Amanda Helms

My first thought was to call this post “Psychosomatic hypochondria.” Actually, my first first thought was to call it something clearer, like “Psychosomatism and hypochondria.” Only “psychosomatism” isn’t a real word, apparently, which makes little sense because etymologically speaking, nouns are usually created before adjectives. At least in the cases of words with all those Greek bits in them. You get your noun or your verb, and then you add on or change suffixes to create new derivations. To wit: psychology, psychologist, psychiatry, psychiatrist, etc. etc. etc. And “psychosomatism” seems like it’d be a rather useful word. Sure, it might more or less mean the same thing as hypochondria. But I figure, if the Inuits/Eskimos can have over 100 words for snow, United States citizens ought to have a couple decent words to choose from when describing mentally induced ailments.

But pschosomatism is not a word, and I was an English major. Hence the switch to “Psychosomatic hypochondria,” but the more I thought about that, I realized that the phrase technically means being in the state of having mentally induced or imagined the state of believing you have a bunch of diseases that you actually don’t. Which would then mean one’s ailments are, in fact, Real Things, because the imaginings of the various conditions is false. (Hey, it made sense in my head. I think.) Which isn’t what I’m going for.

All that preamble to move onto this: For the past month, I’ve been experiencing bouts of dizziness and vertigo. So far I haven’t detected an actual pattern or trigger. Movement can set it off, like when I bend over to brush my teeth, my head feels heavier than it is or should be and I have a sensation of tipping further forward than I actually have. But movement can also have nothing to do with it, like when I’m sitting on my core ball at work trying to think how I can write instruction for teaching vowel diphthongs in a vaguely interesting manner. There I sit, rather still, perhaps with a small frown of concentration on my face as I stare at “ea as in great, ea as in bread, ea as in eagle” and suddenly my brain goes, “Heeyyy! We’re tilting!” leaving me to go rather tense and vacant-eyed while I work to, literally, restore my equilibrium.

It’s become annoying and consistent enough that I’ve set up a doctor appointment. But the issue with these Vague Symptoms that Seemingly Have No Trigger is that you start to feel, well, embarrassed about them. Where do they come from? What’s inducing them? Are they really real at all, or is it truly all in your head? And that’s the jumping-off point for this post’s title.

I’ve been giving this some thought, as I truthfully have begun to wonder if these symptoms are psychosomatic and I am indulging in hypochondria. It can go something like this:

A Weird Thing happens. Huh, you* think. That was weird. I hope it doesn’t happen again. And sometimes it doesn’t, and you forget about it, and that is the end of that.

But sometimes the Weird Thing happens again. Oh, you think. There’s that Weird Thing again. It’s starting to worry me a bit. And then, sufficiently worried about the Weird Thing, you live in a state of anticipation, wondering if it will happen again or if everything will return to normal and weird will no longer have an impact on your life.

If the Weird Thing happens a third time, it’s clear there is a sort of pattern now. Even if the whys and the hows remain unknown. You now expect the Weird Thing to happen. And so it does, again and again. This is where the psychosomatism (see! It would be such a useful word) kicks in. Because I’m a visual learner, I’ve included a graphic.

And if you have a touch of hypochondria, you are likely on the lookout for other Weird Things. Hey, I sneezed and it’s not allergy season. And I don’t have a cold. Is sneezing a symptom of Ebola? Where does Ebola come from, again? Bug bites? Maybe that bump on my face I thought was a pimple is a bug bite. And if I have Ebola, do I have to have a fever? I’m feeling a bit warm; maybe I’d better go check…

Well, my temperature is normal, and I have to admit that pimple really does look like a pimple, not a bug bite. I probably don’t have Ebola. But now that I’m staring at myself in the mirror, do I have less hair than I used to? Maybe…

It doesn’t help that I’ve also had intermittent occasions of disassociation, such as the feelings of unreality one can experience when suffering from a high fever. Not to the extent depicted in this post, mind, but it’s there.

Should you have returned here from Allie’s fabulous site, allow me to continue.

I do mean disassociation, not delusion. Delusion is “If I jump off the top of this building, I will fly!” Disassociation is “If I jump off the top of this building, I won’t fly; I will fall many stories. But it doesn’t matter because this isn’t real.” (Pause.) “But just in case, I don’t want to test it.”

Even in the midst of the Weird Things happening repeatedly and other Weird Things popping up on your radar, if you’re marginally self-aware, it probably occurs to you that it could just be all in your head and you are, for some unfathomable reason, essentially doing this to yourself, thusly:

But even if it is all in your** head, it’s not a particularly comforting thought. Because you’re*** doing it to yourself†. You are making yourself miserable. Do you like sitting on your core ball, wracking your brain as to how many different ways you can say “ea as in great” in a way that doesn’t make instructors want to claw their eyes out when you suddenly feel like you’re about to topple off your core ball and slam into the ground? NO! Why would you do that to yourself? Is your subconscious really that masochistic or bored?

Oh, I’m really getting sick of all this “ea as in” crap, it says to itself while the rest of your brain remains blissfully unaware of its machinations. I need some sort of distraction. How about a touch of vertigo followed by slight nausea? 

“Oh dear. I can no longer concentrate on my work due to the sensation of tilting. Also, I want to puke.”

YAYYYYY!

My appointment is on Wednesday. If I happen to lead with “I gave it a lot of thought and I don’t think it’s all in my head because what sort of person would do this to herself!” perhaps I can simply point my doctor to this URL to explain why.

And I realize this doesn’t have any sort of proper ending. Sometimes that’s life, yo.

*Where you appears in this post, you [except that one] may safely replace the word with I or me, as grammatically appropriate. Just so we’re clear.

**And where your appears in this post, you may replace that with my. Because it’s all about me.

***I’m

†myself

‡Unless you’re suicidal, which I am not.

Okay, at Starbucks, just hanging around until it’s time to head out for dinner theater. Promised myself I’d finally get some planning done, though by “planning” I currently mean freewriting and hoping something decent comes out of it. I have a Grande Skinny Cinnamon Dolce Latte by my laptop, and a book to read in case I really luck out with planning. But hopefully that won’t happen, as we’re now 10 days away from the start of NaNo, and I still only have a basic plot.

I have thought, though, that my Big Bad is going to be Neptune or Poseidon or a decendent. Motivation on his (or her, if decendent) part can be to get the Stradivarius as the power of the siren spirits inside it can help reestablish the Big Bad’s precendence/godlike status–or become a god in the case of the decendent?

I do keep saying I want to have kids, but there is currently one here who is a babbler, a high-pitched babbler, and [redacted] the child is annoying. Very annoying.

Anyway. Descendent would want to become a god, or Neptune/Poseidon wants to get back to the old status. I’m currently thinking the Big Bad will be a descendent–seems to fit better. Rich, probably, because she’d need the resources to hunt down this Stradivarius in particular.

And I’d turned off my Internet in order to save battery, but I may need to turn it back on–can’t remember what connection, if any, Neptune/Poseidon had with the sirens. Or even which one is Greek. If I’m going to go with sirens, might as well use the Greek version of the sea god, hey?

Or the Big Bad could be Athena or Aphrodite or whoever it was who supposedly sprang out of the ocean foam. Or a descendent, as the drill goes.

Ah, good! Poseidon is the Greek version. I was thinking I like the name better. Which isn’t as much of an issue if I go the descendent route, but still.

Got the Internet going again. Poseidon fathered Orion, looks like, and he raped lots and lots of women. So maybe my Big Bad is a descendent of Orion, a little more happy than being descended from, say, the “Giant Sinius,” and she’s got a sort of nobility complex, so to speak.

Whoops, looks like Orion was a rapist, too. Okay, so my Big Bad has issues with being descended from a line of rapists. Maybe she’s not quite a man-hater, but she doesn’t particularly like them–well, maybe she prefers women all the way around. Hmm.

She’s not directly in this book, anyway. Or at least I don’t think she is. But at least I’m thinking about the backstory. It’ll help the series (oh, am I seriously thinking series before I even know if the first book works?) go more smoothly.

Okay, looks like Aphrodite was the sea-foam goddess, but I don’t immediately see that she had much connection to Poseidon. For that matter, I’m not sure how much connection Poseidon had with the sirens. Though it’s my world, so I can do what I like.

Another issue is what I want to do with whole Greco-Roman bit. If I get into the whole Pantheon, am I saying that all the gods/goddesses are single, with the two names, or that there are (were) different entities?

Right now I’m thinking just the single set. I suppose in the backstory the divergence of the Greco and Roman gods could’ve resulted in split personalities–the whole “followers’ faiths giving rise to gods’ mainfestations” bit that comes up with decent regularity. But I’m not 100% sure about that.

And yet another consideration is how God in Judeo-Christian terms comes into things.

Loud baby is gone now. She was cute when she wasn’t going “Ah ba ba ba ba!” at the top of her lungs.

Anyway. My God. I hate to say that my God doesn’t exist in this fictional world. And Shay sings in a choir. The gospel songs soothe her and that deathsong thing. So there’s a definite place for the Judeo-Christian God–and I hate referring to him like this, since he is my God and I am a Christian and I hate trying to figure out how my faith, exactly, fits in with the things I write. Which is a terrible thing to write–I shouldn’t hate it at all. But it doesn’t come easily to me. I don’t have it in me to write quote-unquote Christian fiction. It’s hard, hard, hard to do well.

Or maybe that’s just an excuse to make myself feel better for not writing stories involving the love of Jesus.

[Redacted as I went into a long discussion about my obligations as a Christian and as a writer to myself, my audience, and the story that had nothing to do with NaNo plot development. Though it may make for an interesting post if I can get some cohesive and coherent thoughts together rather than brain-vomit.]

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And I’ve got another three pages where I delved a bit more into my main character and tried to name my male MC, but three pages single-spaced is a bit much for a single post.

Bear with me, readers-that-be. Next week we’ll actually be into NaNo, so theoretically I’ll have an actual excerpt to post, which should be more interesting.

Theoretically.