I'm only a middling baker, but I do know how to make deathcake. Have you had deathcake? You might know it by another name. It's that richly decadent layer cake built from self-directed schadenfreude: the convincing misery that I am just not that good, that knowledgeable, that worthy, of good things, no matter how hard I work or how relentlessly I persevere. It's the willingness to settle for less because not believing in myself enables me to imagine that the world really is a just place, and whatever happens to me is what I earned and all I deserve.
The deathcake diet sends me into all kinds of desperate coping behaviors (blogging, I hope, is one of the healthier ones). Blogging is one of the ways to leverage the technique for undoing deathcake. The technique focuses on taking apart the layers of the cake until the cake (and the plate it's sitting on) are thin enough to fit inside that tiny little pipe labeled "tolerable stress." I wrote about it in a post...and decided I would make a picture. And the deathcake metaphor went away very quickly, because cake is just not what happens when I'm using all my techniques at once and still feeling as if I'm losing ground. My first picture was going to show cake but it became about climate and geology pretty quickly.
View attachment 15224
I think this is basic geology and climatology. (The words in the middle say "comfort zone.") I have my faults, just things I do that aren't well-behaved, stuff I'm not proud of. I try not to but I fall in. There's a porous line where I can kind of keep things under control even though I'm not comfortable.
I have my thoughts, which are sometimes puffy white clouds, or maybe not, until they pass over a fault line and things start to get dark. Then an idea bolts through my head--not a light bulb, but a lightning bolt.
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And because the thought is emerging from just ordinary thinking but now moving down one of my fault lines, things get dark, and my world shakes, and I get a new stress fracture that aligns with the shape of my mind and of course the existing fault lines. Now my faults and my thoughts are engaging. The new fissure breaks into my already tiny comfort zone.
About now I can't stand my loss of control. I'll do anything to regain something that feels like control, but unfortunately the obvious choice is never the best one.
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The choice about not panicking is what's hard. I have to work on building up my tolerance for ambiguity muscle so that the little kid in my brain stops shaking in fear of the unknown. If I understood, truly, that I face the unknown at every moment that isn't now, would I spend it in a blind and wild flight from uncertainty? Would I really trade my situation for a worse one, because "uncertainty" is worse than the focused attention and high energy of responding to a crisis?
I've never thought about panic as a control mechanism before, but in the context of my life, panic must be "meltdown" writ large across time...if a meltdown only lasts hours or days, the effects of panic can last for months, years, or forever. Panic is the last stand before falling into the abyss (below the lowest solid blue line) where depression sits and motion becomes very, very hard and passages very, very dark.
So my challenge personally seems to be about what I can do to stay in the moment when lightning hits the fault line. How will I slow down, find a virtue in being deliberate, and not confuse it with procrastination?
The deathcake diet sends me into all kinds of desperate coping behaviors (blogging, I hope, is one of the healthier ones). Blogging is one of the ways to leverage the technique for undoing deathcake. The technique focuses on taking apart the layers of the cake until the cake (and the plate it's sitting on) are thin enough to fit inside that tiny little pipe labeled "tolerable stress." I wrote about it in a post...and decided I would make a picture. And the deathcake metaphor went away very quickly, because cake is just not what happens when I'm using all my techniques at once and still feeling as if I'm losing ground. My first picture was going to show cake but it became about climate and geology pretty quickly.
View attachment 15224
I think this is basic geology and climatology. (The words in the middle say "comfort zone.") I have my faults, just things I do that aren't well-behaved, stuff I'm not proud of. I try not to but I fall in. There's a porous line where I can kind of keep things under control even though I'm not comfortable.
I have my thoughts, which are sometimes puffy white clouds, or maybe not, until they pass over a fault line and things start to get dark. Then an idea bolts through my head--not a light bulb, but a lightning bolt.
View attachment 15225
And because the thought is emerging from just ordinary thinking but now moving down one of my fault lines, things get dark, and my world shakes, and I get a new stress fracture that aligns with the shape of my mind and of course the existing fault lines. Now my faults and my thoughts are engaging. The new fissure breaks into my already tiny comfort zone.
About now I can't stand my loss of control. I'll do anything to regain something that feels like control, but unfortunately the obvious choice is never the best one.
View attachment 15226
The choice about not panicking is what's hard. I have to work on building up my tolerance for ambiguity muscle so that the little kid in my brain stops shaking in fear of the unknown. If I understood, truly, that I face the unknown at every moment that isn't now, would I spend it in a blind and wild flight from uncertainty? Would I really trade my situation for a worse one, because "uncertainty" is worse than the focused attention and high energy of responding to a crisis?
I've never thought about panic as a control mechanism before, but in the context of my life, panic must be "meltdown" writ large across time...if a meltdown only lasts hours or days, the effects of panic can last for months, years, or forever. Panic is the last stand before falling into the abyss (below the lowest solid blue line) where depression sits and motion becomes very, very hard and passages very, very dark.
So my challenge personally seems to be about what I can do to stay in the moment when lightning hits the fault line. How will I slow down, find a virtue in being deliberate, and not confuse it with procrastination?
