Interesting experience with epinephrine tonight.
I had a psychologically unusual week, which is to say that I was just generally off all week, especially in the first few days. Missing appointments, generally feeling crazy. I blame the full moon, but whatever. Anyway, so I didn’t train all week, and I decided to go spar today to kick myself back on track. Last week I went every single day, so it’s not that I’m way out of practice or anything.
But, it was interesting. By the second round of sparring, I was overloaded with adrenaline, just sweating and tense and really charged. And about 5 minutes later I just became weak and sore. Totally fight-or-flight response. The thing about sparring is that if you’re off, it’s easy to get angry or upset. I’ve seen it happen countless times, especially to those of us who’ve been doing it for a year or less. Very interesting, though. I still feel way off. Stomach’s a little queasy, mentally feel a little weird.
In other news… really thinking seriously about what kind of academic career, if any, I want to have. I came in hell-bent on studying these social psychological constructs like “racial identity” and “internalized racism”. Really beginning to doubt the usefulness of that anymore. It’s not that I’m less committed to working for marginalized people, but moreso really wondering where my energies need to go.
So, for instance, instead of spending time attempting to quantify (or even qualify) nebulous constructs like “racial identity”, which, if history has ANYTHING to teach us, are NOT stable over time, I feel like it might be better and more in line with my concerns about social justice to create a body of work applying all of these brilliant therapeutic techniques to populations upon which they haven’t been normed. A study came out last year that tested exposure therapy for PTSD on a community sample in Philadelphia. The reason this study caught my eye is not only because the population treated (successfully, I might add) was largely Black and working class, but also because community-based therapists with AND without degrees were trained to do this successfully. Given that mine is a health care profession, isn’t that the kind of thing I need to be doing? Getting the shit that’s already proven to work to the people who need it most?
And is studying racial identity going to get us any further in taking down the prison industry? Or the war on drugs? Or the “Overseas Contingency Operation” ROFLLOLZOR? Etcetera.
Moving it right along.
