i have alexithymia. basically i spent most of my early life feeling desperately anxious without really knowing it. just learned to ignore the signals my body sends. i often don’t eat until late in the day. i would probably die of thirst if it wasn’t for the fact i need caffeine to motivate me to do anything in the morning. but eventually the stress breaks through in a way even i notice and i enter burn out. i was getting close to that point when i wrote this line.
have you ever suffered from burn out? are you burned out right now?
this did happen but it wasn’t actually traumatic. i’m not entirely sure if F was really mum’s BEST friend. but a friend of long standing anyway. anyway, F just collected me from primary school and took me swimming. i think i had fun. but it did spell the end of that friendship for my mum. and was probably a symptom in the unwinding of F’s marriage.
i’m not good at swimming. i don’t think i could have swam without arm bands when this happened. i’m still crap at swimming. i hate cold water.
can you convince me to join the cult of ice cold water?
i consider myself to be good with numbers and knowledgeable about business type stuff. i know about politics, law, finance, accountancy, tax. and i’ve read quite a lot of self help re self-management. absolutely useless at telling people what to do. panic and nasusea at the idea of writing my own to-do list on a monday and never plan more than like three days ahead. but nonetheless, confident that i understand business generally. and anytime i see ‘ebitda’ i wince. you may as well be telling me turnover. it’s an irrelevant metric. it means ‘earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation’ – but so what? apple computer’s ebitda may be 100 billion dollars. but it can’t achieve that without paying taxes, paying interest on its debt, replacing out of date hardware (depreciation) and developing new intellectual property (amortisation). apple needs to keep incurring all those costs or it will go bust.
do you suffer from executive dysfunction? how do you cope?
my love got back from her sister’s and we ran across town to view flats and eat the best pizza. it was a very salty evening. she ended up buying one of the flats, so it was nice that i was there. i didn’t go to that many of her viewings. one of the estate agents we met mentioned he was training for a half marathon and we casually told him our pbs, which were quite a bit faster than what he was aiming for. hopefully we inspired him to try a bit harder. its not like we are in the olympics or something.
i actually said this in a job interview many months later. and got the offered the job. i am quite an anxious person. full of doubt. and things don’t tend to come easily to me. despite this, i do sort of believe i can do anything if i keep trying. hence i’m learning piano in midlife and recording an album of spoken word poetry and trying to find time to self publish several works of fiction while semi planning my first ski holiday.
what are your best and worst job interview experiences?
it was never part of the plan, but on one of my many diversions around life i happened to learn double entry bookkeeping. it took an afternoon or so with a textbook. i was on holiday, sitting by the pool. credit this, debit that. i remember wondering: if there is a debit for every credit, how does anyone make a profit or a loss? well. i read the textbook. so now i know. and there are lots of ‘timing differences’ in accountancy. i definitely prefer poetry to accountancy, but there is a poetry about numbers too. i quite enjoy bookkeeping once i get going. but the inertia is hard to overcome.
well this was quite an autistic line. i felt quite a lot of shame about writing it down at the time. and for what it says about the company i keep. but now i know i am neurodivergent i feel a bit safer in saying it. i am trying to learn to live on my own terms. to embrace my inherent weirdness. to understand myself a bit better and to judge myself from a perspective of generosity. and to extend that same courtesy to everyone else.
and in fact, i’m sure a lot of the people i love are neurodivergent too, although not all are or would want to be diagnosied. and do you know i even love some neurotypical people!
i was going through a process of self-understanding. a bit late, to be honest. i guess i’ve known for a while that it takes me a lot of effort to react well to things. i now know that i’m autistic, and a highly sensitive person. i panic when i’m surprised, i hate criticism, i don’t even like compliments much. a few deep breaths. ok maybe this email is just an invitation to a seminar that i can accept or not and there is no underlying passive aggressive message to be offended by.
we want what we want because we want it. to some extent. not much more advanced than a flower turning towards the sun. but because we have so many complicated ways of expressing our desires, and because it can be quite hard to be sure what our desires are (am i hungry or am i anxious?) we can trick ourselves into believing that the ‘me’ from the internal monologue is running the whole show from a place of reason. when actually its just a chatbot that calms you down or riles you up or whatever.
i guess what i mean is that reason gets us what we want, if we use it well. but passions aren’t rational. hunger and horniness can neither be summoned or subdued with reason alone. (food and sex will do it though)
i spend a lot of time in the bath. at least once a week but ideally more. i’m always sort of faffing about, never quite relaxing, reading with the radio on while starting out the windows and rubbing my eyes. so i like a hot wet environment to sort of slow me down every couple of days. immobilised in the bath, i have a tendency to be quite creative. so much of the poem is written in the bath. i wonder how many creative works were conceived of in a hot bath. how many bars of music and novels that only exist due to the miracle of modern plumbing.
ah the march 2024 playlist was very solid. xtc, blur, leonard cohen, george harrison, the divine comedy. but the cohen album, songs of love and hate, was giving me a lot of pleasure clearly. and i have often been told i am obsessive but i never see myself this way. there’s always someone else who seems much more obsessed that i am… on the bulletin board/ sub reddit/ newsgroup or whatever other cultish forum i’ve found myself in. although this love epochal project is maybe a new level for me. hope you like it.
the love epochal. n.n. benn 