Category: Student
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One Tender Step
The thing about writing consistently is that blog posts start showing up in strange places. Like your head. Offline. Which is what happened last night. I fell into a deep, dark depression while trying to go to sleep. Not because something new had happened, but because something finally caught up with me. I had been…
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Noise Into Signal
And then there are bad days. Holy hell. The irony is that the badness is actually part of healing. I feel fine. So I forget. And then I do something that reminds my nervous system that, no, we are not fine yet. Which it communicates clearly. Loudly. Understandably. Because even when there is no pain,…
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Taxing Nerves
I filed my taxes today. Ow. Ow ow ow ow. Not emotionally, surprisingly. Just the normal paperwork migraine of the soul. But also… not as bad as last year? Which is its own strange kind of victory. But the taxes aren’t actually the story. Sunday is. Stay with me for a minute. Saturday was almost…
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A Nervous Truce
This morning was the San Diego neurologist appointment. Which felt oddly like the final boss battle of this whole saga. Or at least the point where someone with a Very Large Brain Map might explain what the hell had been happening. Instead, the appointment started with a question. “What are you hoping for today?” Which…
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Occipital Neuralgia
Occipital Neuralgia is a condition in which the occipital nerves, the nerves that run through the scalp, are injured or inflamed. by Julie G Pilitsis, MD, PhD, FAANSChair, Neuroscience & Experimental Therapeutics Professor, Neurosurgery and Neuroscience & Experimental Therapeutics Albany Medical College Dr. Pilitsis specializes in neuromodulation with research interests in treatments for movement disorders and…
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On My Last Nerve
Nurtec, it turns out, is very new. So new that insurance companies mostly pretend it doesn’t exist. Which means it costs about $250 for eight pills. I declined. Thankfully the gabapentin worked. Not perfectly, but enough. The pain dropped from a seven to nine down to a two to four. Occasionally it would spike back…
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Officially a Nervous Wreck
On Wednesday, February 11th, I slept poorly. Not unusual. Just one of those nights where sleep shows up, but doesn’t quite do the job it was hired for. Later that day a migraine arrived. Also not unusual. So I did what I normally do: took some Tylenol, laid down for a nap, and waited for…
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Dear Me: I Love You. xoxo, ~Me.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my future self lately. Not in a grand, five-year-plan way. More in a very specific, very practical way. The version of me who exists tomorrow morning. Or next week. Or at 3:17 PM when something goes wrong and I’m already a little fried. That future me is doing their…
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Less Thinking, More Observance
I keep saying I want to invent something. Not in a casual, hobby way. In a very specific, slightly feral way. I want to make enough money from one good idea that I can stop negotiating my life in hours and deadlines and instead live off the investments it creates. And every time I say…
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From Self-Sacrifice to Self-Support
I’ve been thinking about the difference between self pity and self compassion, and how sneaky that difference is when you’re inside it. From the inside, self pity feels justified. Heavy, yes, but justified. It sounds logical. Reasonable. Evidence-based. Look at all the reasons I can’t. Look at how unfair this is. Look at how tired…
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Still Not in Trouble
(Still figuring this out…) Ironically, I love making mistakes. At least in public. At least when it’s tech. Put me on a livestream, give me a broken container or a missing semicolon or a weird YAML error, and I thrive. I get to troubleshoot out loud, laugh at myself, and let the community chime in…
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Am I in Trouble?
(Probably Not, But Tell That to My Brain) I hate getting in trouble. Viscerally. The fear of doing something “wrong,” of getting caught, of someone being mad at me? It’s so baked in, I don’t even question it most days. It’s just this background hum, like a low-grade static buzzing under the surface: Am I…