Anxie-teeeeeeeea

An interesting game where you are presented with 10 artifacts from the MET. You have to place where the artifact is from and what time period it is from. Each artifact scores up to 10,000 points, and you lose points the further away your guess is and how far off in time you are. You can only play once a day. Thanks to @baebeylik for showing this to me.

Today I scored really well. Yesterday ... not so much.

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My sycamore tree began life in the gravel at the edge of a parking lot. If trees can feel pain, that is a painful, unlucky death. I carefully dug it up and put it in a pot I made out of a disposable cup.

Hello small one. This world may be cruel, but I will not be.

I decided to take care of it, not expecting it to survive, and when my sycamore tree unfurled one tiny leaf and then another, it chiseled a tiny foothold in my terrified brain, the kind of brain that doesn't remember a world before the atomic bomb and before 9/11.

I googled the lifespans of trees. My neurons had to stretch and expand to accommodate what I learned: My sycamore tree may live five hundred years. It's hard to think something so big. In twenty years, my baby sycamore tree will be three stories tall, and the home of many creatures. In five years, my sycamore tree will be taller than I am. In one year, it will be summer.

There's this concept called sense of foreshortened future where people who have lived through trauma can't conceptualize a future for themselves because deep down they don't expect to survive, When I look forward, all I see is fire and death, melting ice and burning sky. We were raised Evangelical. All we see is Judgment Day, except there is no heaven.

But now there is a tiny gap in the wall, a crack in the door of my cell

and on the other side, I see a tree

There is, in the future, a great old sycamore tree, full of clean winds and the stir of a thousand wings. A hundred years from now. Fifty years from now. There will be forests in that world. There will be a world.

It takes courage, but we have to imagine it.

Most tree species can live in excess of three or four hundred years. I think I'm learning something. I think there are ancient voices saying hello small one, touch the dirt and the leaves, for now you are part of something that cannot die

in 2030 I will be thirty years old and the world will not have ended and there will still be hummingbirds, and we will have photos of the stars more beautiful than we can now imagine.

I planted an Eastern Redcedar; they may live nine hundred years. There will be nine hundred years. The people in that time will remember us. Maybe we will meet the aliens (hi aliens!).

I will blow out the candles on many birthday cakes in a world where there are wolves in dark forests far from home. I am learning to imagine the future. I learned recently that elk were reintroduced to the Appalachian Mountains after over a hundred years of extirpation, and that they are expanding their range.

That tiny crack I can see through now opens a tiny bit more:

Maybe elk will pass through my hometown, maybe there will be a forest where the pasture is on the high hill that I can see from my home

say it, say it, say it: ten years, thirty years, a hundred years from now

When ranchers in Utah's Rich County found eighteen sheep killed in March 2022, they assumed coyotes. USDA Wildlife Services flew a plane over the kill site and found something feeding on the carcasses that had only been confirmed in the state eight times in forty years. It was a wolverine. Utah sits at the extreme southern margin of the wolverine's North American range. The animal is built for the deep snow and high alpine of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, country above ten thousand feet where the winters last eight months and the terrain rejects everything that is not specifically engineered to survive it. A wolverine showing up in Utah's ranch country was not a routine predator complaint. It was a biological event. State wildlife managers had no protocol for it because they had never needed one. Biologists set specialized barrel traps near the sheep carcasses. Catching a wolverine in a live trap is considered one of the most difficult captures in North American wildlife management. The animal is trap-smart, solitary, covers enormous distances daily, and operates almost exclusively in terrain that humans struggle to access on foot. The odds of a wolverine walking into a barrel trap were close to zero. The next morning, a sheepherder found one of the trap doors dropped. Inside was a healthy, twenty-eight-pound male, estimated at three to four years old. It was the first wolverine ever live-captured by biologists in Utah's history. The team sedated him, packed his body in ice to keep his core temperature stable during the examination, fitted him with a GPS tracking collar, and released him into the deep snow of the Uinta Mountains. For researchers who had spent careers studying an animal they almost never got to see, that collar was the first real-time data source on wolverine movement the state had ever produced. The data that came back over the next twenty-five days confirmed what wolverine biologists in other states had documented but Utah had never been able to verify on its own ground. The animal logged over 195 miles of travel in less than a month. He did not drift south toward lower elevations or leave the state. He locked into the high peaks of the Uintas above ten thousand feet and ran massive looping circuits through avalanche chutes, rocky ridgelines, and snowfields deep enough to bury a man standing upright. The daily distances he covered would qualify as an endurance event for a human athlete on flat ground. He was doing it through the most physically punishing terrain in the state, in winter, alone, at elevation, without stopping. The eighteen dead sheep that started the whole sequence were never repeated. The wolverine moved into the high country and stayed there, operating in a landscape so remote and so hostile that the only evidence of his existence was the GPS signal pinging coordinates from ridgelines that no person had visited in months. The collar proved what the forty years of scattered sightings could only suggest. The wolverine was not passing through Utah. It was living there, quietly covering nearly two hundred miles of frozen alpine rock in less than a month, completely invisible to every human being in the state.

Ever since she was six, she's had pain in her legs, which turns into pain in her hips and back for stretches of time. She's tried for years to get a diagnosis, with absolutely no joy. As a kid they thought she had collapsed arches in her feet; then it became clear her feet were fine, but something was wrong with her tendons; and then in her 20s they just shrugged it off with a "We'll never know probably" and that was that. She keeps on top of it with daily yoga, generally, though flare ups happen periodically. If she has to pause the yoga for some reason, she fairly rapidly regresses. Currently she has plantar fascitis again, which has halted everything once more, so right now she's back into a pain slump.

Anyway, she called me today while going from Doctors to pharmacy to get the codeine they've prescribed her for it.

"I think one of my yoga moves to help the fascitis might have exacerbated the legs," she said. "Trouble is, there's never been a diagnosis. I just have to trial and error what might help."

... And I had one of those lightbulb moments, you know? My brain suddenly went "Wait hang on, this is very familiar isn't it?" and rang the bells of memory.

"Did they ever test you for fibromyalgia?" I said.

They had not. It's never been suggested, even. My sister said she'd look up the symptoms and see if it chimed, and rang off.

Fifteen minutes later, she calls back.

Turns out she got to the pharmacy and gave them the prescription. While waiting, she googled fibromyalgia symptoms and found the NHS website.

"It was like someone had written a profile of me," she tells me on the phone. "Like, spookily, scarily accurate to me, right down to the temperature regulation bit. It felt like a practical joke."

And of course, as she stood there in the pharmacy, suddenly staring at the age of forty at the apparent answer she's been trying to get since she was six years old, she burst into tears.

"Oh no!" Said the pharmacist, hurdling the counter in a single leap and scattering the queue (I am exaggerating for humorous affectation.) "Quickly! Come into our little exam room, we'll get you tissues and water!"

My sister was duly ensconced into a Safe Place, and encouraged to cry it out. It took several hiccuping minutes, but finally, she managed to calm down and get back to an Extremely Watery Smile.

"Do you want to talk about it?" the pharmacist asked sympathetically.

"It's just..." my sister said, overwhelmed and searching for words. "My whole life I've been in pain, and they've never found why..."

"Ah," said the pharmacist thoughtfully. "Have you explored fibromyalgia?"

...

"TWICE IN ONE DAY," my sister yells on the phone to me later. "HOW THE HELL HAVE TWO SEPARATE PEOPLE ON THE SAME DAY FINALLY GIVEN ME THE ANSWER, AND NEITHER OF YOU IS A DOCTOR"

Executive dysfunction comes from a lack of available dopamine. Common advice is wrong. You need to provide your own dopamine before you can start. Otherwise you're trying to run your car on empty.

"But what if I still don't do it" well you already weren't getting it done anyway. Now you have a little treat. Try again later.

You deserve kindness and care even when you aren't being productive.

I usually suggest this technique as a "Reverse Pomodoro." In the original Pomodoro, you work for 25 minutes and then take a break for 5 minutes (the times vary, but that's the essential ratio). People with executive dysfunction often find this insurmountable, and they get even more frustrated, and then the task seems even more difficult. So instead, flip those times.

FIRST, spend 25 minutes doing something energizing and engaging that you like to do. Not scrolling social media passively, not watching tv, not napping. Try something like colouring, doing yoga, running/walking around the block, talking about your favourite tv show with someone in real time, playing with the dog or cat, making and eating a lovely sandwich, hula hooping, something active. Having a little treat absolutely falls in this category!

(on the subject of little treats: refusing yourself food until you do work is for fucking Puritans and you can be kinder to yourself)

Then, after 25 minutes (or however long it takes to eat the sandwich or finish the yoga routine, it doesn't have to be exact), spend 5 minutes writing (or doing whatever you're struggling to start). Most people can coax themselves into doing something they find difficult for five minutes, if they have already filled up the joy/energy/engagement bucket. You can put a timer on for the 5 minutes if you want, or if you find that annoying, just work for as long as you like.

The other key is: don't push yourself to keep going when you're frustrated or tired—that will just reinforce the negative belief that you already have, which tells you that this task is painful to do, and needs to be avoided. If you've commonly had to force yourself to do this kind of task, that's likely part of why you think of it as painful and have trouble starting it now. Also, you should just, at a basic level, try not to put yourself in pain for the sake of productivity. So just do it till the good feelings run out. Then start hula hooping or colouring again for another 25 minutes. When the tank's refilled, try another 5 minutes of work, if you can. Adjust times to taste.

So, today, one of my terrible awful tasks was scrubbing a piece of the flooded basement floor. Not fun. Drank tea first, and played on Tumblr after.

But another task was researching the history of familial terms - aunt, uncle, niece, nephew, etc. - so I could make a fun post about omegaverse alternatives. I WANTED to do this. I LOVE linguistic research! But I was doing it to answer someone's question, so it was work that was benefiting others. Painted my nails first, made myself an electrolyte drink after.

This teaches your brain that work doesn't HAVE to be terrible! Slowly, my brain is learning to stop dreading things just because they were classified as work, and instead dread only the things that ACTUALLY suck.