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· Sep 27, 2021

when people say they don't want to be inundated with "negativity" what they mean is that they don't want to feel powerless. it's confusing terminology tho because in this sense the opposite of "negativity" is not "positivity," it's action

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so, there's an idea i think i got from

@Malcolm_Ocean

, about a fundamental asymmetry between "approach" and "avoid" in high-dimensional state spaces: "avoid" is badly underspecified. there are many directions in which to run away from something

in order to guide action in a high-dimensional state space you need something more specific than that. "approach" focuses your attention on a specific destination and then you can try to work out how to get there, with your whole being

this is maybe excessively technical language but i think the technical metaphor is quite sharp and helpful for those who have a rough sense of it. to give a more phenomenological flavor: "approach" means good feels, happiness, joy, "avoid" means bad feels, fear, disgust

and to give a more phenomenological flavor of what i mean by avoidance being badly underspecified: if you spend a lot of time searching out new and exciting things to be afraid of and anxious about, you learn a lot about what *not* to do but not about what *to* do

5:26 AM · Dec 22, 2021Twitter Web App

so, next, i recently finally got around to reading

@dschorno

's "null call" and it's really good. i was very struck by his description of the signs of potential shamanism. this bit about being "wired for danger" especially arcove.substack.com/p/null-call

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i've seen versions of this idea elsewhere with different labels. i think "highly sensitive person" is pointing towards the same thing, as is gabor mate's analysis of ADHD, and i think "sensitive" is the word i want for now, it's descriptive and doesn't have too much baggage

so, let's imagine that there is some kind of "sensitivity" spectrum along which people can vary, with probably a large genetic component. sensitive children will be impacted more by anything that happens to them, good or bad; they feel it more, they "overupdate" on it

there is a particular thing that i think happens when something bad happens to a sensitive child, which i had previously been using the word "trauma" to describe but i think that word is increasingly loaded with baggage so i want to try a different tack for now

so instead i want to thread in another idea / frame i got from

@Malcolm_Ocean

, sarah peyton's "unconscious contracts." there are other ways you could talk about this like schemas, i like this language because it feels respectful and true to the experience sarahpeyton.com/category/how-t

"When we are little ones and we experience difficult or traumatic things alone, without warmth and resonance from others, we make agreements to make sure that scary thing will never happen again."

here's an example that came out of my mouth before i ever heard about unconscious contracts. iirc the "at all costs" is characteristic of this sort of thing although i can't locate a quote of sarah peyton saying that

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· Dec 9, 2019

what i did instead was roar "I WILL NEVER TREAT ANYONE THE WAY MY FATHER TREATED ME. I WILL BE A BETTER MAN THAN MY FATHER AT ALL COSTS." then i burst into tears the workshop lead said "take a knee, gentlemen." and everyone else - staff, participants - knelt around me

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so, the vague picture is that a sensitive child, especially one who's been somewhat neglected and/or abused by caregivers, who experiences bad things is especially likely to react by making a lot of unconscious contracts to protect themselves: "avoid THIS at ALL COSTS"

an individual unconscious contract in isolation can seem heroic or noble. i still want to treat other people better than my father treated me the problem, and the connection with depression, is when you accumulate so many "avoid at ALL COSTS" that no actions feel possible

when every action that occurs to you feels like it runs the risk of violating one of your unconscious contracts then you kinda can't do anything, or nearly when i get particularly deep in this i'm basically limited to books, video games, and TV, and the occasional tweet

sometimes it feels like i'm trapped in a straitjacket constricting almost all of my degrees of motion, and i can like only wiggle my pinky, metaphorically speaking. and so i've pondered quite a lot how to get out of this sort of trap

the stuff about crying and feeling feelings i used to tweet a ton about was a major piece of the puzzle for me and unblocked a ton of stuff *and* in retrospect i was missing a huge huge thing around what you might call reconnecting to joy

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@WeegeeWuvver

· Jun 3, 2021

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i didn't focus on that because mostly joy naturally became more accessible after crying a lot, but it left me really stuck when it became more inconvenient to find a good place to cry, i was a little too dependent on that one outlet

so one of the several things i tried was this: i noticed that i wasn't really paying attention to the video games i was using to self-soothe. so, even though it felt extremely self-indulgent and kinda cringe, i tried enjoying them more on purpose

in a small way this accumulated over several months. i gradually started looking for TV shows and movies i thought i would genuinely enjoy instead of just stuff that was comfortably familiar and mind-numbing, and some of them even made me cry a little which was great

i tried several other things, like shaking / wiggling. i continued to feel like i had very few degrees of freedom available to me but if metaphorically moving my pinky was all i could do i was going to see whether i could leverage that into opening up new actions

it's unclear what effect if anything all of this had but yesterday morning i woke up feeling very bad about myself and my life. just felt like a total failure, out of options. i really needed a place to scream and cry but the nearby hill was too cold

to be clear i considered this a huge improvement over feeling numb. this was progress even if it felt very bad at the time

extremely fortunately i had finally worked up to driving again (after 4 months of being too scared - i actually have my mom to thank for this, for giving me an easy opportunity to try driving a little on our way back from the booster appointment)

(lol i ran out of tweets) anyway a few days earlier i was doing a little bit of driving around and i realized cars are pretty sound-insulated, and i could talk to myself and yell and sing without anyone really being able to hear, and this was AMAZING

so i looked for a place nearby where i could park and be reasonably far away from people, found a park i hoped was going to be mostly empty because it was raining, went there, parked, cried, screamed, cried again

that was already great. i felt like 70% better but also nothing felt really resolved. and then i managed to do another thing i've been too scared to do for months and ask for help

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· Dec 21, 2021

having a real bad time. thanksgiving is over but if anyone wants to take this opportunity to tell me something they're grateful to me for - something i said or did or wrote - i could really use it rn

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even considering writing that tweet made me tear up a bit so it felt like the right way to go. i've been holding back on tweeting like this for awhile, it's felt a lot less safe than it used to, gradually over the last year and then suddenly in the aftermath of the acid thread

but i guess i have gotten more desperate or something 😅 anyway the response was just incredible, thank you all so so much, you really came through for me. it was exactly what i was hoping for - you all reminding me that i did things that mattered to you

it's hard for me to describe how useless i felt yesterday because i'm not really in it atm but my life felt like such a wreck. there's a specific kind of rando on the internet that mostly regards me as a failed mathematician and that kind of thing was really getting to me

the glory days on twitter where we were all opening our hearts to each other felt far away and i feel a lot more connected to them now. what we were doing was good and i'm glad we did it. and maybe we could continue a little more in that vein too

sorry, this ended up being *really* long, i should probably have separated the theory and the personal bit into two threads. i have a lot of pent up tweets okay. this is all really rough drafts and several poorly connected pieces, idk how easy this is to follow at all

so, connecting back to "focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of": part of what i've been doing lately is not reading the twitter TL, because too much of it felt like it was fear and anxiety and things to avoid and i had way too much of that already

twitter can easily become a machine that gives you more reason to not do things, more things to be afraid of, more connections between things you were already afraid of and new things. it can entrench the paralysis of depression and that was not what i wanted or needed

Watch Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop | Netflix Official Site

what i needed was the tiniest accessible slivers of joy, to remember that it was possible for things to feel good, to remember that this was a thing people wanted. a few movies on netflix were surprisingly good for this, for me. this one is very charming:

netflix.com

After meeting one bright, sunny day, a shy boy who expresses himself through haiku and a bubbly but self-conscious girl share a brief, magical summer.

narnia was another thing i was looking at in the same vein. c.s. lewis was increasingly striking me as a very rare sort of writer who embodied so much of what i cherished, and reading him felt nourishing in a way i really appreciated

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