
Life plan: update

8am the next morning, and I am not surprised.
Bewildered yes, but not surprised. This is now the 4th time in a row that a major /global/political event came with particular predictions, but then the exact opposite occurred. I now consider this simply well planned and rolled out info-tactics (warfare?). Or, maybe we’re all just thick af. People who are convinced that they’ll win are set up to take less action, stay complacent. So, well played who ever’s on the other end of those polling strings đ I’ll keep the #auspolpress hashtag as a reminder.
There was *a lot* going on in other languages (not English) that I only knew about because of where I live… and all that campaigning was not reported on, at all…
Still, I’m glad it’s over. And ironically, despite my best efforts to vote them out, they’ll now continue to make me better off, as I am -by chance- part of Australia’s privileged caste. So I’ll have to stay smart about how to resocialise the money hereafter.
But for now it seems we have stopped living in a society. We now live in an economy *only*. This darn word will continue to give me grief now for years to come. And oh buoy I will miss society… I always loved her concept
I just read that âAssumptions are the termites of relationshipsâ – and yes they are : /
After pondering over this a bit further I realised that there’s a blanket allowance for people to make all sorts of assumptions, as soon as they quote their religion as the basis for them. Blanket because we have to be so PC and ‘inclusive’. And I am frankly a bit sick of this by now. Only because you are religious xyz doesn’t give the right to make assumptions about your fellow wo/man. You will have to ask, to ensure what you think is actually true.
My patience for religion has reached zero. It’s made up stuff – entirely made up! Yet still they kill each over it, claiming to ‘be more peaceful than the other’ in the process. Modern religion is all but peak hypocrisy to me.
I am writing this down, on the off-chance that I can help another woman (or man, husband, friend, son, father) to be less panicky about breast cancer and the treatments involved, such as radiation therapy.
I had a DCIS* found in Dec 2018 (*explained below). I got operated right away, had all three high grade nodules completely removed. I healed during Jan/Feb. During Mar/April I have to go to hospital every weekday and receive 25 sessions of radiation treatment to my right upper chest. It started on the last day of Feb, and the wait towards it was the most stressful thing I can remember. I only ever had 3 panic attacks in my life, one was over a decade ago, the other two I had in February, waiting towards these sessions. I would wake up at night, sweat drenched, suffocating. My nerves were on edge, ready to jump anyone who dropped as much as a feather around me.
Now I am into my third week, I have received 7 treatments so far. My panic has subsided, and gave way to surrender. I stopped thinking about the side effects that were so meticulously repeated to me: scarring to the lung, brittling of the ribs, other cancers, the skin will come off, pain increasing and worsening after end of treatments, etc etc… I arranged for work to be part-time, go to work in the morning and get the sessions at St George late afternoon on my way home.
I come to the same machine, every day, and the same bunch of cheery nurses who tend to me during the ~15 minutes a session takes. There’s laughter and banter. What takes the most time is the set-up: I have to lay in the exact position, every single time. On day 0 they prepared a ‘cast mould’, and that is where I lie down in. Next is laser measuring with fancy green lights that cross where they must, and the nurses actually do a numberwang ; -D they call out numbers to each other (confirming the correct alignment). Then they leave the room, and the actual zapping takes ~ 3 x 10 seconds, from different angles.
The whole thing is doable, but now a 4th of the way in I can feel my skin giving up and the internal bruising increasing. I will see how see much more the effect will impact. I will come back next or so and write more about it. I use an (allowed) moisturiser from the pharmacy (Dermaveen, 100ml) to keep the skin from breaking up.
Update 21-03: I’m now halfway through the sessions. Today is day 15/25. I am still doing ok, but now the skin is sore, like a hefty allergy, and the bruising no longer ignoreable. I will continue to go to work, but will stop if I can’t. I get random pain in the area, like deep cuts, but not more than maybe ten times a day. But moving around I have to do slower than usual, so not to upset the whole thing. Two more weeks and then I’m done. I’ll report back next week or so…
Last update 06-04: It’s done, I had my last radiation treatment yesterday. I am quite sore, my skin is about as purple as the colour of the waiting room sign below, and very angry, inflamed, blisters and open sores, but altogether I am in good spirits, also because of the good care I received throughout the entire treatment. Plus the nurses were fantastic, lovely and caring and also funny, there was always giggles and good wishes. So next is now healing, which I was told will take a while. I’ll come back here and report how that went in a week or so.
But main fazit: Don’t be scared ladies, there’s good care out there xx
Final update 12-04: It’s now a full week without treatment, and my skin has recovered a lot. Not right away, the first few days (and nights) after the last session where the most ‘taxing’ (pain, heat, strong itch), but then the healing kicked in almost instantly. I add two photos just to give an idea of how I look now (not shown for obvs reasons are nipple & scar from the operation, which are the most angry & inflamed parts). I post this in the hope it takes the worry of someone’s mind, because from all that I had read before treatment started I had actually feared much worse than this, but could not find any depiction of what the effects might at least roughly be. (plus also posted in the hope not to scare anyone!). The inside is still sore and extremely pressure sensitive, and will take much longer to recover, but I could already go for a long walk, carry bags home etc. Life’s good again : -)
PS – Next steps: Follow up with clinic prof in 6 weeks (cells need ~28 days to rebuild). Then comes follow up with surgeon in July (6 mths after op). Then a full mammogram in Dec (1 yr after op). Surgeon & mammogram repeat 6-mthly for 5 years.
(the two lambs are just saying Hello and not to worry too much ;D xx)
The Stoics, much like Buddhist philosophy, thought humanity’s main problem was attachment. The more attached to external things – jobs, wealth, even loved ones – the more we suffer if we lose those them. Instead, they suggest we only be concerned with what we can control: our own personal virtue. For Stoics, we aren’t vulnerable because the only thing that matters can’t be taken away from us: our virtue & our values.
Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant had similar thoughts. He believed the only thing that mattered for ethics was that we act with a good will. Whatever happened to us or around us, so long as we act with the intention of fulfilling our duties, we’re be in the clear, ethically speaking. It’s our rational nature – our ability to think – that defines us ethically. And thinking is completely within our control.
I go through life and see & value people through their actions, and their intend. What they say is “Schall und Rauch” to me. I strive to live fearless and without baggage. There is no other way if you want to be able to help others and yourself. Angst eats soul and makes your heart small. I have to thanks to my Ethics peeps for all their good food for thought <3.
This! Love liberates! <3 Maya Angelou
Just was offered a new position. Let’s see what I can make from it.
War is political failure. Never, ever forget that
— Andrew Elder (@awelder) 11 November 2018
Just bumping this, as it is truer than ever <3
Brain science tells us there are three kinds of intuition: ordinary, expert, and strategic.
Ordinary intuition is just a feeling, a gut instinct.
Expert intuition is snap judgments, when you instantly recognize something familiar, the way a tennis pro knows where the ball will go from the arc and speed of the opponentâs racket.
Strategic intuition is a clear thought. It’s not a vague feeling, like ordinary intuition. And itâs not fast like expert intuition. Itâs slow. That epiphany of insight you had last night might solve a problem thatâs been on your mind for a month. And it doesnât happen in familiar situations, like a tennis match. Strategic intuition works in new situations. Thatâs when you need it most.
This third kind of intuition is what I go by whenever I can. Strategic intuition is what guides the majority of my decision making. And while it is unpopular these days to request time for thinking, you have to take your stand and do it anyway, and allow for proper time to reflect. I have a 24 hrs ‘sleep it over’ rule.
Which compliments my other approach to life and everything, something that’s called the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide and act). This ‘rapid evaluation routine’ keeps running permanently on the back of my mind (or wherever my intuition-o-meter sits). Originally the OODA method was derived by pilots who apply the loop to make fast decisions and review them in a constant cognitive circle.
You have to swim fast when the water is cold…
The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.
– D. Morrison
Starting a new job on Monday. A reminder to self what matters…
On leave in my hometown hanging with fam and friends is the best thing ever đ
<3
found on the interwebs, by unknown author:
When you have depression itâs like it snows every day.
Some days itâs only a couple of inches. Itâs a pain in the a**, but you still make it to work, the grocery store. Sure, maybe you skip the gym or your friendâs birthday party, but it IS still snowing and who knows how bad it might get tonight. Probably better to just head home.
Your friend notices, but probably just thinks you are flaky now, or kind of an a**hole.
Some days it snows a foot. You spend an hour shovelling out your driveway and are late to work. Your back and hands hurt from shovelling. You leave early because itâs really coming down out there. Your boss notices.
Some days it snows four feet. You shovel all morning but your street never gets ploughed.
You are not making it to work, or anywhere else for that matter. You are so sore and tired you just get back in the bed. By the time you wake up, all your shovelling has filled back in with snow. Looks like your phone rang; people are wondering where you are.
You donât feel like calling them back, too tired from all the shovelling. Plus they donât get this much snow at their house so they donât understand why youâre still stuck at home. They just think youâre lazy or weak, although they rarely come out and say it.
Some weeks itâs a full-blown blizzard. When you open your door, itâs to a wall of snow. The power flickers, then goes out. Itâs too cold to sit in the living room anymore, so you get back into bed with all your clothes on. The stove and microwave wonât work so you eat a cold Pop Tart and call that dinner. You havenât taken a shower in three days, but how could you at this point? Youâre too cold to do anything except sleep.
Sometimes people get snowed in for the winter. The cold seeps in. No communication in or out. The food runs out. What can you even do, tunnel out of a forty foot snow bank with your hands? How far away is help? Can you even get there in a blizzard? If you do, can they even help you at this point? Maybe itâs death to stay here, but itâs death to go out there too.
The thing is, when it snows all the time, you get worn all the way down. You get tired of being cold. You get tired of hurting all the time from shovelling, but if you donât shovel on the light days, it builds up to something unmanageable on the heavy days. You resent the hell out of the snow, but it doesnât care, itâs just a blind chemistry, an act of nature. It carries on regardless, unconcerned and unaware if it buries you or the whole world.
Also, the snow builds up in other areas, places you canât shovel, sometimes places you canât even see. Maybe itâs on the roof. Maybe itâs on the mountain behind the house. Sometimes, thereâs an avalanche that blows the house right off its foundation and takes you with it. A veritable Act of God, nothing can be done. The neighbours say itâs a shame and they canât understand it; he was doing so well with his shovelling.
â
I donât know how it went down for Anthony Bourdain or Kate Spade. It seems like they got hit by the avalanche, but it couldâve been the long, slow winter. Maybe they were keeping up with their shovelling. Maybe they werenât. Sometimes, shovelling isnât enough anyway. Itâs hard to tell from the outside, but itâs important to understand what itâs like from the inside.
I firmly believe that understanding and compassion have to be the base of effective action. Itâs important to understand what depression is, how it feels, what itâs like to live with it, so you can help people both on an individual basis and a policy basis. Iâm not putting heavy sh*t out here to make your morning suck. I know it feels gross to read it, and realistically it can be unpleasant to be around it, thatâs why people pull away.
I donât have a message for people with depression like âkeep shovellingâ. Itâs asinine. Of course youâre going to keep shovelling the best you can, until you physically canât, because who wants to freeze to death inside their own house? We know what the stakes are. My message is to everyone else. Grab a f***ing shovel and help your neighbour. Slap a mini snow plow on the front of your truck and plough your neighbourhood. Petition the city council to buy more salt trucks, so to speak.
Depression is blind chemistry and physics, like snow. And like the weather, it is a mindless process, powerful and unpredictable with great potential for harm. But like climate change, that doesnât mean we are helpless. If we want to stop losing so many people to this disease, it will require action at every level.
â Anonymous
1. The Odyssey (Homer, 8th Century BC)
2. Uncle Tomâs Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852)
3. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818)
4. Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1949)
5. Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, 1958)
6. One Thousand and One Nights (various authors, 8th-18th Centuries)
7. Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605-1615)
8. Hamlet (William Shakespeare, 1603)
9. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel GarcĂa MĂĄrquez, 1967)
10. The Iliad (Homer, 8th Century BC)
11. Beloved (Toni Morrison, 1987)
12. The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri, 1308-1320)
13. Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare, 1597)
14. The Epic of Gilgamesh (author unknown, circa 22nd-10th Centuries BC)
15. Harry Potter Series (JK Rowling, 1997-2007)
16. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood, 1985)
17. Ulysses (James Joyce, 1922)
18. Animal Farm (George Orwell, 1945)
19. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
20. Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert, 1856)
21. Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Luo Guanzhong, 1321-1323)
22. Journey to the West (Wu Cheng’en, circa 1592)
23. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevksy, 1866)
24. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen, 1813)
25. Water Margin (attributed to Shi Nai’an, 1589)
26. War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy, 1865-1867)
27. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee, 1960)
28. Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966)
29. Aesop’s Fables (Aesop, circa 620 to 560 BC)
30. Candide (Voltaire, 1759)
31. Medea (Euripides, 431 BC)
32. The Mahabharata (attributed to Vyasa, 4th Century BC)
33. King Lear (William Shakespeare, 1608)
34. The Tale of Genji (Murasaki Shikibu, before 1021)
35. The Sorrows of Young Werther (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774)
36. The Trial (Franz Kafka, 1925)
37. Remembrance of Things Past (Marcel Proust, 1913-1927)
38. Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847)
39. Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952)
40. Moby-Dick (Herman Melville, 1851)
41. Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston, 1937)
42. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf, 1927)
43. The True Story of Ah Q (Lu Xun, 1921-1922)
44. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll, 1865)
45. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy, 1873-1877)
46. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad, 1899)
47. Monkey Grip (Helen Garner, 1977)
48. Mrs Dalloway (Virginia Woolf, 1925)
49. Oedipus the King (Sophocles, 429 BC)
50. The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka, 1915)
51. The Oresteia (Aeschylus, 5th Century BC)
52. Cinderella (unknown author and date)
53. Howl (Allen Ginsberg, 1956)
54. Les Misérables (Victor Hugo, 1862)
55. Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1871-1872)
56. Pedro PĂĄramo (Juan Rulfo, 1955)
57. The Butterfly Lovers (folk story, various versions)
58. The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer, 1387)
59. The Panchatantra (attributed to Vishnu Sharma, circa 300 BC)
60. The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, 1881)
61. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark, 1961)
62. The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (Robert Tressell, 1914)
63. Song of Lawino (Okot p’Bitek, 1966)
64. The Golden Notebook (Doris Lessing, 1962)
65. Midnight’s Children (Salman Rushdie, 1981)
66. Nervous Conditions (Tsitsi Dangarembga, 1988)
67. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943)
68. The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov, 1967)
69. The Ramayana (attributed to Valmiki, 11th Century BC)
70. Antigone (Sophocles, c 441 BC)
71. Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897)
72. The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K Le Guin, 1969)
73. A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens, 1843)
74. AmĂ©rica (RaĂșl Otero Reiche, 1980)
75. Before the Law (Franz Kafka, 1915)
76. Children of Gebelawi (Naguib Mahfouz, 1967)
77. Il Canzoniere (Petrarch, 1374)
78. Kebra Nagast (various authors, 1322)
79. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott, 1868-1869)
80. Metamorphoses (Ovid, 8 AD)
81. Omeros (Derek Walcott, 1990)
82. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1962)
83. Orlando (Virginia Woolf, 1928)
84. Rainbow Serpent (Aboriginal Australian story cycle, date unknown)
85. Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates, 1961)
86. Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe, 1719)
87. Song of Myself (Walt Whitman, 1855)
88. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain, 1884)
89. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain, 1876)
90. The Aleph (Jorge Luis Borges, 1945)
91. The Eloquent Peasant (ancient Egyptian folk story, circa 2000 BC)
92. The Emperor’s New Clothes (Hans Christian Andersen, 1837)
93. The Jungle (Upton Sinclair, 1906)
94. The Khamriyyat (Abu Nuwas, late 8th-early 9th Century)
95. The Radetzky March (Joseph Roth, 1932)
96. The Raven (Edgar Allan Poe, 1845)
97. The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie, 1988)
98. The Secret History (Donna Tartt, 1992)
99. The Snowy Day (Ezra Jack Keats, 1962)
100. Toba Tek Singh (Saadat Hasan Manto, 1955)
See full article here http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180521-the-100-stories-that-shaped-the-world
From the Ethics Centre: A quick review of the topic of Universal Basic Income (UBI) – the idea of a regular and liveable payment with no strings attached â no exchange of labour or goods.
The idea of a UBI has deep historical roots. In Thomas Moreâs Utopia, published in 1516, he writes that instead of punishing a poor person who steals bread, âit would be far more to the point to provide everyone with some means of livelihood, so that nobodyâs under the frightful necessity of becoming, first a thief, and then a corpseâ.
Over three hundred years later, John Stuart Mill also supported the concept in Principles of Political Economy, arguing that âa certain minimum [income] assigned for subsistence of every member of the community, whether capable of labour or notâ would give the poor an opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty.
In the 20th century, the UBI gained support from a diverse array of thinkers for very different reasons. Martin Luther King, for instance, saw a guaranteed payment as a way to uphold human rights in the face of poverty, while Milton Friedman understood it as a viable economic alternative to state welfare.
Read the answer here: Ethics.org.au/on-ethics/blog/may-2018/ethics-explainer-universal-basic-income
Today I learned about the concept of a doorslam. Or to be precise: I was acutely aware of what it is and how it happens, I just did not know it has a name. But can confirm: it is about self preservation, and trust. And it is irreversible.
From Quora: “An INFJ will exit (door slam) someone when:
INFJs are good on disappearing acts. They simply arenât there for that person any more. The person comes knocking on the door of friendship only to find no one answers the knock. INFJs usually reserve rage for when they are in an inferior and highly stressed state, or in an unhealthy situation.
Read more about this here.
For myself this is actually a soundless occurrence. It’s more a fadeout or disappearance than a bang. There better is an end to pain, than pain never ending.
I just learned about a concept of abuse I had never hear of before – Gaslighting.
And fknell if youâre not richly grounded in the soil of your own truth and innate goodness, it is terribly easy to lose your roots and be toppled.
Gaslighting is to manipulate someone psychologically so that they doubt their sanity. It is emotional abuse where the victim is manipulated to doubt their own memory and perceptions. It happens when one person tries to overwrite anotherâs reality. Perception and view of self get undermined by little and big insinuations and comments such as âoh you couldnât do that, youâre not organised enoughâ, and âyouâre far too emotional and sensitiveâ. Words from a partner can seem harmless, but gaslighting is more insidious than that. It is designed to disempower, so the other person can take control and even make themselves feel better by having power over the other.
The truly destructive thing about gaslighting is that it nibbles away at your self-worth, your belief in yourself, your talents.
The worst kind of gaslighting is âspiritualâ gaslighting, where the admonishments to one’s personality get couched in personal growth speak:
âIâm telling you this because I care about you and if you become aware of how youâre acting and what youâre really like, youâll be able to transform yourself and truly grow.â
Oh what the hell really, relationships are just so hardcore these days o_OÂ and I consider it absolutely possible that this happens frequently in relationships, without the proponents even really fully noticing, or the acts being deliberately harmful or meant to be suppressive, but instead are a haphazardous expression of bad habits adopted from chauvinistic role models at home as a child…
Good news is, there seems a way out of this Teufelskreis:
Develop an indestructible sense of self, based in deep value and love. When you become your own best friend, cheering yourself on, and believing in your innate goodness, you will be far less easily manipulated and knocked off your course. Step-up to greater self-responsibility and power.
Read more on that topic here: upliftconnect.com/gaslighted