Factory Floor

It's never felt right to say I have a delicate stomach: the human digestive system and its microflora are nothing short of heroic and miraculous. The sheer variety of stuff it can rip into constituent pieces and use as both fuel and new tissue staggers me. When I say "holy crap," I mean it.

But sometime between three days and a week into most travel, I spend a few hours in and out of the bathroom. It's not food poisoning; as far as I can tell, it's my guts saying "ma'am, we were optimized for a certain situation and it seems you want us to switch inputs. We're enthusiastically retooling." And then everything is fine.

I am not currently travelling. I am in my house. But Ciro is cooking dinner instead of Mom. Sure enough, three days in. I don't know whether it's like this for everybody.

Therapy

I've been seeing a therapist every week or two since mid May to get my stress response under control. I've mentioned before, maybe a lot, that my day job as a captioner is intensely stressful. The task itself - live to air highly abstract no-error multitasking with no concession to physical limitations - is stressful in a way that's only comparable to air traffic controllers, although in my case a plane won't crash. It also requires emotional suppression I can't compare to anything else; it's literally my job to keep an even, pleasant done while repeating whatever I hear, no matter how highly charged it is. Today, I've already captioned parts of two funerals. My last workday, I spent 4 hours on MLB Network, starting minutes after everyone there got the news their coworker Darryl Hamilton had been murdered.

Essentially, it got to the point where even when off work I was no longer able to calm down or relax or respond to things in a normal emotional way, like I had one sensitivity knob stuck at maximum and the other one jammed all the way down. If something minor happened that I didn't expect, I still got a full adrenaline surge, where all my blood moved to protect internal organs and my focus got laser so I could take care of the threat immediately. Even when it wasn't a threat or particularly urgent. Meanwhile it's been difficult for me to be emotionally present or even mentally present, because (1) feelings cause errors and (2) something absolutely gutwrenching is about to happen, so you should be ready for that. On top of which, I'm socially isolated and low on sleep, so it's been difficult to tell whether my appraisal of any given situation is reasonable or totally bizarre.

Basically, what's been established in therapy is that I'm a reasonably sane person who definitely needs to quit my job, but in the meantime and at least shortly afterward need to figure out how to re-groove my nervous system so it doesn't flood as easily. The main strategy for which seems to be meditation of literally any kind, just reminding my brain that it can be receptive instead of active. To my surprise, although it makes sense in retrospect, the best "meditation" for me has been practicing Italian, where I'm not only deliberately turning off my analytical mind and letting thoughts in the "wrong" language (English) float off the surface and not interrupt me. I have called this child mind, and apparently that was accurate. On days when I do it for even five minutes, I feel much better than days when I don't. It makes more of a difference than whether I exercise or get sunglight or enough sleep.

However the most interesting thing about therapy is how much it reminds me of piano lessons. You practice on your own all week, then show up and say "this is the work I did and how I'm interpreting this piece," and the piano teacher says "I agree with you about what you're doing well and what you aren't doing as well. Practice some more." Occasionally a small adjustment. The similarity makes sense. The metacognitive element is similar. The cost per hour is similar. But I haven't heard anybody make this comparison before; it's fairly different from the way psychologists are represented in our culture.