of just a 1-hour protocol.

In addition to favorite brain regions and networks, there are whole-brain patterns. For example, the brain can get into a state of “flow” where all modules are in synch. Or it might show  a chaotic brainstorm. There are more patterns, and we human beings are pretty diverse. Situations may prompt everyone’s brain differently. Take a moment to reflect, when do you get into your “zone”? What is it like when you are at your most creative and productive?

To meet our needs, the brain’s elements work in concert. As an analogy, if a module is a musical instrument, then the brain is a symphony orchestra that affords complex performances. Research suggests eight ways the brain (specifically, the neocortex) works in concert. These eight are highly effective and sustainable, though we necessarily come to rely on some more than others. You will find descriptions of these 8 below.

FOUR EXECUTIVE STYLES

Before we get into details about all 8 cognitive processes, let’s break things down more simply into 4 executive styles. 

Two Processing Circuits: To start, there are 2 circuits in the brain to process incoming stimuli. One circuit is faster. It sends sensory data directly to the front of the brain, our executive centers, to quickly act on the data. This is a more extroverted style. A second circuit is slower. It sends sensory data to the back of the brain, to link with memory and information processing centers, to compare, contemplate, and collate the data before moving it on to the executives. This is a more introverted style. There are other ways extroverts and introverts different, such as high versus low gain: Given a certain environment, an extrovert may easily find it too quiet and want to “dial up” the stimuli, whereas an introvert may easily find it too noisy and want to “dial down” the stimuli. Suffice to say, everyone uses both fast and slow circuits, and Jung himself described each person has having 2 functions in awareness, one for extroverting and a second for introverting, to make a well-rounded adult.

Two Executive Centers: We have 2 main executive centers: a “goal-focused” left pre-frontal cortex and an “open-ended” right pre-frontal cortex. Different activities light up these regions. For example, when you make a decision, craft an explanation, or focus to shut out distractions, the left goal-focused executive gets active. Or, when you engage in brainstorming, monitor a process, or reflect on yourself, the right open-ended executive gets active. Very nicely, these two executives correlate well to Jung’s functions. Jung described Thinking and Feeling as “rational” or “judging” functions, which definitionally fit well with our left goal-focused executive. And Jung described Sensing and Intuiting (aka “iNtuiting”) as “a-rational” or “perceiving” functions that definitionally fit well with our right open-ended executive. In his framework, Jung viewed balanced adults as having both kinds of functions, just as all people use both their left and right pre-frontal cortex, and their left and right hands, but invariably with some bias for one over the other.

Now we can bring together Extraverting-Introverting and Left-Right pre-frontal bias to get 4 executive styles:

Expedite Decision-making: Proactively meet goals. Often look sure and confident. Organize and fix to get positive results soon. (More goal-focused, more extraverting.)

Refine Decision-making: Clarify what’s universal, true or worthwhile. Often look quietly receptive. Trust their own judgments. (More goal-focused, more introverting.)

Energize the Process: Seek out stimuli. Often look random, emergent, and enthusiastic. Attend to the here and now. (More open-ended, more extraverting.)

Monitor the Process: Reflect on data and perceptions. Often look focused and preoccupied. Attend to reference points. (More open-ended, more introverting.)

You might take a moment to consider which style is more like you, and more like a spouse, colleague, or boss. Remember these are about habitual biases, not boxes, so feel free RANK the styles 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th rather than pick one.

EIGHT COGNITIVE PROCESSES

We can get more detailed. People’s brains tend to differ in two more ways: people versus thing preference, and abstract versus concrete preference. These are not absolute, simply biases.

For example, there is a module that aids us in identifying stuff in our environment. Some people invest more in identifying lots of people’s faces and emotional expressions, whereas other people invest more in identifying makes and models of cars, computers, or other objects. Of course, everyone does both. But like handedness, where we use both hands, there is bias and have a preferred hand that plays a lead role in many activities like writing.

For as a second example, there is a module that is home to lots of “mirror neurons”. This module tends to get active when we do something concrete like observe and mimic a person’s actions, perhaps to learn a skill. It also can get active when we do get abstract and imagine if we were another creature in a galaxy far far away. Everyone can do both, but we have biases that are likely do due a combination of genetic tendency and habits from culture and physical environment.

There are many other examples. We don’t need to go into them here. Suffice to say, there is evidence to support the kinds of variations and biases that Jung observed among people. 

Without further ado, let’s look at the 8 processes. As you explore, keep in mind you likely have preferred one or two from an early age, and may now be reasonably proficient with as many as 5 or 6 as an adult, at least enough to keep up in society, in relationships, and on the job. I have numbered the processes for convenient reference. They do not actually come in any particular order! Each comes with a name like “Active Adapting” and a broad cognitive process such as “Immersing in the present context”. Finally, each comes with a code such as “Se” (meaning extroverted Sensing) that links to Jung’s framework in Psychological Types.

1. Active Adapting (“Se”): Immerse in the present context.

Act quickly and smoothly to handle whatever comes up in the moment. Excited by motion, action, and nature. Adept at physical multitasking with a video game-like mind primed for action. Often in touch with body sensations. Trust your senses and gut instincts. Bored when sitting with a mental/rote task. Good memory for relevant details. Tend to be relaxed, varying things a little and scanning the environment, until an urgent situation or exciting option pops up. Then you quickly get “in the zone” and use your whole mind to handle whatever is happening. Tend to test limits and take risks for big rewards. May be impatient to finish.

2. Cautious Protecting (“Si”): Stabilize with a predictable standard.

Review and practice to specialize and meet group needs. Constant practice “burns in” how-to knowledge and helps build your storehouse. Specialization helps you reliably fill roles and tasks. Improve when following a role-model or example. Easily track where you are in a task. Often review the past and can relive events as if you are there again. Carefully compare a situation to the customary ways you’ve come to rely. In touch with body sensations. Strong memory for kinship and details. Rely on repetition. Check what’s familiar, comforting, and useful. Tend to stabilize a situation and invest for future security. May over-rely on authority for guidance.

3. Timely Building (“Te”): Measure and construct for progress.

Make decisions objectively based on measures and the evidence before you. Focus on word content, figures, clock units, and visual data. Find that “facts speak for themselves”. Tend to check whether things are functioning properly. Can usually provide convincing, decisive explanations. Value time, and highly efficient at managing resources. Tend to utilize mental resources only when extra thinking is truly demanded. Otherwise, use what’s at hand for a “good enough” result that works. Easily compartmentalize problems. Like to apply procedures to control events and achieve goals. May display high confidence even when wrong.

4. Skillful Sleuthing (“Ti”): Gain leverage using a framework.

Study a situation from different angles and fit it to a theory, framework, or principle. This often involves reasoning multiple ways to objectively and accurately analyze problems. Rely on complex/subtle logical reasoning. Adept at deductive thinking, defining and categorizing, weighing odds and risks, and/or naming and navigating. Notice points to apply leverage and subtle influence. Value consistency of thought. Can shut out the senses and “go deep” to think, and separate body from mind to become objective when arguing or analyzing. Tend to backtrack to clarify thoughts and withhold deciding in favor of thorough examination. May quickly stop listening.

5. Friendly Hosting (“Fe”): Nurture trust in giving relationships.

Evaluate and communicate values to build trust and enhance relationships. Like to promote social / interpersonal cohesion. Attend keenly to how others judge you. Quickly adjust your behavior for social harmony. Often rely on a favorite way to reason, with an emphasis on words. Prefer to stay positive, supportive, and optimistic. Empathically respond to others’ needs and feelings, and may take on others’ needs as your own. Need respect and trust. Easily embarrassed. Like using adjectives to convey values. Enjoy hosting. May hold back the true degree of your emotional response about morals/ethics, regarding talk as more effective. May try too hard to please.

6. Quiet Crusading (“Fi”): Stay true to who you really are.

Listen with your whole self to locate and support what’s important. Often evaluate importance along a spectrum from love/like to dislike/hate. Patient and good at listening for identity, values, and what resonates, though may tune out when “done” listening. Value loyalty and belief in oneself and others. Attentive and curious for what is not said. Focus on word choice, voice tone, and facial expressions to detect intent. Check with your conscience before acting. Choose behavior congruent with what’s important, your personal identity, and beliefs. Hard to embarrass. Can respond strongly to specific, high-value words or false data. May not utilize feedback.

7. Excited Brainstorming ("Ne"): Explore the emerging patterns.

Perceive and play with ideas and relationships. Wonder about patterns of interaction across various situations. Keep up a high-energy mode that helps you notice and engage potential possibilities. Think analogically: Stimuli are springboards to generate inferences, analogies, metaphors, jokes, and more new ideas. Easily guess details. Adept at “what if?” scenarios, mirroring others, and even role-playing. Can shift a situation’s dynamics and trust what emerges. Mental activity tends to feel chaotic, with many highs and lows at once, like an ever-changing “Christmas tree” of flashing lights. Often entertain multiple meanings at once. May find it hard to stay on-task.

8. Keen Foreseeing (Ni): Transform with a meta-perspective.

Withdraw from the world and tap your whole mind to receive an insight. Can enter a brief trance to respond to a challenge, foresee the future, or answer a philosophical issue. Avoid specializing and rely instead on timely “ah-ha” moments or a holistic “zen state” to tackle novel tasks, which may look like creative expertise. Manage your own mental processes and stay aware of where you are in an open-ended task. May use an action or symbol to focus. Sensitive to the unknown. Ruminate on ways to improve. Look for synergy. Might try out a realization to transform yourself or how you think. May over-rely on the unconscious.

Further Exploration

You can read more in the following references: “Neuroscience of Personality: Brain-Savvy Insights for All Types of People”, “Our Brains in Color”, and “8 Keys to Self-Leadership”. Or if you prefer a free online 1-hour video, you can find it here:

https://vimeo.com/user40810588/review/143815719/c69a1060ef

Here is an assessment built around the Jungian functions, validated on 3000 people:

http://www.keys2cognition.com/explore.htm

You can find a complete list of references to my neuroscience of personality work here:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/dario-nardi/neuroscience-of-personality-resources/10155730683011216/

[peter-x-harley-cat]

15 Things Harley Learned About Peter Paker

YES, still thirty-five minutes left. (I really liked writing this and I want to expand on it, but let’s see what y’all think.)

WC: 1556

Summary: There’s a new kid in Rose Hill and Harley tries to learn all he can about him.

Prompt: Rose Hill, Tennessee

There was a new kid in Rose Hill. 

Now, normally Harley didn’t get caught up in the normal gossip that everyone in this small town was so inclined to, but even he couldn’t help but be intrigued. Two weeks before the second semester started, he learned three things about the new kid. 

1:   He came from New York City. 

2:   He was living with his aunt. 

3:   He was Harley’s age. 

No matter how much he dug around and bribed and persuaded, that’s all he could get about him. 

A week before the semester started, though, he learned three more things.

4:   He was really cute. 

5:   He was really smart. 

6:   He was (suspected to be) bisexual. 

Number four was discovered when he walked into the garage Harley worked at and Harley lost all motor skills. 

Number five was learned when Harley talked to while his boss was talking to his aunt. 

Number five was discovered when Harley worked on the car and found the pride flag. 

***

Harley had been fixing the car in record time when he heard a bang come from somewhere in the shop. He slid out from under the vehicle to see a boy with light brown hair and wide hazel eyes. He was nearly submerged in the hoodie he was wearing and he had an embarrassed look on his face. Harley gaped at him.

“Uh, sorry?”, the boy offered, showing a small smile. Harley had to physically shake himself to get a response.

“Um, no problem”, he assured, standing up.”What can I help you with?”

“Oh, my aunt is already talking to the mechanic, I was just looking around”, the boy said.

Harley raised an eyebrow. “You shouldn’t go walking around in here. Lots of dangerous equipment.”

The boy smirked at him. “Brake lathes and strut compressors are nothing I haven’t handled before. Talk to me when you’re handling Digoxin and Tabon in large quantities.”

“Ok, first of all, you can’t compare chemicals to machinery”, Harled argued. “Second of all, why would a high schooler be handling those chemicals?”

The boy just shrugged. “I had a pretty good internship back in New York.”

“Shame you had to leave it, then”, Harley said and immediately regretted it when the boy’s grin dipped into a frown. He was trying to find a way to fix it when his phone buzzed.

“I have to go”, the boy said, Harley probably imagining the disappointment in his voice. He looked up at Harley and smiled and Harley momentarily forgot everything. “See you around.”

Harley waved awkwardly as he left before his boss called him to bring the car into the shop. As he was pulling it in, he noticed a bisexual flag sticker on the dash. Huh.

***

The first day back to school, two more things were added to Harley’s ever-growing list of facts. 

7:    His name was Peter Parker. 

8:   He stands up for others. 

Number seven occurred when he walked into Harley’s first period, effectively knocking Harley’s routine off-kilter. 

Number eight happened at the end of the school day when he and a bunch of guys encountered them in the courtyard.

***

“Class, I’d like to introduce you to Peter Parker.”

Harley’s head shot up at that and, yep, it was the cute guy from a week ago. The boy--Peter--turned to face the class, what seemed to be his usual smile on his face. He looked all glowy and half the girls in the class were looking at him like they wanted to kiss him senseless. The idea made Harley feel weird.

Harley seemed to have missed the part where Peter was introducing himself because suddenly the brunette was sitting at the desk next to him and flashing him a smile. Harley had a hard time focusing on History after that.

He found that almost all his classes were with Peter, seeing as they were both already at least college level. And the boy sat next to Harley in every single one, not that Harley minded. He was walking out of the school when Peter ran up to him. 

“So, you got anything planned for the robotics project?”, he asked. Harley smiled at him from the side of his eye and was about to answer when he was stopped in his tracks. Literally.

He looked up from the hand on his chest to see the captain of the baseball team and a few of his yes-men standing in front of him.

“Careful around Keener, Parker”, the captain said, still looking at Harley. “His queerness might rub off on you.”

Harley rolled his eyes and was about to make a sarcastic comment that would undoubtedly get a fist swung in his direction, but Peter spoke up first.

“Thanks, but I’m afraid your warning came too late”, He said, stepping slightly in front of Harley and giving the group a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I started identifying as bisexual in seventh grade.”

The boys looked disgusted and backed up a bit. They looked like they were about to insult them, so Harley cut them off.

“Look, I’m sure whatever homophobic thing you’re going to say is very enlightening and original, but we have a robotics project to ace”, with that, he grabbed Peter’s hand and started pulling him toward his house. 

***

The next five things Harley learned about Peter came over the weeks that they spent together.

9:   He had two best friends named Ned and MJ.

10:  He preferred Star Wars to Star Trek.

11:   Before moving to Rose Hill, he had never left Brooklyn.

12:   He planned on going to NYU for college.

           In turn, Harley told Peter a lot about himself. He told him about his sister Diana, how he had started working at the machine shop, how he had been outed in sixth grade, and how he planned on going to MIT. They spent most of their waking hours together, so many that people started to think they were dating.

“Why don’t we?”, Peter had muttered when Harley had commented on it. Harley had gaped at him.

“What?”

Peter had flushed deeply and ran off, saying something about talking to a teacher. Harley had felt slightly disappointed as he ran away, but he forgot about the interaction when he had to take a test next period. They didn’t talk about it. 

They talked about everything else, though, which led to his thirteenth thing on his list:

13:   Peter’s hands were warm.

***

The two boys had been sitting on the roof of Harley’s shed. They had been watching the stars since Peter had off-handily commented that he had never been stargazing without immense amounts of light pollution. Harley had been determined to rectify that. They had been laying there in silence for a while when Peter spoke up.

“What happened to your dad?”

Harley sucked in a breath before sighing it all out. “He left. When I was seven.”

“I’m sorry”, he said. Harley listened for the undertone of pity, but it never came.

“What happened to your parents?”, Harley eventually got up the courage to ask.

Peter was quiet for a while and Harley was afraid he had overstepped when he said, “They died. Car accident, about a year ago.”

“I’m sorry”, Harley repeated softly. Peter didn’t say anything, but he felt a hand touch his. Harley grabbed it and Peter slowly intertwined their fingers. 

They laid there until the sun started to rise, hands intertwined and hearts beating in sync.

***

It was almost the end of the school year by the time Harley learned his two final things. They had spent five months together, even spending spring break working in Harley’s shed. They had just gotten done with state testing and they were at Peter’s Aunt’s house. When they got to his room, Peter promptly fell into his bed and screamed into the pillow. Harley could understand.

Harley threw his bag down and jumped into the bed beside him, half landing on the other boy.

“Wanna watch Star Wars?”, Harley asked, staring up at the ceiling. It was almost summer and the heat would make it hard to spend hours in his shed or the repair shop. He was drinking in all the air-conditioned air he could.    

Peter shook his head before turning toward Harley. Harley let his head fall to the side and the two just watched each other. 

“Hey, Harley?”, Peter whispered. 

“Hmm?”

“Will you kiss me?”

Harley didn’t know if it was the heat shutting down his cognitive function, the state testing turning his brain to mush or the five months they had been dancing around each other, but he wasn’t surprised by the question. Instead of answering, though, he just leaned in and pressed his lips to Peter’s.

Harley had imagined kissing Peter countless of times, but this was nothing like that. He’d thought of fireworks and shooting stars, but that wasn’t them. It was the feeling you got when a broken car rumbled back to life, of talking all through the night, of watching the sunrise because they were both working instead of sleeping. It was two broken pieces coming together to form a complete whole.

The two things Harley learned about Peter that day was as follows:

14:   He was Harley’s soulmate.   

15:   He was a really good kisser

[queenofallwitches]

Venus trine MC, my MC lies in Saturn and Saturn is in 9th house Aquarius.

Saturn Return, and my Soul Journey into 12th house Sun conjunct Mercury (in Aries) bound by the 12th house Shadow Secrets. Jupiter is Leo and Mars is softened by my conjunct cancer moon, both in my 3rd house. The kicker is Chiron simultaneously sitting over in my wounded goddess divine feminine Luna moon compelling me to build a home, a base and a clan of like minded souls. cancer and Chiron sit together and Chiron is akin to the wounded healer. I have a complex but alchemical natal make up and its been 6 years of accepting the square and oppositions in difficult places to come to terms to work with my natal astrology in a way I can become creatively involved in.

23/3/20 initiated the formal induction of my Saturn return as saturn transited to Aquarius for the first time since 92/93.

It’s a taste of the full saturnine swing coming up after the December 21st astrology grand conjunction. Saturn will be in Aquarius up to July. before moving briefly back before that grand Conjunction with Pluto/Jupiter later in 21/12/2020. (activity period from 14 April 2020 until mid-July 2020) Venus trine MC

Yeah on a tangent but one day I will be thankful this was forged. I am will using my moonchild manifesto to track the astrology and transits for my own wounded healer journey. I don’t have the consistency of a computer to hoard things as I did before the big brother fascism came full formed this year and cannot freely trust anything can be stored. I will be putting things online purely to keep a record of what may soon be lost, unable to be accessed.

Plus I’m burning my journals after I take the photos of them and upload them for a ritualistic purpose.

It’s part of this creative alchemy and trauma soul retrival quest I’ve found myself on. I note this as my Saturn is returning home for my FIRST Saturn return. I have been formally initiated for the infamous, enigmatic Saturn return that marks the passage from “adolescence into adulthood”. (Funnily last time I heard a university lecture on neuroscience, the latest research noted recent findings that the brain of a fully, functional prefrontal cortex in adult brains don’t become fully formed until age 28-30. This first sparked excitement and also uncertainty about the privilege cast to the “teenage myth”. As kids brains are still developing when things like getting a driving cars, choosing a life career, alcohol privilege and making other major life changes at those critical developmental stages are still as risky when a 12-16 year old does it. So now psychology and neuroscience knows that the adult higher order thinking that marks the turn of a mature and civil adult come in the late 20s. Not the teens. So until after 25 a brain cannot be fully assessing its choices due to underdeveloped prefrontal higher order thought processes This was fascinating in the social science side of things where we look into social constructs of society and how teenager was a made up archetype for a post war period. I remember being in my early 20s at the time and my life was no longer a race as it had been made to be prior.the schools of the latest brain neuroscience confirm my impulsive nature could change before age 30. I was hopeful. Maybe I wasn’t a gifted genius who was highly sensitive and afflicted with the contrasting “ADHD or Attention Deficit Primaily Inattentive” which could only be “treated” (as far as I had experienced), via heavy duty schedule 8 drugs. The kind of medication that calmed me down but other people wound beg me to have. Meaning in the past people in my life around me were constantly trying to turn into their party high by taking advantage of my disdain for psychostimulants. But my love and need for money back in that time. Fuck fake friends I say. Taking advantage or dysregulated prefrontal cortex with or without all my labels was still, after all, a risky business, when it comes to juggling psychopharmacology and a myriad of labels that resulted in other medicines given to me that may or may not be accurate. No brain scan or confirmation has been given that my brain is anything aside from ADHD. So my academic quest in childhood was confounded due to this.I learnt a lot about my childhood and growing up with a long list of multiple mental illness diagnosis, and the medical pharmacology given to me for those things; was beyond measurable.

But my neurochemistry was tweaked ineffably by both psychiatric pills pushed on me from age 9 and for things I may not even need. The end result of what my social science teacher termed “social constructs akin to mental illness medical model DSM labels”. My self pursuit of understanding my own brain was a hard thing to understand in the sense that prior to hearing about this from the side of academic and professional training, I had spend 12 years in expensive and possibly more damaging than beneficial treatment for “mental illnesses”. My life was a focal point for the goal I set to help women with the “borderline stigma” after I had fixed my own borderline.

Clinical psychologist was my end game until I found the trauma truth sweeping me into a existential soul contusion merged with trauma after trauma therapy went into flooding memory. Academic research and the psychology and counseling journals I spent my spare time fine combing. For answers. For my why and how. By the time I found any sense of this it became a painful limbo of dancing with my demons, coping destructively and limbo between the underworld and the reality I found my body and mind entwined in.

Now it’s even more synonymous to my own Saturn return journey and how the Saturn return is the mark of adulthood. This can be a speculative musing I make now on celestial astrology and how it aligns to our inner psychological makeup. (The Jupiter return is age 12, puberty ; and the other inner planets all mark significant development milestones in growing up. I’ll go into that more in later blogs).

Astrology is a map of the soul, psychology makeup, can be so deep too. How does it measure up to statistics? Sun sign horoscope is nothing versus the natal chart and how it corresponds to planetary magick and Kabbalah. I have been seperate in my magick and academic work but it was always my will to merge these at one stage I could research it. But now the sands of time are shifting, and Aquarius Saturn is calling for novel innovation I never could convey due to academic being seperate as spiritual, magickal practice is something I was careful to keep silence on when working with clients, peers and mentors, forget telling my psychologists or doctors who wound dismiss any test as “bipolar mania”. I remember once I read “the difference between the mystic and the mad man is the mystic knows who NOT TO TELL.

Now it’s my time to informally but officially start logging my journey into my own healing, soul mapping, I call it cognitive alchemy, gnostic psychology, soul psychology, metagnosis.. I’ve had many a name for the potential inspiration from my true will calling. But I can now forget about the archaic bonds from the academic world I was schooled to excel in by confirming. I am also a high iq gifted kid and having been labelled gifted but “adhd” simultaneously while having traumatic events left right and center is a mix of confusion for me. Teachers classed adhd as a learning disability, my in attention confused with inability to listen to simple tasks. This meant my mind never adapted to that school conditioning but my education was still installed due to the private school system somehow making my alters succeed without effort. Most of my spare time as a kid that wasn’t dissociative was reading books. By me processing my own literature in my spare time, I knew so much random stuff but hid it in order to seem dumb bc that was accepted. But in private in encyclopaedias and non fictional library quests I’d devour books. for my 10 maximum haul of borrowing books. This was a routine my mum and I went to do each week but my reading speed was beyond anything known, as I read and synthesised up to 10 books mostly in one day, from age 6 onwards.

I also stole books and hid my reading habits at school due to a deep shame of not being liked due to reading being for losers without friends, as girls bullied me over my gifted weird quirks. I was pretty but saw my self as ugly for trauma will deprive the mind of seeing it’s own true perception. I was never understood how my looks became a thing used against me by girls who were jealous until I learnt about this myself. I recently accepted and remembered this all after 3 years of integrated healing. I was doing this all on my own. the spiritual and metaphysical work is my primary tool that was keeping me here. Actually saving my suicide program from self destruct after the March 2017 incident I shall not talk about now. But I’m here now, alive, kicking, Saturn here to shove my shadow to consciousness without prompt and this change can bring me into a 30 year blueprint of setting things right.

Now in order to build a solid and functional framework and foundational life. I have a litany of secrets I need to get off my chest. I think to share my growth, my thoughts and my experiences for my own liberation of my deep dark secrets finally free to be released into the public domain.

I have no choice but to share this.

I do this co consciously as a part of my integrative process.

Maybe One day it might be a guide for someone who was as alone as I feel doing all of this self work without support. Maybe it will fade into the cyber void forever. Maybe I’ll use this as a tool to help clients in the future. Whatever this is means nothing but what the process of alchemy can do to forge my liberation from soul loss and traumatic dissociative trauma.

As a therapist I always wanted to avoid what I went through growing up. Now more so. I never want another lost dissociative mental health client who was also stuck between professional and academic pursuits being my “purpose” and having to sacrifice career and my study and research to sit in my shadow to see the shit.

In order to break the shit therapist mould I list journey through my own shit first. This meant I needed to be away from all therapy both as a client and practitioner and student for awhile. I’ve been off since the end of 2017 and now it’s clear it was neeed, how do I heal without healing my own shit first? Am I not the finest example of how bad therapists can get away with their bullshit and be paid for it but never really know who they are. I’m never doing that. I never was about that. So due to therapeutic negligence. I am finding my gift was the lesson. Those a shitty therapist who are a dime a dozen were the anti mentors I saw too often: but my purpose was to be a therapist. But a therapist who did things the way I never had.

Never did I want another to go into the heavy weight of shame from the secrets of sexual wounds, childhood schemas, mixed up and messed up conditioning made to seem functional to outsiders. But that was all alters. Now it was a spiritual journey as magick and my mystical path entwines to save my soul. The self awakening, trauma revelations, merging with the dark night of soul, and the shadow work. Plus everything else coming out is not a journey I can say is or was at all easy, I suffer more now as a co conscious intergrating my trauma. I feel it all without the dissociative switch to save me from witnessing all the shit. Now I see my entire life and it’s fucked up raw and grim reality and I have to do something because I survived it this far? Again I never suicided or stopped into self destruction when I knew my own inner child’s wounds were no longer blacked out but burning bright longing for love. Symptoms for survival and the survival was part of the dissociative switching making my outside self seem so functional, but never seen. It’s not something they needed to drug me for, but it’s another thing I have to address now. My symptoms they drugged with medications that were mind altering and powerful for anyone let alone a developing child’s brain, were suppressed by many meds. Who knows where that ends and the damage via trauma and other things begin? It’s a mess of some thing I was never aware of but always trying to silence due to the need for people to accept me. But that was many mes all living a life that appeased many people, but not for me. Here we are.

[ladyofpurple]

here it is: the post Literally no one was waiting for. i'd put it under a read more thing but i'm on mobile and can't be assed to get out of bed so fuck it. we air our dirty laundry on main for the world to see like men.

so waaay back in february or something, i started seeing a psychologist again. i'd been seeing a psychologist for a while last year, but she had a private practice and got too expensive over time, so i had to stop. now, however, i finally got a referral to the public mental health offices in my county. which is nice, because norway has this neat thing that means when you go to the doctor, public health care facilities, refill prescriptions for medications you have to take daily, etc, the money you spend on those things gets recorded and after you've spent like $260, you get a free card that gets logged into your medical records and you don't have to pay for any of those things for the rest of the year.

anyway, i mentioned a couple of years back that i finally got put on antidepressants for the first time. they helped a lot, but then i just... stopped taking them. there wasn't a reason, really. i just forgot to take them one week when i was stuck in bed with a headcold, and then it was hard to get back in the habit again. i tried to get back on them off and on for a long time, but i'd inevitably just forget again. until, like, i wanna say november/early december last year? i started taking them again. there were still some slip-ups every now and then, but for the most part i took them almost every day. any gaps were no longer than two, maybe three days at the most, and those gaps were maybe once a month or so on average. averages aren't really useful in this context, but i hope you get the idea.

anyway, i finally convinced my doctor that, no, seriously, i really need to see a psychologist, i've always needed to see psychologists my whole life, seeing psychologists help me, i can't afford a private psychologist so i need a public one, and after a lot of begging and insisting on my end and a lot of hemming and hawing on her end she finally agreed to refer me. except she forgot to actually send the email she'd been typing in front of me, and then she quit, so there was a lot of confusion and time spent sorting things out until i got my first appointment.

i didn't like my psychologist at first. she was way older than i'm usually comfortable with (that's a personal me-problem that i know is irrational, and i'm not gonna go into the why but yes i'm working on it), and very blunt in an exasperated sort of way. she made me angry sometimes. she made me feel like i wasn't trying hard enough. but she helped me get shit done, so i guess she was doing something right.

in june she called in a psychiatrist to help adjust my medications, so i started taking zoloft in addition to the other medication (remeron, aka mirtazapine) that i was already taking. the mirtazapine was helping with my depression, but my anxiety was still pretty bad. the zoloft helped.

by my second appointment with my psychologist, she asked me whether i could have adhd, or if there was a history of it in my family. now, i have a lot of family with adhd (how closely related we are by blood is a bit of a mystery to me, my family tree is more like an overgrown hedge and who knows who fits where), and my grandma used to joke that the women in our family "all have a little bit of that adhd brain in us", but as far as i knew, nobody in my immediate, direct bloodline had such a diagnosis. i had my suspicions about myself, of course — i knew that not every focus or attention related problem necessarily has a specific attention disorder source, but i also knew that what i was experiencing couldn't be "normal," in the sense that if i walked into a room with 100 people in it, 86 of those people wouldn't necessarily look at a list of my symptoms and go "oh same hat." i've had add on my about me for a while now. maybe that was silly of me; i hadn't been diagnosed with it, and what i knew about the specifics of it were picked up piecemeal off the internet. you know, that super-reliable place where everyone is honest and factual all the time?

anyway, this began the process of investigating the merits of such a potential diagnosis. research was begun. questionnaires were taken. my mom was invited to one of my sessions, in which she revealed that, oh yeah, bee tee dubs, she's always suspected i have adhd. did she mention that she has also apparently always suspected ocd and that i'm autistic? no? whoops, well, she has now.

end of june i was referred to the neuropsychologist devision of the public health care place. over the course of a little over 6 weeks i went in for 2 interviews, in which i answered several questionnaires, talked about my life and childhood and traumas and what my mom had told me about her pregnancy and labor, every possible symptom i'd ever had, and was sent home with even *more* questionnaries. in addition to these, i went in for two rounds of "testing," in which i was tested on my memory, pattern recognition, reaction time, impulse control, and probably a dozen other things. i was nervous. it was exhausting. i wanted answers but was terrified of what those answers would be.

end of august, my mom came with me for the big reveal. and guess what? she was right. primary diagnosis: adhd, special emphasis on the attention deficit part. bonus diagnosis: asperger syndrome. surprise! i'm autistic, i guess.

it was hard to come to terms with. which sounds really silly, since i wouldn't have even been taking those tests if i didn't think the outcome was a possibility. and it's not like the diagnoses were surprising either. the adhd part was easier to accept, mostly because i already felt pretty confident i had it. but the asperger diagnosis was harder. having to unlearn all those ingrained ableist stereotypes and social stigmas is hard, especially when you had some you didn't even realize were there. it's very surreal to think a thought and be like "no, wait, i do that. that joke is about me." it's a very surreal and slightly upsetting experience to realize how biased you are as general rule, but especially about a facet of your own identity you weren't aware of. and the feeling of everything and nothing changing all at once. i've always been like this. a doctor telling me i have two cognitive/developmental disabilities isn't an event that magically gave me these disabilities. my brain has always worked like this. the only difference between me now and me a year ago is that i have an official, medical reason for Why now.

that's another thing: coming to terms with the idea of being "developmentally disabled." it's not like i'm suddenly a different person — i have to constantly remind myself that my brain has always been like this. but having a piece of paper confirming that i am legally entitled to special allowances in the workplace or at school because i have not one, but two "disabilities" is absolutely buckwild to me.

it makes me reevaluate my life and my past. how many situations did i make worse because i did not have the capacity or knowledge about how my own brain works to self-reflect? was i high-functioning in the past because life was simpler? was it because i subconsciously had a better handle on what works for me and what doesn't, and somewhere along the way i lost that? or was it simply because i didn't have the option to be anything other than high-functioning? it's confusing.

i also lost my spot at college. i can still reapply next year if i want, but at least now i know why i was failing out lmao

anyway, by my birthday in september we started the process of adjusting my medication again. upping my zoloft, getting me off remeron, and as of 6 weeks ago or so, beginning ritalin.

it was a rocky start, but i'm up to 60mg now. two pills in the morning, one in the afternoon. i have a goddamn alarm for 8am every day, even weekends. my sleeping is still wonky, but at least im genuinely tired by 8pm every night. the psychiatrist still wants me to try melatonin for a month (even though i told her multiple times it has never worked for me, and my problem has never been "i'm not sleepy enough"), so i'm on a whopping 2mg of melatonin for the next 30 days. norwegians are fucking WEIRD about melatonin, don't even get me started.

a slightly unexpected side-effect (on my end) of these medication changes: remeron made me gain weight. like, a lot of weight. and i was constantly hungry all the time, overeating to ridiculous amounts. why did nobody ever tell me that weight gain and metabolism changes are a side-effect of anti-depressants? i was more active this summer than i'd been in, like, three years and i just got fatter. which was incomvenient because i kept outgrowing my clothes. anyway, a side effect of ritalin is a loss of appetite and general weight loss. the combination of regularly taking ritalin and dropping remeron entirely? i eat a fraction of what i used to before, i've almost entirely stopped snacking, and i've lost 15 lbs in less than a month. i've already noticed my face is slightly slimmer now. maybe by christmas i'll be able to fit into my old tshirts again.

anyway, my psychologist quit, so i have a new one now. i've only seen her a few times, but she's veeeery different from my old one. i can't decide if i like her or not.

in the middle of all this, i've been going to the social security office as well to kind of get some of my own money, possibly help me get a job at some point in the future. my caseworker is super nice. if she's over 30 i'd be shocked. i relate to her really well, she's very helpful and understanding, and she's very patient with me and my bullshit. she's the kind of person where if we met at a party or something we could probably hang out.

anyway, she's helped me get out of the house sometimes. she introduced me to this youth club volunteer group thing called the fountain house, designed for young people who've dealt with or are currently dealing with mental illnesses and such. i hung out there yesterday and the day before and did some basic office work. it's nice. and then there's a work placement place that can either give you a job on site in one of their four departments, or help you get a job at an actual business elsewhere with more support and leniency than you might get if they just hired you off the street. i'd start in their second hand store. they clean and restore all donations they recieve, and they're super fucking cheap. i treated myself to my literal lifelong dream of owning a vintage typewriter (!!!!!) yesterday, because it's almost christmas and goddammit, i've been doing so much shit the past couple of months i deserve it. do i have space for it? not really. do i have a plan on what to use it for? no. was it heavy and miserable trekking through the snow and rain yesterday back and forth? was it worth the backache in the morning? fuck yeah it was.

a fucking lot of things are happening all at once. diagnoses, medications, lifestyle changes, work placement, social clubs, dealing with bureaucracies on all sides just so i can feel like a person again, not to mention juggling hobbies like writing and drawing and maintaining my irl friendships. i'm getting as many balls rolling as i can while i have the opportunity and mental/emotional capacity to, but i'm worried i'll burn out again. i'm stabilizing and slowly building my life back up, but jesus christ it would suck if this stupid house of cards collapsed again. but i'm tentatively optimistic. who knows, maybe it's not to late to course-correct my mistakes.

so long story short, that's why i've barely been active on tumblr for months. that's why i haven't been writing, drawing, or reading fic. it's coming along, but it's slow.

i guess the most important thing is that it's coming along at all.

[ill-be-istj-if-no-one-else-is]

hii! so i was typed an infj, both by cognitive functions tests, personality tests, and the 16 personalities thingy. my enneagram is 6. so because the whole stigma around the mistypings of infj so i get really unsure of my type a lot. no other type resonates with me more but im not the calm, collected version infj’s are made out to be. as my best self i am chaotic, and excited, making no sense at all and being free. i am also not as morally righteous as infjs seem to be, however i used to be more

           chaotic infj back again. i do see myself being easily manipulated by people with npd and such and can also see myself using my NiFe to manipulate others sometimes without even noticing. i also see myself adjusting to those around me to make them the most comfortable, if they need someone shy or outgoing etc. however, because of the N preference in the community i feel i might be mistyped there, when i am in fact an s. i love ideas and big abstract themes such as morality, the nova effect 2/infj            

3/infj politics, mbti, etc but while still in highschool i see myself just wanting facts and facts and no abstract ideas and anytime there is not a definite answer i get anxious. this could be due to the competitive nature of my school and my perfectionism or when i get into an NiTi loop but i also wanted your opinion. i am very self aware and self reflective, hence why i can’t seem to stop doubting who i am, and i know thats a trait of infjs. i also resonate a lot with andrew garfield who is            

4/infj who is an infamous infp and i know im not as idealist as i used to be with politics but i still don’t think im as free flowing as an infp because i don’t revel in being different i hate it. thanks for listening and doing what you do and if you have any thoughts i would really like to hear them            

5/infj, also im sorry about using Ni and Fe and Ti and all those i forgot they were in ur faq and thats normally how i talk about mbti and i also know i used very average descriptions like morally righteous and stuff which is also in ur faq eek, im sorry i tried my best its hard to describe yourself             

--------------------------------

Hi anon,

Just to get it out of the way, I don’t have a typing for this and my advice is going to be what it is for many high schoolers who have difficulty describing themselves, which is wait until you’ve developed more as a person. It’s always hard to describe yourself, but it’s much harder when many of your choices are made for you and you’re still very much in the midst of figuring out who you are.

A few things to consider when retyping yourself in the future: first, tests are garbage. They type essentially everyone who shows mild curiosity about the world as an intuitive, anyone who isn’t extremely extroverted as an introvert, and reduce the valid differences between judgers and perceivers to neat/messy. I do find they’re often kind of okay on feeling vs. thinking (in the dichotomy sense - they can’t tell apart Fi from Fe), but that’s also something that in many cases I find relatively easy to tell. Anyway, the only thing I’d consider taking away from this is that you’re probably a feeler, and the information you provided seems to back that up.

Second, I’m not sure what your sources are for INFJ behavior. The fact is because this type is so commonly over typed, you can hear arguments for basically everything since people of all types think they’re INFJs and even the same descriptions often contradict, and not in a Walt Whitman kind of way but in a “wow you did not think this through” kind of way. I mean, what kind of moral person prides themselves on the door slam, an immature and stupid thing to do*? So I would just ignore all of those and try to type yourself, as a person, based on the functions.

For manipulations; first, how many people do you know with NPD? Like, actually diagnosed? I’m not saying it’s impossible you’ve run into them but I don’t think I’ve ever run into someone personally with an actual APD or NPD diagnosis that I knew of. Second, what specifically do you mean by manipulation? I find it’s an area that gets weirdly defined on Tumblr and sometimes people use it to refer to like, normally asking people to do things for you which is just being a person. Manipulation has an implication of underhanded tactics.

For liking philosophical ideas: I find most intelligent people do. Intuition vs. Sensing isn’t a matter of liking philosophical ideas in an academic/leisure setting; it’s more specifically about how you interact with them in your actual daily life when you’re not in school or spending your free time. I’m a physicist, like, as my job, and I love physics, and I was drawn to physics by a lot of cool theoretical ideas which I still find interesting - but I have absolutely no desire to be a theoretical physicist professionally. So I have a question, and a caveat here: first, would you be happy spending your life pondering philosophical or theoretical questions as a primary thing that you do? And for the caveat: in high school I absolutely would have said yes, and as a junior in college I realized the answer was actually a strong No, which is yet another reason why I think waiting to type yourself until you’re older is often a very good idea. (Note: this is not a perfect sensing/intuition question by any means anyway - I suspect a lot of ENTJs would answer No here because of their dominant Te. But it’s a valuable question to have in mind when typing yourself.)

I think being a little older will also shed whether you want guidance because you’re a sensor or guidance because of the general nature of high school and academic pressures, and whether you want to fit in because you have Fe or because of the general nature of high school. It’s worth noting that if you’re confident in a 6 core enneagram, that might be a factor whether you use high Fe or high Fi.

I don’t place a lot of value on who you relate to; not only do I not personally know Andrew Garfield’s type I think part of the nature of celebrity (and/or fictional characters) is projecting a persona that can appeal to a lot of people, and the reasons we relate to people often are about shared experience or a shared opinion about something important to us. We can relate to people of different types quite easily - which is good - but it means it’s not really a typing tool.

And finally I guess to clarify - the reason I ask people not to use MBTI terms in asking questions isn’t because I dislike it for its own sake - it’s because it makes it pretty much impossible for me to draw my own conclusions. Typing over the internet is always a challenge because I’m relying on someone’s own unintentionally cherry-picked understanding of their personality, rather than my observation, but when they use functions to describe what they do it, I don’t even know what they’re trying to say because there’s an additional layer of uncertainty based on whether their understanding of Fe (for example) is the same as mine and so I have nothing to go on and won’t be able to answer. Believe me, if the FAQ was about things I dislike rather than things I need to type well I would just be deleting every question in which someone ended a sentence with ‘lol’.

So: no idea on type other than feeler, but I hope the above gives you an idea of what to look for in the future, with the understanding that you might not be able to type yourself accurately for a while, and that’s fine.

*as always I make an exception if you’re cutting off ties with an abuser but a lot of the door slam descriptions aren’t “I stopped talking to my abuser and didn’t tell them why because it would put me in danger,” but rather “this person BETRAYED MY CONFIDENCES and I cannot ever forgive them, they have pushed me too far this time and I have given all of myself, but I shan’t be hurt again, I cannot bear it” and it’s all extremely amateur-production-of-a-Bronte-novel and melodramatic and very silly.

[tinkeringwithcannabis]

The First 90 Minutes Episode 31

Strain: Lemon Walker

Company: Sira Naturals

Location: Somerville, Ma

Cannabis Connoisseur: Shanae

Website: www.siranaturals.org

Hello again to all my cannabis loving and canna-curious friends, and welcome back to another episode of The First 90 Minutes! Today we will be toking and talking about a badass bud that is the product of Lemon Skunk and Skywalker Kush, Lemon Walker. This citrus and lemony strain has THC levels measuring up to 26.5% and is reported to have uplifting, happy, energetic, relaxing, and euphoric effects. Patients have reported relief from depression, pain, insomnia, muscle spasms, and stress when using this strain. The potential negatives associated with this bud are dry mouth, dizziness, heachache, and paranoia. I chose this strain today because I have been feeling very anxious and irritable due to severe tremor onsets and complications due to my seizure medication changes. I have experienced lack of appetite, constant nausea, and ongoing bouts of feeling like I am going to have a seizure, which has made it difficult to function on many levels. I am hoping that this strain will help to relieve the poor mood I am in, and that the relaxation will help to relieve some of the tremors and decrease the stress and irritability I am experiencing. So without further ado, let’s sit back, light up, and toke and talk about the first 90 minutes!

Today I will be medicating via three hits from a joint. Opening up the container, I get an initial strong skunky smell followed by the scent of lemons. Upon performing the taste test, I get a bit of a skunky lemon flavor, but the lemon stands out and there are undertones of citrus that slide across your tongue. Starting my medication session at 6:50 pm, this bud hits very smooth. I am not feeling any noticeable effects right off. At 7:00 pm, I am experiencing some relief from my anxiety and stress. My body seems to be relaxing, and my mood is calming, and even lifting up to happy. I am not feeling any relief from my tremors as of yet, but I am experiencing some cerebral tingling, which seems to be starting to travel down into my body. With a special check-in note at 7:10 pm, the tremors are easing up significantly as the tingling moves down my body. My face feels very relaxed and my body feels like it is almost in a “floaty” state, where the muscles barely have to work for me to move.

At 7:20 pm, my mood has drastically improved to happy and calm. I am experiencing a strong cerebral buzz that has my anxiety almost completely gone and my mind feeling floaty and free. My frustration and stress have pretty much completely subsided, and my body feels unbelievably relaxed. The tremors continue to decrease to a state where I can actually pick things up without feeling like I will drop them or knock them over. At 7:50 pm, the tremors continue to decrease, and my anxiety has completely subsided. My body feels very relaxed, but I am experiencing a lot of cerebral fogginess and some dizziness, along with some couch lock and dry eye. I feel like I am off in my own little world, completely immune to stress or anxiety. In a place where stress cannot reach me. My mood is extremely happy and I feel very calm. Rounding the corner to our 90 minute mark at 8:20 pm, I can feel the effects beginning to mellow out. The high is shifting into a clear-headed, yet calm state. I still feel stress free, but the tremors are starting to increase slightly. The anxiety remains at bay, but the dry eye is still going strong. Although my body still feels relaxed, I can feel some of the tension returning to my muscles. My mood is still very happy, but I can feel the calm demeanor starting to fade slightly as things continued to wind down.

Ok, so normally I would jump right into my final thoughts here, but I want to talk a little bit about my continuation with this strain after this medication session. I decided to use this strain for the remainder of the evening, taking 2 hits every hour until I went to bed. I was able to keep the anxiety very low, and the tremors remained improved by about 80%. I have been struggling with issues of cognitive impairment due to the neurological issues I have been dealing with and the medication changes I have been undergoing, and the next morning both the tremors and cognitive impairment were minimal to the days prior and the days following, in which I did not use this strain. This being said, I have to say that I would highly recommend this strain, and I would really like to see this in a vape form. For me, I would preferably like this in a terp sauce cartridge, but even a PAX Era pod would be awesome. Despite the dry eye throughout the effects, and the dizziness experienced earlier on, I would still use this strain to relieve the tremors and help manage my symptoms around the medication changes. This strain not only provided the mental relief I needed, but also the physical relief I needed as well, to be able to relax and rest rather than stress and become increasingly more frustrated and depressed at the inability to control the symptoms I have been struggling with daily. I would not say that this is a good strain for when you have things to do, but it is the perfect product for right before bed and/or for evenings in where you don’t need a large amount of focus or motivation. Generally, when a strain causes a strong negative, it usually causes me to rate it below a 5 star rating, but this strain is the exception. The dry eye is a small price to pay for the mind and bodily relief I experienced with this strain. Therefore, I give this product 5 stars, and I ask you Sira, please consider producing this amazing product in a terp sauce or PAX pod cartridge form, because you hit the nail on the head with this bud!

You can purchase this product at:

Sira Naturals:

Cambridge, Ma- Medical Only

Somerville, Ma – Medical Only

Needham, Ma – Medical & by appointment only

Well my friends, we have reached the end of this review. Thank you for joining me and please stay tuned for more product reviews!!

Disclaimer:

****Please remember, this blog is an account of my personal experience with this product and/or company. Not everyone has the same experience with every product, and that is okay. I always recommend starting out low and slow with one or two hits to see if that is enough, and you can always increase your dose from there!****

If you found this post helpful, please help spread the word to other patients by liking and re-blogging this post! Thank you!

[sciencenewsforstudents]

A career of hard knocks to the head will not necessarily leave pro athletes with serious, permanent brain damage. That’s the take-home message from a small study. It included pro athletes who had taken a lot of hard hits during their career — including to the head. The findings now challenge what had been suggested by other studies that had autopsied the brains of former college and pro football players.

The new data come from tests of 21 retired athletes. All had been football players with New York’s Buffalo Bills or hockey players with the Buffalo Sabres.

Explainer: What is a concussion?

Each player allowed researchers to extensively scan his brain. The players also took behavioral tests. From these, the scientists turned up no signs of early dementia or unusual rates of mental decline. Both can point to a brain disease known as CTE. That’s short for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (KRON-ik Traw-MAA-tik En-seff-uh-LAH-puh-thee). Today, doctors diagnose CTE only by looking at a brain after someone has died.

For the new study, University of Buffalo researchers gave the athletes a battery of clinical tests. These measured brain function and mental health. Other tests probed such health features as diet, obesity and history of drug or alcohol use. Findings from these men were then compared to those from 21 noncontact athletes (such as runners and cyclists).

The former hockey and football players had expected bad news. They “were pretty much their own worst critics,” says Barry Willer, an author of the new research. This psychiatrist studies traumatic brain injury at the University of Buffalo in New York. The athletes had believed their brains to be impaired, he notes.

In fact, the new tests did not find high rates of problems with memory, solving problems, decision making or being able to plan things. The researchers also found no evidence of declines in the men’s attention, language and spatial abilities. Based on these tests, none of the former football and hockey players appeared to have early-onset dementia.

The good news “was a big surprise to us — and a big surprise to the athletes,” Willer says. The results are in line with several earlier studies of living athletes. This includes one published last year. It, too, found no major problems in the mental abilities of 33 retired hockey pros.

The authors shared their latest findings in a series of papers. All were published August 7, 2018 in the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation.

Not all athletes were totally fine

Eight of the 21 contact athletes appeared to show mild mental impairment. So did three of the 21 other athletes. Such mental problems could hint that dementia will develop. But the difference in rates between the two groups may not be due solely to more head knocks in the hockey and football players. Education, IQ and a man’s weight also could have contributed to some of the apparent difference. As such, the authors say they cannot firmly link rates of mild mental decline seen to which sport a man had played.

Brain scans told a similar story. Several types of magnetic-resonance imaging, or MRI, turned up no big differences. They showed no big differences in brain anatomy. They also didn’t show big links to behaviors in athletes with a history of contact versus noncontact sports. Still, seven of the non-contact athletes showed microbleeds. Scientists have linked these tiny ruptures in brain blood vessels with poorer brain function. The same microbleeds showed up in only two of football and hockey players.

Carrie Esopenko works at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J. She’s trained as a cognitive neuroscientist and a psychologist. Studies of the living, as here, “are exactly what we really need,” she says. Such studies “are really going to help us understand what’s going on in these lives.”

The new study also may ease some recent concerns. Last year, researchers had reported in JAMA that 110 of 111 autopsies turned up CTE in the brains of former pro football players. Those brains had been donated by family members who had suspected something was amiss. However, such concerns and symptoms may mean this sample represented the sickest of former players.

Indeed, notes neurologist Rodolfo Savica: “People who do not have symptoms do not donate their brains.” Savica works at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and was not involved in either study.

Athletes who took part in the new study were in their mid-50s. So they would have been relatively young for a dementia diagnosis. Still, based on earlier reports of brain damage, the researchers had expected to find some signs of dementia in these football and hockey players.  

To better understand the prevalence of CTE, though, more research will be needed. Researchers want to see a larger sample of athletes who suffer blows to the head as well as those who don’t. “There’s a lot more that we don’t know than we do know,” says coauthor John Leddy of the University of Buffalo’s Concussion Management Clinic.

[copperbadge]

storieswritteninthesand

Fwiw, you’ve mentioned those calming mental effects a couple times now, and they sound a lot like the impact anxiety meds had for me - releasing some of the anxiety mental load to make life more approachable. (Sorry if we’re still pretending that part of the diagnosis doesn’t exist!)

Well, not so much pretending it doesn’t exist, although I know I push back on it pretty hard. Part of it is that I still have no documentation regarding it -- last I heard the doctor who was meant to do the writeup said “I’ll have it for you this evening” and then nothing. I replied to her a few days later stating I’d still very much like it and nothing since, either. I’m trying to determine now if I should bother emailing again, if I should get insurance involved, or if I should just let it go. For what it’s worth, the psychiatrist gave me an anxiety screening that I actually scored quite low on, but of course he didn’t spend three hours in a room with me. 

So a few more thoughts behind the cut...

I did spend a lot of time thinking about it after I realized the Adderall was calming me, because there is a shift in mood and an accompanying physical reaction. I think...the problem may be that we use the word anxiety in two different ways in terms of actual mental health (instead of like, “I’m passingly anxious about this date” or whatnot).

There’s Generalized Anxiety Disorder, which is very specific and has a list of DSM criteria that you have to fit. Every time I go back to that criteria, I go “No, this isn’t me.” I simply don’t have enough symptoms. That’s me saying it myself, but I feel pretty confident about it, and the change when the medication kicks in doesn’t cause the kind of shift you’d see if those symptoms were alleviated. 

While ADHD medication can affect anxiety, I think it’s also important to note that I’m taking a stimulant, and anti-anxiety/depressant medications are not generally stimulants but SSRI/SNRIs and benzodiazepines. From my reading, granting I’m not a doctor, what I’m getting with the medication is dopamine, not serotonin. Dopamine and serotonin are both neurotransmitters but they’re transmitting different things, and if my dopamine balancing is what’s making me feel calmer, then it’s likely that Anxiety in the clinical sense is not what I was dealing with. 

But there’s a second usage of the word anxiety, a more casual one, that seems to encompass a lot of shit we really don’t have a good name for. Our vocabulary when it comes to negative emotion is limited, at least in English, and I suspect we don’t seek the nuanced language to discuss it because it’s scary and upsetting. So “anxiety” is possibly getting applied to a lot of stuff that I am in fact feeling but that I didn’t identify as anxiety, that is clinically not identified as GAD, and I was objecting because I hadn’t encountered that form of definition for it before. 

It’s unclear how I signaled anxiety to the evaluator, or what the word encompasses in my case. Could be stress from carrying an extra cognitive load, depression linked to exhaustion, lower-case-a anxiety because I couldn’t put my thoughts in order and so they felt overwhelming. Maybe even just worry I couldn’t get everything done because time blindness meant I could never tell if I had enough time to accomplish all my tasks. Being able to order my thoughts and execute tasks with more ease would indeed alleviate all of that.   

And also, you know...this sounds terrible to say but they gave me an IQ test and while they didn’t give me a number they did tell me I scored extremely high. That doesn’t signify much in the real world, but outlier scores like mine can mean we don’t react in expected ways to testing. It’s possible I just fucked the evaluation because I’m a weirdo. It’s one likely reason, my psychiatrist said, that I wasn’t diagnosed before now: my high cognitive scores were pulling my extremely low executive function scores up into normal range. 

So...I still push back on the idea of a GAD diagnosis, but I’m willing to entertain the idea that whatever is going on in my brain is something that people might realistically refer to as anxiety. And in that sense the Adderall is helping, so I suppose overall it’s a net positive :D 

[pisati]

I’m not sure what it is or why, but something feels bad.

it could definitely still be PMS. I haven’t gotten the mood swings in a while, but my PMS symptoms change month to month, it seems.

I don’t know if my wellbutrin dose is high enough. my friend started at 150 and is on 300 now; I had to work my way up to 100. but I almost feel like I felt better on 75. still not good, but that Bad Feeling is back now. not strong, but it’s there. I feel blank most of the time. existing in the present moment because that’s all I have the energy to do. but now with a hint of sad.

my health situation is starting to get to me. I thought I’d be fine with a lifelong diagnosis, and there are some things I’ve just accepted are going to be lifelong problems for me. maybe it’s more that I still don’t have an answer and I may not get one. even if I get an official CFS diagnosis, that’s a cop-out. it’s a death sentence, diagnosis-wise. it means they can’t find anything actually wrong with me and can’t diagnose me with anything else, but I’m still unwell. there’s no test for it, you just kind of arrive there by process of elimination. at least the medical community is starting to recognize it as legitimate and heavily impactful on people’s lives, but... I don’t know who will take me seriously if I get that. it’s like telling doctors you have anxiety. if I ever have a problem, that must be the cause. 

I feel like I’ll need to mourn. I don’t remember being better-functioning exactly, but I’ve read things I’ve written from back then and I don’t know how I did it. I feel sick to my core thinking that this might be the best it’ll ever get. I had this idea of the person I wanted to be one day, and I’ll probably never get there. I never even had very lofty goals for myself; I just saw myself with a little more color in my skin, being a little more active and being able to stay and succeed in academia. I miss research. I miss learning because I loved it. 

people don’t seem to understand that I’m not trying to limit myself. I know I’ve been able to do more things before. just because I could do them then, that doesn’t always mean I can do them now. people don’t believe me when I try to talk about my cognitive function. it’s so much more complicated than it sounds on the surface. people hear me say I have issues with memory and they’ll tell me “well you remembered xyz so it can’t be that bad!” like... I never said I lost anything. I don’t blank out memories entirely, usually. brains are complicated. there’s some information that’s easier to retrieve. if I follow my usual sludge bucket analogy... that’s the stuff that’s floating at or near the top. sometimes it might be a little bit of a struggle, but it’s easier overall. that’s where my conversational information is. I can fake normalcy pretty well with some minimal tip-of-the-tongue and inconsequential forgetfulness [sitting here knowing the word ‘inconsequential’ is the word I’m looking for and really having to dig to pull it out; typical, but harmless]. some things are much deeper in the sludge and therefore much harder to pull out. sludge isn’t static; things move up and down. that’s how I managed to remember my doctor’s office is off the Ballston metro stop up until the one day I couldn’t. it wasn’t that I forgot. it was that that information was impossible to retrieve in that moment. I never would have guessed thinking could take so much energy, until it started taking much of what little I have.

people with CFS have described the feeling as starting every day with a low battery. that’s definitely true. sometimes I’ll get lucky and wake up feeling maybe 60%. most of the time it feels like 40%. I can do what I have to for a bit, but it really doesn’t take much anymore to exhaust me entirely.

I’m terrified that 60% is the best I’ll ever get. I know I’ll have to change my idea of my ideal self. my ideal future. I’ll have to set my sights a little shorter. but god... I don’t want to. I don’t want to kill myself trying to push myself too hard, but my goals would be well within reach if I were just fucking healthy. if I could sleep through a night and wake up in the morning feeling rested. if I could walk a few miles and not come home feeling too drained to do anything else with my day. so many people take those kind of things for granted. sometimes I feel like I do mourn; how much better I could have done in school if I could have just gotten enough sleep and if my brain could have worked right. it did enough to earn very good grades and pass all my classes, even the hardest ones, but I know I could have done better. 

my dad makes scattered cameos in my dreams. I saw my grandpa in a dream for what feels like the first time last night. I’ve been feeling like there’s a lot of tears I’ve been holding back over the last few weeks. dad should have been here for my brother’s graduation. he should have been in the audience next to me and in the reception afterwards, talking about the keynote speaker’s speech. cracking jokes that make all of us groan. pulling both of us in for a hug, walking around phipps with us. he really would have liked it.

he was stressing me out to the point of tears the last few months, but I miss him so fucking much. 

I keep taking in rats and caring for them. I love it. I love them and want to do what I can for them. but it hit me while holding fitzie and petting him that his time is coming soon too. I’ve seen so much death. I’ve held pets while they died, I gave one CPR to no avail, I’ve held their lifeless little bodies and cried and cried. I can see fitzie like I saw frankie. his limp tail. I can see louie with nothing behind his eyes; ollie one day too. every rat I’ve ever fostered. the babies; in two short years, some unfortunately less, some hopefully more. I didn’t want to think that way about such young ones. I want to enjoy the present, enjoy what I have while I have it. but that end is always coming. and it’s so permanent. there is, and then there isn’t, and there never will be again. being so close to it; I wonder what it’s like sometimes. when it’s my time, if I’ll know. who’ll be there to hold my hand. if there’ll be anyone at all. my dad was alone.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this. maybe I’m trying to get it out so it doesn’t keep eating at me, if that’s what’s contributing to my mood. getting it out doesn’t seem to help all that much. I just hope I feel better tomorrow. that I remember what to tell my psychiatrist tuesday. I do have a lot to be thankful for, still, and a lot to look forward to. just. I’m really not feeling great right now.

[kegareki]

alls-well-that-ends-weird

Yeah, so I started seeing a therapist for what turned out to be a persistent depressive disorder, and after about half a year she recommended I go talk with this other psychologist (she didn't explain why, but my service covered the cost so I went) After a few sessions he rendered me to this group of three psychologists who had me do cognitive exams (one was for executive function and the other was memory formation) Then they reffered me to a sixth and final doctor

A kinesthiologist who basically made a record of my response times and overall hand/eye coordination (and meanwhile I have zero clue what any of this is for) So after about six months of this I make my way back around to my original therapist who tells me that they were testing me for an autism diagnosis, and yeah turns out I have asperger's syndrome, and then she gave a heckton of informational pamphlets and sent me on my way till next session together

I did some research after and, yeah, for high-functioning autism you have to go through multiple psychologists without any idea what they're testing you for so that you're diagnosis is as accurate as possible and so you don't know to use any of the mirroring behaviors aspies tend to develop subconsciously in order to pass as neurotypical I'm just glad I didn't have to pay anything out-of-pocket for it

Kinesiology in general is pretty quack, i think, but they just had me hooked to a brainwave machine (personally I have no clue which kind it was) so they could measure the time length between introducing a stimulus and when I responded to it They might've been a neurologist?? The sign on their practice's door said kinesiology

that’s. so. Huh. ya learn something new every day

taking lots of tests w lots of people that won’t Tell You What They’re Doing Things For sounds like a really stressful experience though... like ??? i understand it’s so that you go in blind and act natural, but At The Same Time. Stress

[pass-the-bechdel]

Homicide: Life on the Street season five full review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

36.36% (eight of twenty-two).

What is the average percentage per episode of female characters with names and lines?

31.18%

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

Three (episode twelve ‘Betrayal’ (40%), episode sixteen ‘Valentine’s Day’ (41.17%), and episode seventeen ‘Kaddish’ (50%)).

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

Zero.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Fifty-three. Fifteen who appeared in more than one episode, two who appeared in at least half the episodes, and one who appeared in every episode.

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

ONE HUNDRED. Twenty-six who appeared in more than one episode, seven who appeared in at least half the episodes, and four who appeared in every episode.

Positive Content Status:

The overall quality of the representation is changing with the quality of the show itself; it’s still solidly good stuff, and there are some distinct highlights across the season, but in totality it feels less incisive than it has in the past, and less self-aware (average rating of 3.09).

General Season Quality:

As above - still solidly good stuff, some distinct highlights, but less incisive and less self-aware as the writing caves to the pressure to be more generic and ‘traditionally entertaining’. There’s still no single episode here that I would call ‘bad’, but the comparison to previous seasons definitely comes up lacking.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

My opening credit sequence!!! Let us all take a moment to bow our heads and remember the scratchy black-and-white montage of the original, CLASSIC opening titles, with the faces of the characters looming ominously out of the shadows. It set the mood for the show perfectly, it was iconic, it was perfect. In their increasingly hilarious desperation to make the show into something flashy and generic for the masses, the network has henceforth replaced that wonderful sequence with a bizarre rainbow array of neon lights and random crime-y words overlaying stock images of crime-y stuff, complete with nice, glowing, DEEPLY NINETIES shots of the cast being zoomed past the camera. It’s awful. It’s funny. It’s infinitely more dated than the original titles could ever have been. And it has abso-fucking-lutely nothing to do with the show. No grainy shots of Baltimore landmarks. No artistic interplay of light and darkness. No barking dog (how DARE they take that from me!). Where the old sequence prepared the viewer for a show about serious unlovely business, this replacement caws: “CRIME! CRIME CRIME! Bright colours! Pretty people! Crime stuff! Popping, exciting, colourful crime! Nineties! CRIME!” Welcome to season five of Homicide: Life on the Street. It’s not as good as the previous seasons.

Now, in fairness, the show hasn’t changed in any major fundamental way (which makes that new opening credits sequence even more embarrassing, like the execs really thought a ‘cool’ header would convince audiences that the show was hip and fun now), and this is still both solid viewing in its own right, and better viewing than most of its contemporaries (and a lot of what’s on today, for sure). I’d also like to acknowledge something that is kinda being lost in translation due to my (STILL TERRIBLE) decision to make these posts summary-only, and that’s the actual number of named-and-speaking female characters per episode. Because the average when compared to the number of men on the floor isn’t that inspiring (as noted in previous posts, it’s still shockingly high compared to the standard set by other shows of the time/genre), but the number, independent of its comparison to men? The most common incidence this season was to have seven female characters in any given episode (eight of the twenty-two episodes this season boast that many). There are two episodes this season with eight women in compliment, and four others which managed six; the lowest number of women in any episode was three (which happened twice). Of course, when the flip side of that is a number of men which only once dipped into single digits (’Kaddish’, a balanced eight and eight), you still wind up with a less than thrilling average. But having six or more women around for the vast majority of the season? That’s practically unheard of, even in most modern shows - even some female-driven shows don’t always boast so many, though they make up for it (usually) with 1. less male characters, and 2. more story and screen time for their female characters - I won’t pretend that Homicide’s women get a comparable amount of narrative time and attention as its men, but it is not to their exclusion. To have so many women around is especially rare in anything male-dominated or masculine-coded (like, oh, everything that counts within the ‘crime’ genre), and for far too many shows, three women in an episode is a surprisingly large number, not the absolute minimum. Whatever other criticisms I have (and I’ve got ‘em!) for this season, that thing I’ve acknowledged before, about how this show manages to be fairly nonchalantly inclusive of women despite the odds? That still holds true.

MEANWHILE, IN CRITICISM LAND: this season feels a lot more serialised than previous seasons have, and I - normally a vocal supporter of serialised television over episodic - do not love it. The episodic nature of the show is a given - cases come and go - and as such, the thing that increases the serialised approach here is an increase in personal dramas, and specifically, an increase in narratives that take place outside of work and sometimes entirely independent of it. Obviously, the characters always had personal lives, and sometimes their personal lives impacted their work, and sometimes that impact rolled out in a protracted fashion over multiple episodes or even a whole swathe of a season (I’m mostly thinking about the disaster of Beau Felton’s marriage and his descent into alcoholism which formed such a significant part of his story in season three). The difference was that in previous seasons, these personal life developments felt more like they existed simply because these things happen in real life, and the focus was predominantly on the way that such events interact with the work the characters do, because that’s what the show is about, after all: life as a homicide detective, not life as a person who also incidentally happens to be a cop. I don’t hate any of what they were doing in this season, and some of it has serious merit, but altogether it does feel a lot more dramatic and distracting than what has come before, more manufactured, and more like it exists to create conflict in the characters lives instead of just letting them be who and what they are, and let the story come naturally from that.

We’ll start with Pembleton: in the season four finale, Pembleton had a stroke. This season begins with his first day back on the job - such as it is - and it’s not smooth sailing. Pembleton’s ability to perform his duties is physically impaired, he’s limping, he doesn’t have a full range of motion, he can’t drive, and he’s stuck on desk duty until he can re-qualify on the gun range. But he’s also having cognitive difficulties: he has a major stutter, his memory struggles even on small things like names, numbers, or simple spelling that he has known since childhood, and his mind wanders or makes leaps not pertinent to his current situation (as when he fails his first attempt at the gun range after becoming distracted by the dual meaning of the word ‘magazine’). Remembering Stan Bolander being evaluated before receiving approval to return to active duty after being shot in season three, it’s hard to imagine Pembleton receiving the same seal of approval under these circumstances. By the end of the season, he’s getting along just fine and it’s like the stroke never happened, and whether that degree of recovery is realistic or not, I feel like it’s unrealistic for him to have been sent back to work when he was not even close to being capable of actually doing the work. I feel like the writers were too busy indulging in the range of side-effects that a stroke can have in order to make the consequences dramatic, they overplayed the whole idea and then had to walk it back in order to have the character be functional within the narrative. Pembleton’s stroke has everything to do with the dramatic potential of disabilities, but nothing to do with a realistic assessment of the long-term consequences those disabilities might have on his ability to work or play like he used to, and that’s a sad disappointment for the veracity this show once represented.

Meanwhile - though I welcome the decision to include Pembleton’s wife Mary in the story more often - the strain on the Pembleton marriage reaches critical mass, and it’s not hard to see why: though Pembleton says the words out loud to other characters (”Mary’s been so good with everything”, etc), he’s erratic, self-absorbed, and inconsiderate in his home life, and his behaviour toward Mary reflects little gratitude or even recognition for the colossal amount of work that she has put in to both caring for Frank after his stroke, and caring for their newborn child born not long before said stroke. Mary is an unsung superhero in the Pembleton home, and it’s understandable that Frank is very preoccupied with his own recovery, but it’s not acceptable that he fails to respect the struggle that Mary has been through at his side. Even after she leaves him, Frank doesn’t really seem to acknowledge his own shortcomings - Mary didn’t leave him because he had a stroke and she couldn’t deal (he was ‘better’ by this point), she left him because she was done with being ignored and having herself and their child treated like completely secondary considerations in Frank’s life, after his own self-image - and when he petitions Mary to return, it’s still all in terms of what having his family around means to HIM. He’s miserably eating Mary’s cooking from the freezer and feeling sorry about the fact that she’s not there to make him more, and he wants her back because he loves her, sure, but also because being a husband and father is part of his self-image, and that’s what his entire personal arc this season boils down to, stroke, job, separation, and all: it’s about Frank Pembleton’s all-important concept of self, to the exclusion of any concern, respect, or basic recognition for the other people in his life and their own wants or needs or value as individuals whose lives do not actually revolve around him. 

Pembleton also has dramas with his partner Bayliss, which is par for the course at this point and mostly pretty useless as a result: how many times has one or the other of them declare that they don’t want to be partners anymore, and then they dance around one another for several episodes before admitting that, yeah, actually they do want to work together after all? Brodie hangs a lantern on it, but that doesn’t make it any more compelling to watch. What is more compelling - and actually a well-earned character revelation which makes a huge amount of sense when compared to past evidence - is Bayliss’ confession that he was sexually abused by his uncle when he was a child. Bayliss actually mentioned it - in an obfuscated fashion, substituting ‘cousin’ for ‘uncle’ and claiming not to remember what happened - back in season three when he and Pembleton were talking about whether or not they’d ever had a gay-questioning moment, and in that context we can see how Bayliss’ homophobia has manifested from that experience, as well as his disdain for anything he considers sexually ‘perverse’ - Pembleton has accused Bayliss of being sexually repressed on more than one occasion, and this revelation shows us that the repression is not out of ignorance or puritanism so much as it is a gut reaction to anything which reminds him of the childhood abuse he has tried so hard to hide. That doesn’t make it ok for him to be a homophobe, but it explains, and it’s necessary for Bayliss to make peace with his past in order to be open-minded and understanding of others moving forward. As much as I applaud that storytelling, the decision to have Bayliss ‘confront’ his uncle and then start taking care of the man after seeing the squalor in which he now lives kinda turns my stomach. It would be one thing, to have Bayliss take the high road and decide that compassion was more important than hate, forgiving his uncle and then moving on with his life, but what he does instead involves physical and emotional labour for his uncle’s comfort, it has cost in money, energy, and the potential to jeopardise Bayliss’ job as he is repeatedly ‘out on errands’ instead of working, and on one occasion the uncle even calls him at work and asks him to come out to his place NOW and bring him stuff, which Bayliss does after initially refusing. The whole situation plays not like compassionate forgiveness and healing (even though the show frames it that way), it looks and smells exactly like the uncle taking advantage of Bayliss’ good nature for his own gain (not just enjoying what he is given, but actively demanding and pushing for more), and that is alarming and disturbing. Of all the ways this particular facet of the plot could have played out, I am extremely troubled that this is what they went for, without any reflection upon the decision.

In a whole ‘nother direction, we have Kellerman, and his partnership with Lewis, and y’all, I am baffled. Kellerman spends half of the season on administrative duties, like Pembleton, but in his case it’s because he’s being investigated by the FBI for allegations of corruption dating back to his time in the arson unit. As with the rest of the story decisions in this season, I don’t object to this on principle, it isn’t a bad narrative arc or piece of character exploration (or deconstruction, as it turns out), but I am kinda amazed and confused that the show took BOTH of its power couples partnerships out of commission for half the season (in Lewis and Kellerman’s case, it’s actually effectively the entire season - they only partner onscreen for four cases, and one of those is a single scene, not an actual episode plot). After the Lewis/Kellerman partnership was such a breath of fresh air last season, I can’t help but feel like their separation this season was a completely deliberate decision to stop them from, what? Stepping on Bayliss/Pembleton’s toes? Bayliss and Pembleton are the only surviving partnership from the show’s first season, and even then they were framed as the ‘main’ partnership on the show - did someone get antsy about the fact that season four had used Lewis/Kellerman so effectively? Did they shoot themselves in the foot on purpose? It certainly fucking feels that way to me. It feels like they tanked Kellerman’s whole character and ruined his partnership with Lewis so that Bayliss/Pembleton could still be the big shots, and that’s very unnecessary; part of what made the first season work so well was that the cast felt more balanced, and even if there was kiiinda a ‘main’ partnership, that didn’t stop the rest of the partnerships from having almost equal footing and almost equal representation in episodes. Lewis/Kellerman has been the only pairing since the originals that has felt meaningful, like there’s a real working chemistry between the characters and not just ‘these two were written together for the episode, because’ (as with, say, Munch/Russert in the second half of last season, which I often forget was even a thing because it was such a nonentity). I’m so mad about this. Pro tip: I will get madder, next season.

Anyway: Kellerman’s arc. It’s not bad, in and of itself (though I could have absolutely done without the ill-advised visit from the Kellerman brothers, that was crap from every angle). But surely, having Kellerman’s life/career unravel regardless of his innocence is an arc they could have achieved in a more intensified fashion, one that sidelined him for less of the season? Surely there was a better way to do this than to just waste him for eleven episodes? I’m not going to wish away the arc in its entirety, because despite being mostly frustrating, it did deliver us the best episode of the season in the form of ‘Have a Conscience’, Kellerman’s first episode back on the job after being cleared of any wrongdoing, and the only episode to truly use the Lewis/Kellerman partnership in the way that the previous season did. Down on the seeming futility of their work and the lingering damage that has been done to his reputation, Kellerman contemplates suicide, and for twenty minutes of screen time, Lewis works his way around to talking him down. The show hasn’t done this kind of contained, lengthy, focused storytelling since the unparalleled ‘Three Men and Adena’ back in season one, and it is a more than welcome return to that format, volatile and tense and insightful, sometimes ugly, but always honest. And it hits all those good male bonding beats, all that lovely vulnerability in Kellerman that made me so happy in season four, and both Lewis’ desire to be open and connecting in the moment, and his tendency to spook and shut down after things get too real (there’s something really heartbreaking about Lewis’ discomfort in the following episode, when Kellerman tells him not to worry because he’s seeking professional help - as much as Lewis is haunted by Crosetti’s death and the question of whether or not he could have done anything to prevent it, he can barely look Kellerman in the eye after being confronted with what it means to help someone through crisis). For one episode, though, we have Lewis and Kellerman as we loved them in season four, being honest about their feelings and listening and supporting one another, and when Lewis gives Kellerman his jacket to keep him warm out in the chilly open air, it feels natural and right, it feels truthful, all toxic masculinity set aside so that they can get through this thing, like partners, like friends. That episode, I wouldn’t trade for a less dramatic Kellerman arc; the rest of his content in the season? Could have been better. Could have been so much better.

The other thing Kellerman had going on this season was a romance, which wasn’t too bad because the basic chemistry was there and the romance itself didn’t override or derail any other stories happening, so I’m not gonna go into it: the important thing is who the romance was with, and that would be Dr Juliana Cox, the new chief medical examiner and the new Other Woman on the show since Russert is largely absent for the majority of the season. Cox is pretty great, which was a bit of a surprise to me since I had never like Michelle Forbes in anything before and I was worried she’d ruin everything (nothing against her as an actor, she’s just always played aggressively disagreeable characters any other time I’ve seen her so I was accustomed to going ‘URGH, it’s you’). Not unlike when they introduced Russert, they do overplay Cox’s identity as a Strong Independent Woman when she first shows up, but I’m ok with it since they use the opportunity to have Cox call men out on their bullshit (the case in her introductory episode involves murdered prostitutes) and lay down the law like a total boss. It may be a little heavy-handed, but it gets the job done, and in fairness, that degree of mettle and ready combativeness if tested doesn’t dissipate over the course of the season, nor does it feel unrealistic: the true test for any new character introduced to this show is whether or not they have the naturalism and believability to fit in, and I approve Cox on those grounds: she is a character deserving of this show at its best. 

To wrap this discussion with a few more gripes and one last nod of praise: one of the problems with the more serialised storytelling and the way it revolves around the personal lives of select characters is the huge void this creates between the cast members who seem ‘important’, and the ones who don’t. Howard is still a great, self-possessed character, but the lack of any narrative for her - personal or professional - in this season is egregious. Because previous seasons were more balanced in their attention and harped on long-term personal arcs less, it didn’t matter if a character didn’t seem to have a ‘point’ on the show besides just existing, because existing is the main thing that people do: Howard doesn’t have to legitimise her existence with drama, she’s just gotta be who she is and how she is and let life take care of the rest. As soon as you start letting dramatic events take precedence, however, it starts seeming weird if everyone isn’t having them, and characters start to appear useless if they aren’t generating any drama (this is how unrealistic soap-opera storytelling happens). Kay Howard is and remains better than that, but I wish they had just let her go out on some cases and basically Do Stuff, it doesn’t have to be dramatic. Just let her do her damn job, on screen.

Speaking of underused characters, if the writer’s wanted to do the whole FBI-investigation-sidelines-a-character-for-half-a-season trick so badly, why didn’t they target someone who barely does anything to start with, someone we won’t miss in the regular rotation? Someone like...Munch. As is, the only ‘Munch episode’ in the bunch is ‘Kaddish’, which isn’t bad, but it does include some terrible flashbacks to Munch’s highschool years that are basically just every single highschool cliche ever, and the episode revolves around Munch’s old crush who has now been brutally raped and murdered, and excuse me if the continued obsession with Munch’s fixation on the fuckability of women is not my idea of a good time (ESPECIALLY when it is focused around the way he shared that desire with a number of other men in connection with this particular (VIOLENTLY! MURDERED!) woman). In context, the aspect of the episode which deals with Munch’s relationship with his Jewish faith feels completely disconnected from the rest of the content. I’m not happy about it. I’m also not happy about Brodie, still being a whiny little creep who can also add ‘spying on Howard and filming her with her boyfriend without either party’s consent’ to his roster of misconduct; as much as I have enjoyed ‘The Documentary’ in the past, under the slightest scrutiny it’s actually a total mess of an episode (and Brodie appears to be a terrible documentarian, even accepting that we don’t see every moment of what he’s made), and the entire concept is actually very plot-holed and a poorly-imagined idea of a fourth wall breaker. And speaking of misconduct, I gotta flag a pattern that’s emerging: in ‘Narcissus’, Gee doesn’t want to investigate local black community activist Burundi Robinson, despite allegations that he’s pimping out the women under his care and that he’s recently sanctioned the murder of one of his own in order to cover it up. While Gee comes around after his initial hesitation and pursues the investigation, the fact that he hesitates in the first place out of a desire to ‘protect the good Robinson is doing in the community’ is frustratingly deaf to the fact that Robinson prostituting the women in his care and ordering men killed if they try to speak out against it is obviously NOT GOOD FOR THE COMMUNITY, GEE. This reminds me directly of the arc in season three (which I flagged at the time) with the gay congressman, whose ‘good work as a politician’ was enough for Pembleton to try and help cover up the fact that he was also A VIOLENT DOMESTIC ABUSER. To a lesser extent, they also played this in season four when Bayliss tried to talk himself out of arresting a doctor for negligent homicide after she failed to provide proper care to a patient because she didn’t feel he deserved it - Bayliss’ insistence that the doctor should be allowed to stay in practice because ‘she saves people’s lives’ is at odds with the fact that she deliberately didn’t save this one, and as with the other examples here, the fact that someone does good work in one form does not entitle them to a free pass to do evil elsewhere. The dissonance bugs me, and I don’t know why the showrunners think that these are worthwhile dilemmas to present. Moral quandaries certainly exist, but these are not them.

ANYWAY I promised to end on praise, so here it is: Beau Felton. I’m not saying I’m glad he’s dead, because that’s a sad tragedy, but the way they handled it was excellent, and the delivery of such a twist at such an unexpected time - when we could easily have assumed, after two seasons’ absence, that Felton would never be seen and scarcely be mentioned again - was so well pitched to feel shocking, heavy, and meaningful, when it could so easily have played like a cheap trick, just one last unnecessarily dramatic turn (it was also the closest we got to a ‘Howard story’, though that’s a stretch really, she’s involved but it’s not about her). It was a tall order, to pull off the death of an old regular character off-screen without feeling contrived, but here we are. I’ve complained quite a lot about this season, but the magic ain’t gone, not yet. Not yet.