December Days 2022 #27: Gaseous
Dec. 27th, 2022 11:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[What's December Days this year? Taking a crowdsourced list of adjectives and seeing if I can turn them into saying good things about myself. Or at least good things to talk about.]
I was not, as a part of my upbringing, required to exert effort or otherwise attempt to train my body to keep gas in if it wanted to get out. There were no punishments for improper behavior for flatulence, although excusing oneself was expected and required should it happen. Family gatherings, as we joke, are for eating lots, poking gentle fun at each other (often over playing card games), and making rude bodily noises at each other. The first two happened regularly, the third, less so, but it was a matter of excusing oneself and moving on.
It's not irony, but incredulity, perhaps, then, that farting is the thing that pushed me past my capacity to cope several months ago. There were occasional days where something about what I had eaten produced a larger than usual volume of gas and I was unhappy at the volume and frequency of venting, but I excused myself when it happened and tried to keep the incidences down to as few as possible. They were, as best I could tell, not stinking, thankfully, but they were embarrassing and usually loud.
In my annual performance evaluation, my supervisor said that I was doing fine meeting the standards, and to take this comment with the amount of seriousness it deserved, but he'd heard complaints about me farting and wanted to be sure it wasn't a medical issue. (If only he knew how saying that could make it one.) I did my best to assure him that I was trying not to do watch things, and that it wasn't medical, as best I knew, and then I found somewhere to sulk and to get my annoyance at the petty bullshit out where nobody else needed to hear it.
Variable attention stimulus often comes with a companion after living long enough with it, diagnosed and medicated or otherwise. Because other people and the society tend not to understand that things they see as intuitive and effortless are difficult for others, encountering someone who does have those issues usually ends with the NT person frustrated or upset and the ND person apologetic about how the ND person can't just act or be normal. It doesn't go the other way. The best the ND people get is being in a space where being themselves is the norm. Since that's a rarity, rejection sensitivity is often along for the ride. Some if it is self-defense, as many people aren't so cruel as to pile on with annoyance and aggravation to someone who is already distressed about things and doing that job for them. Some of rejection sensitivity is trying to avoid a situation where someone can get upset at them, either by trying to make sure it's perfect or by trying to shirk any responsibility at all so that there's no chance of disappointment or anger at failure. Proper scaffolding, support, and working with someone to find what days work for them would help contextualize and blunt the impacts of rejection sensitivity, but that would require accessibility, and we know that's a thirteen letter word just about everywhere.
I mention this because the original series of things that led to my near-firing were for things that were normal work behaviors or normal behaviors that would happen with variable attention stimulus issues. It's been many years since that situation happened, but because it's a pretty strong wound, rejection sensitivity plays a part here, and because it is once again a situation where unknown people are complaining about natural processes and there is at least the appearance that it's being taken seriously enough to mention.
And because it is this year, with all of our meeting, conference, and study rooms fully open to the public at work, there was no guarantee that I would be able to find another place to do work when these bouts were happening. When things were closed to the public, that would have been a workable solution, but now, not as much. The solution, apparently, was to simply stop farting, or if I were in such a situation, to remove myself from the work I was doing until it passed, I guess, wherever that might end up being.
Well, I tried the "stop farting" solution first, since there are enzymes that can be taken to produce less flatus and/or to process lactase more effectively and with less chance of gas. And they worked, but then they seemed to be working too well and discouraging other functions. I stopped the enzymes, but the problems they started persisted, and them amplified. While I was also pursuing diagnosis for variable attention, which went very smoothly, honestly. The medications for variable attention had a less-great side effect of exacerbating the other situation and interacting poorly with some of the things meant to help me with ensuring enough nutrition came in and enough waste came out. Things seem to have reset themselves after going through the procedure of having a doctor examine the various pipes to ensure there are no obstructions or aberrations (no obstructions, no cancer,) and I was given freer permission to use whatever tools would be most effective at making sure everything was moving well, so I am monitoring myself and giving myself permission as needed to use my tools. And also looking into possibly getting some other issues of mine worked out so they might stop contributing their own worries to the worry pool.
Because of the reaction I had to something that should have been petty shit, easily dismissed, and the full-on panic that set on when I needed to take Auxiliary Cat 2.0 to a hospital for clearing a UTI (worry about losing the cat and worry about paying for the unexpected expense,) I've also been pursuing mental health assistance with professionals to see if I can get my baseline anxiety levels down not to just normal for me, but normal for supposedly normal people. It's going okay, in that I'm getting tools and new perspective on things, but there's a fair amount of entrenched resistance to a lot of things, many of which stem from the rejection sensitivity and living in a world that says a person's worth is tied completely to their productivity or other people's opinions of them.
This is the year where I'm trying to get a lot of my shit together, and in usual form, trying to do it stacked up with each other. Because someone complained that I was gaseous, and I've reacted completely out of proportion to it in the possibly vain hope that I can get my systems working sufficiently that there will be no reason to complain about me, even in minor ways for things that I can't actually control, based on the trauma from what happened the last time people complained about me for minor things that I may or may not have been able to control. It is, as promised, an extended fart joke, but unlike most fart jokes, it's not funny.
- gaseous (comparative more gaseous, superlative most gaseous)
- Relating to, or existing as gas (matter in an intermediate state between liquid and plasma).
- Of a liquid containing bubbles: gassy.
- Tenuous or indefinite.
I was not, as a part of my upbringing, required to exert effort or otherwise attempt to train my body to keep gas in if it wanted to get out. There were no punishments for improper behavior for flatulence, although excusing oneself was expected and required should it happen. Family gatherings, as we joke, are for eating lots, poking gentle fun at each other (often over playing card games), and making rude bodily noises at each other. The first two happened regularly, the third, less so, but it was a matter of excusing oneself and moving on.
It's not irony, but incredulity, perhaps, then, that farting is the thing that pushed me past my capacity to cope several months ago. There were occasional days where something about what I had eaten produced a larger than usual volume of gas and I was unhappy at the volume and frequency of venting, but I excused myself when it happened and tried to keep the incidences down to as few as possible. They were, as best I could tell, not stinking, thankfully, but they were embarrassing and usually loud.
In my annual performance evaluation, my supervisor said that I was doing fine meeting the standards, and to take this comment with the amount of seriousness it deserved, but he'd heard complaints about me farting and wanted to be sure it wasn't a medical issue. (If only he knew how saying that could make it one.) I did my best to assure him that I was trying not to do watch things, and that it wasn't medical, as best I knew, and then I found somewhere to sulk and to get my annoyance at the petty bullshit out where nobody else needed to hear it.
Variable attention stimulus often comes with a companion after living long enough with it, diagnosed and medicated or otherwise. Because other people and the society tend not to understand that things they see as intuitive and effortless are difficult for others, encountering someone who does have those issues usually ends with the NT person frustrated or upset and the ND person apologetic about how the ND person can't just act or be normal. It doesn't go the other way. The best the ND people get is being in a space where being themselves is the norm. Since that's a rarity, rejection sensitivity is often along for the ride. Some if it is self-defense, as many people aren't so cruel as to pile on with annoyance and aggravation to someone who is already distressed about things and doing that job for them. Some of rejection sensitivity is trying to avoid a situation where someone can get upset at them, either by trying to make sure it's perfect or by trying to shirk any responsibility at all so that there's no chance of disappointment or anger at failure. Proper scaffolding, support, and working with someone to find what days work for them would help contextualize and blunt the impacts of rejection sensitivity, but that would require accessibility, and we know that's a thirteen letter word just about everywhere.
I mention this because the original series of things that led to my near-firing were for things that were normal work behaviors or normal behaviors that would happen with variable attention stimulus issues. It's been many years since that situation happened, but because it's a pretty strong wound, rejection sensitivity plays a part here, and because it is once again a situation where unknown people are complaining about natural processes and there is at least the appearance that it's being taken seriously enough to mention.
And because it is this year, with all of our meeting, conference, and study rooms fully open to the public at work, there was no guarantee that I would be able to find another place to do work when these bouts were happening. When things were closed to the public, that would have been a workable solution, but now, not as much. The solution, apparently, was to simply stop farting, or if I were in such a situation, to remove myself from the work I was doing until it passed, I guess, wherever that might end up being.
Well, I tried the "stop farting" solution first, since there are enzymes that can be taken to produce less flatus and/or to process lactase more effectively and with less chance of gas. And they worked, but then they seemed to be working too well and discouraging other functions. I stopped the enzymes, but the problems they started persisted, and them amplified. While I was also pursuing diagnosis for variable attention, which went very smoothly, honestly. The medications for variable attention had a less-great side effect of exacerbating the other situation and interacting poorly with some of the things meant to help me with ensuring enough nutrition came in and enough waste came out. Things seem to have reset themselves after going through the procedure of having a doctor examine the various pipes to ensure there are no obstructions or aberrations (no obstructions, no cancer,) and I was given freer permission to use whatever tools would be most effective at making sure everything was moving well, so I am monitoring myself and giving myself permission as needed to use my tools. And also looking into possibly getting some other issues of mine worked out so they might stop contributing their own worries to the worry pool.
Because of the reaction I had to something that should have been petty shit, easily dismissed, and the full-on panic that set on when I needed to take Auxiliary Cat 2.0 to a hospital for clearing a UTI (worry about losing the cat and worry about paying for the unexpected expense,) I've also been pursuing mental health assistance with professionals to see if I can get my baseline anxiety levels down not to just normal for me, but normal for supposedly normal people. It's going okay, in that I'm getting tools and new perspective on things, but there's a fair amount of entrenched resistance to a lot of things, many of which stem from the rejection sensitivity and living in a world that says a person's worth is tied completely to their productivity or other people's opinions of them.
This is the year where I'm trying to get a lot of my shit together, and in usual form, trying to do it stacked up with each other. Because someone complained that I was gaseous, and I've reacted completely out of proportion to it in the possibly vain hope that I can get my systems working sufficiently that there will be no reason to complain about me, even in minor ways for things that I can't actually control, based on the trauma from what happened the last time people complained about me for minor things that I may or may not have been able to control. It is, as promised, an extended fart joke, but unlike most fart jokes, it's not funny.
The Leguminiferous Aether
Date: 2022-12-28 07:47 am (UTC)... Anf you grew up with an enviably healthy attitude to bodily functions.
Meanwhile yet another person I know has succeeded in obtaining a diagnosis and medication for attention issues. I'm going to mount another assault on the vast ramparts of bureaucratic obstacles that make this difficult to do, for people who find it particularly difficult.
Re: The Leguminiferous Aether
From:no subject
Date: 2024-06-26 09:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From: