There is no more normal

The COVID-19 news is sounding a bit more positive lately, at least in my area. And so there is a lot of conversation about going back to normal, going back to business as usual. I do try to act normal in my daily life, as much as I can. Being normal has always been a “fake it till you make it” effort for me, anyway. I can present an persona that functions as people expect. I can sympathize with the desire for a calm, predictable, dependable world, and even share it.

However I don’t feel anything like normal, if “normal” presumes a certain level of trust in the social structure and authorities around me. There is less I feel I can take for granted every day. I wake up and go to sleep with an inner and outer watchfulness. I watch others. I watch myself, listening to my own words and actions and wondering, How truthful are you?  Other than the general aim for truthfulness, I don’t always know exactly what I am watching for. Patterns in the underbrush I suppose, movement in the shadows. I go to bed exhausted most nights.

This article by Matt Taibbi does a good job of pulling together many of the stories I have been following the past few months with an increasing sense of uneasiness. It’s been 6 months since my break from Face.book and I’m not at all sorry. There are a few groups and people I miss, because they manage to be positive social ecosystems within the larger negative complex. But investing time in local, personal relationships has had far better results for the time and effort put in. When I want to step outside my parochial worldview, carefully choosing where on the internet I put my attention is far better educationally. I have read more books this year than in any of the previous 5 (and quite possibly cumulatively).  I do a pretty good job of keeping up with podcasts too (though there is always more than I have time for). There is of course the risk of getting into an echo chamber, but all the people I listen to are curious and/or educated people and there is my own extremely high openness to experience, which acts as a counterbalance I think.

I am open, but I also like to know where the boundaries are. There is a line in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series that I really like. She is talking about being a leader, or maybe about being a man, I forget which. (Doesn’t matter anyway; I have a well integrated masculine side.) It goes something like: “What it really means to be a leader is to draw a line in the sand, and to fight anyone that steps over it.”

2021 is about drawing my lines in the sand. I may put them in the wrong place sometimes; I may be ignorant of many things and make mistakes. I am not interested in convincing anyone of how right I am because I am rarely convinced of that myself. But the lines need to be drawn so I have some way of understanding what is going on when information and/or its suppression is used like a weapon. I have to understand clearly what is real and important to me when propaganda and gaslighting is the order of the day. I have to know who I stand with and what I will and won’t tolerate being done to them. 

I wasn’t sure what to call this post. “There is no more normal” is maybe a bit of an extreme statement. I have calm happy days. I continue (I hope and believe) to be a positive influence. I think what I really mean is: “There is no more normal I take for granted.” In so far as normal exists for me now, it is created through my daily actions, reactions, and sense making. So I do hope I have the strength and the skill to continue to make that happen.

Psychiatric medications

I sometimes feel like the odd one out these days because I don’t take and have never taken psychiatric drugs. No anti anxiety, no antidepressants. I consider myself an anxious person and I think at certain times of my life I was depressed, though it was more episodic and circumstance based than constant. I have seen doctors and counsellors at various points in my life for mental health reasons. But nobody has ever handed me a prescription for anything. I haven’t thought a lot about that over the years, but as I get older and learn more, I am increasingly grateful for my doctors’ forbearance.

Most recently I listened to 

this podcast, The Dangers of Psychiatric Medication.

It was a bit shocking, though not a surprise. Among the issues raised:

• Psychiatric drugs are tested on a short term basis, a month to three months, but most often prescribed indefinitely. Therefore there is little or no evidence they are safe long term;
• Dependency is essentially a given with all drugs, with some leading to dependency quicker. This means that when dosage is reduced or stopped, there are withdrawal symptoms. These symptoms often lead people to believe that they “need” the drug, not realizing they are experiencing withdrawal not their original problem;
• Many people still believe that they have a “chemical imbalance” in their brain, and that taking drugs fixes it. With the possible exception of a few rare conditions, this is simply not true. Brains are highly complex systems and there is no way to simply add a chemical and fix a problem without affecting other parts of the system. Plus mental health problems are usually caused by circumstances, not chemistry. Drugs may be effective if they are used short term to help the person deal with the problem, but this is not often what happens: instead the drug is taken  long term.
• The “chemical imbalance” idea is specifically promoted by commercial interests as it leads to a perceived need for the product

Psychiatric medications are not an area of personal expertise for me (again I am grateful to not have personal experience to add to this discussion!) Nevertheless I see the need to understand better what is going on with the frequent prescribing of these drugs, the fact that an awful lot of people are taking them, and to identify and correct any fallacies that I find.

It also makes more urgent that question: what do you do when life is really tough and you truly struggle to cope? Because life is tough! If I continue to choose not to take any drugs (and this is my plan) I definitely need to keep learning about alternative ways to approach life and its challenges. 

Leaving Neverland

I recently read this excellent article looking at a topic many wonder about: Why are so many people reading and/or listening to Canadian professor Jordan Peterson?

Jordan Peterson is telling young white men what many of us already know: Neverland is a lie.

 I have been listening to and reading a lot of Prof. Peterson’s content since 2017, and have benefited from it greatly. (I am a woman in my early 40s with a family). I’ve also read a lot of “why do people listen to Jordan Peterson!” articles and often “why is it mostly men!” articles, many of which drip jealousy and resentment, and thus explain their own existence if nothing else. I don’t even read those kind of articles anymore, BUT this article by Ms Natthew is very different and makes many excellent points. 

I particularly appreciated the point about how current generations need to make choices about social arrangements and responsibilities  that previous generations could take for granted. This is absolutely a stressor on people and an extremely important issue. And people of my generation and younger (also thinking of myself when younger) likely never articulated to ourselves or had it clearly explained just how big a challenge it is to shoulder responsibility while isolated.

“Moreover, even as we have sought to centralize, routinize and institutionalize many of our familial relationships and friendships, we recognize that our interactions with others are nearly always conscious choices rather than ever-present unconscious realities. For this reason, our responsibilities—professional, marital and parental—are ours alone in a way that was not true for either my Italian-American grandparents or his Liberian ones. Hence no amount of self-awareness or hard work can render us truly fit for the sheer amount of personal responsibility required of anyone trying to be a decent citizen, worker or parent in today’s newly individuated world.

“Enter Jordan Peterson with his now 24 rules, making what was communal, implicit and abstract for my grandparents individual, explicit and specific for me.
“Thus, it is Peterson himself who has noticed that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated. His resonance with younger people reflects the extreme demands of modern life and the new isolation in which we are expected to meet those demands. It also reflects the failure of our parents and grandparents to prepare many of us for the logistical, psychological and emotional reality that they unwittingly created.”

Matthew also makes the point that JBP resonates more with young (white) men than women because women and some racial minorities already understand his message, but young men are more likely to actually believe they can evade responsibility without consequence.  I tend not to agree with the author that there are more “lost boys” than “lost girls”. There are no shortage of women living alone, struggling with responsibility (and/or avoiding it), seeking relief through medication or retail therapy or whatever. But if our modern world doesn’t necessarily nurture young women, perhaps it caters more to us in the sense that it can repackage and sell our desires back to us.  I would say that if you really want to generalize, it’s not that JBP’s message is not relevant to women, it’s that we are lagging a bit behind in our awareness of its relevance.

Highly recommended read.