The weird things you think about after getting your dog high
She's currently zonked out of her mind while using me as a human couch, so neither of us are going anywhere. The commands to get off me are seemingly not registering to her all, or perhaps she's simply choosing to ignore it. Either way, I've been coddling her ever since her surgery a few days ago, so I guess I'll allow it.
I've had to sneakily feed her a cocktail of pain meds, anti-inflammatories, anti-anxiety pills, and sedatives in order to get her to cope with the stress of the entire process, and thankfully she's responding well. I think it's because she knows she has someone she can count on no matter what.
But it's in the ways I've been numbing her to her stress that I am reminded how I've been doing the same thing to myself my whole life. Not exclusively through drugs mind you, but in principle the only way I've been able to control my stress and my emotions have been to completely disconnect myself from them. Rather than acknowledging the ways that I'm being impacted by events around me, I tend to focus on the next step, the next responsibility, or the next distraction.
And I can't complain because it's served me well. I'm as productive and as resourceful as anyone I've ever come across, but there's also an almost mechanical element to it all that really sets me apart from all other people. A lot of times in my life people have made comments calling me robotic or implying that I was like a machine or a zombie. It kinda brings to mind the concept of the uncanny valley, where something appears human on the outside, but there's also this chilling feeling that something is off and not quite right. It's an odd quirk that's finally been given a name thanks to advances in AI, but it really makes you wonder where it originated from in the first place.
How or why in the course of human evolution has this uneasiness around almost-but-not-quite normal people come from? A more fanciful imagination can imagine wild theories like shape-shifting aliens, time-travelers, or even something like the Terminator which made us want to defend ourselves against imposters. Regardless, it's something I feel that's been instrumental to my chronic loneliness. One of the few fictional characters I've ever really felt like I could relate to was Victor Hugo's Quasimodo, whose name literally means 'almost normal'. And it's in thinking about this that I can understand that in the ways in which he is physically deformed, I must be emotionally deformed, and people unconsciously avoid that because they must recognize it as a liability. Mental illness is shunned not because of any sense of superiority, but out of fear.
Now that I've become self-conscious about my limitations, it's given me some motivation to dig through all the psychological layers I've built up around my emotions throughout my life and am trying to connect with the fear that normal people can intuitively register with. Today, I've had the opportunity to explore the fear around my dog's health and well-being.
The surgery she had was for a tumor removal, and it's currently in a lab awaiting analysis to determine whether it's malignant or not. And while a normal person might be riddled with anxiety as they brace themselves for potentially bad news about the health of their best friend, the deepest part of myself believes it already knows the answer. I found a second lump on the inside of her leg.
Over the last few years I've becoming increasingly convinced that there is some kind of divine intelligence somewhere in the universe. Maybe I'm wrong. This theory coincides a little too perfectly with the sense of hopeless I talked about in my last post, and it's likely that this fatalism about life could be nothing more than a coping mechanism. But for the sake of this post, I want to explore the possibility that maybe there's no such thing as coincidence and maybe things happen for a reason.
I've been trying to get her tumor removed for months, and the vet is consistently booked through with tons of animal appointments. I almost feel lucky to get scheduled as early as I did. But it was just before the surgery that I took her in to get a blood sample done to see how she would respond to anesthesia. It was that very same day that the car next to mine rolled in with a dog that looked unmistakably similar to mine. It's like they could have been siblings. The entire time I've had my dog, I never knew what breed she was. I knew she was a mix and had my guesses based on my knowledge of other dogs and a whole lot of Google image searches to test out my convictions, but I never knew for sure.
As fate would have it, this stranger that pulled in next to me noticed the similarity as well and so we got to talking. He confirmed that his dog is pitbull/boxer mix, which would lead me to believe that my dog is too. The unfortunate part is that boxers are a breed that's especially prone to cancer, as it's the #1 health issue they face. Almost half of all boxers die from cancer according to some studies, which is a sobering fact to learn when you're awaiting medical results from your dog's tumor operation. All of my alarm bells should be ringing and alerting me to this fact that I might lose the thing I love the most to something I can't control.
But that fear isn't there. Another thing I've been doing over the last few weeks has been rediscovering my obsession with the show Lost through various clips and compilations spoon-fed to me by the YouTube algorithm, though all the same it's been nice to stroll through memory lane. Heavy spoilers ahead for anyone that hasn't seen it, but the last season was essentially about the entire cast of characters making their peace with death and learning to move on. To remember what happened, to cherish what we had, and ultimately to accept all of the anger, the pain, the love, the sadness so that we could move on from it. Maybe it's all a coincidence, but what if this is the universe's way of helping me embrace the difficulty so that I can finally grow out of the self-preserving habits were hard-wired into me from childhood trauma.
I'm aware that there's a heavy element of wishful thinking here, but if I can connect all the dots here for a second, maybe it's a cosmic message helping me understand what I need to do to be a better person, to live a happier life, to reach my potential. That I had to learn to love my dog and all her little quirks in order to learn how to love people in a way I was never shown how. That I then have to lose my dog and have my heart broken in order to learn what hearts are for. And maybe it's all BS mysticism and I am concocting this story up in order to cope. I don't really know, but it maybe it doesn't matter if I can take a valuable lesson out of it either way.
Guess we'll find out when the test results are in
I've had to sneakily feed her a cocktail of pain meds, anti-inflammatories, anti-anxiety pills, and sedatives in order to get her to cope with the stress of the entire process, and thankfully she's responding well. I think it's because she knows she has someone she can count on no matter what.
But it's in the ways I've been numbing her to her stress that I am reminded how I've been doing the same thing to myself my whole life. Not exclusively through drugs mind you, but in principle the only way I've been able to control my stress and my emotions have been to completely disconnect myself from them. Rather than acknowledging the ways that I'm being impacted by events around me, I tend to focus on the next step, the next responsibility, or the next distraction.
And I can't complain because it's served me well. I'm as productive and as resourceful as anyone I've ever come across, but there's also an almost mechanical element to it all that really sets me apart from all other people. A lot of times in my life people have made comments calling me robotic or implying that I was like a machine or a zombie. It kinda brings to mind the concept of the uncanny valley, where something appears human on the outside, but there's also this chilling feeling that something is off and not quite right. It's an odd quirk that's finally been given a name thanks to advances in AI, but it really makes you wonder where it originated from in the first place.
How or why in the course of human evolution has this uneasiness around almost-but-not-quite normal people come from? A more fanciful imagination can imagine wild theories like shape-shifting aliens, time-travelers, or even something like the Terminator which made us want to defend ourselves against imposters. Regardless, it's something I feel that's been instrumental to my chronic loneliness. One of the few fictional characters I've ever really felt like I could relate to was Victor Hugo's Quasimodo, whose name literally means 'almost normal'. And it's in thinking about this that I can understand that in the ways in which he is physically deformed, I must be emotionally deformed, and people unconsciously avoid that because they must recognize it as a liability. Mental illness is shunned not because of any sense of superiority, but out of fear.
Now that I've become self-conscious about my limitations, it's given me some motivation to dig through all the psychological layers I've built up around my emotions throughout my life and am trying to connect with the fear that normal people can intuitively register with. Today, I've had the opportunity to explore the fear around my dog's health and well-being.
The surgery she had was for a tumor removal, and it's currently in a lab awaiting analysis to determine whether it's malignant or not. And while a normal person might be riddled with anxiety as they brace themselves for potentially bad news about the health of their best friend, the deepest part of myself believes it already knows the answer. I found a second lump on the inside of her leg.
Over the last few years I've becoming increasingly convinced that there is some kind of divine intelligence somewhere in the universe. Maybe I'm wrong. This theory coincides a little too perfectly with the sense of hopeless I talked about in my last post, and it's likely that this fatalism about life could be nothing more than a coping mechanism. But for the sake of this post, I want to explore the possibility that maybe there's no such thing as coincidence and maybe things happen for a reason.
I've been trying to get her tumor removed for months, and the vet is consistently booked through with tons of animal appointments. I almost feel lucky to get scheduled as early as I did. But it was just before the surgery that I took her in to get a blood sample done to see how she would respond to anesthesia. It was that very same day that the car next to mine rolled in with a dog that looked unmistakably similar to mine. It's like they could have been siblings. The entire time I've had my dog, I never knew what breed she was. I knew she was a mix and had my guesses based on my knowledge of other dogs and a whole lot of Google image searches to test out my convictions, but I never knew for sure.
As fate would have it, this stranger that pulled in next to me noticed the similarity as well and so we got to talking. He confirmed that his dog is pitbull/boxer mix, which would lead me to believe that my dog is too. The unfortunate part is that boxers are a breed that's especially prone to cancer, as it's the #1 health issue they face. Almost half of all boxers die from cancer according to some studies, which is a sobering fact to learn when you're awaiting medical results from your dog's tumor operation. All of my alarm bells should be ringing and alerting me to this fact that I might lose the thing I love the most to something I can't control.
But that fear isn't there. Another thing I've been doing over the last few weeks has been rediscovering my obsession with the show Lost through various clips and compilations spoon-fed to me by the YouTube algorithm, though all the same it's been nice to stroll through memory lane. Heavy spoilers ahead for anyone that hasn't seen it, but the last season was essentially about the entire cast of characters making their peace with death and learning to move on. To remember what happened, to cherish what we had, and ultimately to accept all of the anger, the pain, the love, the sadness so that we could move on from it. Maybe it's all a coincidence, but what if this is the universe's way of helping me embrace the difficulty so that I can finally grow out of the self-preserving habits were hard-wired into me from childhood trauma.
I'm aware that there's a heavy element of wishful thinking here, but if I can connect all the dots here for a second, maybe it's a cosmic message helping me understand what I need to do to be a better person, to live a happier life, to reach my potential. That I had to learn to love my dog and all her little quirks in order to learn how to love people in a way I was never shown how. That I then have to lose my dog and have my heart broken in order to learn what hearts are for. And maybe it's all BS mysticism and I am concocting this story up in order to cope. I don't really know, but it maybe it doesn't matter if I can take a valuable lesson out of it either way.
Guess we'll find out when the test results are in
31-35, M
