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I'm going to take a wild guess, and suggest that your attitude towards FAI research, and your experience of CFS, are actually related. I have no idea if this is a standard theory, but in some ways CFS sounds like depression minus the emotion - and that is a characteristic symptom in people who have a purpose they regard as supremely important, who find absolutely no support for their attempt to pursue it, but who continue to regard it as supremely important.
The point being that when something is that important, it's easy to devalue certain aspects of your own difficulties. Yes, running into a blank wall of collective incomprehension and indifference may have been personally shattering; you may be in agony over the way that what you have to do in order to stay alive, interferes with your ability to preserve even the most basic insights that motivate your position ... but it's an indulgence to think about these feelings, because there is an invisible crisis happening that's much more important.
So you just keep grinding away, or you keep crawling through the desert of your life, or you give up completely and are left only with a philosophical perspective that you can talk about but can't act on... I don't know all the permutations. And then at some point it affects your health. I don't want to say that this is solely about emotion, we are chemical beings affected by genetics, nutrition, and pathogens too. But the planes intersect, e.g. through autoimmune disorders or weakened disease resistance.
The core psychological and practical problem is, there's a difficult task - the great purpose, whatever it is - being made more difficult in ways that have no intrinsic connection to the problem, but are solely about lack of support, or even outright interference. And then on top of that, you may also have doubts and meta doubts to deal with - coming from others and from yourself (and some of those doubts may be justified!). Finally, health problems round out the picture.
The one positive in this situation, is that while all those negatives can reinforce each other, positive developments in one area can also carry across to another.
OK, so that's my attempt to reflect back to you, how you sound to me. As for practical matters, I have only one suggestion. You say
so I suggest that you at least wait until his next visit, and use that extra time to understand better how all these aspects of your life intersect.
I spent a good year and half trying to answer questions related to the points you brought up after first seeing the mind-body specialist, although you gave me some good perspective.
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Actually I only discovered the purpose a couple of years after the myalgic encephalomyelitis set in, before t... (read more)