Meeting Minutes: Quicksand Diplomacy

I’m feeling… I think grief?

A lot of existential dread or some sort of melancholy.

I’m at the Nevada ATAP / my MSW practicum office right now and I just cannot bring myself to focus on anything. It’s astonishing how much I still managed to get checked off my to-do list anyway.

I’d say… I first noticed the feeling creep up once I arrived at the office. I joined our All Staff Meeting, where they had on a guest speaker who offers families autism support and coordination, much like ATAP. I quickly jotted her down in my myriad lists and kanbans of TBB resource ideas.

After we logged off, I was suddenly winded with these fuzzy, static feelings. This is not unusual; with my alexithymia, my internal emotional state is often unbeknownst to me. When feelings do arise (and they often do, hard), it almost always starts with confusion.

I don’t like feeling confused. Working against this muddiness is practically an all-encompassing process. My bouncy brain—always online 25/8, a trusty agentic organ—starts allocating all cognitive resources to investigative mode.

Do you know what it’s like to be an investigative journalist for the inside of your own head?

Interoception, also against me, is like searching a building that refuses to admit it has rooms. Trying to investigate inside it, even with a flashlight, is like working against a rigged board game. The Clues are seemingly there, obvious to anyone but me, perhaps even right in front of me! Yet, I see nothing but a roomless void.

This cognitive reallocation is cost-intensive. I’m trying to get things done, to come home after a successful day of flow/fugue state, but it feels like I’m working against the Tahoe seiches. All my thoughts (many of them obsessively intrusive) t-u-g-and-p-u-l-l-and-r-i-p me away from anything but their demure whispers.

And there is a cost to listening; it is frustration. Yep! You guessed it; the second emotion that often arises from confusion is maddening frustration.

There is no place to put these thoughts in my head. They fester in the widening vacancy, multiplying like hungry particles suspended in the air, latching onto my neurons as collateral, feeling nothing but gluttonous satisfaction.

After that, it truly is a race against time or a full body neurophysiological response. Whichever comes first—migraine or attempting to rest, for the fifth time, against my grating mental machinery?

Every unattended thing begins demanding immediacy after my resources are utterly depleted. I attempt my hand at Quicksand diplomacy, spouting silent syllables of tactful compromise undetected by the human ear against the enemy, which, to my dismay, is invisible. The viperous whispers come to a halt, leaving only reconnaissance to plead its case.

I have forgotten what I was fighting so hard to uncover. And you’d think this would be reason enough to cease the hunt. Yet, the traceable residue of a case left unsolved is too irresistible to decline.

And so the cycle continues.

//

Grief, as it is known, spirals out of you eventually.

Unspiral.
Woozy.

Unfolding.
Intrigued.

Overloading.
No warning.

Seething. A secondary emotion.
Aware.
Grief aware.

Powerless.
Conviction.
Helpless.
Needless prosecution.

Hopeless?

A stalemate.
Body offline.

//

2026-07-07-1249