i'm fascinated by this for reasons i'm not sure i'll be able to articulate. i think it's becoming clearer that one of my interests i keep coming back to is tracking changes in folk psychology over time, trying to understand how people conceptualize themselves and each other
Conversation
one of the fascinating bits is that in the standard scientific reductive materialist ontology "you" are supposed to "be" your brain, so to see such a strong vein of disidentification with "the brain" raises the question: if "you" aren't your "badbrain" then what are you?
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separately, i think representing ego-dystonic stuff as "idk i guess my brain is just bad" speaks to this pervasive medicalization of suffering, hence the choice of "brain" as a symbol as opposed to e.g. demons, since brains Officially Really Exist
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when you medicalize your suffering into "there's something wrong with my brain" you conceptualize the appropriate type of response as "i should fix my brain," which lends itself to medicalized responses like pharmaceuticals, all the way up to extreme shit like lobotomies
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a more trauma-informed perspective might be something like "i was hurt very badly and i adopted extreme strategies for relating to myself and others to deal with that hurt that feel too risky to let go of" (relevant to the OP) which has a totally different vibe to it
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among other things it offers a *meaningful reason* that your "brain" is being "bad": it's trying to protect you from a form of harm you experienced in the past. that's a very different story from "idk i guess my brain chemicals are just wrong because of bad luck???"
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it also suggests a completely different question to ask for how to improve things: the question, stated poetically, is something more like "how do i let go of the past?"
worlds different from "how do i fix my brain?"
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back to the original meme; i've been focusing on the brain side but the cute thing side is important too (anyone recognize it?). it's adorable, and it's crying, and it's saying "please," and all of this matters
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in the meme the cute thing is explicitly being positioned as being not the brain (!) and implicitly being positioned as "really me"; this is also a theme in some meme comics, that the "real me" is cute and soft and squishy, an inner child kind of character
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furthermore the cute thing's request in this meme in particular is to "be vulnerable with the people i love" (π₯Ί)
i read into this that the cute thing is 1) not the brain and 2) "really me" b/c it's functioning as a symbol for the heart, the part of us that loves
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so, the cute thing part of the meme expresses something true and important, i think. i do wish the brain part were different, and the best way i can describe the difference is to point to a comic with very different symbolism
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very sadly it is 6 images so i can't fit it into one tweet. i found this on facebook, the original artist is apparently @carrececeile on insta
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it still strikes me every time: "brains are made to keep us alive" implies, very clearly, that "we" are not our "brains"
Quote Tweet
My doctor and I were discussing my anxiety and she said "Brains are made to keep us alive. They're not made to keep us happy." And I can't stop thinking about that.
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annals of "my brain" research
Quote Tweet
ADHD brains and dopamine is some weird stuff.
I do something that needs to get done and my brain goes βShouldβve done it sooner, you asshat.β
I save the world in a video game and my brain is like βfinally, feels good to be actually useful, doesnβt it?β
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