Conversation

QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
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
@nosilverv
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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 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
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 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
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 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
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
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
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 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
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 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
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 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
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 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
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 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
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 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
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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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