1/- I should read this on zapatismo as indianismo, but it lies out of the scope of my project, or does it, really? I would like to be in Bolivia to do it … and I am so tired of being under so much stress of different kinds and I wonder how much of the general pain I am in is grief, and the grief is for the self I sacrificed.
2/- I feel grief either way — sharp and disabling when I am working, and when it stops me from working, and more dully when I neither work nor leave. I might have been destined for this field but I think I knew whereof I spoke when I first said it had become inaccessible to me.
I said that if I were to stay in it I would need actual support and not just exhortations about my duty to the profession or accusations of abandonment. I said recriminations about how I was warned not to go to graduate school and paid no heed would not help. Neither would admonishments about how I had made my bed and must lie in it, and had hurt people and must now be hurt; it was actual support I would need.
3/- Being in this work and yet being disabled for it means surrounding oneself with mementos and feels unhealthy in the extreme, like preserving the bedroom of a child now decades dead. On the other hand those things are mine and I am alive, and if I could contact them I would be myself in the edition that is now required but that I essentially murdered when that was required.
Me cago en la leche.
4/- People like one to go over one’s past and at an intellectual level this is interesting since one can mine it like an archive. When it was first asked of me I said I would rather go through some archives in Peru and that hurt someone’s feelings, so I relented. This was not a good idea. And I wonder why one is asked to relive pain when one goes over one’s past, and why pleasure and joy are considered to have been illusions if anything was ever difficult or problematic. Why is it only pain which can be considered real? And, why is one asked to go again and again over the errors of one’s ways, what one could have done, what one’s faults were?
5/- That dream I have, of pouring my mind into freezer boxes to save for later, and recording my research on cassettes to put into the freezer as well, in ziploc bags until the war ended. I dreamed it last night again and this iteration of the dream located the first instance of freezing for preservation at the beginning of high school.
Piensa el presente guárdame para
mañana mañana mañana mañana.
At the end of college I had just begun to thaw and this is why I went to graduate school. At the end of that I remember feeling warm like a plant; I would stretch my spine and curl my toes. At the same time the entire edifice was unstable since it was known what a terrible traitor I was for having done these things.
6/- I do not understand why you are depressed, with your good health, your beautiful flat, your joie-de-vivre and your wonderful job, said a friend when all of this started. It is because I have self-hatred, I answered.
7/- I think the focus on pain is poor hygiene and I regret having learned it. I keep trying to train myself out of it but only changes of venue seem to give respite.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I have remade myself in different locations. When people say you can’t escape yourself, I answer with Jim Steinman: “You can’t run away forever, but there’s nothing wrong with getting a good head start.” And in fact I think you can, too, escape yourself by moving, but that’s not worth arguing about with people who don’t believe it. The smart-ass answer has enough truth that sometimes it makes people think.
I am having a flare-up of chronic physical pain. It is worse at night, when it is harder to think of other things. It is better during the day, with distractions. Some pain is bad enough that you can’t think of anything else, but if you want to have a life while living with pain, then yes, it is good hygiene to figure out both how to reduce it (sleep, exercise, good food, judicious use of drugs because there is no virtue in suffering) and how to set it aside and do other things.
Yes, I believe in moving.
Do you have fibromyalgia or is that too direct a question? A friend of mine from graduate school has it and it sounds terrible.
But I think it would be smart of me to decide I have chronic emotional pain and not be scared by it, because it is being scared by it that is so … disabling. I do not seem to meet the profile for depression or respond to antidepressants. The pressure to “get over it” may in fact be what is in my way here.
And: I just found the term “traumatic depression” in a student paper, which I did not know. Apparently there is that and there is post traumatic depression; I like these terms better than PTSD.
Yes. It is not so terrible, or not for me, or not now that I have lived with it for so long. Most of the time I can forget about it as long as I look after myself properly. Flares happen either because of other illness, as I think is the case now, or because of stress. It did take a long time to work out how to manage it, and in the early years, it was much more severe. I minded the brain fog far more than the pain, and it is a great pleasure to have had my mind back for the last several years.
I think the notion of chronic emotional pain might be a useful one: it’s something you can live with and manage, but you don’t have to cure it, might not even be able to cure it permanently, but remissions are certainly possible. And a change of climate can work wonders!
Change of climate, yes. It is not in the stars right now which means I have to practice good hygiene here, so to speak. Fibromyalgia, I am told the flip side of it is that you have a *really* good excuse to live a healthy life.
Brain fog, I think I had it for a long time albeit for other reasons. It was due to not having it that I joined the writing group. When I had it, no amount of trying would move a project forward, I would just go in circles.
Chronic emotional pain, yes, this concept is really liberating — does not require nearly so much energy to manage; I can see absorbing it as a characteristic and almost making friends with it. It might afford some form of knowledge all its own.