Category: Observations

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Observations Seattle

Impressions of MLB All-Star Week From Someone Who Doesn’t Follow Baseball.

For those of you who follow baseball, you likely know that All-Star Week is happening here in Seattle. For those of you who don’t follow baseball (like me), All-Star Week lasts less than a week and is a celebration of baseball and baseball players. (For example, the World’s Largest Baseball is currently here in Seattle. More on that below. You can already see how I’m focusing on the wrong thing.)

This is the only event I can recall in the 16-ish years I’ve lived in Seattle where the city has put in extraordinary effort to make it shine for its citizens and visitors. (I enjoy living in Seattle, but let’s be honest: the effort is for the visitors.) Because Seattle is tucked in the northwest corner of the country, people just don’t routinely pass through. People seem to equate visiting Seattle with visiting the Galapagos Islands: Neat places with oddities, but so out of the way!

In an effort to be a better spouse, I have been learning about baseball over the past few years, but my fund of knowledge is superficial. For example, when our Mariners made it to the playoffs last year, that’s when I learned what a “rally cap” is, though I had to learn about this via the “rally shoe“. (Again, I’m still missing the point.) It takes me a while to offer a complete definition of a “perfect game“. I know just enough about certain baseball players to ask questions one expects from a child: Do you think Shohei Ohtani the pitcher could strike out Shohei Ohtani the batter? (Can you imagine being married to a psychiatrist who also asks unsophisticated questions about baseball???)

So, for our mutual amusement, here are random, initial impressions from the beginning of Major League Baseball’s All-Star Week from someone who doesn’t follow baseball.

It costs a lot of money. Well, at least the Home Run Derby and the All-Star Game cost a lot of money. The event that most interests me is the inaugural Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Swingman Classic, created by former Mariner Ken Griffey, Jr. (There’s a statue of Griffey in front of Seattle’s baseball stadium, which has the phenomenally boring name of T-Mobile Park.) Tickets are all sold out, so I can’t attend, though I’m inspired with Griffey’s efforts to do what he can where he can.

The World’s Largest Baseball is here. I’m suspicious, though: Is it an actual baseball composed of cork and rubber and yarn and leather? (Here’s a promotional video of Play Ball Park that features this giant baseball stationed outside T-Mobile Park; it appears around 0:14. There’s what appears to be a panel near the base of the ball. That doesn’t seem right.) I’ve been wondering about the World’s Largest Baseball all week. If I actually go to Play Ball Park, I’ll provide an update.

The young people are excited. A couple of shockingly pink tour buses featuring Mariner’s star Julio Rodriguez’s smiling face parked in front of a hotel within walking distance of the stadium earlier today. Children and adolescents in baseball uniforms spilled out. Adults corralled their wandering, jumping, and chatty bodies through the revolving doors. Other young people and their accompanying adults are roaming around, proudly wearing jerseys and ball caps that declare their allegiances. (I am particularly impressed with the Milwaukee Brewers logo: The glove contains the letters M and B! So clever! Designed by an art history student!)

This may be the most excited people have been about baseball in recent memory. The Mariners is the only team that has never been to the World Series. People are perennially disappointed with them. (The Seattle Times recently published this piece: Why fans dislike this Mariners team so much. YIKES.) Whenever I see a televised Mariners game, the seats are never full. The only Mariner who made it onto the All Star roster by public vote was pitcher Luis Castillo. Now, none of us can get away from baseball: Posters emblazoned with ball players are plastered all over utility boxes downtown! The local paper has published numerous articles about baseball (not all of them supportive, as noted above)! The city made an assertive push to remove/house all the people living outside near the stadium in the weeks leading up to All-Star Week! The beautification of downtown and Pioneer Square (flowers! new trees! pocket beaches!) has all been in the service of sports! (It seems that the All-Star game was also the catalyst to fix the escalators in the downtown light rail stations that haven’t worked in over two years.)

If any of you fine readers are in town for All-Star Week, enjoy the next few days! If you’re going to any of the games, one of my favorite things about the stadium is the sculpture of the baseball glove at the left field gate. It’s called “The Mitt” (it’s in the photograph accompanying this post). You can learn more about the artist and this sculpture here.

Categories
Observations Reflection

Catastrophization.

There are valid reasons why people catastrophize (to imagine the worst possible outcome of an action or event): Terrible things happen. Uncommon calamities occur, things that we never thought would happen to us. Common catastrophes occur, too, things that we know will happen, and yet all of our preconceptions do not provide adequate preparation.

Are common catastrophes really “catastrophes”? Like death and dying? Death by “catastrophic implosion” is a catastrophe by definition. What about migrants drowning at sea? People dying from heart disease? overdoses?

Do the reactions and opinions of other people determine whether something is a catastrophe? If you’re the only one who thinks it is a catastrophe, is it still a momentous tragic event?

To catastrophize is to have an active and creative mind, one that brims with possibilities. These options are unlikely to happen, but they could.

One function of catastrophization is to provide mental rehearsals. Practice gives us a sense of mastery: We thought about a Thing, we considered the consequences of that Thing, and now we have plans to avert disasters related to that Thing.

Doesn’t “Emergency Preparedness” sound better and induce less anxiety than “catastrophization”?

However, “catastrophization” often omits the “preparation” part of “emergency preparedness”: We get lost in loops of apocalyptic ideas. Paralysis (and perspiration) ensues.

More recently I’ve wondered if catastrophic thinking reflects a lack of self-confidence, or at least a fear that we are incapable of dealing with disasters. We are terrified that we will not survive.

It seems the most debilitating aspects of catastrophization do not always involve material things. We may fear the flames engulfing our home, but we fret more about the potential destruction of our pets and loved ones who live with us.

Material destruction is distressing, though annihilation of our identities is intolerable. Who am I if my children die? What does it mean if I’m the only person left who has these memories? What will happen to “me” if I can’t deal with this Thing?

Maybe this is a lesson that only comes from time and experience: We can survive more than we think we can. The world can shatter our hearts in unimaginable ways, but we persist. What was unimaginable becomes part of our personal history. We weren’t eradicated; we endured.

This is not to say that the experience was “fine” or that we are “fine”. The external and internal wreckage is real, but we are still here.

How do we persevere among the ruins, though? What do we do when catastrophic thoughts descend upon us, demolishing the tenuous safety and security we think we have now? What do you do when your thoughts take you to a world that doesn’t exist right now (and may never come into being)?

It sounds trite and overdone: Bring yourself back again and again to this world and yourself. What is actually happening right now? Where are you? What are you doing?

See the summer trees, their limbs full of luscious leaves. Hear the wind rustle the branches, a green applause filling the air. Feel your toes in your shoes, the way the small bones in your feet support all of your weight. Do you feel your tongue in your mouth?

Indeed, what is the texture of the pain in your lower back? Is it mostly sharp right now? Or a monotonous throb? Can you trace the direction of the sensation? How do you respond to it? How does it respond to you?

The sirens that wail: Can you hear how they change pitch? When does the “WOOOOoooo” finally disappear? Did you hear it dissolve, or did you only hear its absence a few minutes later?

What are the shapes of the letters in that text message? What punctuation is present? What are the colors in the emojis? What might happen if you took a full breath before sending a message? What message are you sending yourself with a short breath? A long one? A noisy one?

Life, in all its beauty and ugliness, continues to unfold whether or not you are giving it your full attention. You could live your life entirely in your thoughts, one catastrophe to the next. What might you miss in the world outside your head if you do that?

And have your catastrophic thoughts diverted any disasters? Thinking about all the things that could go wrong might help us feel like we have control over something, but do we really? Things will go wrong whether we think about them or not… and things will go well even when we think they won’t. Thoughts are magical, but magical thinking is ultimately a collection of ideas in our minds.

In catastrophization we have great confidence in our thoughts. When living in this world, let us have more confidence in ourselves. We can make it, even if we don’t believe it.

Categories
Homelessness Observations Reading

The Guest Who Has No Place to Live.

Inspired by this tweet (“This book is viscerally upsetting, lol. What the fuck”), I read The Guest by Emma Cline.

The inside flap offers an accurate description of the story: Alex makes a “misstep at a dinner party” and ends up wandering around Long Island. She has “few resources and a waterlogged phone, but [is] gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others.” She is indeed “propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality” and “a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.”

And, yes, the book is viscerally upsetting.

Is the story about status and hierarchies? Yes. Is it about appearances and identity? Yes. Is it about the transactional roles young women play in American society? Yes.

Is it about a young woman who has nowhere to live? Yes: Alex is homeless.

This is not the reason why I chose to read this book. (Honestly, the only thing I knew about the book was from that tweet. We can wonder together why I wanted to read something “viscerally upsetting”).

It’s not Alex’s status as a homeless person that turns the stomach. (I don’t even know how many readers use the frame of homelessness while reading this story.) It’s the odious nature of her choices, how unsettling her behavior is. She is not endearing. (Kudos to Cline for creating a character who is unlikeable yet compelling.) We readers get caught up in the appearances of luxury and decadence that we forget that Alex is trying to find a stable place to live.

We never learn Alex’s backstory; we don’t know where she is from, what happened to her in the more distant past, or how she came to behave this way. Part of the point of the novel, I think, is that we can never know: Appearances are what matter. You can tell any story you want to get your needs met.

For readers who want to make their lives more difficult (…), this book introduces uncomfortable questions related to homelessness:

  • If a young woman is despicable, does she deserve to be homeless?
  • What do we want to happen to young women we don’t like? Do we want them to suffer? Is homelessness a sufficient punishment?
  • Do we therefore assume that all people who are homeless must have done terrible things?

Then there’s the question of redemption. The events of The Guest unfold over the course of one week. Do we think Alex could ever redeem herself? What if it takes a year? or five?

Should people who are unlikeable be homeless until they redeem themselves?

Maybe Alex is a cipher, but, more importantly, she has no place to live. That’s why she’s “propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality”. Perhaps we take comfort in the idea that Alex is a character, that this is a novel.

  • Would we make similar choices if we were in Alex’s situation?
  • Could we also do such unlikeable things if we were homeless?

What if the homeless young women we encounter aren’t anything like Alex? Might we want to make different choices ourselves?

(And, yes, to be clear, I do recommend The Guest.)

Categories
Medicine Observations Systems

On Who People Think You Are.

The author wearing a black face mask while holding a soft serve cone. The wall behind her features a cone that looks like a fish that has green soft serve in it.
A photo of yours truly wearing a mask. Photo credit to Amy L.

There were two patients in the hospital room. Both were elderly East Asian males, each reclining in his bed. The curtain that divided the room in half was pulled forward, offering the illusion of privacy. Sound still travels through cloth.

Outside the hospital room I rubbed sanitizer onto my hands. The only size of blue plastic gowns offered was extra-large. My arms swam through the enormous sleeves as I pulled the gown over my yellow sweatshirt. The only gloves available were size large, which I slid onto my hands before putting goggles on my face. I was already wearing an N95 mask. Only my black track pants and black sneakers emerged from my blue contact precautions.

My dad had alerted me that, overnight, he was moved from a private isolation room into a shared room. His roommate, though ethnically Chinese, spent much of his life in a different country in Asia. He spoke limited English. They quickly discerned that they both speak Chinese.

Within a few minutes, I pushed the curtain back so the divided room became whole. Chinese conversation flowed among the three of us, punctuated by occasional wet coughs rattling through the torsos of the two men.

If I looked right, I could see through the window in the door. Sometimes staff walked by, paused, and waved. One was a man in his fifties who, at one point, opened the door and said to me, “We’re thinking we might discharge him today.” He gave me a thumbs up sign and shut the door before I could respond. He wasn’t my father’s doctor.

Later, my father’s nurse walked in and asked who I was. “Oh,” she commented, “I thought you were the interpreter.”

The other man’s nurse walked in minutes after that and asked who I was. “Oh,” she said, “I thought you were a physical therapist.”

Later, in the hallway, the man who appeared to be in his fifties waved me down. He was wearing a long white coat and there was a red label on his ID badge that said “Doctor”. His eyes smiled at me as he asked, “How is your dad doing?”

I paused before asking, “May I ask who you think my dad is?”

“Mr. Other Guy,” he said effortlessly.

“That’s not my dad.”

“Oh?”

“The other Asian man is my dad.”

“Oh.” He was anchored in awkwardness.

“Thanks for taking care of Mr. Other Guy,” I said before walking away, releasing the anchor. He waited a beat before veering off in the other direction.

Categories
Consult-Liaison Observations Systems

Demoralization and Status.

This TikTok video provides an accurate (and shouty) summary of the National Guard member who leaked classified military documents. In short, it appears that the Airman shared these documents in an effort to elevate his status within an online cohort. (Someone on the internet opined something like, “This was a cosmic level of stepping on a rake that hits you in the face.” Correct.)

We all have engaged in behaviors to heighten our position in relation to others. Depending on who you ask, some argue that we are constantly adjusting our behaviors to communicate and maximize our status.

Our perception of our own status is not always accurate. It seems that we sometimes exert tremendous effort to demonstrate high status to make ourselves feel better, rather than to assert that we have higher rank than others. (Much research has been done to show how humans assess and react to status.)

Maybe it’s a stretch to link demoralization and status to each other, though this is what has come to my mind over the past few weeks. Demoralization is usually framed as an individual process, whereas status involves groups of people.

Merriam-Webster provides the following definitions:

  • demoralization: weakened morale; to be discouraged or dispirited
  • status: position or rank in relation to others

I’ve written about demoralization before, though it was more in reference to individuals experiencing medical illness. The paper I reference in that post offers this definition of demoralization:

the “various degrees of helplessness, hopelessness, confusion, and subjective incompetence” that people feel when sensing that they are failing their own or others’ expectations for coping with life’s adversities. Rather than coping, they struggle to survive.

This is where I might be speaking out of turn: Is it fair to apply principles usually applied to a single person, particularly one’s intrapsychic processes, to groups of people? (Would I be a true psychiatrist if I didn’t use the word “intrapsychic“?)

But let’s consider this together. I’m starting with the Airman, but that isn’t actually the point of this post.

What if that Airman was feeling demoralized? Within his Discord group, he may have been able to rely on his age to maintain high status. What teenager doesn’t think a 21 year-old person is cool? But what if group dynamics shifted and, suddenly, the Airman was no longer the proverbial “alpha”, but had been demoted to a “beta”?

In an effort to restore his status, he might have employed any one of the strategies to reduce his vulnerability:

The sharing of classified military documents isn’t a demonstration of resilience, but it is a display of power that produces postures of coherence, agency, and courage. In sharing classified papers that only he has access to, he is dissolving any confusion he or anyone else may have about his “rightful” status. To combat feelings of helplessness, he demonstrated agency to provide evidence of his power. It takes some flavor of courage (…) to share sensitive information. By sharing these documents with his Discord cohort, he facilitated communion, established a purpose for himself, and got to bask in the gratitude of his friends. What a way to escape the isolation that accompanies a degradation of status!

So let’s consider other things that are happening in the nation that might be reactions to demoralization and efforts to reinstate high status: states banning TikTok, banning abortions at six weeks, protecting access to transgender care.

Again, is it fair to apply individual, intrapsychic processes to groups of people, particularly groups of people in politics? (But aren’t political groups comprised of individual people?)

The passage of laws—something that feels real and concrete—brings coherence and fosters communion! It brings hope and purpose! Doing something—exhibiting agency—summons courage and generates gratitude! Your rank in relation to others feels like it is rising. Even though there are people who will view your actions as further erosion of your status, it doesn’t matter: You feel better. You feel more power.

The passage of laws reduces confusion, despair, and helplessness. Instead of feeling isolated, people can channel their feelings of helplessness and resentment into doing something, which makes cowardice evaporate. You may already possess high status—all the other people around you may already defer to you because they view themselves as having lower status. And, yet, if you feel demoralized, the positive regard from others may be insufficient to elevate your own status in your own eyes.

We can never get away from ourselves.