Witt's End

The hand was easier to notice. I assumed it came first. Were the thoughts really that far behind. Or did they even come first. Sometimes changes to our cognition are just harder to notice.  A tremor. Weakness. Pain. Dropping things. Hand writing worsening. Those are all glaring spotlights, right? Let's contrast that.  A mild change in memory. Being stuck on a name. Taking longer to recall or recognize something or someone. That can be so much harder to notice.  Thoughts are fickle things. They often change. They rarely truly persist as a constant. There's too many variables. Cognitive and behavioral changes are difficult to quantify, especially deficits. I personally think it's especially so for a few reasons.  First. In life we change our minds. Simple enough. We have new experiences. We learn new information. Our thought patterns and hopefully our behavior changes accordingly. That's just part of the human experience.  Which leads to the second point. We just ...

Often public service requires actions that require compromise with our values. Actions that are at odds with faith and practice. That can cause long-term emotional stress and cognitive challenges. This can include a lot of things. Shame at perpetration. Guilt at surviving. Anger at being on the sidelines. A loss of trust in oneself. All of the above are signs of moral injury.  Some of you are wondering the hell am I talking about? What's moral injury? Some call it a soul wound, but that doesn't really explain it does it. So I'll turn to a couple definitions to lay the ground work.  First from the VA's National Center for PTSD , " In traumatic or unusually stressful circumstances, people may perpetrate, fail to prevent, or witness events that contradict deeply held moral beliefs and expectations." And a similar definition from Syracuse University's Moral Injury Project , " Moral injury is the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass  when that...

Too often us humans tell ourselves that religious participation will solve all of our problems. That all of the resources we need are in one place. But are they? Is church truly the place that fix all of our temporal and physical needs as well as the spiritual? Does it have the resources required to do so. I'm not sure.  This may be the ultimate expression of "I need prayer and my medication" I've ever written. Because I am seeing more and more how different aspects of my life need different helps and attention.  There was a time where I tied my mental health to my spirituality. But that has changed. Mostly through experience. Now I view them separately but impacted by each other. Both because I've needed to address my mental health. And because I channeled it into a career.  I love my current role in my career. I'm passionate about it. Being able to help people on recovery is a massive aid to my own recovery. I love being able to have access to literature and...

I own an AR-15. I built it from parts. More assembled it than built it. But that's how you put them together. Especially when you've spent a long time determining how you want to configure your rifle, what the use case(s) would be, and what makes sense to you as the user.  It's a facsimile of a dissipator. 16 inch barrel with full length rifle sights. But instead of a full rifle length gas system it has a mid length gas system hanging out under the handguard. Which instead of an A1 or A2 guard is a Magpul MOE. I run it with iron sights, just cause that's fun to do. Now to many people the writing of those paragraphs would paint me as holding very specific policy plans and goals. But there in lies the rub. The complexity and experience of being someone who owns firearms, really likes them, but thinks we can do more as a society to address the issues they cause.  I started writing this last year and kept stopping and starting. I couldn't ignore various events and the p...

I can't say that I did any better than surviving yesterday. I muddled through my group. Struggled through charting.  I'm just tired. And it's a kind I haven't felt in a long long time. But it's pervasive, and it's getting a lot worse. I wonder how long I can keep doing what I'm doing. I used to think it mattered. Now I'm not so sure. At least to anyone but me.  For the first time I'm questioning what the hell I'm doing. And that scares the shit out of me.  I didn't think I would be one to find the purpose of life in my career. I am still not sure if that is true. But I do want my work to mean something. That those hours are worth more than the intrinsic value of the paycheck.  So what do I do? I'm not sure and maybe it's time to stop being circumspect and I should just face it head on. So I'm going to try that and just let things be what they are.  This current administration as an entity has enmity for the poor, indigent, homeles...

Recovery. Progress. These are two terms I talk about all the time. The path that happens when we choose to address something. It's the next phase of the journey. And it can lead to healing. Currently it's the entire focus on what I do. Just supporting people in their recovery.  But I can't be a hypocrite. I have to put in the work for myself. Maintaining that recovery for myself and the progress I've made. It's been quite the journey. And every time I think about a potential destination the goal posts move. What I expect of myself changes. I think that's a healthy place to be. It's taken a lot of work. It will continue to take work. There's no end. Just a new way of living.  It's causing me to reflect on the faith that helped get me here. Faith, works, grace. The whole lot of it.  My entire life there has been quite the focus on the Atonement of Jesus Christ and it's role in our lives for redemption and salvation. It's an essential piece of h...

 Dear God, What are we going to do? I fret. I worry. I toss and turn. I can't lose the sleep that I'm not having. It's a forgone conclusion.  So I'm just talking. Without thinking. Letting these thoughts race.  There are too many suffering. Too many worrying. So much more than me. I have been given much alongside my trials, my tribulations, my sorrows. I can't ever lose sight of that. But tonight. These days. I struggle to go to work without shaking. I struggle to concentrate. And I don't think I'm alone.  I may be considered a snowflake for this. A bleeding heart. That's just who I am. I care.  I know these prayers are usually private. That's the way I was raised. And in my streams of consciousness that's usually how it goes. But right not my heart is breaking. And words on a page makes the most sense to me. Is cathartic. Necessary for me. What can I do? Other than shouting in the void. Other than the limited work I keep doing day after day.  It...

Have we examined how problematic it is when we equate good health with righteousness? I want us to think about that for a moment. When we think about having faith to be healed, and the blessings of heaven, how do we react to chronic illness and permanent disability? Do we expect that there is a personal responsibility of the person who we describe as afflicted? Sit with that for a second.  We often start with language we often equate to sin and Satan. Now we don't always stay there. I would argue most don't. But the direction that our sympathies go isn't always healthy. Our attempts at empathy often past sympathy and wind up somewhere around pity. That effects how we interact with people. With those struggling or thriving with various illnesses, medical conditions, and disabilities being treated as near helpless. Earnest sentiments are expressed that are often harmful. We seem to divide people into the useful and the helpless when we do this. And whether we are super consci...

 I’ve struggled many times to describe what I do for work. And I’ve struggled just as hard to explain how you get there.  This was especially apparent this week. People love the population I work with but have no idea what I do. What it means. I feel it’s important to illuminate it.  I am a Peer Support Specialist at the VA. I’m currently credentialed as a Peer Counselor in the state of Washington (the state will be transitioning to a Peer Specialist license with more training and education). What does that mean?  Peers are people with lived experience with mental health and/or substance abuse challenges. They are successful and involved in their recovery. Those peers working at the VA also have to be veterans. That’s who we are.  Now to what we do. All peers support people in their recovery. They may run support groups, they do accountability checks. Peers help people access their resources. Peers may work on therapy and recovery skills with people both in grou...

  Am I motivated, driven, focused, or am I manic? Is the path I’m setting up sustainable or ready to crumble? I’ve really been pondering that that last few days. I spend at least part of the summer a bit sick and a bit depressed. Usually part of it is cyclical. But at least 50% of it is seasonal depression. Yeah summer kicks that into gear for me. When I come out of it. When the desire to move comes I just wait for the mania. Or at least a hypomania. Watching to see if I’m sleeping. If I’m grounded. If aspirations stray from dreams to delusion. I don’t know where I am right now. I just know I finally have enough energy to workout. To combat my body with what little reserves my fatigue allows. It’s the easiest aspect to ground in someways. A physical reality. But I’m making plans for school. For my future. It feels right. I just get worried if I can keep it up. If it’s real. Mania brings energy. But it can also bring inattention. It can bring other problems. So I’m always worried. A...

Make America great again. Make men great again. Catchy phrases. Easy to remember. They work well as slogans and rallying cries.  I understand the desire for nostalgia and aspiration. I do. But I don’t know if this is it: I remember when the make America great again started to get some steam. I asked what time period was America great. I was told repeatedly the 1950s. A time where there was no civil rights amendment. A time of economic prosperity, but women couldn’t open a bank account on their own.  That’s the problem with looking backward. We can get tunnel vision. We can focus on what benefitted us and who we are (or would be) and we miss how others would be affected.  I personally feel that America has always been great due to its potential, people, and perpetual progression. So I struggle with looking backward when we have so much ahead of us.  The same portions of society that truly believe that America needs redemption to a state of greatness also thing that we...

 I’m obsessed with the idea of finding balance in my life. In feel some sense of equilibrium. Probably because so much of my daily life is spent in extremes and out of sync.  I didn’t realize it for so long. But now I can see the patterns with some semblance of definition things have gotten clearer. My brain constantly changes its seasons rapidly. More rapidly than most. And more extreme than many. Multiple times a year. And now I can see it. How that shifts what I would want for balance.  Writing is a part of it. And strive as I might to follow a traditional regimen or push myself with some type of discipline I’m afraid my productivity will ebb and flow. There’s a cycle to the writing. A depth and introspection that comes with the depression, but a lack of energy to see it through. A thousand starts and ideas. Then the mania is the energy that comes to finish them all, but not focused to do more than see something else through.  That’s not to say that I can’t see a ...