Archive for July, 2015

Me, at least some of the time

Friday, July 31st, 2015

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CloudCuckooLander

I had a really amusing one tonight.

What would happen, resource wise, if we all just stopped keeping track entirely? Our money has “In God We Trust” printed on it but if we really did, we wouldn’t need money.. we’d all just do our bits, expecting the system as a whole to work because we were doing our part of it. We’ve assumed that the result if we did this (didn’t keep track) would be a economic meltdown but that may be based on the theory that there’s one objective reality.. if there’s a whole entwined set of them, maybe our failure to keep track wouldn’t break anything at all. (I can just see me trying to sell this experiment to Congress now. “Hey guys! I’d like to test the fabric of reality by turning off money…”)

So..

Thursday, July 30th, 2015

It was asked, what good things happened for people because of my unscheduled and unplanned foray east.

Well, let’s start with the hitchhikers. One of them said he’d spent the last night under a bridge. I was able to deliver him *to his home*. He was only 89 miles away, but you know, when you’re carrying a duffel, 89 miles is a stupidly long way to go. I think it did a lot for his state of mind that I was also able to deliver him his favorite artist (Conway Twitty) on request, courtesy of the laptop in the back of the van.

The second one I wasn’t able to get to where he was going as it was significantly off my route. But I did get him 300 miles down the road, and we had a good talk. He was rainbow folk, and a former Navy cook.

Let’s also mention the guy in the SUV stuck on I-95 because he was out of gas. He had his whole family in the car. I took him to a gas station where he filled up, and then back to his car. We shared no common language.. well, I know the word ‘Amigo’, which I said when he got in the car, and he smiled and then we used hand signals to agree on finding a gas station, etc. Perhaps the word for friend is really the only word you need in any language?

We can also mention Vinnie, as I think spending some time with me venting about her recent situation was good for her. At least, I hope it was.

Dream space improvements

Thursday, July 30th, 2015

So, over the last week I’ve been using my neuro-hacking abilities along with whatever assistance I may be getting from whatever spiritual entities you might or might not want to believe in to work on dreams. I’ve had numerous extremely vivid nightmares and.. for the first time.. last night what was almost certainly a initiating sequence for a lucid dream with dream control. It didn’t, you know, totally *work* – but I have to say I’m impressed with the lack of subtlety. It was not one of those situations where you wonder if you’re dreaming. There was music, and a sequence that reminded me of the C-64 game Master of the lamps that I *think* was supposed to assemble into a flying scene for transportation from where I was to where I wanted to be. This was initiation for video-game-era quality dreaming.. the visual quality was reality grade, as was the sound quality.

So, it didn’t work.. I very much tried to do something inside it and very much failed.. but it felt like it *almost* worked.. like you could feel stray signals leaking away into bits of neural net that were miswired, but if I were trying to, say, fix a analog audio device and I got results this good, I’d know I was almost done. I am very hopeful, since among other things in order to not be having one of my standard I-can’t-breathe nightmares I have to assume the neurological wiring for keeping me breathing while I’m sleeping is almost fixed! Another hint for this is that I several times in the last week have awoken *feeling rested*! Since in previous years the usual experience was to wake feeling more tired than when I went to bed, this is significantly awesome.

I don’t get the feeling that my entire mind is repaired just yet.. I still very much feel the divisions during the day, especially when I toggle between modes to program vs to do social interaction.. but at least *some* of the wiring required to have the kind of dreams you’d want to have is apparently active.

There’s this odd thing I’ve experienced, way back in my youth, where I would occasionally lie about progress in personal development and it would become the truth. Now, these days, I try to avoid lying at all, but I’m kind of curious about whether I should be trying to do this.. it’s not so much lying, as it is in the words of 12-step “Acting as if”. Kind of a hopeful jump-start. I do think that repeatedly saying “I can’t” is damaging.. as Wang Chung says, the words we use are strong, they make reality.. and I know I don’t want to be believing I can’t.

In the case of $person

Thursday, July 30th, 2015

I feel the need to say, if you are *seriously* thinking I would sexually assault you, have you ever thought of how much I would pay to *not have* the memory of having done so? Like, if someone were to ask me, “I’ll give you $1 million dollars but you have to have the memory of forcing $person to have sex in a way that hurt her.”.. Okay. Keep inserting larger values for the million. Keep inserting. You’re not going to find a number at which I’d take the deal.

See, to me, *that* is what love is like. You want the person you love to *not be hurt*. This would seem to be kind of basic, love 101, not advanced love, not anything that takes ideas more advanced than you’d expect to find in the mind of the average 10 year old. If the person *must* be hurt, you would want it to *not be your agency* that hurt them, or even your body. I’ve already got the somewhat awful situation of it’s the *idea* of me that’s hurting $person a little bit, because $person thinks I would do something I wouldn’t do. (Or maybe she doesn’t. I could write a whole novel on the subject of that.)

And more..

Thursday, July 30th, 2015

So, I think part of what I’m forever confused about, is how anyone could think that I would enjoy sexual assault, that I could ever get what I want and need from it? It just sounds inherently.. well, kind of awful.. to me. Like, awful for both participants, not just for one of them. I may have mental issues but I don’t think I can ever see them pushing me that far into the dark.

So, yes, those of you who are afraid of me, I think you have in fact failed the minimum safety check for mental health. I think you’re a danger to yourself. You’re imagining someone as willing to hurt you in a way that said person is not, and I kind of think that imagination hurts you. And, I mean this really and sincerely, good luck with that. The imaginary monsters under our beds are in a lot of ways the most powerful monsters there are.

Insanity

Wednesday, July 29th, 2015

I Waited Until My Wedding Night To Lose My Virginity And I Wish I Hadn’t

This is a battle I still face. To the extent that I am DID, I personally endorse sexings as a wonderful way to spend time with a friend, great exercise, something that I love how feels, etc. However, there are voices inside my head, so to speak.. not voices, that would make them too easy to identify and squish, more sort of.. text messages? Inherent thoughts? I think it’s the worst at 3 AM. Lately it’s had a lot less power over me, which is nice, but there is this inherent internal meme that I spend a lot of time fighting.. it’s actually more a set of memes. You’ve got the sex is sinful and wrong set (although I really hope that A: heaven is real and B: there’s a lot more sex and a lot less fear) but then you’ve also got the sex isn’t wrong, but YOUR breed of it is.. and then you’ve also got the boys enjoy it but girls don’t and similar sets of insanity.. as I said, I’ve got a set of alters, the most prevalent one being one that is a Root Rep of my mother, so to speak.. I think this definitely falls into the Pink Floyd The Wall thing nicely..

It’s annoying and I wish it would go away. Fortunately, it seems to be going away, so perhaps my wish is being granted. Anyway, the counterarguments are beyond obvious:

1) Sexual contact in my experience, at least the way I do it, is friendship-building and leads to really close and loving emotional moments. So it’s pro-love so insofar as God (the one we’re defining as defining sin here) is in favor of love they’re not going to be anti-sex.

2) How can something feel good and right and be a sin? I think this is the scariest one because there are moments where I believe this is possible and these are the moments where I believe God is evil. Athiesm is a preferrable mental place to this by a long shot. Living in a universe where there are no escape routes and God is evil is *disturbing*. Even if it’s only happening in your imagination for a few minutes it’s not a few minutes you’d really want to be present for.

I have to remind myself that there are parts of my mind that are not as well connected to my personality as a whole as other parts – parts where absurd and absolutist thinking make sense because of the limited context of available memory and experience. And yet, when ‘mother’ crops up even in my thinking, I want to run far far far away.

So, to hit the usual high points of discussion of what I believe about the spiritual universe, at least in passing.

I believe I’m not the biggest thing out here. So in that sense I believe in angels, Gods, what-have-you. I do *not* believe Earth has accurately captured them and put what they believe and want and need into a book – or if they have, I haven’t read it yet. However, I probably agree with enough of the talking points of Christianity that you could call me a Christian? Of course, this might also be true of Islam, certainly is true of the Unitarians, etc. I think it’s safest not to give me a label. But, I do think a spiritual plane *exists* – however I don’t think you can *know it exists* unless you already believe in it. This one is easy to explain – what you believe forms filters that affect what you experience, so you’re not going to get any signals you aren’t willing to accept. Now, on the other paw, I do believe every adherent to every religion experiences signals that validate their choice of religion because of how they’ve got that part of their mind set up. This part this far is things I’ve talked about many times, news to nobody.

I will say that I’ve had the first valid (to me) spiritual experiences ever, in a church, which leaves me a lot more open to the possibilities that churches might be good ideas, or at least not completely pointless. I think some of the mental damage I took comes from the fact that I was pressured a lot into confirming into a religion while I was experiencing nothing and feeling nothing of the spiritual domain.. it was just like I was tuning a radio in a empty band, while my parents spoke of God as if they were having a actual connection of some sort, and I was upset and didn’t want to go forward with this whole confirmation thing since I wasn’t having this experience at all, and they had already printed the invitations. I will own my own part of that, I should have been a *lot* more assertive. Throughout my entire childhood really.

Now, how does this all tie in with my mental illness? Well, I have to think about a bunch of questions. Am I sick because I wanted to experience being sick (in the course of a infinite amount of time a lot of absurd things become possible) or because I made some bad decisions or because some *other* people made some bad decisions? We’ve definitely reached the point in my story arc where I want to *stop being sick* – I mean, I’d really like to stop living on a world where the pyramid of needs isn’t just guaranteed covered, leaving you free to figure out what you want to do with your self-actualization – it drives me nuts that we let people starve to death and be homeless just so we can waste a whole lot of resources tracking our resources, and that no one can design a better system. But that’s a subject for another blog post. Anyway, I’m definately ready to stop having there be something wrong with my mind.. one of the things that was wrong with my mind the strongest, and is a lot less present right now, is paranoia.. persistant, irrational fears and the inability to lead my life because of them. As you’ve all noticed in my blog lately, I’m a lot more willing to just talk about whatever instead of letting my fear keep me silent. It may be a irrational hope, but I have hopes that as I talk about some of this stuff solutions will be found, patterns will be noticed, etc.

If we do believe in a God of Love, and we believe said diety wants me as part of *eir stable, then we have to ask some interesting questions. Does said diety want me to be sick? I mean, perhaps my mental illness makes me a interestingly shiny gem, but I like to think that a diety of love wouldn’t want to have people collected like specimens in a bottle but would rather have real friends, in which case having me not be sick, or not be as sick, would seem to be a desirable thing. And indeed I would say of late that I seem to be getting some sort of assistance from the spiritual domain. Of course, that might just be my imagination, but then, *everything* might just be my imagination.

Where the rubber meets the road

Wednesday, July 29th, 2015

Okay, so this is going to be a difficult couple of posts to do. I am crossing my paws I manage to do it all accurately and with as little observer bias as possible and in a way that doesn’t cost me any more friendships.

Whoever you are, you might want to start with Assume Good Faith. I don’t want to add any more pain and fear into a system (Earth) I already clearly see as having too much.

However, let’s talk about the deep dark past first, when my intentions might not have been so well formed. I feel the need to bring up the past because one of the reasons for one of the things I wish was different in the present *is* the past.

In particular, I’d like to start out by talking about my sister, who I think is probably the victim of a mental illness at least the size of mine. Now, at this point I have forgiven her for everything she has ever done. But, in my young-Sheer adventure, she was weirdly and scarily violent. I later discovered there was a lunar cycle thing going on there, but at the time it just seemed like sometimes, I got my hair pulled, I got punched, I got kicked in the stomach, often for apparently no provocation at all. And she had.. well, still has, last I checked.. this way of talking to me that made me feel about three inches tall. She was a master of word choice and tone of voice and all the things you need to make someone feel tiny and she used them.

Now, at some point in our cohabitation, I did something which I still (Sort of) regret and which is still (apparently) quite in her memory.. she was pregnant, and she had been attacking me pretty much whenever she wanted, and I threatened to kick her in the stomach. I don’t think I would have actually ever done it – my parents check my memory (or at least claim to) that I wasn’t violent towards *her* generally. But I had reached that mental and emotional place that I think is often referred to as “Enough”.

It had a dramatic effect on her. At the time I was quite pleased. she moved out! I think she didn’t trust her ability to not attack me (not something she had a lot of practice with) and she wasn’t sure she could still get away with attacking me whenever she wanted.

Anyway, I’ve never been proud of that particular moment.. as I said, I don’t want to add more pain and fear into a system that has too much..

Somewhat recently.. about five years ago I think.. my sister decided that she’s terrified of me and wants me to stay as far away as possible. As far as I can tell she thinks that at some point I’m going to end up raping her. This is difficult for me to credit insofar as A: I’m really militant about this whole nonviolent thing, B: I wouldn’t want to have the memory of having done it and C: This is so far out of my core personality that people who know me often laugh at the idea. But I guess if you’re 3000 miles away and learning about all my exploits via the internet it sounds credible, and I think there’s a little group of people in that position that have started passing the idea that they should be afraid of me around like a joint. And my sister is definitely a big part of that. Okay, for me this has been mildly annoying, insofar as she can’t be present at any family gatherings that I’m present at.. at some point I started realizing that it is yet another way for my sister to bully me, which resulted in me rolling my eyes a bit and sighing and wondering if she’s ever going to get over her Issues.

But lets move to nearer times for a minute. As most of you know, I have this repeating issue I’ve been having where every six months or so I go manic, black out, and end up in jail or a mental hospital after sending a bunch of emails to one person who wishes at this point I would go away.

Now, let’s get a few things out on record. If I had one wish without wishing for more, at this point, it would be to have my friendship with this person back. And I undoubtedly in these emails say a few things which are inappropriate insofar as a lot of my internal censors are not working correctly. They’re never threatening (because that’s not the person I am) or graphic, but clearly they make her unhappy and my inability to just stop has been upsetting everyone, myself included. Now, it’s possible if my sister wasn’t ostensibly afraid of me, this person would be willing to just talk to me and everything could come down from defcon 1, but that is not to be.

Obviously something inside me is not working right. For a long time, I went through the motions of going to shrinks and doctors and taking pills and surely this will fix me. Of very late (the last few days) I’ve started to ponder whether I need to take a somewhat more self-directed and aggressive approach insofar as I do have this sinking feeling that nothing is getting any better and it has been not just years at this point but a solid decade.

Anyway, so, it’s gotten to where friends can tell when one of these events is about to strike me.. I recently came from SoCal wound tighter than a clock spring and decided, if such a word really describes how things happen in this state (I think maybe the words “it eventiated” ) that I was going to go, not for the first time, to Virginia.

Now, there were some signs from the beginning that this trip was going to be different. Normally, I don’t actually get there, and I think that my mom has a good time calling the person who lives in Virginia and gossiping / winding her up about how afraid she should be of me. (If it sounds like I don’t have a lot of trust in my family, well A: I’m paranoid, we know that B: I don’t C: I have DID. That doesn’t happen because you come from a great family situation). However, first of all, the ‘Blackout’ phase of this trip was a good deal longer than usual.. over a day is completely missing, and the resulting jump looks to me like a teleport from the west coast to the east coast.. second of all, I spent so much time with crosstalk among alters that I ended up with a blister on my tongue.. I was present for some of that, and it was delightfully weird, as crosstalk among alters generally is. Third of all, none of the usual thing stopped me. I got a ticket in Minnesota, that didn’t stop me. I got stuck in St Louis because of the usual confusion of why we bother to do resource allocation tracking for food. That didn’t stop me although it did get me a three day hold. I finally got to $CITY and carefully did *not* go to person’s house (I was really hoping person would come out and talk to me on neutral ground, and either give me a Last Goodbye or, there was a bit of me still holding out hope, return to being my face to face friend)

What I did do was go to a bar and sing “Little Pink Houses” and “When The Saints Go Marching In” – I actually got invited up on stage with the singer, which fit my energy just fine. I talked to some old timers about being patriotic. I went to a church.. twice.. and both times had some pretty authentic (not to mention awesome) spiritual experiences that I have yet to fully grok but make me think I should go back to some churches. The church service was in Spanish. I think that helped *a lot* because the words didn’t make me mad.. and recently at a class I learned that only 7% of human communication is the words.. so I was a lot more aware of the tone of the experience etc. The second time I went to the church (a day later) they had live music and I think they were expecting me and ultimately I cried my eyes out about the whole situation, which has probably been something that has been needing to happen for several years now.

And I sat in my car and I waited. When it became clear person was not wiling to come to me, I decided.. partially as a matter of a way to make myself even less threatening and partially because I had reached the point where I did not trust myself at all to be myself after trying to operate a car while peaking on seroquel.. to check myself into a hospital and see if *that* would get me some kind of something.

Well, it did. Last Goodbye was apparently the answer, but instead of showing up to deliver it in person, I got a court summons and a protective order. This was both good and bad, and I still feel like I should have done things a bit differently here. It gave me a chance to hear person talk (and I *love* hearing person talk.. the way she uses her voice and her hands when talking just pets my brain somehow) and it also gave me something I had been really badly needing, a 3d memory that wasn’t text of rejection. See, the last time I saw her face to face she was behaving as a friend to me. And knowing as much as I do about information theory.. not to mention having *had the experience* – I know it is trivially easy to hallucinate text.

And I will say, she wasn’t actively mean about it. If my sister were ever to take out a protective order, she’d take advantage of the time to also make me actively wish that suicide is something that woudl work. (Repeated testing has told me, at least in my case, there’s a hypervisor, suicide doesn’t work. Not that there aren’t times lately where I wish it would). I can actually sort of imagine my sister describing how sick, perverted, useless, stupid, ugly, weak, and other undesirable behaviors I am.. I guess I have a alter who is a software model of my sister. Now there’s something I could use to lose.

Anyway, protective order… initially my response was “Well, if that’s what she wants, she shoudl have it” since I’ve never been of the position that if person wants distance from me she should have anything *but* that.. it’s just the alters that come up during a mania that, I honestly forget, have no memory of the times between. But, it occurs to me, this is giving said alters a tool to hurt me a lot a lot since person can now have me thrown in jail for sending her a email. I wonder if person has ever worn handcuffs the way cops put them on, which always hurts you paws, or been in a cold room of cinderblocks designed by idiot humans who think punishing is a good idea to send the message “You’re a bad person. You deserve to hurt.”. I also wonder if person really does think I deserve to hurt because there’s something wrong with my mind. I doubt it a lot.

Anyway, I already do hurt because something’s wrong with my mind.

I’ve begged God for a early death.. like, now would be good.. bu that’s not the sort of wish apparently that we get. So I’m stuck here, wishing I wasn’t. Maybe if I had a better attitude you’d still want to be friends. I do have a lot of friends, and I’m grateful for them, and I’m loved, and I’m grateful for that, and sometimes it gets all the way into my core and that’s very nice, and sometimes it can’t and that’s not so nice.

So, I was talking about things I might have done right or wrong. I got a lawyer, which might or might not have been a good idea.. as I said, I didn’t really exacly want to win but I also was willing to admit that it would be a good idea for me not to lose. THe judge, not too suprisingly, sided with person – I can’t really conceive of the situation where the judge doesn’t, since person is there saying “I want this person not to talk to me”, which really is a reasonable request and something we should all be free to ask for. My position doesn’t look very reasonable at all, since it’s “If I forget and do talk to you, I want to not go to jail.. “. I keep hoping if I develop the habit of writing the things I would have put in the emails into blog posts instead, maybe the next time I go manic.. plus, of course, as I mentioned, I now have a very real, visceral, 3D memory of rejection. And the wish that I hadn’t dragged person through all the unhappiness in the spaces in between. Not to mention dragging me through all said unhappiness.

What I wish most is that none of the ‘be afraid of me’ club were convincing themselves of something that, as far as I can tell both from the way I’ve behaved my entire adult life and from the way my friends treat me, makes any sense at all. However, this is America, and fear is something we love to sell ourselves, so I guess I’m not surprised to find people convincing themselves that I’m a threat.

More later.

I should say here..

Monday, July 27th, 2015

I don’t think there’s *anyone* inside me who’s a potential rapist. It is weird to even try to figure out, though, what the aspects of personalities you can’t get access to might be.. I think mostly the people inside me who aren’t me are mostly very afraid.. I have some really odd things going on inside my head.

I have a deep seated fear of being on the recieiving end of anal sex, which might say that my shattering is the result of sexual abuse, but that seems unlikely to me.. it seems more likely that it’s just the result of how all the various things overlay. I am really terrified of breaking glass. For some strange reason I feel like I could tell almost any secret to this one person.. and I’m really, really wrong because she doesn’t even want me to write her at all. However, at this point I’m inclined to just post my secrets to the world.. One Republic seems to have the right idea for me..

DID..

Monday, July 27th, 2015

So, I wanted to talk some about what this is like for me. Most of the time.. I’d say 99% of the time.. I just experience being me. I make choices, I see the results of those choices, I appear to have normal free will and it appears to operate normally. During a period of my life that ended in 2009, I appeared from my perspective to have almost no free will at all.. I actively wanted to be doing one set of things, or would even try to do those things, and my experience would be of doing other things. This was extra difficult for me because I wanted to get as far away from a romantic entanglement I was in as possible, starting (let’s be honest) a few weeks after the entanglement started, but I couldn’t. So, that’s one form that whatever’s wrong with my head manifests as.

I don’t do scary things to other people.. I mean, I don’t have memories of my doing violent things or forcing people to do things or knocking over banks or anything. I guess that’s one thing to be grateful for as that would be a bit more nightmarish than what I do experience. I do experience blackouts.. about every six months, suddenly I feel amazingly good and then.. from my perspective.. its just a blackout, and suddenly I’m thousands of miles away from where I started. Recently I got to sit in court while someone talked about how I’m not doing a good job managing my mental illness.. I don’t think this person realizes that I take the medication I’m assigned, I talk to the people in my mental health teams, and nothing gets fixed because, to be honest, this particular problem is probably a bit beyond what we understand so far about how the human mind operates. It’s a intermittent fault, which means that there’s no way anyone can know whether the drugs I’m on and the things I’m doing are working until the fault conditions are met and we find out, no, they’re not. Intermittent faults are hell to debug even when you’re not trying to debug them from *inside the running system that’s got the fault*. I won’t even start on my impressions of the medical system that the U.S. has to offer the average citizen, which appears to be way, way, way more concerned with privacy, not to mention who pays for what, than fixing *anything*.

Okay. This wasn’t supposed to be a whinefest and certainly I shouldn’t be whining at the person who’s life I’m degrading by constantly wanting to talk to her every time this intermittent fault activates because she certainly deserves it even less than I do. I was explaining what it’s like for me. (There is a part of me who thinks, *very strongly*, that this person should really talk to me *while I’m sane* because it could simplify everyone’s life a little bit, but this might just be because as everyone knows I want my friendship with this person back – although at this point that seems improbable – or even because even when she’s in court describing me as a potential rapist hearing her talk in her unique way of talking was making parts of me feel happy as other parts of me were feeling, wow, you really think THAT’S me? )

There are periods where I feel like I’m not the only one driving the bus. Like, I’m getting to add my *influence* but I’m not the only person around. That’s easier to deal with than total blackouts. I’ve been assured by various people who talked to me in (to me) total blackouts that during total blackouts numerous personalities are present. I keep hoping some of these people will guest on my blog to talk about what that’s like for them because I, for one, am interested. Sometimes I feel like my influence is very limited, like in the start of manic periods, and other times I feel like I have a fair amount but not enough, like in the periods where I didn’t want to be getting hooked up with a particular young lady but wasn’t able to say no in force of her very aggressive personality. I don’t, by the way, think that was in any way her fault. I think it was mine, in that I was somewhere to the left of submissive. See earlier posts.

I assume, after reading various things, that something hit my mind like a hammer back when I was a few months old. I have all sorts of guesses as to what that might have been, my most popular one being that my parents perhaps had a fight they don’t even remember having while they were moving from germany to the U.S..

It’s interesting to me, given the blackouts I have and the out of character behavior that occurs during said blackouts, that it’s taken me this long to acknowledge I have DID. All I have to say is, it’s scary. I remember many times thinking “There’s more than one person in my body..” but .. I don’t know. For the longest time I was deeply afraid of what people would say, or think, or do, if they knew.

So, this whole DID thing keeps upsetting me..

Friday, July 24th, 2015

I keep reading more and more about it, and it seems like it’s difficult to fix. I mean, I’ve been going to shrinks for years, taking whatever pills they tell me to take (despite rumors to the contrary), and while my life has gotten noticably better, it hasn’t gotten, you know, really good. But it’s still.. I don’t know.. it’s like you just finished changing a head gasket only to discover a thrown rod. It’s discouraging. It’s even more discouraging to realize that I don’t really have any way of knowing

A: How *many* people are in me
B: What exactly they are thinking
C: What triggers them to suddenly get control of the body

I know aside from manic periods that happen twice a year on six month centers it’s incredibly rare that I lose any time, which is encouraging but also a little disenheartening.. I don’t know of any way to trigger them to come out of their hiding places.