One thing I’ve learned about weeding is when you look over a patch of ground for weeds sprouting you have to bob your head a little, cause if you don’t and there are any stationary in your literal blind spots your brain will hide it by sampling from the nearby ground and using a clone tool
Suspect I may have had a sleep deficit going into last night. That’s probably gonna be a problem with the way the anxiety-zeroed personality doesn’t feel any worse as I get tired – my mental quality still degrades and I start to drift off, but there’s not as clear a signal where on that spectrum I am.
From the mania though I have experience in tracking my sleep and making sure I get enough even if I don’t feel sleepy.
Ok no smashing today while I wait for that tweaked pectoral muscle to clear, sorted the wood for future smashing, did some more weeding, and now that I’ve mostly smashed up Blueberry Hill and used the pulled stuff from weeding to build a ramp down into the shell – from right by my backyard gate – I don’t need the one I built up from the other side anymore, so dug that out and used the dirt to build up the lowest part of the plateau.
Also had yet another neighbor walk by, congratulate me on all the work, and extend offers of bounty
friendly warning and/or prediction: you've been real chatty recently, which has looked like a prelude to mania before. Wonder how long it'll take before the "no, I'm not manic, I know what mania feels like" phase starts.
Yeah, there’s that, but I’ve noticed it lately too. It really felt like it was building up to a mania a month and change back (my normal cycle is around 6 months) but then it disappointed and in retrospect the intense imminent expectation of it might have been the mania? And then things started to slope down afterwards.
But my manias have actually been pretty irregular since the personality change, no two the same, so ???
I honestly think it might be I’ve been having stronger coffee this week. Hm, if the anxiety zeroing is stripping the badfeel and making it hard to notice when I’m tired, maybe it’s also leading me to underappreciate overcaffeinization (which I’m tempted to by the sleep deficit I’m building unnoticed)? Hmm.
In general I probably won’t be caught off-guard by mania as much anymore cause I’ve started remembering when the last one was and tracking when I’m due, rather than just trying to read symptoms in felt experience
friendly warning and/or prediction: you've been real chatty recently, which has looked like a prelude to mania before. Wonder how long it'll take before the "no, I'm not manic, I know what mania feels like" phase starts.
Yeah, there’s that, but I’ve noticed it lately too. It really felt like it was building up to a mania a month and change back (my normal cycle is around 6 months) but then it disappointed and in retrospect the intense imminent expectation of it might have been the mania? And then things started to slope down afterwards.
But my manias have actually been pretty irregular since the personality change, no two the same, so ???
I honestly think it might be I’ve been having stronger coffee this week. Hm, if the anxiety zeroing is stripping the badfeel and making it hard to notice when I’m tired, maybe it’s also leading me to underappreciate overcaffeinization (which I’m tempted to by the sleep deficit I’m building unnoticed)? Hmm.
I don’t know what it was but until I visited home last Christmas after the personality change I just didn’t have a good integrated geographic sense of where I grew up – I registered it as a series of linear paths with totally random Clue-style secret passages between them I guess – but possibly in compensation I have amazing dead reckoning uh… reckoning, you can drag me all around in circles uphill and downhill and I will retain a sense of what exact direction and how far away my starting point is
I figured it out, this actually comes from how I was stereoblind and never saw in true 3D, and so instead of generating 3D mental maps of places I just had senses of the linear experience of particular routes with no sense where they were relative to each other, so this developed to compensate
Which means so far my record for dealing with Long Covid symptoms so far is
Brain infection – caught a big chunk of damage with only and all of the parts of my brain I didn’t like, used the depersonalization to explore the concept of selfhood from outside and more precisely reshape the self in line with my life experience as it returned
Aerobic energy generation – rendered me barely conscious to the point of hardly breathing, I immediately reasoned it out and converted it to miraculous weight loss that is finally giving me a body to match my idealized self
Blood pressure drops – okay I passed out twice at the bar that actually trusted to serve me despite how the brain stuff made me unsteady and slurry, that kinda sucked, but it’d been a bit high before so okay?
this or maybe
I think was the testosterone, which was subtle enough I didn’t even notice at first, but on top of making me more sexually charismatic means my wounds heal faster and I gain more muscle from exercise – those are the effects steroids hack. Which is nice, because the #1 brain stuff switched me from being flatfooted to walking with raised arches, which apparently uses a completely different chain of muscles throughout the body I have to train up from scratch
Iron deficiency – the fatigue had gotten worse and even more creatine didn’t help, my limbs felt weighed down, and then 3 days in I was in the supermarket and was like “wait, you know what this reminds me of reading about? anemia” and got some iron pills and yeah, that was it
Used muscles fatigue more – this one’s receded some, I think it might have interfered with the breakdown of lactic acid, but as the muscles continue to build (with the help of testosterone, #5) even intense smashing just doesn’t push me to the limits and generate as much?
So basically as far as I’m concerned, I am the human that won this plague
I love that I can jerk off about guys now. That’s just so neat!
Could you not before?
No, I was straight my whole life, I actually tried “bihacking” myself as a teen but while I succeeded in dispelling any aversion to m/m sexuality I ultimately had to accept I was just not into it. But in 2020 I caught Covid before vaccines existed, it spread to my brain and caused enough damage there that my existing personality was no longer viable, and after a period of depersonalization I generated a new one that is different in some major respects, including being bisexual.
Well, I experienced it as that narrative, but rather than “the old personality became unviable, so I generated a new one”, it’s possible that selfhood-focused brain structures became so affected it was not possible to maintain any personality and by the time that wore off permanent damage had altered mine
I could kinda use one of those push-roller things where the roller is an empty barrel weighted by filling with water to flatten down Strawberry Ridge, but that’s pretty bulky for something I have no further use for. Maybe if you could detach the roller and use it as a rain barrel on its own.
