Good: nose is no longer running.  Don’t feel like I need to accomplish anything today because the way forward in my work this week is pretty straightforward and I can just do it tomorrow or Tuesday, when hopefully I’ll feel better

Bad: Felt anxious last night, woke up at 2 AM feeling anxious, took a fairly large dose of Ativan plus doxylamine and went back to sleep.  Still anxious this morning.  I wonder if this has to do with the fact that I’ve been taking lots of Ibuprofen because I’m sick, since Ibuprofen has been shown to interfere with SSRIs.  This feels like overactive explanation-seeking for what could just be natural variability, but I really haven’t felt like this in at least two weeks, maybe three weeks, and the difference is striking

Siiiiiick again

Maybe I’ve been sick this whole time (3.5 weeks or so), but it just became less noticeable for a while?  Flus can last for a long time

Thankfully research has been going very well so I don’t feel pressured to be exceptionally productive in the next few days (and also I have a lot of intrinsic motivation to keep going, anyway, even if I don’t feel good)

(Since I first started feeling sick right when I increased my dose of Lexapro, I’m wondering on some level if it’s making me feel sick, though I don’t know if that’s a thing that happens?  Except for serotonin syndrome, which I clearly don’t have)

You know, I made a post about unfollowing moneycat a while ago and at the time I spun it as “this has nothing to do with her views in the abstract and it just has to do with me and my issues”

But let’s be honest: that was disingenuous.  I don’t agree with the set of views about trans women she’s been expressing repeatedly and insistently for a while now

The underlying idea in a lot of her posts seems to be “if you are a man with any kind of problems, the solution to these problems is becoming a trans woman (P.S. it will also made you politically great instead of politically awful)” and not only do I disagree with this in the abstract, I disagree with it in practice.  I can’t just sit there and say, high-mindedly, “ah, this is a trans issue and as a cis man it is not my place to say things about it.”  Because that’s not actually what she wants me to do; she wants me, as a (currently) cis man, to agree with the viewpoint and consider “becoming trans”

If I were to claim high-minded neutrality it would be a lie, because I’m still living life as a cis male and that’s an implicit disavowal of the moneycat ideology.  If I were to say anything except “I don’t agree with that ideology,” I’d be a hypocrite.  So here we are: I don’t agree with that ideology.

I get to say that, as a cis man, because the idea system in question makes claims about what my life choices should be, and simply by making life choices I am already implicitly agreeing or disagreeing.

I don’t even know what “becoming trans” would mean.  I’ve never wanted a woman’s body or a woman’s place in the social environments I’m in.  I don’t “feel female.”  I don’t think trying to be a woman, in the material/social context I’m in, would be a moral good.  It would not concretely help anyone, including me.  It would concretely hurt some people.

I’m not saying that moneycat believes every single cis man in the world should be trans (though lord does she come close at times), but she seems to push it as a one-size-fits-all solution to both one’s emotional problems and one’s worries about one’s moral place in the world.  Some of the kinds of problems she presents it as a solution to are problems that I have, and as a result, the things she says are (probably unintentionally) reminiscent of things that people have said in the past to try to manipulate me into doing things by exploiting my anxieties.  If she can have this manipulative effect on me, I am worried that she can have it on many other people.

I also worry about the implications of this in an overall, statistical sense.  Moneycat may frame her oppositions to masculinity as opposition to stereotypical dudebro masculinity, but the dudebros aren’t the ones listening carefully to her message.  Her message is going to resonate primarily with men who are already deeply worried about their moral place in the world.  The implication effectively seems to be: “if you are a man with low self-esteem, you’re probably really a woman.”  Think about that for a moment!

I’m not making this post because I want to start an argument or even because I think I have anything insightful to say – I’m making it out of the feeling that I needed my words to line up with my actions.  Pretending that I don’t explicitly and confidently disagree with her on this stuff would, as I said, make me a hypocrite.

I followed her for a long time and still follow a lot of people here who really like her and her blog, and I do like her and her blog, but I simply can’t agree with, or even maintain neutrality towards, the turn it’s taken in the last, I dunno, six months or so.  If this creates tension between you and me, well, maybe that is tension that should exist.  As I said, I don’t want to be a hypocrite.

Illness was better but mood was worse this morning.  Then I remembered I can just take more Ativan and now I’m accomplishing things!  Drugs are good

(Still not really confident the Lexapro is doing anything [yet]; I can placebo myself into thinking all sorts of things about it, but ultimately I still need benzos and the whole idea is to not need benzos)

OK, I’m staying home sick for the next two days.  I wonder what I’ll do with myself.  Caffeine seems to make reading possible but based on prior experience I think it’ll be difficult after 2 PM or so.

Maybe I’ll finish that weird RPG I was playing about the nautical anime witches?  I don’t get the sense it’s very long though

I just increased my dose of Lexapro so if there are any transient side effects from that it’ll be nice to lump them together with the flu so they don’t conflict with doing anything.

(Also, I got a prescription for the benzo I usually take rather than the one my psychiatrist accidentally [!] prescribed me two weeks ago, so we may be able to finally tell whether all the wonderfulness of the last two weeks was due to Lexapro or just due to being on a different benzo)

In one of those emotional states today where any attempt to think about large things like my place in the world creates a horrible shameful pit in my stomach

But thinking about small things, such as the bugs I am trying to work out of my code or Oliver Penrose’s idea of “the Markovian postulate” in statistical mechanics, works just fine

One of my friends, who was a math (and general academics) superstar in high school but stopped thinking of himself as an academic in college, keeps saying to me that “at some point [he] realized that he’d never be able to feel fulfilled by academic performance.”  I’ve never been able to be sure how to properly phrase my response, but it’d roughly be “I’m not looking for ‘fulfillment’ from math, I’m just looking for something to cling to when I need to ward off THE VOID”

Oh but now in the light of day I find that old review just too embarrassing to post after all

Like Karkat I hate all my old selves, for petty reasons, probably more than they deserve

It took me several months of therapy, about a year ago, to reach the insight that my (at the time) intensely felt desire to impress a cold, hostile, insecure man in a position of authority in my life was the result of the fact that this man reminded me of my father

Everything is a cliche, I live in a work of fiction

(Recently I’ve started an injoke with myself where I internally refer to the selfsame man as “Darth Vader” and it took me several weeks of that for me to get the joke there)

tourette’s talk

This is a post for tumblr user vastderp, who requested info about Tourette Syndrome (AKA Tourette’s or TS):

oh hey, thanks! i’m hoping to get people’s personal experience with medicating it in particular, what helps, how much you take, and what the side effects are like, and whether missing a day or two is enough to cause symptoms to worsen. 

the reason i’m looking for this is that i am thinking about writing about someone who has OCD and TS, but I only have OCD myself. also if you have any I Wish People Would Fucking Understand This issues, i would love to hear them too. I’m betting #1 on that list has got to be some variation of “no, we don’t all fucking curse uncontrollably!” but i figure there’s probably a lot more where that came from.

Okay, first of all, there are two misconceptions – not necessarily “common misconceptions,” but ones I’ve heard or seen before – that I want to mention:

1. People occasionally seem to get the impression that Tourette’s is in some fundamental way a linguistic disorder.  I’m thinking in particular of Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn, whose protagonist had TS, which was mostly depicted as something that made him uncontrollably utter words and phrases chosen or remixed from what he was thinking about or what he had just heard.  This bled over into a tendency to compulsively recombine and play with words in his head.  I guess this could be an accurate depiction of someone whose Tourette’s was very OCD-like or occurred together with OCD (though that’s a guess and I wouldn’t really know, not having OCD myself), but the idea that Tourette’s somehow inherently involves an unusual relationship to language is simply false.  To be diagnosed with Tourette’s, you need to have at least one vocal tic (in addition to at least one motor tic), but often those aren’t even verbal in nature.  The most common one is throat clearing; mine is a high-pitched squeaking noise.  More generally, I think the best way to think about TS is as a disorder of motion, where “noises” (including verbal noises) are a particular sub-type of “motions.”  To some extent I figure this is all pretty obvious to anyone who’s done any research about TS at all, but I feel like I need to mention it because it apparently wasn’t obvious to Lethem (?).  (I’m not dissing Lethem here, BTW, who I generally like, and whose character with TS I liked even if he wasn’t at all a representative TS case.)
   
2. People sometimes get the wrong impression about how voluntary or involuntary TS tics are.  This is understandable, because they’re at a weird border between the two that’s kind of hard to describe.  They’re not purely involuntary motions like reflexes – they’re more like very strong urges to make a particular motion.  On the other hand, calling them “urges” doesn’t quite do justice to just how hard they are to resist in practice.  Here’s a very close analogy for what they feel like (I came up with this to describe my own TS urges, but I’ve later heard it independently from other people with TS).  You know how, if you try to hold your breath for a long time, you eventually feel a strong urge or compulsion to stop holding your breath?  And this urge has certain special characteristics: it’s very intense, it consumes most or all of your attention, and it has this horrible feeling of acceleration, like you know it’s going to be far worse a few seconds from now, like by thinking about the next few seconds you’re staring into an onrushing, intolerable abyss?  That is almost exactly what the Tourette’s urges are like, if you replace “stop holding your breath” with “make a squeaking noise” or “tilt your head to the side” or whatever.  (Despite that dramatic description, they aren’t always that intense, though they can be at their worst.  But they have that sort of “intolerable onrushing abyss that must be stopped” quality to them, even when relatively mild.  If that makes any sense at all.)  The consequence of all this is that TS tics really can be avoided via willpower, but sometimes only temporarily, and it uses up all your attention and is extremely unpleasant and generally isn’t a practical solution in any real situation (unless the tic in question is “press the nuclear launch button and initiate WWIII” or some other silly special case).

Okay, with those out of the way, I can talk about medication.  Ideally, I’d recommend you ask someone else in addition to me about this issue, because it’s been a very long time since I’ve taken medication for TS, and also because my experience with it was somewhat extreme.

I think a rough estimate is that 1/3 of childhood TS cases disappear in adulthood, 1/3 persist unchanged, and 1/3 persist but are greatly diminished in severity.  I was in the last category; I still have TS, but it’s mild enough now that it mostly just looks like nervous fidgeting and doesn’t strike anyone as pathological if they don’t know what it is.  I took Risperdal (Risperidone) from, IIRC, age 11 to 16, when my TS was at its worst.  It didn’t fully eliminate my tics, but it made them less disruptive in the classroom and, most importantly, it prevented them from interfering with my sleep.  Before going on Risperdal I would have nights where I would lie in bed for many hours having constant tics that prevented me from relaxing enough to sleep.  (In retrospect, a hypnotic might have been a better way to deal with this particular problem than Risperdal – I’m not sure why this never occurred to my prescriber.)

One side effect of Risperdal was weight gain – my weight went from 50th percentile for my age and sex to 90th percentile.  The mental side effects were much, much more unpleasant: I had pretty much constant brain fog and could not concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes.  I loved to read before going on Risperdal (and love to read now) but I couldn’t read books from start to finish while on it (I managed to absorb some information from nonfiction books by flipping randomly through them and reading a few pages at a time; fiction was impossible).  School was very difficult and I needed a lot of tutoring and other help; it instantly became much easier when I stopped taking Risperdal.  (This all gave me a very confused and muddled self-concept, because I was a gifted child when very young and retained from that a sense that I was “smart,” yet was constantly confronted with situations where I could not perform intellectual tasks that were considered easy by most or all normal people.)

Thankfully, I never experienced any sexual side effects or gynecomastia/galactorrhea, although those can happen with some antipsychotics and I think Risperdal in particular is known for causing the latter two.

I tried to stop taking Risperdal a few times in the five years I was on it, and every time my tics returned to their original, severe state.  I don’t remember if this happened immediately or whether it took a few days, but I don’t think I ever lasted more than a week off of it.  I think the reason I was successful at finally going off of it at age 16 was that, by that time, my TS had started to subside of its own accord, so by that point my “natural,” unmedicated symptoms were bearable.

I don’t remember what my dosage of Risperdal was, but I do remember it was considered relatively low (I think it was between 1 mg and 2 mg).  There’s some discussion of doses here.

I hope that helps!  Some of it was probably more detail or personal than what you were looking for, but I wasn’t sure what to include and what not to include and it’s easiest for me to err on the side of inclusion.

tiny legal professionals

Follow-up to this morning’s post: psychiatrist prescribed me Lexapro, which is what I was hoping for.  Excited to see how it goes.