The smoky London office at 21 is a perfect case study in how environmental stacking works. Overcrowded commute + heat + constant performance pressure + smoke-filled air + commission-only stress + no autonomy + a body already running on insufficient resources... Each one of those is a hit to a health bar that started lower than everyone else's. Any one of them alone might have been survivable. All of them simultaneously, without any understanding of your own physiology, is a recipe for disaster. And the GP's "glandular episode" gave you nothing to work with. So the failure got filed under "me" rather than "conditions." This piece is the retroactive correction that you deserved.
It really moved me to hear you reframe that out loud for me; this is the power of getting it down in writing (not just seeing it in my own mind’s eye at last) and sharing it with those who get it too. The internal correction is profound, even after all these years, during which I’ve known (for several of them now) that glandular was all wrong and that something more complex and nuanced was going on with me. With every reframe of my life, and I have a few left in me yet, I move further into a place of self-knowing and quiet appreciation, generating a kind of inner strength that helps make up for the profound absence of some of the physiological variety. Perhaps one will lead back to the other eventually…I think it already is because I am feeling more resilient than I have been for quite some time. Thank you for commenting once again.
There's something quietly defiant in our reframes. Not giving up the project of understanding yourself, even now. I think you're right that the self-knowing and the physiological are connected — the nervous system registers being finally seen too 🌿.
The smoky London office at 21 is a perfect case study in how environmental stacking works. Overcrowded commute + heat + constant performance pressure + smoke-filled air + commission-only stress + no autonomy + a body already running on insufficient resources... Each one of those is a hit to a health bar that started lower than everyone else's. Any one of them alone might have been survivable. All of them simultaneously, without any understanding of your own physiology, is a recipe for disaster. And the GP's "glandular episode" gave you nothing to work with. So the failure got filed under "me" rather than "conditions." This piece is the retroactive correction that you deserved.
It really moved me to hear you reframe that out loud for me; this is the power of getting it down in writing (not just seeing it in my own mind’s eye at last) and sharing it with those who get it too. The internal correction is profound, even after all these years, during which I’ve known (for several of them now) that glandular was all wrong and that something more complex and nuanced was going on with me. With every reframe of my life, and I have a few left in me yet, I move further into a place of self-knowing and quiet appreciation, generating a kind of inner strength that helps make up for the profound absence of some of the physiological variety. Perhaps one will lead back to the other eventually…I think it already is because I am feeling more resilient than I have been for quite some time. Thank you for commenting once again.
There's something quietly defiant in our reframes. Not giving up the project of understanding yourself, even now. I think you're right that the self-knowing and the physiological are connected — the nervous system registers being finally seen too 🌿.