It is injection day, well night, because I have decided to do it before bed tonight instead. I am hoping that I will be able to sleep soon and skip some of the discomfort after. There is still tiredness for a few days, but the headache only lasts a day or two, instead of the five or six it was when I was having the infusion every two months, instead of the injection every two weeks.
However, I mentioned a few months ago that after several months of doing this at home without issue, I seem to have developed some kind of aversion and I get a lot of anxiety the moment I take the cap off the needle. I was hoping it was a passing phase, but it has been about three months, so six or seven injections, and it is still the same.
Annoying.
Tonight, I tried to sit with it for some time to see if anything arose that indicated why or how I could get over it, but nothing did. It was quite strange to sit there in such an anxious state though and I can imagine that if someone felt like that for long periods, it would be crippling. My head logically doesn't have any fear of needles, nor is it scared of any pain as it is near painless anyway, so why?
I have done some reading, but most of it centers around people actually having a fear. I do not. Nor is it because the medication doesn't work for me, because it does. It seems that it really is that something in my brain has been triggered and this is the response.
I hate my brain.
As it used to be the one thing I could rely on. I am in no measure intelligent, but I have always been able to think quickly on my feet well enough to assess situations and adjust appropriately. Unless I am talking to a girl I like - then I flounder.
While married, I have wondered what it would be like now as a single person to talk to women I am interested in again, because a lot of my emotional triggers from the past have been disconnected and I am less reactive, less impacted by things that might have evoked a stronger response earlier. In some ways, this has been very freeing. In others, it has been oppressive, because I can no longer trust that my historical behaviors are going to appear when they should. Trust is important for relationships.
What happens when we can't trust ourselves?
We all likely go through various periods or face conditions where we are unable to trust ourselves with something, but I feel that is my general state now. I have also noticed that a lot of my spoken language failings are more noticeable to me now and, I am noticing that people listening notice it too. Most are patient, but at the same time, I sense impatience creeping into their frame, whether they want it to or not.
I get it. We are not only all busy with our own lives, but also our attention span has decreased steadily as we spend more time in front of screens on short content. We flick rapidly from sentence on one topic to a sentence on a completely different one. Scrolling at lightning speed through images, seeing none of them well.
In the past, we had to wait a week for our favorite show, now we can skip the intro credits, because we can't wait the thirty seconds. I remember waiting minutes for an image to load on the internet in the 90s, now we get frustrated if a webpage doesn't spring to life in under a second.
Patience is a scarce resource.
And when we get the feeling that people are wasting our time, we become impatient, even when we know it isn't their fault. Just think how often people interrupt to finish the sentences of others. If we were truly listening, why would we make the assumption? If we cared to listen, we wouldn't it.
Yet, I know I am guilty of this.
I know that when I am listening to my wife and daughter speak, I sometimes finish what they are going to say in order to speed the conversation along. but, this robs them of the opportunity to practice, to improve, to feel heard. It is a very bad habit and I am working on it, because I really do know better.
But, just like I know better about the injection, knowledge and behavior don't always align. Knowing is not doing and we live in a world where knowledge is very, very cheap. Just about everyone has access to all the information they could ever want and in minutes, a person can consume the compounded knowledge of thousands of years of the greatest thinkers. It is all just there, yet are we actually getting better with the more that we know, or are we just knowing more, without the skill or reason to apply it?
I suggest that for many of us, it is the latter.
We are a culture of screen scrollers and headline readers, yet we seem to have less and less practical experience to back it up. What we know isn't obtained by living through it, it is downloaded, independent of what we have done, or could do. Everyone feels they are an expert, even though they have zero hand-on experience with their expertise.
While we feel like we know,
we are unblooded.
And our inexperience shows in the confidence we have in what we say, but our unwillingness to put it into practice. We know that even though we know, we can't trust that our behaviors are going to match the information. There is a disconnect, yet until we have to prove it, we can live under the delusion. If we had to suddenly put our skills where our mouth is though, perhaps more of us would feel that level of anxiety, knowing that we have set ourselves up to fail.
Fear: it flows through us all.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
