Something that I’ve been doing recently is trying to meditate every day. I’ve been wanting to try it ever since I’d seen Sam Harris mention it as a kind of “secular spirituality” (my words). From what I’ve learned and experienced so far, it is a good compliment to everything else I’ve been practicing to address chronic and mental illness (somatic experiencing/trauma/whatever you want to call it).

I use an app called Insight Timer that has guided meditations. The ones I try to find are not so much what I’d (perhaps harshly) consider “woo woo” (e.g. ‘feeling the energy of the earth’) but instead are more about connecting with the present moment. (My favorites: Joseph Goldstein, Tara Branch, The Easier Softer Way Meditation, and Jason Murphy Pedulla.)

That’s how I’d define mindfulness: connecting with the present moment in one’s body. Because I’m almost constantly thinking -which is fine because that’s how the brain work- I’m always outside of the present moment in our body. I’m thinking about the past or the future, or I’m judging something about the present. All of this is taking my attention away from the present moment -not “this period of 10 minutes for meditation”, the exact present moment in which my body is having sensations and emotions come and go, ebb and flow. Thought is fine; it’s part of what makes life so interesting and I’d scarcely get anything done without it. But our brains can do more than just thinking and as with most things, there’s a balance to be had.

“Socially awkward” makes my mind jump to saying something at an inappropriate time, or speaking or laughing too loudly, or being unaware of personal space boundaries. While I constantly worry about being seen (or exposed) as that person, the majority of me being “socially awkward” mostly comes from the exact opposite.

For a very long time, I would say nothing in social situations even when being directly addressed. My brain just didn’t come up with what the response should be, even if the situation called for a simple “Thanks”. After a lot of practice (with cashiers, mostly), I taught myself to respond with a list of phrases for situations, like those little kids books that plays a sound when you press a button when the story tells you to.

One of the more damning symptoms that have emerged since this whole chronic illness thing kicked off is how horribly my memory has been effected. For a while it was so bad that it felt like I could hardly function; you’d ask me a question and I’d just sit there in silence, not because of an “on the tip of my tongue” feeling but because I my brain wasn’t giving me the words for the thought I wanted to express. It feels like trying to use the web when the internet is down. The wheel just keeps spinning but the page never loads.

It always reminds me of the movie Memento where the lead character can no longer form long-term memories and thus has to “remember” things by taking polaroid photographs. I’m not quite that bad, but ever since the chronic illness really started getting serious, I’ve quite literally felt like I can’t remember past a certain point in the past. It felt like my brain suddenly gated them off and wouldn’t pull up anything; childhood memories, events, dates, and most importantly, myself.

I’m not a good pet owner. I’m not one of those horrible people who keep their dog chained up outside in horrid conditions or try to force their cat to eat vegan, but recently, after spending some time with people who know much more about dogs and cats, I’ve been made aware of how mistaken my view of what a “pet” really is.

It’s human tendency to see things as being like us. We mistake a shadow in our bedroom for a person, we see a face on Mars, and we understand dogs and cats to just be small, stupid, furry people. At the same time, we also tend to see them (and all animals, really) as appliances, as things that we obtained for a purpose. In reality what we have is a life: a complex nervous system with pattern-based learning and reward systems, fully capable of being effected by trauma.

I have a constant temptation with this blog to post things that I see online that I can relate to. There’s no shortage of them, especially on Tumblr; graphics and images of things that make me go “this expresses how I feel perfectly!”

They can be both negative and positive. There are images of encouragement of how things could be (many of which I find to be shallow and cliche), but there are also the depressing ones that describe how things are now. For some reason the negative ones feel better, I guess because it’s more cathartic, and I won’t deny to having a folder of them saved to my PC. But even though I have nights were I seek the comfort of seeing such images, I don’t think they’re actually helpful, and that’s what I want this blog to be.