MYHA: One Of The Best Conversations I've Heard About RSD, Not A Trendy Label, A Very Real Thing For Some People—Does Anything Help?

Posting It In Case This Reaches Somebody Who Has "It" But Does Not Know Its Name

“From the beginning, Kafka sided with the humiliated.”

‘—Elias Canetti, Kafka’s Other Trial

The reason I’m posting this clip now, despite all that is at hand in the world, is that I don’t want it to slip into the river and get lost in the tide.

I think it’s a very “helpful” conversation for people with RSD, and I’ve listened to many.

(Push past the intro, if you have difficulty with such production effects, as I do.)

I think you will find this really grounding and comforting— if you have RSD.

If you don’t, there are few podcasts I can think of that would interest you less.

Does praise make you happy, induce dopamine? Congratulations, you don’t have RSD.

One reason my RSD is flaring today is that my sister Bibi, persuaded me I should send a birth announcement to extended family about my grandson Gabriel.

As in…act normal? Act well. Decent. Follow traditions.

Communicate.

Exist.

I developed anxiety, hyper-ventilation, disassociation— put it off for days.

Then I thought to title the email: “Barry Farber’s great grandchild born June 16 In Spain!”

Because it’s a borrowed branch of validity—a valid claim on scarce attention.

Joyous life events that conventionally mean you share with family, friends—very hard for RSD people.

Birthdays are a form of torture. If we could we would cast a unifying spell that reassures people they don’t have to wish you a happy birthday.

RSD is not exactly about not being liked— it is more about not registering.

Attention contracts are reduced to trying to never bother people, until the self-fulfilling RSD prophecy (“I don’t register with people”) is complete.

All RSD podcasts really ought to have a Kafka photo on the wall somewhere in camera range—he is the RSD patron saint. Close second maybe Hans Christian Anderson, but Kafka is more contemporary.

If you “want to understand Kafka,” (without reading his actual books) in about 90 minutes, I suggest reading Elias Canetti’s 130 page masterpiece “Kafka’s Other Trial.”

A tour de force, like all Canetti’s stuff.

The psychic root of Kafka’s “The Trial” is in fact a tribunal, a ritual humiliation, involving a conflict between two women, and their families—not a keen awareness of the blights of state bureaucracy.

I literally carry it everywhere, this book.

So, friends: We get to the bottom of vanishingly little, but those Kafka-ologists who pushed the notion he was a homosexual are utterly discredited.

Milan Kundera has also raged against this, and rightly so.