Jan 10

 Back and forth to the vets. I have lost count of how many times we have now been. No more than 3 days from a visit. And sometimes back to back days. I haven't bothered to track the cost. It must be fairly significant by now however. Not that it matters. I am not counting.

We have settled into the same pattern of treatment for Athena. Endless eye drops. Irrigations. Anti biotics. The bombardment of potions and liquids every few hours doesn't stop. We are now on 4 different regimes of liquid in eyes. And the latest advice is for one of them to be done as often as possible.

But there is no shift in condition or improvement. I think, as ever, her eye is lost. We are just fighting some impossible fight to keep it hydrated and in a permanent state of not quite dead. But her sight is still gone, has been gone for weeks at this point. Her eye is still the same gnarled scar of opaque tissue, sometimes bloodied, awful looking. I don't think it will recover. Nevertheless, we persist, hoping that things will suddenly change.

I continue on a buzzing base of exhaustion. Somehow my body is responding and desperately extracting deep sleep here and there where I can and keeping me on my feet, but at a shitty, always rough level, with unusual bursts of hyper energy interspersed. Curious blasts of brain power and energy and then slumps.

In a very strange way I am both operating at a shitty level as per normal, and also a higher one at times. It's not pleasant at all. But there's almost a touch of steel in there, down to the bone, no room to fully slump, and so you are forced to punch above your weight continually. But at a cost.

It is enough to get through and count the days past. But I am stretched. And slowly I can feel the edges blurring and it getting to be impossible to rouse myself.

Still. We are not defeated yet.

Work has unhelpfully been full on. Another week of needy voices all wanting my help and to unstick them from their issues, or do their work for them. This week also saw a shade of ungratefulness in the tone. Fixing their issues. Not quite giving them the time that they needed in order for me to entirely fix their problems and do their work for them.

It has left me with a bad taste in my mouth. People can be ungrateful shits. Not in pain. Not under duress. Nothing to excuse or understand shit behaviour. Just. Sulky complacent egos. People do not do well with failure. And someone else unsticking them from their failure.

In any case. It doesn't super matter. I have just let it slide over me. I am tired. But I have not forgotten this week. Or will let it go without consequence. In future I will try less hard to fix peoples issues. I will do what I do. But I will be doing less of other peoples homework for them. They can sink or swim a bit harder in future.

Thus is the just desserts for being an ungrateful demander of help.

Otherwise at work, I got done all I needed to get done this week. I did good. And sorted everyone out. Remarkable given the lack of sleep and shit I am getting at the moment.

Moving on from work.

My signed off from work with "stress" friend has predictably not adapted well to having time off. She has, as foreseen, shifted to filling her time with endless shit to do ( despite me warning her not to do that ). She is nothing if not a predictable rat in a trap. Round and round she goes. Take her out of her job and her feet still manically peddle, her brain still arranges a breathless schedule and tasks get lined up.

Stop. Just. Stop.

Being productive and useful and busy is a great thing. But being entirely unable to just stop, to breathe, to manically have to keep going is a serious problem. Without realising it, people like that wander from being effective doers and motivated workers into manically conditioned rats who must dance a grim jig to a tune that never ceases. As Jarvis Cocker sings, "it's gone from something comfortable, to something else instead".

She will get no rest or relief like that. She will end up spending a week or perhaps two just filling time with shit, like some crazy extra vacation time to fill up with chores and nonsense. And her mental health will not recover. Her emotions will not spring back. And she will be as miserable as she ever was. Lost. Completely incapable of understanding what she is doing and why or how to alter course.

Not exactly an uncommon theme for those in the grips of such demons. That's mostly the point. Your brain, personality, everything, gets you stuck between a rock and a hard place. Unable to go on. And unable to stop. Neither gives ground. Until the bit in the middle - you - breaks. A mental breakdown. All the rationally constructed rat traps of must do this, cant do that that you have carefully pieced together over the years shatter into pieces, your world as you know it disappears, you enter in a state of utter despair and no hold on any values or anything that makes sense. Your life, as you knew it, ends. And it's only from that position that you can craft something new. A different pattern. One that does not hold you between two impossible things of the immovable object and the unstoppable force.

In a very ironic kind of way, it's possible to frame this as nothing more than a battle between your own  stubbornness and your wellbeing. And we can often be so stubborn that we'd rather go down in flames than change. So. We do. And in the conflagration, the stubborness finally burns. There is more than a hint of truth here. Often the afflicted are also stubborn personality types. Won't be told. Bloody minded. Fuck you. But this too, is often just another layer of a mask that hides vulnerability. Better to be stubborn and bloody minded than vulnerable. And there's the irony - at the bottom of a shivering crying heap of vulnerability of a mental break.

I digress.

She isn't there. But neither is she helping herself. It is what it is. She will learn or not. Slowly or not. At best, I can nudge her to be still. Rest. Do not fill your time with shit. But it's up to her what she does. I doubt she will rest. She doesn't know how to. I think I can see where this probably ends. And then a probable possibility of what happens after. But. Eh. That. Is almost certainly better left unsaid. Other than to say. It wont be her end. Neither will it end well. Perhaps not ever.

But again. This isn't exactly uncommon. This is the slow rolling tragedy that many people live in and are seemingly unable to escape from the prison that they build around themselves.

A very long time ago I came up with an analogy for this kind of thing to explain it to people. Boxes.

Imagine a box. You live inside this box. Its walls are the boundaries of your world. They are formed from your education. Your intuition. Intellect. Culture - how you were raised. Your values, this is right, that is wrong. And. Importantly. A large part of that is the things you decide for yourself. The lies you tell yourself. The rationalisations you keep. The things you worry about.  That which you are afraid of and will not approach. And the things you absolutely will not talk about. Refuse to accept. Are absolute irrefutable truths of your world - that are self imposed. And also. Your mental health demons. Anxiety. Paranoia. The ghosts that dance in your head that keep you at bay.

This. Is your box. Its walls are almost entirely set by you. Only you can see them. You cannot see outside the box. The box is your world. People can come and go in and out of your box. You can visit people in their boxes. But wherever you go, your box is around you. It is not something you can get out of simply by walking. It is the world around you.

At one level, the things you learn, something new, some new piece of wisdom or understanding will allow you to move the walls of your box. To make the box bigger. Even at times for you to suddenly find a door in the wall of the box, which you step through and out of, into a bigger box. 

You can think of this also perhaps in historical terms. Before people knew the world was a globe, they thought it flat, that you could sail off the edge. This was their world. Their box. Until the idea that this wasn't the case took over. It was a globe. Proven to be a globe. And everyones boxes got that bit bigger. Nothing objectively had changed. The world was as it always was. But the worlds that the people had built for themselves in their own heads changed dramatically.

So learning, education, experience, can be a line that you have got up to but not got past. One of your walls.

But most often those walls are not about education, or just learning a new thing from a book, but are instead kept by the things you cannot deal with and will not confront.

The relationships that are compromises, ugly, dysfunctional, but you wont address. The career that you wont break free of. The job you will not leave. The decision you cannot possibly make. The excuses you pile up as to why the wall of the box is absolutely true and very real. I cannot do this because...

.. and in almost all cases it is a lie. Carefully woven. Beautifully constructed and reinforced with reasons and logic. And still a lie.

People will fight for those lies. Maybe even die rather than admit they are a lie. One part of this can be hardcore rationalisation ( you can read some psych blurb about that here ). But other darker parts are just things that people will not confront at all.

Just about without exception people come to rest in a box that they will not get out of. Not because they cant. Because they wont. They stop in a box that they are "comfortable" in.

Comfortable here does not mean at ease. At peace. It means a place where someone can exist for some length of time without expiring. At the smaller end of the scale it is almost always a place of suffering. Putting up with pain. Misery. Emotional abuse. Hopelessness. It can be offset by distractions and treats and being busy. But it is what it is. The box is too small. Claustrophobic. Suffocating. People live in their boxes hunched over gasping for air refusing to breach their box.

As someone learns more about themselves, about the world, so their box gets bigger. As they learn to listen to themselves, not lie to themself, they shift from one box, escaped, to a yet bigger one. And perhaps at some point along that path, that box is big enough that it is not uncomfortable, not suffocating. There is somewhat a growing sense of peace therein. But it is still, a box.

Boxes within boxes within boxes. Out to.. infinity. Out to, an objective theoretical point of total enlightenment and grasping the objective whole of the universe and your position within it. Impossible.

It goes on. About the importance of always moving to bigger boxes. Of not getting trapped. Of understanding the very nature of the box you are in and the prison walls you build for yourself. Of things like never being able to reach a point of perfection free of all boxes. Of it being the journey. The understanding of the meta. Not the end result. And the bigger the box you are in, the better you understand yourself, the world and others.

In the end it is just really an analogy for learning. But also combined with that is the principle of the ideas we keep ourselves imprisoned by. From things like faith - the tenets of ficitional religions - to things like matter of fact relationships - the marriages that dont really work, the households that are abusive or otherwise. Held together by the shackles people place on themselves.

A while after I came up with that analogy I learned about Plato's cave. And saw a similar pattern a similar idea. That Greek dude. More than 2000 years before me. Saying stuff about knowledge. Not boxes. But a cave. Singular. But still. Uh huh. His further insight was that trying to lead people out of their cave - their box - would more than likely get you killed. His darker lesson was not to interfere with the assumptions and make believe that people had made for themselves. Clearly he had a dim view and set of experiences about this.

Full circle. We come back to ungrateful people demanding help. Insight. Whatever it is. No good deed goes unpunished eh Plato ? I think he would probably agree with that for some circumstances.

In any case.

Back to reality.

My friend. Trapped in her box. A box of her own making. Absolutely assaulted on all sides by the evils and trials of the world. But also imprisoned within a box of her own making. Unhappy. Suffering.

There is, at the end of this, an interesting observation. That smart people. Confident people. Educated people. Can make some of the strongest boxes - prisons - that there are. They have the smarts and capability to weave the most compelling rationalising arguments for why the wall of a box is there and how they cannot possibly get past it. Or even see it. But it is at the end of the day still a wall of a box, a limitation, and in many cases, a lie you will not move past.

Of course, the same can be said of those with a lack of critical thinking skills. A filler of faith. Faith can build impressively strong prisons too. Of a different material than the clever rationalisations of the smart. But just as strong. And still a lie.

Uh huh.

So much knowledge. Such little time. With such poor ways of communcating it.

Communicating stuff well, is more than half the battle.

There is a really simple dumb ass over simplication of all of this.

Be honest with yourself.

Learn to listen to yourself.

Learn who you truly are.

Be curious.

Be brave.

And never think you know it all.

Why ? Because it will reduce your suffering.

And maybe the suffering of others. But definitely your own suffering.

And that. Is probably the best thing you can ever do for yourself.