So, I was talking with my friend Andy, who never fails to give me some good food for thought, and he mentioned the idea of post-traumatic growth. Basically he was pointing out that trauma is not without some value and that after all the other, more negative aspects of experiencing it, some individuals experience significant growth. I ponder whether this has happened to me or not, and if it has, whether it’s happened one or many times.
One of the definite bugs that’s been introduced via whatever I was exposed to in my childhood is I can’t cry when I want to. Like right now I feel like crying – I definitely feel like I’m being treated quite badly – my mom of course also can’t answer the phone while my sister is around, so I can’t talk to her about being kicked off my trip dates that she had agreed to without any attempt to apologize – so I feel like crying, but I can’t.
I can cry sometimes when listening to certain songs or watching certain movies, but I can’t cry when sad things happen. I still haven’t cried about my dad dying, for example.
For those of you playing along at home, I have been able to, at least in some sense, walk a mile in my sister’s moccasins and I’m no longer angry at her, nor do I believe she is doing this to hurt me.
For my sister, if you are reading this – I completely understand why you came to the conclusion you did about me being a threat. I would never, ever force you to do anything but I understand why you would react strongly to anything that felt at all threatening. I don’t expect to see you any time soon, if ever, but for whatever it is worth you have my support. One thing you need to know is odds are you do have *severe* PTSD and you probably do not remember the event that gave it to you. I really hope you find whatever help you need to feel safe and I will try my hardest to not trigger you in any way.
What happened didn’t involve me – and it was NOT YOUR FAULT – and it would have broken almost anyone. I hope reading this message isn’t triggering and I really, sincerely wish you the best of luck in healing.
So, I’ve come to have a pretty good understanding of most of the process.
First of all, it seems like my subconcous plans for these even though my concisous mind doesn’t know about them. I am not sure why although one thing I would note is I come back each time with new abilities and they have also enabled me to fight a entity in my mind which isn’t me and which wanted me dead. (I have a feeling that I’ve largely won that war with this particular battle, although maybe this is just the optimism of coming back fresh from a slaughter)
Anyway, first, I get the urge to stay awake for long periods of time. Staying awake often feels very good for the first 48 hours or so, and then starts to feel, um, less good, but I get the urge to continue anyway. Somewhere around 96 hours, it becomes necessary for my brain to do the maintenance that normally is done during sleep. This is largely releasing neurotransmitters that have been uptoken – uptook? – during neural firing. There is a *reason* this is normally done during sleep. When I have it happen while I am conscious, I lose access to most of my memories for a while. In fact, I have to do a repair process to get anchored at all. I will normally check myself into a mental hospital or do something that cues society to do so, because I shouldn’t be working on anything computer related while I’m doing the restart procedure.
The restart and repair process takes a few days. The fastest way to cue it is to force sleep, for which normally 100mg of seroquel is adequate. Using larger doses of seroquel is not advised unless 100mg is not adequate, because Seroquel is actually antagonistic to restorative sleep, but of course, you have to get into the sleep process. There is also a self-test procedure that I will automatically run, mostly involving remembering song lyrics, parts of my past, skills, etc. Often there will be many neural chains that have to be relinked – this usually presents as me not being able to remember lyrics and reworking the same song over and over until I can.
Recently I said to my sister we have got to stop this ridiculous not talking to each other. One of the things my sister said was “You will not like court”, which implies she has some terrible list of things to say about me – maybe she was planning on getting $PERSON to tell the tale of how I’d repeatedly tried to get to her and therefore was stalking her..
Um.. wait a second. I *never*, after the first time, got to $PERSON’s house. I kind of assume this was by design. I certainly could have. I was often within a few blocks of it, but I knew she didn’t want to see me. I don’t know what I was doing, or looking for, exactly, my subconcious is full of interesting stuff, but I don’t think it’s really all that scary to come to within a mile of someone. Especially given that I’ve never owned any weapons, never been charged with sexual assault, and would rather die than hurt $PERSON or force her to do anything she didn’t want to do in real life.
Did I send her a bunch of very confused and probably scary emails including one that could easily be interpreted as very inappropriate? Yes. Wish I hadn’t done that either. It felt so good to be able to talk about what was wrong with my mind.. I tried to back off and range by asking her where her lines were since I’d obviously crossed one – and I was so used by this time to having friends I could say almost anything to – but. alas. It was a fuse, not a breaker, that I had opened.
I’ve offered my sister a apology for anything she wants. I think as far as changed behavior I already have. she has *NEVER* apologised for her psychological abuse, for her threats to kill my family, for her repeated physical abuse. I wonder what all she would trot out in a court case, and what she would say. At this point my theory is her goal is to get me disowned so she can get all of the inheritance.. or maybe she still, for reasons I can’t fathom, just takes joy from hurting me.
So, here with a new set of thoughts. The first is wondering how often I subconciously plan my runups and occasional mnetal crashes. It would be nice to think that I don’t do so – I’m not cosnciously aware of any plan – but the timing gets increasingly suspicious each time. I seem to plan them for minimum damage to my life, if I do plan them. I am not aware of having any plan.
I figured out something that’s vaugely terrifying.. in the same vein as my theories about Milgram – if we accept the idea of the human mind as a loose confederation of subnets rather than one cohesive whole – which certainly fits the data – then we have to consider that any lie created within the system is inherently dangerous to the system as a whole. For several reasons
1) A ‘lie state’ network has to be created to remember which subset of individuals have heard this lie, unless it’s consistantly told to everyone
2) Routing of some firings occur through fairly complex means and the pointer to the data will end up being inaccurate because it’s not the truth
The biggest problem will come if the user of the mind thinks they can lie to themselves. This is NOT going to end well – among other things, #1 becomes reentrant (ponder whether that’s the right word.. recursive might be better)
Once I realized that lying is both using capacity better used for other things and is literally causing brain damage in that it’s leading to incorrect routings and signalling inside the mind, I resolved to confess all my lies, no matter how difficult, and to never do it again.
Another thing to contemplate – if you are lying, you are on the side of noise rather than on the side of signal. I know which side I want to be on in that particular battle.
Yet again I seem to have overestimated my ability for being alive and landed somewhere where the doors won’t open. Probably not for that long – I’d certify myself sane now, really. One advantage, painful though it be, I have a immutable memory of a rejection from $_PERSON which hopefully means that loop can bloody well die now and I can mourn what could have been without thinking there’s any path back. And still try to learn balance and health from what I knew to be true about them. $_PERSON, should you happen to read this, you have my sincere thanks for your kind and well worded rejection while I could actually write it to memory. I know none of this is your fault and you didn’t deserve any of the flack and annoyance factor that came from my mental issues.
In upcoming sheer’s mental guesses about neural architecture, look for a post about why creatures of our type should never lie.
I am wondering if we would think more reasonably about mental illness if we called it by what I think might be a more appropriate name – neural misconfiguration.
The vast majority of these are the results of either our current very stupid memetics (things like our current religions and our misunderstandings about the nature of life, love, and happiness) or abuse from others as a secondary effect of same.
side note: It is no kindness to let a friend hurt you. They will regret it later.
So, last night I had a dream in which Phoebe had written a book about all the things about me that sucked when I was 19. Of course, I had to agree with a lot of them myself. Sometimes that all feels like a different lifetime.
I do think I like who I am now a lot more than I like who I was then – or, for that matter, liked who I was then at the time. On the other paw, I think I had to go to that place to get to this one – at least I don’t see a process that would have given me the dedication to do the things I need to do that hadn’t gone through some of the unfortunate steps needed to get to this place.
One of the topics I do occasionally worry about is what if there just isn’t a objective reality? Since we know that our minds are easily powerful enough to generate a experience of reality being created out of whole cloth, this seems possible. It would explain how for some people the Jan 6 USA misadventure was a bunch of tourists on the lawn while for a bunch of other people it was a armed insurrection, for example. It could of course go a lot further than that. It’s a worrisome concept, because it can’t be disproven – but if there isn’t a objective reality I’d really like to reprogram the simulator so that *my* reality is more what I’d like to be doing.