I’ve resisted blogging. I don’t think the dailiness of my life is that interesting. I don’t read blogs and don’t expect my friends to. But I’m in a process now. I need some clarity. And for me as for so many (perhaps not enough) clarity comes from writing.
Why “nervous” [the original title of this blog]? It’s what I am. The clinical name for it now is anxious; the name I grew up with, and find most useful when I need to explain myself – something I need to do fairly often – is neurotic. “Nervous” neatly dovetails the everyday meaning of anxious and the etymological meaning of neurotic. Oh, and I like the faint echo of how my condition might have been described around the turn of the last century – as a “nervous complaint.”
My condition. Hmmm. Conditions can be transitory or permanent. Time will tell. It’s a good bet that I’ve been nervous – neurotic, anxious – for a good fifty years (some of them better than others, of course, ba-dum-BUM!). And now that I’ve been diagnosed – officially within the last year – I know a little more about things I habitually do and don’t do, that may or not make sense. I know a little more about what and how I think, and how that influences how I feel, and in turn what and how I think, and so how I react to people and to situations. For everyone’s sake, I would like to minimize “explosively” as one of those ways of reacting. “Snidely” and “condescendingly” have largely lived out their usefulness, too, I think. “Kindly” is something I’m working on, and in some ways have a pretty good start on.
Rather than a “condition”, I usually think or talk about a “stance” – a starting point – my baseline likely reaction to just about any phenomenon I encounter. There might be many layers of socialization and intention over that baseline that get me through each day, but every once in a while the baseline – to switch metaphors – acts as a faultline, and something slips and grinds below me, and before you know it I’m ass over teakettle.
Weird to face this. Because the stance is that of someone who always expects the rug to be pulled out from under him. And it’s only by recognizing that that expectation has become a dependency, and that I am my own likeliest rug-puller, that I have any hope of calming down and just getting on with it, as the rest of the world does every day.
That’s close enough to the truth for now.
Best to all,
M.
