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
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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
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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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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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to be clear i considered this a huge improvement over feeling numb. this was progress even if it felt very bad at the time
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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)
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(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
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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
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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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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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:
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about to read the narnia books for the first time. anyone have strong opinions on the correct order? i'm reading a big book that has them in chronological order but i'm leaning publication order
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and it's hard for me to convincingly establish any kind of causality even to myself let alone to someone else but maybe some of that stuff helped inspire me to take the leap and ask you guys for help yesterday, and trust that that was something you'd want to do
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phew, so many tweets, this feels like a good place to stop. if you managed to make it this far thanks for listening 🙏 AND PLEASE REMEMBER
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focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of
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i’m probably gonna break this up into multiple threads and try to describe some stuff better, i think i was trying to connect too many ideas and didn’t quite stick the landing 😅 but at least none of these tweets are gonna get me main character’d
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one more thread that served as inspiration here
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When skills and tasks are learned and deployed the attentional schema is busy paying attention to negative examples and generalizing across them. But now your attention is taken up by a bunch of things to avoid, which generalizes to 'avoid' and ultimately to dissociation.
4/
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My decision-making phenomenology used to be extremely fucky in a way that I expect to be shared between most rats: deciding was VERY HARD because one wrong decision might make EVERYTHING BAD FOREVER them. No slack at all. Just BIG BAD. This came out in multiple ways:
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find the tiniest slivers of joy
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This is literally the actualization of @jordanbpeterson’s message
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