Category Archives: Insight

Suppressed Thoughts

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On the walk to the post office to mail the reimbursement submission, I realized I have actively suppressed thoughts. I was not aware of this until today. This insight explains some of my other behaviours.

I know that I am trying very hard to avoid a depression spiral. This is the proximate cause of the problem. A thought enters my mind, I recognize the thought involves a negative association and I seek to suppress the thought. At night, when falling asleep, I am less able to suppress thought. At the edge of sleep, all those thoughts I have attempted to suppress, or ignore, come floating back into consciousness and I am unable to avoid them. This surrender to the problematic results in an extended period of wakefulness that makes it impossible to enter sleep.

Suppressed Thoughts

This may not be a complete inventory. These are some of the thoughts I found myself attempting to suppress today.

Loss of self as evidenced by projects, or objects, toward which I no longer have any emotional attachment. This has two aspects. The first is the shock that accompanies each “Pompeii moment.” In Pompeii, the citizens became frozen in time as they were smothered by the ash of the exploding volcano.

My Pompeii moments result from the accident. As I clean up the house, I discover old projects abandoned in progress, projects abruptly arrested by the after effects of the crash. I downed tools, walked away, and never returned. The project has been untouched for three years.

This phenomenon has a second aspect. It also speaks to the degree of routinization. Subsequent to the accident, I became enmeshed in a narrow routine and rarely exited this behaviour pattern. The routine focused on the most basic life skills. I cooked. I washed. I slept. I wrote. Everything else was cut away, abandoned, left untouched.  Today I have become an archaeologist, picking over old tracks, trying to interpret and make sense of what I find.

It is a cold shock to rediscover my injury in the form of these abandoned moments. Each discovery leaves me more hesitant, tentative, uncertain, mistrusting. I learn that I cannot trust myself for the world I perceive as “out there,” this world of solid phenomena, exists primarily in here, in the wet pulp between my ears. Somehow a set of operations more intimate than sex, more complex than calculus, that unfathomable nugget that is me, was me, has eroded away, become atrophied, lost, disappeared. And this ghost of ego departed on quiet cats paws, silently, without me ever noticing it had left.

There is nothing positive about this epiphany.  It leaves me shaken and choked to the core. Even when writing these words I am left to struggle with my comprehension of these effects, their implications for what it means to be “me,” to be human, a member of homo sapiens sapiens.

 

 

 

 

Submission

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Much of today was spent putting together a submission to Québec Santé to obtain reimbursement of payments made for medical services rendered in Ontario. There are very limited resources available in Québec. A year ago I wrote a complaint to Québec Santé regarding my inability to find a GP and I received an email in which they acknowledged the critical doctor shortage.

The submission is not a complex task. It requires assembling multiple documents:

1) A copy of the receipt issued by the Doctor.

2) Copies of the four cancelled cheques confirming the payment made.

3) A completed reimbursement form.

While relatively simple, this submission was difficult for me to put together. I quickly became very frustrated handling six pieces of paper, confirming they are in sequence, ensuring I print out the correct copies, and that the dates on the cancelled cheques match the treatment dates on the receipt.

As soon as I sense myself becoming frustrated, I become even more upset by my inability to perform this relatively simple task. It is beyond belief that I cannot complete this task quickly and easily. During the period when I worked for Gargantua, I was responsible for undertaking weekly performance audits for 30 persons. This was a much more difficult job than the reimbursement submission. It was undertaken under severe time constraint with a number of other variables that increased task complexity and difficulty. Despite this, I experienced no problems. Today, I undertake a much simpler task and I encounter problems.

This submissions task has been a recurring problem since I commenced seeing Doctor H two years ago. It has not become easier over the course of this interval. So there exist pockets of improvement (such as my improved ability to write, or to blog), and other areas of task performance in which improvement is limited to non-existent.

I try and focus on the positive aspects of improvement. Doing so provides me with a confidence boost, and helps me engage the world in a positive manner. When I encounter performance deficits, such as this submissions issue, the experience is extremely deflating and it quickly undermines the narrative of performance improvement.

Submission Insight

Immediately after drafting this post I felt overwhelmed. Identification of this issue negates any narrative of self-improvement. I once again feel as if I am deceiving myself. This sense of self deception erodes all confidence and initiates a downward spiral of self-recrimination, and despair.

The insight derives from the observation that my response to despair was to commence a mindless, and highly repetitive, blog housekeeping task. Writing is soothing and calming. Performing endless repetitions of the same task is also soothing and calming. The repeated performance of routinized tasks anchors me in a context which is within my capacity. I gain a sense of achievement that serves as a salve to an ego bruised by the forced acknowledgement of a deficit.

This observation provides a psychological rationale for routinized behaviours. It also explains where the last two hours went.