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" (🥺)
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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The original version of the meme could be fun to include in your analysis
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oh man this whole "serotonin" thing is another major component of folk psychology i'm super interested in. same for "dopamine." something really wild going on here imo
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everywhere you hear yourself or someone else refer to "dopamine" (e.g. "gotta make good tweets for that sweet sweet dopamine" or whatever), try substituting "hope"
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