(morning writing)

[elainegrey]

Me: what goin' on?

To Carrie who wouldn't leave the deck this morning until i came out to keep her company as she does her business.

To my accounts as yet another system (reddit), with a totally different identity (and absolutely no link to my phone number, ha, or phone) is hacked. I am sad i can't have MFA on dreamwidth or live journal. This may be enough to trigger me to shut down my LJ account because i just don't know what might happen if i lose control over it, unlike dreamwidth where i trust the ownership.

I had a chat with my therapist about the personality difference i notice between Christine and I: she's quick to blame everything else for problems while i blame myself first. (Note: i am not in the "everything else" or this would be a problem.) EG: she'd blame a form first where i might wonder if i mistyped something. In this chat i noted that i don't think my instinct to blame myself first is pathological, just a learned or personal tendency. And generally, i think the introspection is not a bad thing.

But an insight a moment ago about my frustration that i seem to flail in the time available to me: how much of this is because of increased assaults on my fragile attention? Admittedly this morning it was probably open tabs: a short story that i finished skimming because dwelling in someone's dissatisfaction was not interesting, and the payoff at the end didn't relieve the gloom. Poking a bit about typhoon Sinlaku to understand to understand just how unusual it is: typhoon season is the same as hurricane season, so this is a cat 5 in April which is pretty darn early for a July season start. And joy, more US islands decimated by storms, and That Man is probably too distracted to be wondering how to contact the leader of the Marianas and Guam to offer assistance. Anyhow, i can't fully blame "the attention economy" for my distraction, but maybe i can blame for some of my sense of loss. Maybe i'm not becoming a befuddled brain yet (thoughts of the silent brain bleeds that took my mother away and the lingering sense that the bright woman slipped away early on and we missed it as the angry woman remained).

Still... and yet, again, maybe it's me, me believing in some golden age of attention and yet i suspect i've been able to direct it more clearly at work in the past handful of years, so what executive function budget i've got is less scattered about my life but more intensely invested. And so the rest of my life feels deprived.

Comments

[adore]

me believing in some golden age of attention and yet i suspect i've been able to direct it more clearly at work in the past handful of years, so what executive function budget i've got is less scattered about my life but more intensely invested. And so the rest of my life feels deprived

I don't browse any short-form social media anymore, but I do have a lot of tabs open and it does feel overwhelming. But I don't think it makes me more distractible. What you said about your executive function budget being intensely invested in one thing made me think of one more thing: I have the capacity for intense focus, but like any deep mental work, it's limited. I can't operate in focus mode all day or even most of the day, because it exhausts one. Regardless of whether I opened my browser and looked at the tabs. (The eight or more hour workday would gobble all my focus and then not leave me any, either, because I can deep focus for only about two to four hours.)