Legwork and Life, week of 3/6/19

This is Legwork and Life, where I track the legwork and opportunities in my career as an autistic advocate, and also describe parts of my adult autistic life, including my perspectives on everyday problems and situations.

Hello from surprisingly low-pain town.  I had a wisdom tooth removed.  My first such surgery, and only one I'll need.  My dad is a mutant and had no wisdom teeth, and I got most of his lucky genes for this particular aspect of development.  To add to my luck, the tooth that had to come out was an upper tooth, and wasn't impacted or otherwise complicated.  Very much a grab and yank situation, whereas with the lower jaw, you kind of have to chisel the teeth out.  Funnily enough, the doctor did grumble a bit about how tough my bones are.  I guess that gave him some annoyance while trying to extract the tooth.  Still funny to me.  

I do have a really nice bruise on my face from the local anesthesia injections.  It was relatively faint for a couple days but appears to be getting darker and more visible despite my yellow-toned skin.  I'm guessing that's because I'm insisting on using my jaw now.  The recovery and care instructions insist that I brush my teeth and such, and I've been wanting to eat more than pudding and very soft foods, so I've needed to open my jaw wider than a half-inch to accommodate that.  Hopefully that'll go away soon.

I was awake for the surgery, and it actually taught me something kind of interesting about my system.  You see, when they administered the local anesthesia, it came mixed with epinephrine... also known as adrenaline.  The helper person warned me I might feel my heart race, and not to worry.  I did not feel my heart race or my mind try to panic.  In fact, the only major difference I could detect was the shaking of my hands.  I had serious trouble completing my Picross puzzle.  I normally have some shake in my hands, but it gets markedly worse if something is immediately panicking me.  

This reminded me of a theory I read years ago regarding deer, humans, and human society.  Deer have two modes: calm and upset.  They mainly live in calm, unless predators or some kind of threat occurs.  At which point they switch to upset, and fight or flight their way through the situation until they're out of it.  After which they switch back to calm.  

Humans used to work similarly.  When threats occurred, we fight/flighted to deal with them and then returned to being calm.  The theory goes that as human society developed, we also developed things that register as a threat but can't be dealt with appropriately using fight/flight.  Money problems and angry bosses at work, for example.  These situations put us into fight or flight mode, but because they can't be dealt with so simply, we can get stuck in fight/flight instead of returning to calm.  

The theory posits that this is part of where depression and anxiety come from, and possibly other forms of mental illness as well.  Heart disease, poor sleep, and other physical symptoms follow as well.  Living "on edge" all the time has costs to your mental and emotional health, after all.  

This is the basis of many mindfulness programs.  The idea is to bring yourself back to the calm state, into the present where your boss isn't immediately angry at you, and your money problems can wait to be handled until you get home.  It's not that you start ignoring the past and the future, so much as that you take time sometimes to be in the present.  A reasonable number of people swear by meditation and various forms of mindfulness.  

The fact that I barely noticed the effects of medically administered adrenaline, other than in regards to how well I could play a puzzle game on my tablet, strongly suggests to me that I might be stuck in fight/flight more often than not.  

I have had a very hard time with meditation in the past, to the point where it kind of felt like my thoughts were just bouncing around inside my skull, screaming to get out.  Finding calm and quiet inside myself has always been easiest for me when actively engaged in something, whether that's reading, writing, doing puzzles, or playing a video game.  I struggle with it otherwise.  

Unfortunately, "otherwise" might well be what I need to be healthier.  It'd be rather notable if I managed to learn and practice meditation and found that it made my hands stop shaking entirely.