The strangest thing happened to me.

One minute, I'm a care-free, yellow backpack and too much free time having, songbird communications, major smiling at everyone I see.
The next, I'm an employed 8-5er, regular commuter, malnourished, unhappy victim of anxiety.

Okay, so maybe the shift didn't happen quite that quickly. But damn, did I make a behavioral 180 from last month's Amalie.

I guess I decided on impulse to take on more responsibility as a result of the things I was feeling when I posted my last entry. Bad idea. Too big of a change, not ready for life to happen yet. But it's okay, I'm adjusting where I can and healing more than that.

That's not what I came here to talk about, though. i just feel like it's an important detail for understanding my frame of reference.

If you've ever used a virtual map, you know that zooming out, or changing your frame of reference gives entirely new meaning to the location you're assessing. The idea of recursiveness is basically, an idea repeating on a different scale -- that encompasses all preceding levels of that idea.

Yannow?

1! 2! 3! ...

No, I'm not yelling numbers at you. These are factorials.
1! is 1
2! is same as saying 2*1
3! is the same as 3*2*1
4! is 4*3*2*1

So basically, 4! is the same as 4*3! and 3 is 3*2!
With each increasing "level", you're incorporating one new element, and the rest exclusively elements of the preceding level.

I came here to talk about things that are recursive.
I don't know if I'm the only one that this happens to, but I feel like life is full of motifs. Sometimes, you learn something, and it just keeps coming up on your life, and it doesn't sustain in frequency for an extended period of time, but it seems like it coincidentally shows up a lot in the small amount of time after its frequency is exposed.

And lately, my motif is the idea of recursiveness.

I first was able to identify this motif last week during my rhetoric class when we were talking about Andy Warhol. A few words about the guy: he's a business artist. The question posed to us was, whether giving people a pretty picture that meant nothing was "art." The conclusion is that the art isn't in the object itself, but the fact that the object has no meaning is meaningful. Therein lies the art. Another conclusion is that the meaninglessness is calculated. And therein lies the art. A step out even further, a collective attempt at attributing artistic qualities to something without meaning is "art." And further than that, the ability to identify and make judgments about this collective attempt is art.

It's a cool thought, but why do you care, Amalie?

Because. Battling anxiety is recursive.
The first level is the actual stress. Your body basically stresses out a couple times, then it realizes "hey I'm getting stressed out a lot lately" and starts to behave as if it is always stressed out. For the person newly victimized by their own bodies, who isn't sure what happened, this creates the second level of stress that can almost go unnoticed. But not quite, people who are at all in tune with their minds (people with anxiety are extra in-tune as a result of the hypersensitivity) will start to notice things changing, and not be able to attribute them to anxiety because they are usually unfamiliar with the symptoms. They will start to make their own hypotheses about what is going on with them, and will usually assume the worst. This essentially confers for the nervous system that is already stressing about stressing about stress. And a fourth level is added.

I feel as if I have at least arrested the development of my own anxiety, because I have been fortunate enough to have someone very in my life who dealt with anxiety and all its physical manifestations, and was able to identify reasonably early on that I am not dying.

[Maybe another day when this has all blown over, I'll blog about what it was like to feel like you were dying for those couple weeks before my self-diagnosis.]

Interestingly enough, this concludes my post.
Sucks, huh?
It sucks having all these problems presented to you and being able to identify them as what they are but not having the satisfaction of closure, the happy ending I know at some point I'll be able to tell about in hindsight.

I live that right now.

But that's not what I came here to talk about.
It just comes out.