#compartmentalization

I love friendships, I love intimacy, I love sex. Which are all things I wouldn't need a serious relationship for. But the amount of backbone and quality of life a serious relationship brings into my life is just unmatching. I do date a lot. I am an extrovert. I do meet new people all the time. But getting into a relationship, hasn't really quite worked out yet. Most of the time it's rather just sexual encounters or I just don't match with my parters of choice. And for the last couple months I caught myself being very frustrated. Always having high hopes that "this time it's finally gonna work out" just for it to not work out due to a different reason everytime. And I am just soooooo emotionally attached most of the time. Like my dating life sometimes decides, things like my appetite for a whole week, or my sleep quality. Which isn't healthy at all. So every few months I have the best three weeks of my life, just to be devastated and borderline traumatized for the next 8 afterwards, over people I have known for a few weeks. :P My best friend "F19" (who is normally the most empathic person I know) always tells me to just stop crying. But she had the most Disney picture perfect relationship of like 5+ years. Of course she's ok with being single now lol. It's not like I am looking for the love of my life. I am just getting very lonely. And my cravings are up in the sky. Any tips, how I can shift myself into a better mood?

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/14/compartments/#flow

If there's one FAQ I get Q'ed most F'ly, it's this: "How do you get so much done?" The short answer is, "I write when I'm anxious (which is how I came to write nine books during lockdown)." The long answer is more complicated.

The first complication to understand is that I have lifelong, degenerating chronic pain that makes me hurt from the base of my skull to the soles of my feet – my whole posterior chain. On a good day, it hurts. On a bad day, it hurts so bad that it's all I can think about.

Unless…I work. If I can find my way into a creative project, the rest of the world just kind of fades back, including my physical body. Sometimes I can get there through entertainment, too – a really good book or movie, say, but more often I find myself squirming and needing to get up and stretch or use a theragun after a couple hours in a movie theater seat, even the kind that reclines. A good conversation can do it, too, and is better than a movie or a book. The challenge and engagement of an intense conversation – preferably one with a chewy, productive and interesting disagreement – can take me out of things.

There's a degree to which ignoring my body is the right thing to do. I've come to understand a lot of my pain as being a phantom, a pathological failure of my nervous system to terminate a pain signal after it fires. Instead of fading away, my pain messages bounce back and forth, getting amplified rather than attenuated, until all my nerves are screaming at me. Where pain has no physiological correlate – in other words, where the ache is just an ache, without a strain or a tear or a bruise – it makes sense to ignore it. It's actually healthy to ignore it, because paying attention to pain is one of the things that can amplify it (though not always).

But this only gets me so far, because some of my pain does have a physiological correlate. My biomechanics suck, thanks to congenital hip defects that screwed up the way I walked and sat and lay and moved for most of my life, until eventually my wonky hips wore out and I swapped 'em for a titanium set. By that point, it was too late, because I'd made a mess of my posterior chain, all the way from my skull to my feet, and years of diligent physio, swimming, yoga, occupational therapy and physiotherapy have barely made a dent. So when I sit or stand or lie down, I'm always straining something, and I really do need to get up and move around and stretch and whatnot, or sure as hell I will pay the price later. So if I get too distracted, then I start ignoring the pain I need to be paying attention to, and that's at least as bad as paying attention to the pain I should be ignoring.

Which brings me to anxiety. These are anxious times. I don't know anyone who feels good right now. Particularly this week, as the Strait of Epstein emergency gets progressively worse, and there's this January 2020 sense of the crisis on the horizon, hitting one country after another. Last week, Australia got its last shipment of fossil fuels. This week, restaurants in India are all shuttered because of gas rationing. People who understand these things better than I do tell me that even if Trump strokes out tonight and Hegseth overdoes the autoerotic asphyxiation, it'll be months, possibly years, before things get back to "normal" ("normal!").

Any time I think about this stuff for even a few minutes, I start to feel that covid-a-comin', early-2020 feeling, only it's worse this time around, because I literally couldn't imagine what covid would mean when it got here, and now I know.

When I start to feel those feelings, I can just sit down and start thinking with my fingers, working on a book or a blog-post. Or working on an illustration to go with one of these posts, which is the most delicious distraction, leaving me with just enough capacity to mull over the structure of the argument that will accompany it.

Kumandra: Fang, Heart, Spine, Talon, and Tail

Meine Wohnung: 3 Zimmer, Küche, Bad, Flur, Balkon

Kleines Zimmer: Talon "Klaue" weil da gerade so viel gesägt und gefeilt wird, und man sich vorsehen sollte, ob man noch alle Dinge da hat, wenn man wieder raus findet.

Großes Zimmer neben Balkon: Fang "Hauer", d.h. Zähne, weil es gerade mein Esszimmer ist. Dass davor zu Fitness und Kampf gerüstet wird, lässt nichts Gutes vermuten.

Küche: Tail "Schweif" weil dort in den Töpfen gerührt wird, und zum Andenken an den Koch Boun.

Flur und Badezimmer: Spine "Rücken" weil es sich so lang zieht und man immer sich durch Hindernisse durchkämpfen muss von Sachen, die einfach stehen geblieben sind (bis auf die Uhr, die sich bewegt).

In modern IT organizations, compartmentalization is the practice of dividing responsibilities, systems, or data domains into clearly separated units. This approach can be incredibly helpful when it brings clarity, control, and protection. It can also create problems when it interferes with collaboration or end to end visibility. Nowhere is this balance more important than in Master Data…