Conversation

QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

bro alright let’s just do this right now. anyone reading this: what’s lockdown been like for you? struggling to find the words is a *good* sign! keep struggling! aim for weird metaphors! it’s been a weird fucking time

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Rival Voices is AN OLD MAN

· Jan 28, 2021

There’s an arbitrage happening in that we don’t have sufficiently advanced phenomenology to extensively describe in mutually intelligible terms the consequences of lockdowns. Suffice to say future meditators have their work cut out for them processing past cultural trauma

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

when i was off twitter in december everything felt meaningless and pointless and flat. like i could not viscerally see a point to anything. no action i took seemed like it was going to affect anything that mattered. but i wasn’t at peace about this either. scared and frustrated

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

i’ve been avoiding video calls for month because something about them feels “fake.” like i don’t want to keep tricking my system into believing that another person is in the same room as me when they’re not. i can’t actually touch or hug them. voice calls less have this problem

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

someone used “untethered virtuality” to describe the lockdown experience the other day and there’s a lot to chew on there. unbroken staring at pixels on screens all day is not the normal activity of the human animal. none of this is real. i’m not actually talking to you rn

7:56 PM · Jan 28, 2021Twitter for iPad

QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

Replying to

zoom and netflix and twitter and whatever else have in some sense allowed us to partially plug into a crappy version of the matrix and it’s kinda better than nothing but i bet it’s driving everyone crazy in a million different ways

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

i've been hesitant to talk about this for awhile. it's seemed like we're kinda pretending that things are more normal than they are and i didn't want to burst the bubble? appreciate the conversation i had about this with

, helped me feel saner

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

i've been playing around with the phrases "emotional anorexia" and "emotional scurvy" to describe what i was feeling in december like i was starving myself of trace nutrients and the more i starved myself the less i wanted them

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

the offer i made recently to RT requests for help etc. was not just for you guys, a lot of it was for me. i am starving for meaningful action right now and helping follows out is one of the more meaningful things i can do that i can see

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

i've been wondering if sufficiently bad lockdown can convince deep unconscious parts of you that maybe other people don't really exist or the world doesn't really exist or things like that. sounds like some of the experiences y'all are reporting might be consistent with that

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

it do be like that sometimes 😬

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· Jan 28, 2021

Replying to @hormeze @QiaochuYuan and @discomfrtble

some create a safer virtual reality inside of the four corners of lockdown and bringing something as insanely complex and unpredictable as a separate human being can feel very overwhelming after enough time

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

oh i like this!

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· Jan 28, 2021

Replying to @QiaochuYuan and @discomfrtble

one thing that has really helped me and some of my friends is making dedicated parts of a call where we kvetch, vulnerably complain about wats happening in our internal world. then the complaints enters the external world and mixes w/our friends kvetching. feels holy and intimate

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

thanks for your responses everyone. in the interest of providing something approaching a concrete way forward, i've been feeling surprisingly better 1) crying a week or two ago and 2) more recently making a bunch of small movements to break out of freeze

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

(really i did not expect the crying to help much this time but that's where all the good tweets came from)

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

i'll repeat the thread from the other day too: at least one person mentioned feeling like they weren't "really" suffering and like... this is real suffering! this situation is so so so fucked up even if you aren't in physical danger

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

· Jan 25, 2021

maybe also worth saying explicitly: lockdown is really insanely fucked up. i have been suffering and going crazy and probably you have too. it is not remotely normal. please keep that in mind when you're wondering why everything seems so bad or you have so little energy

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

absolutely massive stockpile of psychological energy building up and this is where it's going so far

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The Mayor of Horsetown

· Jan 27, 2021

Pandemic Day 25: I made bread :) Day 95: I sure do miss my friends .... Day 310: The White House appears to be under the control of a shirtless man in a Viking helmet Day 330: Reddit’s coordinated attack on Wall Street is going as planned

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