Tumgik
touchingthevoid · 8 days
Text
From where I stand, hell does exist. It’s just that hell is not as much a place as it is a state. I guess all who have experienced clinical depression are familiar with it.
Hell is when you become trapped inside your mind, and that mind trapping you is made solely of an asphyxiating mix of abstract, overwhelming sadness, oppressive panic, undefinable confusion and a deep, frightening sense of being lost, accompanied by the fear of never again being able to find the way towards yourself again.
The self becomes unreachable, I know the person I am is still around but, in the midst of the handicapping chaos keeping me a prisoner inside my own mind, I just can seem to reach them.
Hell is made of acute, paralysing pain. A pain which cannot be pinpointed to any specific part of the body, but an extremely violent, blinding pain nonetheless.
Hell is when your mind turns against you and buries you alive inside yourself.
1 note · View note
touchingthevoid · 1 year
Text
I can’t deal with the fact that I’m ageing. And I really am ageing. Doors are closing. Horizons are narrowing. Opportunities are becoming increasingly limited.
20 years ago feels like yesterday. Although I can’t say I’ve wasted the last 20 years, I can certainly say that, unlike today, 20 years ago, it was easy to become whomever I wished to be become. Look the way I wanted to look. Live how and where I wanted to live.
Time is awfully unforgiving, and the clock only moves in one direction. The walls of age keep getting reinforced by it, and I feel like, soon enough, they’re be caving in on me.
4 notes · View notes
touchingthevoid · 1 year
Text
I’m feeling terrible today. Had a bit of an argument which I - being my awkward usual self - didn’t see coming, with one of the people I care the most for.
No matter how hard I try to train myself to, as soon as I start communicating fluidly - meaning, not pre-analysing and reformulating each sentence - I keep failing to realise when I’m being hurtful and/or insulting towards people. I don’t mean to be, but it turns out that I just am.
It seems like the only way to avoid conflict is avoiding communication altogether. I can’t seem to get over this invisible barrier between me and other human beings. It’s like I’m locked in a cage with no walls, and yet still a cage which keeps me isolated from humanity.
And, what’s worse, I definitely cannot handle conflict at an emotional level. I get “lost” and can’t help spiralling into pure, unreasonable panic. And that makes me physically ill - the classical physiological symptoms of a bad anxiety crisis, a real panic attack. And this pushes me further into my invisible cage.
It seems hopeless. I feel hopeless.
0 notes
touchingthevoid · 1 year
Text
I used to think that expectations were the worst thing in life. I defined “expectation” as the surest route towards disappointment. After giving it a lot of thought (and experiencing a lot of disappointment), I have changed my point of view:
Perhaps our expectations are but a reflection of our hopes. And hope is vital. Maybe things don’t turn out the way we hope/expect them to. We don’t always get what we want - I guess we can count ourselves lucky if we even get what we need.
However, whatever the outcome, the time we spent hoping, or expecting a good outcome, is a time during which we experienced something very close to happiness. Whatever real life results, what went through our minds during that period is the sort of stuff which can “convince us to keep breathing on”.
0 notes
touchingthevoid · 1 year
Text
Remembering that ridiculous moment when I tried to “teach” my French coworkers how to say ‘Albert Camus’ “properly”… “K-mas”… ffs…
0 notes
touchingthevoid · 1 year
Text
I used to distrust the British NHS, but now I fully trust the French one: I trust it to either let me die by doing nothing (almost happened) or to kill me by trying to do something (also almost happened).
0 notes
touchingthevoid · 1 year
Text
It really bothers me when someone who’s feeling rather but justifiably sad say they are “depressed”, or when someone who deeply dislikes something say they have a “phobia”. It trivialises the very handicapping conditions those terms refer to in clinical terms.
If I’m sad because my relationship ended, sad is what I am, not depressed. If cockroaches disgust me and I want to be nowhere near one, I’m disgusted and want to keep my distance - that’s all.
When I am depressed, I feel cold all the time, I either can’t sleep or sleep all the time, day or night matter not. I may be really thirsty, but the glass of water half a meter away from me feels too far away, I don’t have the energy to grab it and drink from it. As a matter of fact, hunger or thirst dissolve into the overall, overwhelming and fully unjustified discomfort that keeps me disconnected from everything and everyone. And discomfort is all there is - friends, music, romantic comedies, food - nothing helps, and nothing matters - I’m numb and unresponsive to anything other than medication.
I am arachnophobic. When I see a spider, I feel like a big horse just kicked my chest and smashed my sternum - it’s a brutal, blunt pain, which is followed by my diaphragm basically paralysing. I can’t breathe in or out and, shortly after, I pass out. When I wake up, my whole body shakes, I cannot control my hands enough to get medication into my mouth, I struggle to speak when I ask someone for help finding the pills and putting them inside my mouth - it is embarrassing, people laugh, I feel ridiculous, and yet I can’t even do that to help myself. Tremors and goosebumps and sensations of things crawling all over my skin take hours to go away. My peripheral vision shows me “things” moving which aren’t really there, and that keeps me in a most terrible state of high alert for hours on end - even with medication.
If my tummy is hurting, I won’t say I have “gastric cancer”, pretty much no one in their right state of mind will (I hope). That would trivialise a disease which is painful, handicapping, and kills. Depression is painful, handicapping and, in case some people don’t know it, it also kills. So why should it be so trivialised and, consequently, taken so lightly?
If your answer is “because one is physical and the other is psychological, so we can control it”, then you really need to do some serious reading. Depression is not limited to “being sad” (actually, it appears that apathy is more common and handicapping than sadness in clinical depression). And it’s not about “thinking sad things”, there’s a very wide and complex chain of biochemical events and physiological processes involved - and those are pretty physical too.
Basically just ranting, I know. I’ve had a close encounter with a big spider today and it feels like people think I enjoy the attention I get from dropping with my leg twisted on the dirty, wet floor. Because, yey, I love destroying tights and getting cuts and abrasions which have the potential of getting infected with stuff like E. Coli or even MRSA (god knows what sort of bugs that dirty water contains).
And then the usual “why are you so scared, you just need to realise you’re bigger and stronger than it” - like, “wow, I had never realised that! ground-breaking advice, truly!” - I am scared of poisonous snakes, and I am scared of bacterial infections - when it comes to spiders, I’m not scared - I have a phobia.
Or, the funniest “why don’t you just breathe?” - yes, because I totally stop breathing just because I love fainting and - as we all know - human beings are known to be able to decide to stop breathing and being able to do so until they pass out! Makes all physiological sense!
Just… arrrghhh!!!
0 notes
touchingthevoid · 2 years
Text
I have been thinking about public healthcare, the PrEP (yes, I know it’s a “sensitive subject”) and antimicrobial resistance. And I felt the urge to put some of it into writing - knowing in advance that it may not be the most “PC” thing to do.
I know a person who is not a sex worker but, instead, a very successful self-employed person in the tech field, with the sort of wit I can only dream of. He has more male sex partners than he can actually count, mostly because, given his taste for chemsex parties, he can’t always be sure how many partners he’s had - or whether or not they were protected.
This is a lifestyle choice made by a highly intelligent and successful person, his chosen way to have fun, and he’s free to choose to enjoy life that way.
The welfare state of the country I live in pays for his PrEP. So I, and every other tax payer in this country pay for it.
About a year ago, next to me in a public hospital’s A&E in the country’s capital city, there was an elderly lady with oesophageal cancer who required an urinary catheterisation. It is a painful procedure normally done with lidocaine gel which both lubricates and helps numbing some of the pain. There was no such gel in that A&E. According to the staff, the department had run out of it months before, and there was no budget to buy more. Yet, budget hasn’t run out for my wealthy (and healthy) acquaintance’s PrEP.
Yes, I have read the studies and understood the numbers in the PrEP’s “profitability” projections. There will be (according to the experts) savings in the long run. That is, if we include HIV prevention vs the costs of treating HIV in the equation, and basically nothing else.
That equation, however, seems to forget “human factors”, which we know can be instrumental in producing both miracles and disasters.
Generations have grown up dreading HIV-AIDS. Other STIs are treatable, but not this one. HIV is *THE* STI. To protect ourselves from it, we use condoms, and we don’t stop to think about how many other STIs they help protecting us from. No one truly fears those other STIs - nowhere near as much as we fear HIV, at least.
Here comes the miracle of the PrEP. We are safe from HIV - and HIV is, again, *THE* STI. Remove HIV from our list of worries and sexual freedom increases exponentially. Other STIs are easily treatable - what is a meagre course of antibiotics, after all?
Well, in the great scheme of things, it is a lot, and increasingly so. Everyone has heard terms and expressions like “antimicrobial resistance” or “antibiotic stewardship” but, thankfully (lucky them), not many have come face to face with those terms’ reason for being.
We have used and, sadly, abused antibiotics for decades (we’ve been literally feeding what we once called “magic bullets” to the pigs, for goodness sake!) and, whilst the bugs have been getting used to and, therefore, immune to our “magic bullets”, no new classes thereof have been introduced into the healthcare context recently.
What we see now, are pathogens that once responded well to certain antimicrobial agents no longer doing so - some of them being those behind STIs. Superbugs like MRSA, which were once limited to healthcare facilities, are now popping out of apparently nowhere in the midst of the community. And that’s just one such superbug, many others are out there - and new ones keep showing up - they adapt according to what’s thrown at them, and what we throw at them are antimicrobial agents, such as antibiotics.
Back to the PrEP - the moment we are protected from HIV and start feeling that barrier protections are more “nice to have’s” than anything else, what happens in terms of the myriad of other STIs, some of which many of us have never even hear of? They are overwhelmingly treatable, so that’s precisely what we’ll do: treat them - with antimicrobials - thus exacerbating the major global problem of antimicrobial resistance.
We may say that a few courses of doxycycline is cheaper than a lifetime of integrase, protease, etc inhibitors, and that’s quite true. But once that doxycycline no longer works and we start going for the “heavy machinery” to handle “trivial bugs turned monsters”, can we really say how much that will cost?
And when exposing all sort of pathogens (not only STI-related ones, but everything out there) to that “heavy machinery” starts turning some amongst that virtual infinity of “benign” bugs into superbugs, how much will that cost, both in terms of the financial burden to our NHS’s and in terms of lives?
Everything is connected but, from everything I’ve read over the last year or so, not enough connections seem to have been explored as to allow us to say with any degree of certainly that “the PrEP is cost-effective in the long run”.
Add to that everything that is lacking in our healthcare systems, which our governments, whichever they are, can’t squeeze out of the tax payer to pay for and, from proton beam therapy to the widespread use of viral vectors in cancer immunotherapy (mentioning oncology alone, and there’s a lot beyond it), given that my acquaintance has chosen his lifestyle, but my A&E “neighbour” didn’t choose her cancer, can we really say that the PrEP should be our budget priority?
Up to each individual to come up with their own answer to this question - which is not being asked anywhere near often enough.
0 notes
touchingthevoid · 2 years
Text
It’s been a while since I last posted something here. It’s not like I have nothing to say. On the contrary, I always have far too much to say, more than I’m capable of putting into words.
I am constantly thinking, several parallel thought streams at any given time, even when I sleep. That creates an insane amount of data, too much to be translated to human-intelligible/communicable format.
That’s one of the reasons why communication with other human beings is so challenging - when I say something, I say too much, go into too much detail, spill statistics, fire different hypothesis, and that makes me sound like a lunatic. People get bored, confused or even frustrated - especially when all my interlocutor is expecting is a straight, binary, yes/no answer.
However much I try to control it, my mouth/fingers always end up attempting to follow my head. And I can’t seem to find simple stuff inside it.
It’s sort of hopeless, really.
0 notes
touchingthevoid · 2 years
Text
And, suddenly, there’s just sadness. A heavy, yet somehow cushioning sadness. No motive, just sadness, an abstract sadness that fills every space, every breath, a sadness which suddenly becomes me, and sadness is all I am, not just what I feel. No thought, no reason, just sadness. Suddenly the world liquifies into this shapeless sadness, and sadness is all there is.
29 notes · View notes
touchingthevoid · 2 years
Text
Taking a deep dive into the real me (or at least who I perceive myself to be)… and it’s depressing.
I’m 38, look 25 and cannot come to terms with my real age: I do not identify with people my age (not only because they tend to be married with kids they won’t shut up about and so on, but also because they look and sound old). I can identify more with younger people (people in their 20s) but only to a certain degree: they lack the experience, the ups and downs in life that end up making us who we are, and they tend to think that they “know it all”, so they always seem shallow and a bit deluded to me. In any case, it makes me feel awkward, almost retarded, that I can create connections, albeit very superficial, much more easily with people over 10 years younger than me than people my age.
It somehow feels like I’m stuck in time. And yet the fact that I perceive younger people the way I do tells me I’m not. So, basically, I end up belonging nowhere, with no one, sometimes not even with myself.
I have troubles saying “no” and, in broad terms, I abhor the idea of being unpleasant or somehow not likeable outside work. Work is like “my kingdom”, I know I am right and I can demonstrate that I am, so I have no issues saying what I think (again, because I can prove that what I’m saying is correct). Outside work, I apologise constantly even when I know I’m right, just to avoid confrontation and being seen as unpleasant.
Still, I don’t see myself as likeable. I am too complicated, I think and question too much, I can’t stick to “talking about the weather” and bring up “heavy subjects all the time”, and I constantly challenge my own as well as other people’s ideas and beliefs, and that makes me boring and annoying. Or, as I’ve been told by “my perfect guy”, I generate “too much emotional pressure”. Basically, not only do I “think too much”, but I also tend to force others to do the same, and that makes me anything but likeable.
I try to make up for this by being nice with practicalities, like being present and trying to find solutions for other people’s problems, or even fixing them myself. When this does not work or isn’t applicable, I “apologise for my awkwardness with my wallet”, that is, I buy people gifts. This doesn’t seem to work either. I am good to have around for as long as people have problems I can solve, the moment the problem is gone, I become disposable, and am indeed disposed of.
However, to these people, the few I for some reason like or feel a connection with, no matter how they hurt me or how many times they “dump me” when I’m no longer useful, I can’t say “no” to them. This makes me feel stupid and frankly ashamed of myself and how “weak” I am, but I can literally do nothing about it and, if I try, that makes me feel worse than I feel by letting myself be used, dumped, and reused again.
In general, I have troubles connecting with people. I tend to study them before engaging with them, and as I study them, I see all the things I wish I didn’t, or fail to see the things I wish I did and which would support a connection. I rarely love or hate someone, although I near-obsessively try to please everyone, I am mostly indifferent to the vast majority of people. I know they exist but, if they didn’t, I probably wouldn’t even notice.
This difficulty connecting with people, however superficial the connection, means that I treasure those I get to somehow connect with perhaps (actually, certainly) too much. That makes my presence overbearing as they are so few that I focus far too much on each of them. And then I’m back to the trying too hard to make myself likeable and failing miserably at it cycle.
Although I have this need to please people, which goes to an extreme with the few people I like, I struggle to empathise with them. I may solve their problems but I don’t see them as such - maybe slight complications, but not real problems. And I’ve recently realised (through “my ideal guy”) that I don’t understand what stresses people. Thanks to my slightly unpleasant medical history, I came to equate “problem” to “imminent death” and “stress” to “finding a way to survive in a very limited timeframe”. So, to me, what other people consider “a big deal” is actually just a minor hiccup.
I try not to show it (again, I mostly hide my real emotions for fear of being disliked), but that bothers me, how people tend to make their baby geckos sound like giant crocodiles. I know it’s not their fault that they don’t know what staring death in the face and being forced to orchestrate their own survival (because those who should be doing it are just doing utter nonsense) is, but it still annoys me greatly.
The above takes me to my lack of trust. I was never someone who inherently trusted people but, since the first time I was seriously ill and saw mistake being done after mistake, was sent home from a major hospital with a bottle of morphine “so I could be comfortable” as “nothing else could be done”, and had to organise my own medevac whilst suffering from multiple organ failure, whilst calculating in my head how much of each painkiller I could tolerate without OD’ing on them just to be able to move and pretend I was okay enough to fly - since that moment - I literally trust no one and implicitly assume that people (mostly medics) will make mistakes that, if I don’t keep a close eye on them, will probably kill me (which so happened last November - and this just reinforced my vital need to trust no one).
All of this makes me incoherent with myself: I love, apologise even when I know I’m right, and can’t say “no”, but I neither empathise nor trust. I know my behaviours are pathological and the results are toxic, and yet I cannot break the pattern, because doing so makes me feel even worse than putting up with things that make me feel extremely bad.
0 notes
touchingthevoid · 2 years
Text
I hate how we judge history and historical figures based on where we are and who we are today.
The main reason why a CT scan is so much more accurate than an xray in terms of diagnosis is that it’s 3D. We can’t know much about something if we only look at it from a single (always biased and bidimensional) perspective.
1 note · View note
touchingthevoid · 2 years
Text
Bloody ZIA (Zscaler Internet Access) includes proxy functionality, but it is *NOT* a bloody proxy. The human body also includes feet, and yet no one says a person is “a foot”, do they?! Just arrghhh, how, why?! Dafuq is wrong with people?!
0 notes
touchingthevoid · 2 years
Text
“... to convince us to keep breathing on ...”
0 notes
touchingthevoid · 2 years
Text
Sometimes, when I’m watching pictures and videos of other ferrets and wishing they were mine, I feel like I’m cheating on my own...
0 notes
touchingthevoid · 2 years
Text
People tell me I’m insensitive and have no empathy, but they are quite wrong. What they mistake for lack of empathy is simply the acknowledgement that reality is what it is, and complaining about it changes nothing. The facts are what they are and being overly emotional about them is counterproductive.
As a matter of fact, when I tell people “it is what it is, your complaining is unhelpful”, what I’m obviously (to me at least) trying to say is that unless we accept things for what they are in a non-emotional way, we will find it hard to find strategies to overcome or cope with the things that bother us. Being realistic is, in my view, the only reasonable way to deal with reality.
So, my perceived “insensitivity” is actually my attempt to tell people to snap out of the pointless whining and start looking for tangible ways to deal with, rather than complaining about, reality.
0 notes
touchingthevoid · 2 years
Text
I’ve been trying to ask “normal” people who chose to live with someone else a simple question: why do people who are financially independent and can afford living alone choose to live with someone else?
From “so you don’t feel lonely” (how exactly is living alone the equivalent to feeling lonely, I wonder) to “because that’s just what people do when they are a couple” (people also used to buy slaves, so “what people do” is no justification and (thankfully) subject to change), so far, I haven’t had a single answer that makes actual, rational sense.
From where I stand, living alone means control over your personal intimate space, it means having a space that is truly your own and what you truly want it to be. When you live with someone else, that personal space doesn’t really exist, all you have is a compromise between what you want, and what someone else wants, so no one actually gets to have the space they really want.
So, really, why doing it? The fact that the majority of people do it tells me implicitly that there must be some rationale behind it that goes beyond the irrational explanations I got so far. So what rationale is that?
1 note · View note