#9: icp was right about magnets

First things first: it has been a rough, grief-filled week in the world, and it feels weird to be writing about how I'm doing kind of ok for once. But someone close to me reminded me that it's a lot harder to fix things when you're sick, so here I am, sharing this personal reflection with you.

I used to be a wildly prolific critical blogger, spitting out reactive analysis in a strangely urgent way; those pieces weren't workshopped or designed for Maximum Clicks, they just sort of bubbled out of me. Had an idea? Had to give it shape. I was younger, and less considered in where I spent my energy, and so I was very, very invested in the Discourse. It also seemed a little bit less futile in those days, or maybe I was just more naive. I was used to conversations happening in subcultural spaces that actually sometimes did, over time, cause shifts in how people approached the world—because those spaces were actually built to some degree on relationships people had with one another that could be personally accountable. Social media writ large ain't the same way.

The thing that eventually killed this entirely was the chance meeting on a dissecting table of the pandemic and my mental health, if you will pardon the cheap reference. Like, uh, a LOT of people, many of the techniques I'd built up as workarounds for managing my depression and PTSD just weren't available to me any longer. The constant weight of being immunocompromised and relatively isolated in a world that wants desperately to keep the gears of capital going no matter how many bodies pile up in the machine got to me. I became so exhausted all I wanted to do was turn my brain off every night. I kept working, kept writing for work, but it was harder than it had ever been before. I was used to having my words; they'd been with me as long as I could remember. Now it felt like I was doing the writing analogue of speaking with a constantly dry mouth.

With a tip-off from my friend Jacqui Shine, a job that allows me to work from home with flexible hours, and actual good health insurance, I started doing transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS. The process is a little ridiculous; you get strapped into this giant helmet, you have to wear earplugs and a mouthguard, and it sends magnetic pulses to stimulate nerve cells in specific parts of your brain that deal with mood regulation. This feels, to me, like a woodpecker knocking on my skull; unpleasant, but dealable-with. You have to do it five days a week for 10-20 minutes a day, 36 sessions, which means going to the doctor's office nearly every day for a long time. I was honestly not expecting it to work.

[DISCLAIMER: I am not here to proselytize or advertise for anything; I'm not claiming this might be a solution for you. (It is especially not recommended for people with bipolar depression, just FYI.) I'm just sharing my experience.]

The first week or two, I felt pretty zonked. My brain was ... doing a lot, I guess? But by the third, I started feeling better than I had literally ever felt in my entire existence. I had energy I had never had before. I wanted—WANTED—to clean my apartment, rather than feeling like I had to. I started doing yoga every day, because I suddenly wanted to move more, and making food choices that made my body feel good as opposed to things that provided me immediate emotional comfort but made me feel sluggish and constantly hungry. The invisible gate in front of my writing ability came down. I found myself better able to advocate for myself, less frightened of or stressed about social interaction. There were days I found myself puttering around humming to myself—happy. What the fuck? Was this what being Not Depressed actually felt like?

Let me stress again here that I have never felt this way. I didn't even feel like it would be possible. Magnets: how do they work? Again, this isn't easily available therapy; it's prohibitively expensive out of pocket, it's hard to find a job that will allow you the time to go to the doctor every day (let alone if you're a parent or caregiver), and the time commitment is a lot. If we lived in a system with different priorities around healthcare, community, and the sharing of resources/elimination of poverty, it could be a widely available treatment. It is fundamentally fucked up that it's out of the reach of so many.

Look, the U.S. is a flaming trash bin intent on driving, during the last days of empire, directly into a mountain. You know this; I know this. Our government's response to rising Covid numbers is to recommend giving Covid relief funds to cops. Bills preventing us trans people from accessing gender-affirming care—children and adults—are passing all over the place, and the right-wing "groomer" panic continues to put our lives at risk. (Some ghouls used the horrific school shooting this week to further trans panic, putting actual people who had nothing to do with any of it in the crosshairs.) We are facing incredible inflation and continue to have a crisis of the unhoused that our legislators are responding to by ... further criminalizing the unhoused. The overdose crisis continues apace, despite the best efforts of people working in harm reduction. We live in hell. I just feel better equipped to face the flames at the moment.

With my words back in place, I'll be regularly publishing this newsletter again. It probably won't be the same kind of heavily Discourse-responsive stuff, though. I'd like to delve into all the little cracks and crevices of knowledge that I find interesting and syncretize research I've been doing (because I can also read books again, a thing that the pandemic also destroyed). There will be some responsive news hooks because I do live in the world, but I don't want to be churning out Content responding to things on Twitter constantly. I just don't feel like that's useful for anyone at this point.

I hope that whomever is reading this is able to find some moments of grace and comfort where you can. These, I know now, are the most precious of things.