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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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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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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Hey thank you for writing this 🙏🏻 unconscious contracts is something new to me that I’m gonna chew on, something about it feels quite striking
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it’s been quietly sitting in the back of my mind for awhile, feels important. i haven’t actually read anything about how to release yourself from them though which is the actual juice 😅
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