I keep telling myself to stop publicly posting about this whole leg of my sobriety journey because it is not interesting. Yet here we are, and here I intend to remain.
I don’t know what’s causing my mood disturbances right now. But I am disturbed in a way I haven’t been for many years. They say that heavy cannabis users may continue experiencing withdrawal effects for about a year. It could be that. It could be my attempt to curtail caffeine, which is a grumpy experience. It could be the gaba/l-theanine I’m using to sleep. It could be PMS. It could be bog-standard autism meltdowns.
I never really had a full picture of what was happening to me. Therapists and psychiatrists haven’t been entirely helpful. There are reasons I ended up self-medicating with, like, everything on the planet. But there are also reasons I stopped all that.
I do miss the version of me that didn’t have many emotions, when I was very stoned. I liked the numbness. Obviously! It’s hard and scary when I melt down. I can miss it, but not want it. I’ve learned too much to want it again, for better or worse. The exciting self-medicating part of my life has ended. Now it’s just me with my miswired brain, and I’m raw-dogging this shit.
The helpful thoughts that I have now that I’m older and not using Substances:
This is going to pass, sooner rather than later.
These feelings are just feelings.
Wherever I am in the moment is where I am in the moment.
The latter point is an extension of things I’ve been learning while reading about Buddhism. Thinking about tanha, desire, and the desire to be rid of whatever meltdown I’m in, the desire to be different — that is one source of dukkha, suffering. It’s also a reminder to root myself where I am and utilize grounding techniques I learned in IOP.
To some extent, I am trying to accept this is how I’ve always worked. This is my werewolf, my demon, my Lady Hyde. I haven’t seen her in a while. She is scary and familiar. Hey there, girly-girl. Weirdly, I kinda missed you.
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The whole Netflix games thing is still weird, but it is going to bring Hades natively to iOS on March 19th (Engadget), so I’m pretty pumped about that. It’ll be a good format for it.
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Anna Marie Tendler has a memoir coming out in August, and it sounds relatable (Variety). I’ll be there.
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I always have the urge to snark about projects like this, which seem ill-advised at best and a grievous misuse of resources in a struggling society at worst, but I’m honestly pretty neutral about efforts to bring back woolly mammoths (NPR). The end game might strike me as silly, but hopefully we learn useful stuff from it.
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Doctors aren’t allowed to participate in lethal injections, so a lot of the people who do it are simply those with related experience, like EMTs and nurses. In some states, they are volunteers. (NPR)
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Here’s an interesting Ars Technica about the evolution of a firefly’s glow, which comes from something called luciferase. I wanted to try to summarize it, but I don’t really understand it, and scientists don’t entirely understand it yet either. Still kinda cool to think about though.
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The FDA has approved its first OTC continuous glucose monitor. (Engadget) I already predict it will be used by a lot of people who follow ketogenic and low-carb diets as part of their eating disorder. For my part, I seem to have reactive hypoglycemia as a side-effect of my SSRIs (which I was told by a dietician at IOP a couple years back), and I really want one of these so I can (hopefully) be warned the drop is coming before I’m feeling like hell. It needs replacement every couple weeks, so I hope it’s affordable.
I do a finger stick test if I want to verify why I feel horrible — usually while eating something to bring up my sugars again — but I feel *so* *terrible* in these situations, it would be nice if the thingy just did it for me.
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The climate crisis has already been here for a while, and in many ways that American denialists just don’t see. Here’s an AJE article about how climate change is impacting Malaysian fishers.
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Vinnie Jones refused to play Juggernaut again unless they paid him much better, and Hollywouldn’t pay him (ba dum tss), so there we are. (Variety) He’s not the only Actually Good Actor who has been deeply disappointed by their brush with modern superhero cinema. It’s a shame: Jones is not just a good actor, but a great fit for Juggernaut. I can’t think of one better tbh. Pay actors what they deserve! Stop making movies by committee!
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I’ve pretty much only heard negative reactions to the live action Avatar: The Last Airbender remake, but Netflix’s numbers have deemed it worthy of renewal anyway. (Reactor, formerly Tor dot Com) The cast is adorable so I guess I’m glad they’re getting more work.
Tangentially, I’m really reluctant to share Reactor articles when Tor, the publisher, is using AI covers. It’s just like…the world is such garbage and they’re not a place to hide out from it. Reactor can try to disassociate but the north remembers. Or something like that.
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Frostpunk 2 is coming out in June. Maybe I’ll actually play more than the one campaign in Frostpunk 1 someday? Hahahaha just kidding, it’s one of those games I love where I will only ever play about 5% of the content. I’ll buy the sequel to support them, though.
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Researchers found an amphibian that makes milk. Sounds tasty already! (NPR) Slurp slurp.
