The Curve
Yesterday I had the realization, as I was making me way through the second or third day of much cooler weather, just how much bodymind tension I’d been toting around during the hot summer days that restrict my activities and constrain my autonomy. Everything just plain felt much freer and looser than it had in months.
It made me think of something I’d said here last month when discussing my pacific circuit.
Complicating the idea of my pacific circuit is that through either resilience or resignation, as my world shrinks due to the still-undiagnosed fatigue, I keep marking most days as having been “neutral” (my general target for overall state of mind) despite, for example, not having been to the zoo—a once weekly, then monthly, activity—since May and not having blogged—until right now—for two months, when those things were of a self-regulatory nature. It’s entirely possible that through such resilience or resignation I’d continue grading on this kind of curve when imprisoned in that room somewhere in New England, but as much as this dynamic makes me sad now it would only make me all that much sadder then.
What I’m stuck on in thinking about that bodymind tension is this question of resilience versus resignation when it comes to grading my days on this kind of curve. If I adjust my thinking and feeling to grade my days based upon the options of what’s currently being made available to me, doesn’t this suggest the disguising of an inevitable downward trend?
What if this sort of “grin and bear it” grading curve is a kind of masking, that thing autistics do that if maintained for too long and too deeply risks burnout. “Compensatory attempts are taxing,” I once quoted some researchers as saying, “need to be sustained over time, and are often unsuccessful, resulting in a cost to wellbeing.”
There was a Vice piece about resilience during the pandemic that I ended up separately citing here twice without realizing it. There’s a quote I used the first time worth bringing into the conversation here.
Resilience might sometimes look like grinning and bearing it. “But there’s times when resilience may look like crawling back into bed and crying,” Bedard-Gilligan said. “Feeling those emotions and processing through whatever it is that’s causing them. It may actually be the most adaptive thing you can do at that moment.” Bonnano coined the phrase “coping ugly” for the things we have to do in some situations to manage in the moment.
The challenge, however, comes in the calculus of which is more detrimental to your health: grinning and bearing it or “coping ugly”. You can’t crawl back into bed every single day.
Me, two years ago:
We have something of a botched view of resilience as being something we demonstrate through endurance rather than through recovery.
When I talked here about “grading on this kind of curve when imprisoned in that room somewhere in New England”, the reason why I see this as a fate akin to dying is that there’s be nothing in it but the enduring of it. There would be no hope of recovery, because the situation would never end, until, eventually and inevitably, I did.
The funny thing about to some extent reclaiming that mediocrity is that, as I’ve also discussed in therapy, whenever I’ve done any mood tracking, I’ve tended and trended toward weaving back and forth around a basic midline. In my original tracking app, I had this labelled “Meh”. Now that I’m tracking at the end of each day on my Apple Watch, I select “Neutral” more than anything else, and only fill out the succeeding screens with emotions or causes if the deviation is strong enough in one direction of another.
What I mean by funny here is that, as I said in therapy yesterday, I feel like if an outside, third party looked at my mood tracking they’d assume that we needed to do something get me above that midline. Whereas I think that maintaining that midline is my goal. Whenever I have an extended period (by which I mean, say, a week straight) of making “Slightly Pleasant” or even “Pleasant” on my watch, I know that one or another of the weeks that follow are going to dip the other way.
That, of course, averages out to put me squarely back at the midline overall, and I admit to some skepticism of anyone who claims that they are happy or would mark their days as “Pleasant” most of the time. I don’t look at my habitual midline as a drawback. I think I see it as part of what resilience I do have.
Me, one and a half years ago, quoting from Deb Chachra’s How Infrastructure Works:
Resilience isn’t efficient because it typically requires an upfront or ongoing investment of resources, in the form of time, money, energy, or cupboard space, in order to head off worse outcomes.
Again, though, mentally time traveling to that existential prison in western Massachusetts, were I to grade such a degradation of my autonomy on this curve, devoting these compensatory resources to convince my bodymind, somehow, that I’m on that middle path, what worse outcome, exactly, would I be heading off? The worse outcome would be here, would be my life, and I’d be grinning and bearing it for what reason? There would be no metaphorical cooler weather coming to restore my autonomy and aid my recovery. I’d just be dying, slowly, inside.
Early on in my blogging about having been diagnosed as autistic, I’d happened upon a thread I’ve followed intermittently ever since: the idea that autistic brains do not habituate. This complicates the entire question of resilience versus resignation.
(This, I believe, likely is the entire basis of autism: a sensorium dysphoria from too much getting in. It’s somewhat akin to the “intense world” theory, and monotropism is how our brains address it.)
No, I did not, in fact and inside, “get used to” the hotter summer days that kept me inside, artificially limiting my autonomy and frustrating my agency. What I realized yesterday is that these past months have completely fucking sucked, and I simply hadn’t been allowing myself to recognize just how tightly wound my entire nervous system has been the entire time.
It’s not that this realization brought an accompanying knowledge of a solution. Maybe I do have the grade the shitty times on that curve just in order to get through, and then, eventually, past them. Maybe that kind of what only can be called resignation itself is some fashion of resilience—but only when it’s known to be a transient and temporary thing.
At some point, of course, I knew, the heat would break, the days that are too warm for me to leave the house, frustratingly at increasingly lower temperatures than even just a few years ago, will give way to cooler weather and even overcast skies, and those built up tensions in body and mind can begin to unclench and dissolve.
So, yes: I’ve spent the summer grading my days on a curve. Most days were not, in fact, that middling, neutral “meh” that serves as the guiding star for my self-regulation. Yes: I grinned and bore it (without the grinning, because that’s not me), and pretended otherwise. Now I know, or think I know, that I did this, that I was capable of doing this, because eventually it would end, and I new that eventually it would end, and room could be made for recovery.
It’s just that this only works when I know, or at least when its presumptively true, that there will be a light at the end of the tunnel, even if I can’t actually see and confirm the existence of that light for months on end.
This won’t work, however, when the tunnel isn’t a tunnel, but a dead-end cave with no exit.