I’ve been imploding lately. It’s quite inconvenient because people don’t see it happen. Once you have your ability to signal that you have is pretty reduced.

I used to have shorter implosions but I also had more people on hand to help when that was my reality. This one has gone on long enough for me to think as a default state it has some advantages. Defaulting to a state of full on retreat from the world having already spent the useless energy on somehow feeling guilty for having failed badly enough to wind up like this is actually working in terms of helping ensure survival oriented tasks get done.

For months a command to hang in there was issued. That’s what people say when they know it’s unrealistic but if they spent too much more energy on how badly you are being failed by the “system” they too would implode or perhaps explode. It was not realistic or reasonable or fair.

It’s a product of a lack of appropriate supports that I could stay in this state for long enough to see the plus side here. For almost two years I have struggled to remember to eat and drink. In my state of minimalistic expectations I have remembered three days in a row.

On Friday I weighed whether I could cope with going to services. Even at my worst I tend to be okay with services so I opted in but from a position of them being a potential bonus rather than something to beat myself up about if I couldn’t go.

There’s all sorts of things I should do this coming week. Anything beyond the work related and basic survival is again going to have to be an opt in. I did horribly badly with the one task I shoulded myself into the past week.

There are health related things that have a high priority for any surplus energy I do have. It’s quite mentally freeing to have had this default approach thrust on me.

I spent so much time worrying about getting to this state. It’s not so bad really. There is fall out for sure because the sequence of events is unclear to most other than myself. I did offer my formal surrender to the health authority but I doubt they recognized it as that.

My life though the past half year has been very analogous to the more futile battles fought in 19^th and 20^th century history. Historians inflict notion of valour on people who then go off and fight stupidly outnumbered battles to die with honour. I have been to battlefield memorials. That my life feels like one and my own participation in it like a volunteer who blunders onto a field where everyone has died _-

well that is a failure for sure. Not on my own part I think.

This is not the first time in the past few months that notions of hunkering down and blending in with the ground seemed like the only way to live mentally. My brain has been in an unrecognizable state for months. So much energy has gone into trying too hard. I call it brain fry in my own mental short hand.

I love my brain. It has been a truer companion than my body for sure. I feel it should have an apology for the ways I damaged it by trying to darn hard when no amount of effort on my own part was going to do anything other than make my own life worse through that horrible feedback loop where the stress of having to try hard makes me less able and the stress of being less able is a stress that we think should be overcome by effort. So it goes and goes and goes.

Having surrendered or more realistically since no one has acknowledged my surrender more like having thought, if my life was a war that I have already lost is freeing. I have shed all the tears I have in me for this failure. Ever minute I rest now is super helpful for my brain. It feels far less “fried” than it has in almost two years.

When I was young and physically healthy I once during the annual mock war that included real soldiers disguised myself so convincingly as a mound that a unit walked right over me. That may be the best analogy of my life right now. All that hurt like heck but I was such a success at being a mound I could lie there within sight of my objective and having recovered enough from the whole being a mound thing advance on it.

People get so invested in not giving up when sometimes that’s the healthiest thing to do. There was no setting my life up so it was not going to demand more resources than I have. My ability to think was being drained away. In my own hierarchy of what is being lost I sometimes state how I care about that beyond my ability to walk but people can’t measure how your thinking feels. You always have to say what’s wrong with it and these sort of thing that doesn’t seem to have any proper words so they can only be appreciated when it changes qualitatively I think. You suspect things are not optimal and your poor brain seems to feel all sorts of things that technically you know it can’t but you have no words for your reality.

Instead of a default position of full on combat sapping me constantly, giving up on “hanging” in there in any sense as a useful thing has been very energizing. I have fear because there are a lot of unappetizing bits to my life if I am honest, but that fear is processed. It is lying there like the reality of knowing people’s pathing would take them right over me. The being trampled on was less scary as it happened than in the seconds where you know you will.

In the next few weeks a few medical realities will more fully unveil themselves. Decisions will need to be made. Anticipating those decisions and what is to come will sap me as much as trying to be valourous in the face of more than I could cope with.

I am a very responsible person. I suspect more will get done now than in the past month. Maybe not everything that people think I should do, but enough to keep me alive and as an added bonus my brain will be less alarming to it’s host.

If more was desired of me then people should have taken my words about my capacity to carry on as literally as I meant them. There is no point in clamouring that you cannot carry on and wearing yourself out carrying on. Sometimes you just need to make like a mound and lie there. Keep your objective in mind but proceed only when it is safe to do so.

Fuller participation in life as humans live it while desirable seems beyond me as a default setting right now. If I think about that long I feel a bit sad but I spent my tears on my failure to be a passable human already. I will be a mound and from that mound occasionally operate as a human.

Hopefully one day the health authority catches up to notions of how it should support me. In the meantime they know how to find me. I know what needs to happen. For this minute not questioning that that knowledge is indeed in me, and that however minimalist my life looks right now it feels quite a bit healthier than has been the norm for quite awhile