reflections on wayfinding

Sometimes I reach a state where I feel I've given up. It's not an ultimate act of giving up on life, but it has a smaller yet similar feeling of being trapped, with nothing to look forward to. No hope, no inspiration. So sense of worth in the past, present, or future. Just muddling through, endlessly. Why strive anymore?

I think the clear answer to that is: when I think of it, if I saw someone else in this position, I would want them to strive. I wouldn't want them to give up on getting better. Because I know it's possible to face similar challenges, similar constraints, but still be able to find joy. It's possible to have a sense of self worth, even with the world going wrong.

If I had someone in my life who was in that bad place, I wouldn't want them to give up. I wouldn't want them to accept that there was nothing else left but moping, muddling, and suffering simply because they couldn't imagine good things in the future.

There really are cases where people's health probably won't improve. Where there isn't much hope left. But I know for someone in my precise position, as downtrodden as I feel, I can get better.

So when I want to sink down into nothingness to hide from the world, to hide from my own feelings of hollowness, I know it's important to affirm: "I want to get better."

I want to feel happier more of the time, in spite of these challenges. I want to have a continued sense of purpose and self worth, in the face of disappointment and even crisis.

It doesn't feel like it, and it's not worth shit to larger society, but I know I still have a lot right now. I have my health. I have some time. I have knowledge.

Maybe I can't reach certain kinds of success. Maybe I'll be facing setbacks for years to come. But maybe even more so, I want to become a stronger person who can find joy, inspiration, and purpose even in that turmoil. Even if no one gives me a gram of respect.

I have some ideas for this, which I'll write about later. I think Guy Winch's work helped connect a lot of different threads. Emotional hygene and emotional first aid are actions we can take to improve our emotional health. I think there's room for becoming more emotionally fit and resilient overall, just how we use exercise and nutrition to help our bodies stay healthy. We learn physical skills systematically, through sometimes just through perseverance. There's got to be a way to train our emotional-behavioral skills as well.

Since I turn red, experience tachycardia and often nausea when I consume ethanol, I might be at a higher risk of esophageal cancer, says this one paper. The symptoms mean I am either ALDH2 deficient or ALDH2 low activity, so I metabolize a highly toxic byproduct of ethanol, acetaldehyde, much slower than other people. It accumulates and gives me annoying symptoms that people bug me about in social gatherings.

Acetaldehyde is responsible for the facial flushing and other unpleasant effects that ALDH2-deficient individuals experience when they drink alcohol. Importantly, there is now direct evidence that ALDH2-deficient individuals experience higher levels of acetaldehyde-related DNA and chromosomal damage than individuals with fully active ALDH2 when they consume equivalent amounts of alcohol, providing a likely mechanism for the increased cancer risk.

This is from: "The Alcohol Flushing Response: An Unrecognized Risk Factor for Esophageal Cancer from Alcohol Consumption"
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1000050

I read about this the first time in 2009, but I didn't change anything because I read it completely wrong. It explains there are two types of people who experience flushing--people who don't have ALDH2 activity, and people who have some but very low ALDH2 activity. I mistakenly read it to mean that some people get the flush, but don't increase their risk of cancer. And somehow I dropped myself into that category. (I probably saw what I wanted to see. Somewhere, I probably didn't want to be grouped with those pitiful people who can't drink.)

Here's what it actually says. The first group:

ALDH2 Lys/Lys homozygotes are unable to consume significant amounts of alcohol. As a result, they are protected against the increased risk of esophageal cancer from alcohol consumption. This observation also provided evidence for a causative role for ethanol in esophageal cancer, and a key role for acetaldehyde in mediating this effect.

And the second group:

ALDH2 Lys/Glu heterozygotes experience a less severe manifestation of the flushing response due to residual but low ALDH2 enzyme activity in their cells. As a result, some are able to develop tolerance to acetaldehyde and the flushing response and become habitual heavy drinkers, due in part to the influence of societal and cultural factors (see below). Therefore, paradoxically, it is the more common low-activity ALDH2 heterozygous genotype that is associated with greatest risk of esophageal cancer from drinking alcohol.

So the first group gets so sick they can't really even drink. That means something completely different from what I thought. Good lesson to read the damn thing.

The first case sounds like my dad. He drinks some wine, and within half an hour is very sick. That's why I grew up with neither of my parents drinking. Even when I saw members of my extended family drinking, it seemed weird and vaguely bad.

I'm not a regular drinker, but I've drank a fair amount during college and living in NYC. I feel sick fairly quickly, but it often seems I "sober up" quicker than other people consuming the same amounts. No one in my mothers' family has the flushing response. So I'm probably in the second group.

I can't really evaluate how good this research is. One commenter remarked that if low ALDH2 activity increases cancer risk, then other cancers should . It does seem compelling enough to take precautions.

It's not that hard to quit, since I don't really have drinking habits to begin with. I have a fair intellectual and cultural interest in alcoholic beverages for a while. But I don't remember the side-effects of drinking ever being pleasant. I always thought of it as something I had to put up with to be social, or to be true to the cultural phenomenon. I have wished for some way to (often imagined) peer pressure and social shame on many occasions.

If I stand by this decision to quit, I'll need to confront the social stigma. More than any actual pushback from others, it's the stigma I've internalized that is most daunting. Some folks may joke around, but the people I care to associate with are all very respectful of personal decisions, especially when they have to do with health. On the other hand, my internalized worry about being thought of as lame or weak was powerful enough to cause me to misread this thing in the first place.

I'm glad I checked back on this. Aside from the important opportunity to avoid cancer, it's also given me the opportunity to ponder my own choices and motivations. Even if my symptoms were innocuous, would it be the right decision to drink alcohol when I don't like the side effects the substance has on me? When I know I'll be feeling physically sick while everyone else is having fun?

"You don't have to do it if you don't want to," seems like obvious advice, but in practice it can be very hard on both ends. Sometimes what you want is a confusion of conflicting principles and preferences.

I understand the irony of this title.

A few weeks ago, I began to really give credence to the idea that anxiety has been a big factor in how I've gone through my life. How many decisions have I made because I worried or tense or wanted to avoid something? A lot, probably.

Anxiety has two parts, as far as I can tell.

• Tension


• Thoughts

The thoughts part: Some days I have a lot of thoughts. Other days, not as many (but still a lot). When I get upset, the number of thoughts I have tends to multiply. By quite a bit. When I have a lot of thoughts, I often want to sort them out by writing. So I usually write about things that fascinate or bother me. I think I make better decisions about things after I write about them, so if I'm having a lot of thoughts, maybe it could be a good practice to write about them first.

This reminds me of something. I used to get stuck on timed writing assignments in school. Even now, writing takes me a long time. A post can take hours. It's hard to keep typing and typing like they tell you do--more than I want to admit, I forget how the rest of sentence is supposed to go in the middle of the sentence. I'll have a great thought or sentence planned out, then I'll space out for just a moment, and when I return I'll have lost the momentum of the thought.

Momentum of the thought? Do other people's thoughts have momentum? A lot of the time it feels like I have to keep a thought moving, or it'll fall to the side. It'll run out of gas. And we'll just never get there.

The second part, the tension part: most of cognitive-based psychotherapy focuses on the thoughts or beliefs you have. Sometimes I refute the beliefs or thoughts (verbal thoughts) but there are still these worries or bad sensations there. They don't abate. Then the thoughts--or cognitive distortions--will slowly, slowly creep back, like water spilling into the rowboat or clutter in the room. Why am I up to my ankles again?

I worry about a lot of things. I worry that I am just rambling about myself in a way that doesn't help other people. So no one's going to read this. I worry I'm going in circles and haven't really derived many insights. I worry I'll basically look and feel the same way for a very long time.

"Buy better beer, don't try to be a better person," Killer Mike said, amidst a bunch of otherwise sensible advice. I worry about that being true for me.

What's so bad if that all ends up being true? Sometimes it feels like I can only stand where I am because of where I've promised to be in the future. Time feels like a loan, and so far I'm just getting further and further into debt. I look at the systematically bad choices I've made over the years and see problems no one really has answers for; I have to figure it out for myself. What if I'm just not qualified to figure it out? What if the game really is being a goopy, sloppy mess and being okay with that? If I acknowledge that, do I have to cur myself off from all the friends who are cheering for me to come out of a lifetime funk? (They think it's just 5 years, but haven't read my LJ.) Where am I standing, statistically? Am I standing ankle deep in some kind of denial?

I look ahead sometimes when most of my writing has less to do with sifting through my own problematic refuse. What joys could I bring to people? What stories could I tell? What inquiries could I make? Another worry is that if things ever clear up, I really won't have much to talk about, write about. That my lifetime of writing was one huge anxiety attack.

The worries just kind of happen until I can really steer my attention in a different direction. That also just kind of happens.

I have a lot of thoughts. They're more like things that happen than things that I do, but when I'm having a lot of thoughts I can also have thoughts about a lot of different things. Maybe it's a kind of weather. It's raining thoughts? Time to get the urns and tarps and pots and pans; we'll distill it have plenty to drink and grow with for a while.