Emerging needs (5)… Late life stage(s); whole of life patterns
Torrey Orton
May 24, 2013

For a while I’ve been distracted more than normal for me, which is quite a lot. I know as a result of recent brain inspections that my distractibility is not precursory to dementias. More expressive of persistent characteriological and endemic congenital inclinations. And the distraction has been accompanied by more feelings of impending personal doom than usual, too.

 There’s not much reason for doom premonitions. I’m doing quite well at the big four on my must-do-to-be list: (1) understanding the world, (2) helping therapy patients live better, (3) enacting my hopeless vision of impeding the harassing effects of HoGPIs on Fertility Control Clinic patients and (4) writing about the first three. But I am having doom premonitions… fuelled by an underlying sense that I’m not really being effective in addressing the way the world seems to me - roughly, falling apart …

 This has been going on for about 6 months now. My blog production dropped off; irritability rose, along with hours of low grade distress avoidance activity…reading the latest news in five papers on three continents; watching mindless tube reruns; struggling to get in sufficient stick work to feel tuned up for mountains next month, and for everyday activity now….and I found myself over the last few months sighing, sometimes, repeatedly with a biggish intake of breath as if I were holding my breath doing whatever I was doing…a good precursor to a possibly shape shifting new departure perhaps.

…I first remember this happening in Paris in 1973 around my 30^th birthday – an occasion marked by my first writing efforts and a sharp realisation that whatever I was supposed (according to my class and education) to have achieved by then I was achieving something else (which didn’t become clear for another 10 years or so). I had one of my first touches of depression in my second year of undergraduate life a decade earlier. All have carried the basic elements of depression – hopelessness, helplessness and overall torpor with a scattering of self-destructive inclinations and emotional fragility surfacing in irritability with little blockages (e.g. a difficult instruction sheet for a home climate monitoring system), ruminant angers at worldly injustices,  plus imagined withdrawal from many of the things I most cared about, though never actually doing so….

This pattern of depression around the turning point of some personal / career trajectory has history. I almost did not finish my undergraduate psych course 25 years ago because I couldn’t be bothered writing the last couple of papers…they dragged on me...there was no question of capability…more one of significance, mattering…they didn’t and the process was for the four years of night school somewhat beneath me???

I’ve been coming up to my 70^th for 18 months as my appreciation of my declining statistical life potential increased. It was the half-way point between 60 and 70 that yielded this blog and a first time commitment to intensive work as a therapist, and then three years later the start of Friends of the Fertility Control Clinic. Both were outcomes of a five year search for the next big work things in my life as my China consulting period came towards a close (too much flying, etc.) in the mid noughties.

 What I have to face up to now is writing seriously, aiming at a larger audience about fewer things. This has been coming for 18 months. I knew at the turn of last year (Jan. 2012) that I should ramp up my writing effort, having established that I can produce weekly for three years in this blog on a scale appropriate to weekly commentary production and often enough in a style generally accessible, maybe.

 One of the topics is neuroscience and well-being mediated by therapy. I’ve had 8 Keys to Brain-Body Balance (Rob’t Scaer, 2012; Norton) sitting on my reading table for 6 weeks and approached it a number of times in the way I approach what I imagine may be a disconcertingly high potential reading: apprehensively, tentatively and sporadically. The latter usually means reading a bit of the introduction, then poking through the chapters, preceded by a scan of the table of contents, checking out the index for a few key conceptual indicators (power, conflict) and starting with the last chapter. So I did here. It took five weeks to decide that I really was going to read it. My process has been sporadic, though with an ‘I hope this one’s different’ focus driving each encounter.

 I’m now thinking this means starting a new blog, or similar, which would be aimed at larger audiences and retain www.diarybyamadman for continuing forays in its existing topics and readers – therapy, acting right, appreciations, rectifications and such. I know this will require a focus and discipline well beyond what I’ve managed in my life to this point, signalled as they say by doubts about both my competence and will to do it - the normal process recurring in the story above. Finding the right basis for choosing focal points will be the principle challenge. The choices have to all be self-sustaining, as the neuroscience and psych one feels to be. That is, what I need to write about I have to be sure is my need, and if I can make it the world’s as well that will be good, even in any small part. A couple of other candidate focal points are in view but still not enough for a mention or an election.

 I’ll let you know how it works out…by hook or by…One early warning sign is that I’ve cleaned up my desk, mostly, for the first time in five years. This includes actual throwing out of two reams of printouts and dud post-its and clippings from imagined subjects of interest, and relabelling of a couple of collection boxes. Also, I departed about 20kgs of redundant IT wires and instruments like long superseded backup drives - remember Iomega?? – to the local recycling station on a loose Sunday morning. There were three lifeless laptops in the collection, too – another memory lane: Twinhead?? Doing this confronts me with the next stage: retained clippings, etc. which I believe by retaining are worthy of development. So….