Neurovagrant

For now, I’ve shifted most of my bloggery over to Neurovagrant.com. Catch you there!

I collapsed in bed, utterly exhausted, earlier this week. It was that type of fatigue where you’re too tired to fall asleep, and so I lay staring at the ceiling for a while just trying to drift off. I had worked 16 hours the day before, had eight hours off, and was just home again from working another eight. On top of that, I felt emotionally spent and utterly broken. I hadn’t eaten a decent meal since the breakfast burrito about twenty four hours earlier, a breakfast burrito that had rocketed through my digestive system like lead.

Now, before I go on, I want to explain a little about how my mind works. I have a very visual memory; it’s not photographic in the sense that I can remember everything I’ve ever experienced visually, but I can remember almost everything in that fashion. This is especially true of things I’ve written down; if I picture it as written, I can see it how I originally penned it, each handwritten inflection, each flaw in the penmanship, and that allows me to remember the context.

In addition to that, my mind works best when it’s near or at the breaking point. When it’s overstressed, overstimulated, and under-rested. It’s able to make leaps and bounds and secure logical connections that it otherwise might’ve missed. A lot of my fiction conceptualizing and writing is done along these lines because…well…it works. Same with writing papers for school.

So I lay in bed, broken, wrapped in my big thick comforter, and thought about how tired I was. The next moment, inexplicably, I was thinking about a study I read a few years ago. I wrote down the basics while studying it, and couldn’t recall the journal it was in but I did recall the title. “Elevated Tryptophan Levels in the Dorsal Raphe Nuclei of Depressed Suicides.” Catchy title, eh? The jist of the study was that brains of a number of depressed people who committed suicide were examined, and found to have elevated levels of tryptophan. The theory proposed by the authors was that the elevated tryptophan represented a compensatory mechanism when serotonergic (serotonin-based) neuro systems weren’t working right.

The question became: why didn’t the compensatory mechanism work well enough to prevent the suicide? And I’m left wondering, since it struck me in bed, if it’s because a side-effect of the tryptophan was the fact that it either didn’t help or worsened feelings of tiredness and fatigue.

Fatigue is a killer in depression. It’s one of the hardest symptoms to fight because by definition it means you don’t have the energy to fight it. You lay there and feel like the world could burn down around you (or is burning down around you) and you couldn’t lift a finger. So something in the Depressed Suicides in the study meant that their serotonin system was wonky, and the tryptophan attempted to make up for it but ultimately might have done more harm than good.

It’s something to think about, at least. I may be totally off-base, here. But completely thrashed and laying in bed, making that connection felt like a win. And I’ll take wins wherever I can get ‘em.

An old friend of mine called rather randomly today just to catch up. Martin and I became fast friends back when I was a Buddha-Blogger (as he was, too) and have kept in touch sporadically ever since. He’s now married with crotchfruit, and the guy that used to spend hours a day on the ‘net barely even checks his email, so we talk on the phone once every few months.

We got onto the topic of my emotional status quo getting rocked (in a good way, mind you) in the past week, and some temporary neuroticism I engaged in last night. He started laughing at me.

“You’re grasping. Cut the shit!”

Grasping is a very, very Buddhist term referring to what you do when you operate from a place of fear or a feeling of insufficiency. You get all paranoid and try to cement everything so you feel like you know exactly where you stand, and then erect a death grip to try and hold onto it all. As we were talking, the sneaky sonofabitch emailed me the recording of a lecture by Jack Kornfield, a psychologist and famous meditation teacher. The subject, of course, was grasping.

It was perfectly timed.

Kornfield talks, among other things, about longing. Longing can be stigmatized depending on what branch of Buddhism you’re into, but K dismisses all that. The point, he says, is sensing that longing, observing it within yourself, without attaching judgment to it. Longing isn’t to be dismissed; it often covers wounds and pain and loss and grief. The point is to pay attention to it, but not from a place of judgment, not from a place of fear.

He also talks about desire; sometimes it’s not that desire needs to be eradicated. Sometimes, we need to have the desire fulfilled by healing, or love, or understanding. The point is not to advance some moralistic or dualistic agenda, but just to pay attention.

What, he asks, could you have at this moment that would really truly satisfy you? Follow that line of thought. What does that tell you about the situation, and your role in it? What does that tell you about you?

He then returns to the idea of sensing your longing. When we sense longing without judging it or identifying with it, something greater appears. He talks about the Tibetan concept of Padma-longing, or Lotus-longing. It begins as the neurotic (his word, not mine) and hysterical quality in longing for a union, and then is transformed in its moment of opening. That opening is the realization that those neurotic and hysterical qualities emerge from a place of fear, and that you don’t have to see things from there. If you open like the lotus, you can truly sense. You look at a tree, and see a tree. You look at a person, and see a person, without imposing your hopes or fears or expectations.

From boingboing.

Bella DePaulo has a great post on lying in relationships over at Psychology Today (which I found by way of HuffPo). She distinguishes between regular lies on the one hand, even kind-hearted lies, and serious lies on the other. Kindhearted lies tend to be the ones we say to make our significant others feel better, or at least ones we tell to avoid making them feel bad. Serious lies are big time betrayals of trust, and are typically negative in any relationship.

The distinction is important, I think, and one well-made. I’m willing to admit that I can’t remember a relationship where I didn’t lie. The honesty involved in DePaulo’s work is very refreshing.