I’m going to take a wild guess, and suggest that your attitude towards FAI research, and your experience of CFS, are actually related. I have no idea if this is a standard theory, but in some ways CFS sounds like depression minus the emotion—and that is a characteristic symptom in people who have a purpose they regard as supremely important, who find absolutely no support for their attempt to pursue it, but who continue to regard it as supremely important.
The point being that when something is that important, it’s easy to devalue certain aspects of your own difficulties. Yes, running into a blank wall of collective incomprehension and indifference may have been personally shattering; you may be in agony over the way that what you have to do in order to stay alive, interferes with your ability to preserve even the most basic insights that motivate your position … but it’s an indulgence to think about these feelings, because there is an invisible crisis happening that’s much more important.
So you just keep grinding away, or you keep crawling through the desert of your life, or you give up completely and are left only with a philosophical perspective that you can talk about but can’t act on… I don’t know all the permutations. And then at some point it affects your health. I don’t want to say that this is solely about emotion, we are chemical beings affected by genetics, nutrition, and pathogens too. But the planes intersect, e.g. through autoimmune disorders or weakened disease resistance.
The core psychological and practical problem is, there’s a difficult task—the great purpose, whatever it is—being made more difficult in ways that have no intrinsic connection to the problem, but are solely about lack of support, or even outright interference. And then on top of that, you may also have doubts and meta doubts to deal with—coming from others and from yourself (and some of those doubts may be justified!). Finally, health problems round out the picture.
The one positive in this situation, is that while all those negatives can reinforce each other, positive developments in one area can also carry across to another.
OK, so that’s my attempt to reflect back to you, how you sound to me. As for practical matters, I have only one suggestion. You say
he travels to the USA for a few days every couple of months
so I suggest that you at least wait until his next visit, and use that extra time to understand better how all these aspects of your life intersect.
I spent a good year and half trying to answer questions related to the points you brought up after first seeing the mind-body specialist, although you gave me some good perspective.
and that is a characteristic symptom in people who have a purpose they regard as supremely important, who find absolutely no support for their attempt to pursue it, but who continue to regard it as supremely important
.
And then at some point it affects your health.
Actually I only discovered the purpose a couple of years after the myalgic encephalomyelitis set in, before that point my primary goal was to get better and to worry about other goals afterwards. I do not think that becoming more purpose focused translated into me devaluing my difficulties; I was focused on myself and my health at the start of this thing and that seems to have remained constant, it’s just that suddenly those weren’t the most important things to me anymore. My health became not just something intrinsically valuable but also a very important means to an end. Though I’ll be mindful about how my goals affect me, even if they weren’t initially involved in my health problems they could be involved in their continuation if I take matters too seriously.
I don’t want to say that this is solely about emotion, we are chemical beings affected by genetics, nutrition, and pathogens too. But the planes intersect
Exactly this; I keep learning over and over new ways in which the mind and body and all their subsystems can affect each other in very major ways. Several insights related to this concept put me into partial remission in the first place.
so I suggest that you at least wait until his next visit, and use that extra time to understand better how all these aspects of your life intersect
I wouldn’t say that I’ve done all I can in figuring out how all these things interact with each other. I would say though that with the success of the partial remission and all the work I did afterwards towards figuring out mind-body interactions within myself that I am at the point of diminishing returns with results vs effort and that I need to pursue other avenues at this point.
I’m going to take a wild guess, and suggest that your attitude towards FAI research, and your experience of CFS, are actually related. I have no idea if this is a standard theory, but in some ways CFS sounds like depression minus the emotion—and that is a characteristic symptom in people who have a purpose they regard as supremely important, who find absolutely no support for their attempt to pursue it, but who continue to regard it as supremely important.
The point being that when something is that important, it’s easy to devalue certain aspects of your own difficulties. Yes, running into a blank wall of collective incomprehension and indifference may have been personally shattering; you may be in agony over the way that what you have to do in order to stay alive, interferes with your ability to preserve even the most basic insights that motivate your position … but it’s an indulgence to think about these feelings, because there is an invisible crisis happening that’s much more important.
So you just keep grinding away, or you keep crawling through the desert of your life, or you give up completely and are left only with a philosophical perspective that you can talk about but can’t act on… I don’t know all the permutations. And then at some point it affects your health. I don’t want to say that this is solely about emotion, we are chemical beings affected by genetics, nutrition, and pathogens too. But the planes intersect, e.g. through autoimmune disorders or weakened disease resistance.
The core psychological and practical problem is, there’s a difficult task—the great purpose, whatever it is—being made more difficult in ways that have no intrinsic connection to the problem, but are solely about lack of support, or even outright interference. And then on top of that, you may also have doubts and meta doubts to deal with—coming from others and from yourself (and some of those doubts may be justified!). Finally, health problems round out the picture.
The one positive in this situation, is that while all those negatives can reinforce each other, positive developments in one area can also carry across to another.
OK, so that’s my attempt to reflect back to you, how you sound to me. As for practical matters, I have only one suggestion. You say
so I suggest that you at least wait until his next visit, and use that extra time to understand better how all these aspects of your life intersect.
I spent a good year and half trying to answer questions related to the points you brought up after first seeing the mind-body specialist, although you gave me some good perspective.
.
Actually I only discovered the purpose a couple of years after the myalgic encephalomyelitis set in, before that point my primary goal was to get better and to worry about other goals afterwards. I do not think that becoming more purpose focused translated into me devaluing my difficulties; I was focused on myself and my health at the start of this thing and that seems to have remained constant, it’s just that suddenly those weren’t the most important things to me anymore. My health became not just something intrinsically valuable but also a very important means to an end. Though I’ll be mindful about how my goals affect me, even if they weren’t initially involved in my health problems they could be involved in their continuation if I take matters too seriously.
Exactly this; I keep learning over and over new ways in which the mind and body and all their subsystems can affect each other in very major ways. Several insights related to this concept put me into partial remission in the first place.
I wouldn’t say that I’ve done all I can in figuring out how all these things interact with each other. I would say though that with the success of the partial remission and all the work I did afterwards towards figuring out mind-body interactions within myself that I am at the point of diminishing returns with results vs effort and that I need to pursue other avenues at this point.