coldhearted scientist وداد

I got e-mail from blog readers asking whether I were all right, and yes. I had a PTSD episode, which I disliked. I have been researching flashbacks today and realized something fundamental, but not at all new; I had merely forgotten it.

Back when I was seriously going to quit academia, a series of events had taken place such that I started to get these flashbacks. My original research field is fairly rife with triggers for them, and so is first year language teaching. That was the key reason I decided I ought to change careers and worked on it: I knew I was disabled for this one, but not disabled generally, and so the most practical thing to do seemed to be to move next door, so to speak. I do not normally discuss this PTSD situation as one of the reasons for the career change I keep discussing, but it is fundamental.

People did not believe me. Medical characters thought I must either be generally disabled or exaggerrating, it could not be that there were specific triggers, I could not be both entirely lucid and also capable of experiencing this kind of pain. Academics were horrified that I would leave the fold. This, in particular, is why I find academic advice so … triggering, and rant and rave about it; I got tons of it in that period and it was beside the point.

There was much I could have done at the time to save the day, in particular: turn down Book Contract #1, change focus and write something entirely different, from scratch. That was in fact feasible, or at least much more feasible than trying to power through Book Contract #1. But it was against academic advice and I did not do it, which of course compounded everything. Life got somewhat hard therefore and now I deal with the practical results of life having been hard for some time. And these practical results are themselves hard.

The flashbacks are partly fatigue driven. They are also be more easily managed if I am not with people almost all the time. And I am still learning about them. The language program wars we have here are a trigger for them, I have just realized. Related is that I experience terror after asserting myself on certain issues, in situations similar to some in the past where similar assertiveness would in fact have resulted in extreme violence; it does not now but it is as though I bring the same violence upon myself in a kind of hallucination.

I asserted myself about the language program Monday and Tuesday, said specifically what I was willing and not willing to do, and made it clear I would “compromise” to a certain point but not further. Wednesday morning I woke up in a nightmare and the dream did not leave me for some time. The physical pain that comes to me on these occasions seems endless, seems not to have the possibility of ending. I am ambivalent about these events, I seem to gain a lot of insight from each one and at the same time, I think they are some form of self-harm. Some of this seems to be about another job I had, actually, that was traumatic and with which I have evidently not dealt.

At one level I have these episodes because I am tolerating things I should not; the episodes let me know this is going on. If they are just self-harming I should really renounce them, not just work through them, watching them diminish, or look at them as a left-handed guide. There are rather radical treatments you can do for this sort of thing but the reason they got as bad as they are was misguided treatment. I seem to get more out of reading what other people say about the experience.

There are also some things I do not know. Did the material and conditions of Book Contract #1 have to work as a trigger? No, not at all, not with actual as opposed to mere standard academic advice. Does our language program have to work as a trigger? No, not if it can be more professionally run. Are these episodes also an avoidance tactic of mine, are they a sideshow that blocks access to work?

I think not but I will say they take time from both play and work, as dealing with this one has taken five days now, which is five days in a semester. What I learned, though: the language program is a trigger, which is why I cannot simply power through it; I have to take care of myself in these courses, as it is said. The roughness of the students shocks me, but my roughness on myself should shock me more.

Axé.