What to Expect and How I Do It

[mrissa]

For those of you who are coming here from out of town for Fourth Street and have not yet packed: it's supposed to be in the eighties here (which is mid-twenties for those of you thinking in Celsius). Definitely early summer now. We may possibly be done with the rain upon rain upon rain, even.

I will be glad to see people at Fourth Street, but please remember: I can't jump up and run across the room to greet you, no matter how happy I am to see you. If you want to talk to me, please come over to me to do so if you can manage it. If you can't, please remember that it's not that I dislike you or think you smell funny or etc. Also, I am happy to be hugged, but if I'm standing up and you've come and hugged me, please make sure I've got something to hang onto before you go wandering off. Finally, an offer of an arm or help fetching something or etc. is always, always appreciated, but an offer to re-diagnose me or change my PT is not.

People sometimes say they don't know how I can do it, keeping up the PT three times a day for the last four months while it's making me feel very nasty, and not knowing when I'll be done. I had been reacting to this statement with some confusion, since I don't really see that the other choice (deciding that I'll just stay dizzy) is a good plan. But I wonder if I have been taking this insufficiently literally, and what some of these people really mean is that they don't know, practically, how one goes about maintaining that sort of discipline over this length of time.

The trick I wanted to mention this morning is forcing the choice. I think mostly when people don't get things done that they genuinely want to get done, it's not because they're choosing not to. (Things they don't genuinely want to get done are a different story, albeit with some overlap.) It's because they're drifting past without making the choice. They are not looking at their dirty kitchen floor that they want to have swept and thinking, "I choose not to sweep this now. It is more important to me to use that time and energy to read my book/catch up on e-mail/etc. I will sweep it Thursday morning early." They are just doing the other things they're doing, and letting their brains slide past the choice whether or not to sweep the kitchen floor.

So with the PT, I don't let myself think, "I'll do that later," and I don't let myself just not think about it. I do it three times daily, after meals, and if it gets to be more than half an hour after a meal and I haven't done it, I firmly say to myself, "You can do this now, or you can do it in an hour, or you can choose not to do it at all this time." But not making a choice is not on the list. "In a little bit" is not on the list. Twice I have chosen to do some of the exercises right away and some an hour later. I've never chosen not to do them in an ordinary circumstance. (In the four months, I've missed three of the PT sessions: one Easter/Minicon weekend, and one each on the days I was traveling to and from California.) I have even gone so far as to say aloud, "I'm not going to do my PT tonight." But then I always have anyway, because when push comes to shove, I want to give myself the best chance of recovering from this as completely as possible. So I make sure that push does come to shove. The pessimal condition for me would not be that I don't fully recover my vestibular functioning; that would be bad, but we could adjust. The pessimal condition would be that I don't fully recover my vestibular function and have to wonder if I could have, if only I'd worked harder at the PT. And that's the part I can control. So I do.

Comments

[callunav.livejournal.com]

The pessimal condition for me would not be that I don't fully recover my vestibular functioning; that would be bad, but we could adjust. The pessimal condition would be that I don't fully recover my vestibular function and have to wonder if I could have, if only I'd worked harder at the PT. And that's the part I can control. So I do.


Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.


Hope Fourth Street is good for you.

[aedifica]

I will make a point of coming and saying hi to you, and I'll try to time it so that you're not in the middle of something else at the time. (The reason it needs to be made a point of, instead of merely being a matter of course, is that I don't know you in person yet. I'd be shy about it, but since you really can't come say hi to me, if I stay shy about it there's no chance at all that I'd get to meet you.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's why I posted this: to remind people that while I try to be accommodating of shy people as much as possible, I will almost certainly not be wandering around peering at namebadges and greeting people effusively if I already know them online.

"In the middle of something" is a hard one at cons. Because one is often in the middle of conversations, and people shouldn't necessarily take that as a sign that they should go away.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

A very useful post, in several ways. I think you're right about people not choosing; I suspect I do this all the time. I'll have to try the technique of forcing the choice.

Also looks like I should go digging for summer clothes. It's rainy and cool this morning in Seattle, and yesterday, the first sunny day in a while, only got up to 70 or so, so I'm not yet dressing for weather that's reliably in the 80s. I have summer clothes somewhere...

And I will definitely seek you out over the weekend, but you're on your own for finding means of escape when you've had enough.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My gauge for whether it's summer in Nebraska is if I don't wear jeans for weeks on end. In Minnesota, this isn't really a good indicator because it so rarely happens. Here my gauge is if I don't automatically get out socks or stockings when I pick my clothes for the day.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, in that case we are in Minnesota summer by now, because my sock-wearing has been reduced to optional status, depending on my choice of shoes. Heck, I might even wear skirts if I could figure out where they've gotten off to.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I am so hoping that you will have a great con.

*Hugs from here*

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Interesting. In the case of rowing, the opposite works better for me; I have a much better track record for early-early morning practices if I just get up and do it without stopping to think. (It turns out that for me the Nike slogan really does work.) But of course there are a lot of different circumstances around that - of course the biggest one is being me and not you, but there's also the fact that the penalty for skipping a practice is much less dire and that rowing is supposed to be (and often is) fun once you get out there and start (this one doesn't work so well for the rowing machine but I'm sure it's still much less unpleasant than your PT).

The best thing about reading blogs for me is the insight into how other people work. Now I've been reading them for 7 years or so, I'm convinced human diversity is much greater than I had ever realized.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, sure, if you just do it, you don't get to the point where you have to think it through in the first place. That's often better than having to force the choice, but if you find you're not Just Doing It, making it an active choice can help.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Glad to be useful.

[pure-doxyk.livejournal.com]

Fantastic post for so many occasions...thank you.