Blue Light Glasses

 Hi y'all,

It's migraine week for me! 0/10 - would not suggest. Last week was sick week, which is also unpleasant, but at least resolvable with a good dose of dayquil. Migraine week is worse, in my opinion. If you're not familiar with them, migraines are pretty unpleasant. For me, they lead to periods of nausea, exhaustion, extreme light sensitivity, and (duh) a really bad headache. For context: this week, I asked my fiance if it would be appropriate to put muscle rub on my forehead because it hurt so much. He told me no, which may or may not be true but certainly kept me from getting a mentholated rub in my eyes, so good on him. My migraines are brought on by stress, too much time in front of screens that emit blue light, drinking too much alcohol, and likely a couple other factors that I haven't had the displeasure of recognizing yet.

I spend a lot of time in front of screens between work and school, and although during the summer I was good about turning off my phone when I was in bed, sometimes after 11+ hours of attentive engagement I need some wind-down time with goofy instagram content (or an endless feed of election content, I guess). Between the lack of exposure to folks outside of our home, and the fact that I'm stressed out with school and work, I'm drinking more than usual too. If I'm tipsy, I'd rather watch TV on my laptop than do a crossword puzzle. If I'm on my laptop and tired, I might as well get in bed with it. If I'm on my laptop already, scaling down to a phone is effectively a good thing, right? If I slept poorly the night before because I was up too late, drank too much, and had a screen too close to my face, I'm stressed out the next day because I'm scatterbrained. Ad infinitum. I don't think I'm the only person going through some kind of this cycle, even if the specificity of the cycle differs from person to person. 

From an externalized perspective, there's a few obvious answers here about how to resolve things, but I don't even want to get into them, because I know what they are and they feel daunting. I want to stand on my porch drinking red wine and marveling at the little lights I impulse bought from target and finally put up today when I should have been responding to Mark about my thesis survey questions.

 

 

So big changes are daunting and make me feel a little more powerless when I already feel overwhelmed. And daunting + overwhelmed leads to anxiety leads to depression that is not well managed by 30 milligrams of Prozac a day. 

 

I'm saying no to big changes for now. Little changes though, those seem more manageable. Play with the dogs before you get on Twitter? Maybe. Take a melatonin before bed? Sure. Make sure to keep your water bottle filled? Yes. Listen to a song that lets you lose track of time? Good. Make a list of extremely cross-offable things you need to do in the morning? My gel pen is already in my hand. Use your blue light glasses that make your eyes look (ironically but charmingly) blue? Yes, please, take them off of the top of your head they do no good there.

Again, I'm not the first person to try to recalibrate my brain towards little steps of positivity, but I do know that hearing it over and over can make a difference sometimes. On a car ride last week, I was listening to the most recent episode of Reply All, which also addressed the general state of our happiness (but spoke less about our own self-defeating tendencies). I'd suggest listening to it, if it appeals to you. The Reply All boys are kind and make me laugh and act like real people. They ask questions that are hard, and questions that are fun, and talk about the things that makes them smile, and also their anxieties and fears. For me, the visibility is nice. This episode in particular ended with a call to their audience to send in a voice memo of the little things in their lives that were making things better for them during this hard and strange and lonesome time. They'll air those voice memos soon and both the visible path of that process and the fact that other people are offering vulnerability and a check on the hardness of reality will likely soothe me. After that the semester will end, and then a year after that, my time in graduate school will end and hopefully in the midst of that COVID will be under control.

Until then, I'm trying to get myself to remember the little things that I can do for myself, and to let some of the little things go.

***A note: I know this post wasn't about #rethinkingstatus - I promise we'll be back to regularly scheduled programming soon! There's an argument to be made about how the discussion of mental health and discomfort is in itself a breakdown of the ways that we traditionally conduct status, but I don't have the words to elucidate it right now. Maybe one of you do :)