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Going back to the physical symptoms of psychological
problems, I’d always read about the effects of stress, but only gotten around
to experiencing the normal crabbiness and constant worrying type of thing.
Well, I haven’t been hungry for three days now, and I’ve been getting little
enough sleep that I’m wondering how I’m thinking clearly. Well, I think I’m
thinking clearly. I guess there is something to this stress thing. I also never
knew that stress could feel like suffocating – literally not being able to get
enough air. The part of me that thrives on guilt is rejoicing, because now this
is familiar territory. Bring it on, I have a map to this minefield. I don’t know what it is, but there’s
something safe and comfortable about cutting back on the life essentials –
food, sleep, air – and ramping up the workload. Maybe it’s because I feel like
I know the rules. The strange thing is that I should love what I’m doing this
quarter. On paper, it all looks good: physics, communication, German, language
processing. So why do I feel like I can’t breathe?
On the plus side, my linguistic anthropologist of a
professor explained (inadvertently, and in passing) exactly why my relationship
with my mom is so bad. Of the different forms of communication (according to
this particular model, there are six), I like all my interactions to be
referential: I want real, relevant information to be exchanged; I want all the
words to have some function beyond the social “I like you, you like me, let’s
spend some time exchanging banalities.” My mom, on the other hand, prefers what’s
called phatic conversation. In phatic conversation, the words don’t matter so
much as the event of speaking/communicating. Phatic conversation is about
establishing or reinforcing a relationship between the people participating.
From where I stand, you don’t need to spend a whole conversation on that
particular goal – very short interactions suffice. I suspect that my mom needs
much more of an interaction for that reinforcement to take place. My god, it
all makes sense! Even if the rest of the class goes to hell, I’ll consider it a
success just for that eureka moment.
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