Tackling My Biggest Problem - Notes on Sunsickness

I had some nice conversations today with a good friend who was helping me with my weird sunsicknesses. He basically eliminated all of my worst migraines in one 90-minute phone call a year ago. This was “my biggest problem” or “my biggest weird debilitator” and so getting it taken care of was a very big deal for me. These were weird basilar migraines with aura that I’d gotten for 20 years between every month and every few months.

This also wasn’t a one-off; he has done things like this with people before. His methods with me are pretty chill though hard-won and I vouch for them.

This post is too spur-of-the-moment to get into that, and so I am just recording some thoughts from today.

We were discussing my strange, now strangest, biggest problem, that has usurped the first place of the migraines, which is my weird debilitating sunstroke / heatstroke / sun sickness thing, wherein I am sometimes somehow incapacitated by the sun for hours. Very inconvenient sometimes to just get knocked out like that! Sometimes I get knocked out every day for a few days, sometimes every other day for a week, sometimes not at all.

This is very inconvenient, and I have thought about it before, and failed to make the progress I wanted to. And so I am now thinking about it again.

I like actually taking your biggest debilitator, or your biggest thing that makes you different from other people in ways that are inconvenient, very seriously. Not overly emotionally — everybody has things like this in some domain. Why not spend some brain cells working on the problems that make you the most sick / most annoyed with yourself / most annoying to other people. It does not mean that this thing makes you fundamentally broken unless you fix it, or anything like that. You don’t even have to fix it or want to fix it. Just if you made a rank-ordered-list, every person would have something at the top of the list. And I consider it virtuous to on occasion devote some brain cells to that.

I suspect that people don’t usually apply vigor to these problems because if it’s your biggest problem, and it’s actually your biggest problem, there’s a good chance that you’ve had it, and were not able to resolve it, for quite a long time. This means that the chance that you tried something for it, with some amount of care and discipline, and it did not work, is high. Which means you went through a judgment-avoidance-hope-failure loop. And if you’ve gone through that a few times, going through it again versus using a different strategy or maintaining a holding pattern can be hard.

Which is why I consider it virtuous, rather than neutral.

Anyway — my sunsickness. Notes!

I do not know much about the historical figure known as the Sun King or much about the Sun God. I have noticed I get similar intense reactions when eating Sichuan food. I often really love the sun, but when I am in a sunstroke mode, happy fondnesses for the sun are hard to access. I have never made a sundial. I do not know anything about sun intensity or how it changes over the course of a day or how it changes due to elevation.

These seem like low hanging fruit to research a bit. If I do not do that, I am not really trying.

My hope is to figure out what is overwhelming about this sun energy some of the time, and get better at channeling it through my mind and body, the way that Zuko channels lightning in Avatar. Or just figure out what the painful thing even is. Or figure out how to make an elixir / figure out what kind of food or drink may be helpful either in prevention of episodes or healing.

My hypothesis is that “figuring out what the painful thing even is” in a straightforward identification will actually end up being harder than healing it. My hypothesis is that learning more about the sun and other adjacent things will somehow allow me transform me in such a way that I end up doing the first option basically automatically and the sun stops being a problem.