functioning

At cocktail parties, I played the part of a successful businessman's wife to perfection. I smiled, I made polite chit-chat, and I dressed the part. Denial and rationalization were two of my most effective tools in working my way through our social obligations. I believed that playing the roles of wife and mother were the least I could do to help support Tom's career.During the day, I was a puzzle with innumerable pieces. One piece made my family a nourishing breakfast. Another piece ferried the kids to school and to soccer practice. A third piece managed to trip to the grocery store. There was also a piece that wanted to sleep for eighteen hours a day and the piece that woke up shaking from yet another nightmare. And there was the piece that attended business functions and actually fooled people into thinking I might have something constructive to offer.I was a circus performer traversing the tightwire, and I could fall off into a vortex devoid of reality at any moment. There was, and had been for a very long time, an intense sense of despair. A self-deprecating voice inside told me I had no chance of getting better. I lived in an emotional black hole.p20-21, talking about dissociative identity disorder (formerly multiple personality disorder).

When our mental functioning is whittling away and our mind becomes a lame duck, perception does not form the context anymore and all connections on the social chessboard are conked out. Only patience and endurance may draw us out of the quagmire of numbness and allow us to tear open the cloudy screen that is hiding our points of __nterest_ and __ttention_, so long as we focus on the __ingular moments_ and the __ppealing details_ in our life. Awareness can help us shape a comprehensive picture for a functional future. ("Lost the global story.")

At the W.M. Keck Observatory on the very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea, there was no routine monitoring of mental functioning, blood oxygen levels, blood pressure or heart rate of workers.

Some people are still alive only because they find being dead more boring than being alive.

Shoes need feet to walk! Everything needs something to function!

Supreme level of maturity is needed to realize; that, conveyance of family life, depends on equally maintained pair of wheels and both crediting each other, for their functioning and struggles as well.

It was a myth you couldn't function on opiates: shooting up was one thing but for someone like me-jumping at pigeons beating from the sidewalk, afflicted with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder practically to the point of spasticity and cerebral palsy-pills were the key to being not only competent, but high-functioning.

I advise people not to research radiation unless they are prepared to take the risks to their own health and mental functioning that the various forms of radiation are known to present to the human.

Immobilization: A state, however mild or serious, in which you are not functioning at the level that you would like to. If feelings lead to such a state, you need to look no further for a reason to get rid of them.