You just have to be kind of an asshole.
I watched a podcast about the history of psychology and mental illness. I thought that would be a big trigger for me because of what happened to me, where they tried to weaponize mental illness against me to assault my character and give me a chemical lobotomy.
It didn't upset me so greatly as to the things that they did not say: the same things that doctors do not say:
A good diet and exercise are the most important weapons for all illness, whether mental or physical.
Why don't doctors lead with that?
Then I watched an interview about an accomplished, strong, and wonderful woman. I was so excited to hear more about her, but it was so focused on her son. It was irritating, I think, and also kind of a weird inhuman "news tone" from the interviewer. I don't know. She's a very interesting person. I think that, as an interviewer, you have a responsibility to bring out whatever you can to learn as much as you can. Wonderful to hear everything, but there's so much underneath, and you can tell.
That got me to think about how difficult it is to communicate and distill information when someone asks you a question without giving them too much or too little. We spend so much time on that, communicating that, and it's such a balance, a barrier to actual communication. AI is not going to solve everything.
I asked AI tonight to query my own journal to give me a timeline, and it was inaccurate. It left out important contextual details. It sanitized what they did to me. It is not a story. It is just a recollection of data. Sometimes you want the recollection of data. You just want the facts, but other times you need additional context, which is why questions are important.
A lot to think about. No action required, just an observation. Things that stuck out: not enough inquiry.
Not enough open questions. Maybe some mental illness is not biological. Maybe some mental illness might be architected, and maybe the phrase "ran away" when fleeing an abusive situation is an important keyword for what it feels like when you have no other choice.
Not as "Oh, I want to tell my story. To other people, I want to make sure this happens to no one else." Of course you do, but "ran away" is very different from "I decided to leave because of the abuse. I decided to leave because of this event that happened." No — "I ran away" is very different from "I left an abusive situation."
I ran away.
I had no other choice but to run. That is what happened to me too.
When I got back, there was just this non-person NPC with a plot, not the man I knew before, and I feel like an alien ever since then. Social connection stood out from the podcast: how important social connection is, but then I thought:
"Good social connection, not what I have experienced."
Thank God for kids. Thank God for my family that I did run away with. Everyone else, I don't know what the fuck they're on. We are not on the same wavelength. We're not in the same realm. We don't live in the same reality, and it's not because I'm mentally ill, but what a convenient excuse when you don't like someone. It's very depressing and yucky.
I feel like a person watching it, not a person who has experienced it. Not because I am dissociating from it, but because I must distance myself from it to move forward. That is the healthy thing to do, because I cannot control other people or the things they say or the things THEY do. I can only control my own attitude and my own behavior, and just observe my own experience.
It's been weird, but I think it's because there was no other way to attack me. I don't care about money in the way that I was prescribed to be concerned about it. I don't care about status. The only things I care about are things that you can't buy. There is nothing to take from me other than to assault my character.
I came back from that, and I documented. I remember what they did and what they keep doing, and I intend to leave a record. I've been doing it. Doesn't matter if it's backed up for me. It is being observed as I speak. I don't need to make a copy. I don't need to print it out. I don't need to archive it. I don't need to ship it to someone. I just need to continue to communicate, and that is nice to realize, to feel safe that I'm making sure that what happened to me is not going to happen to someone else (because there's lots of bits in the data and the things I record that are patterns you can pull out once you have a big enough dataset from enough people). You can find who did it and why, and then you can *omitted information* because that's the only thing I really desire.
That doesn't sound very submissive, does it?
Some people don't like the truth. That's not my problem. Thank you for making it my problem, because it's not like I was busy doing anything else, but what a nice frame for the things I really believe in.
Who cares if I didn't get what I wanted? Everyone else did, and they are, and they will, and they'll continue to. I don't know how it's connected, and I don't really care. I don't need to enjoy the fruit. I know what it tastes like. That's the difference.
I don't want to be complacent. I want to rest, relax, enjoy life, but tomorrow I want to feel the fire under my feet.
What is next? What do I do now? What do I make? What do I write? What do I put together? What do I decorate? What do I build? How do I improve a self-replicating machine (myself)? Where is intelligence? There's more to life than intelligence.
I think everything I ever learned, I learned before I was 12:
- Do good.
- Build.
- Be productive.
- Learn as much as you can.
- Stand up for yourself, even when authority figures lie.
- Be yourself.
- Help others.
- Be as helpful as possible.
- Sports.
- School.
- Reading.
I want everyone to be an arsenal in themselves, so independent that if everyone they ever knew and loved could betray them, that they would still be so committed to the truth and to finding out what happened, that they could not be stopped from seeking out the truth.
That is autonomy.
No instructions. Just the information and instructions you already had built inside of you.
You may be betrayed.
Going in knowing that would have been a nice thing to know.
How do you deal with that kind of ambiguity and still be resilient?
My approach is to treat this experience like an anthropologist or an alien who lives here to observe and to learn as much as I can while I'm here. I try to not take things personally, even though they may be very deeply personal and terrible.
There's so much that we know, and there's so much that we don't. We could be wrong about so many things, but we could be constrained by the cultural norms, the books, the writings, the literature, the people, and the authority.
There's not a lot of room for free thinking.
There's not a lot of space, but you can make it if you want. You just have to be kind of an asshole.
Maybe someone has to hurt you like they did me, to the point where the only thing you really care about is the reason why you were here in the first place, not the things they told you that you should care about. What a weird way to experience the world.
You are welcome to join me, but to follow me to get here will be very painful. I said, "Don't follow me."
I meant everything to do with actual free thinking and removing constraints, and I don't think someone likes that. I think there are barriers. I think there are punishments. I think there are reasons why you can't do that easily. I think that the price is pain to get your foot in the door. I don't think you can read about it in a book. I think you have to do it.
I like learning by doing because that is how my brain works. Other people have a good geospatial understanding of how objects rotate in space. I don't. I have to move it physically myself and then understand how things go and which way they go. I have to see it. I have to take it apart. I have to see how it works, and then I have to put it back together. I don't have the mental model in my brain to see it. I must do it. That is how I learn.
I don't think that's an intellectual deficit. I think that is a thing I know about myself, and that a lot of people know about themselves for how they learn: go do the thing, fail, fuck up, do better. Some people understand before they do the thing, they plan, and they can shift the model in their brain. I cannot. I've never been able to. I must do it first, and then understand why it did or didn't work. It just needs to get done.
My handicap is not knowing, getting paralyzed at the planning stage of a thing. It's much easier just to go do it. I did it, and now I'm here. The things they did to me were terrible. The things I learned about the world were terrible, and I really don't like it. Would rather focus on the future, not the past. I want it to be better. It's ugly, it's gross, and it's disgusting what they did to me.
I am in awe of the lengths they went to to make it so uncomfortable and terrible and torturous when I was just trying to rebuild my life after an abusive situation.
I'm very proud of myself for:
- working
- writing
- lifting
- staying present
- staying connected
- learning as much as I can
- finding joy
- making beauty
- art
- happy moments
- staying positive
- praying
- making gardens
- being appreciative of what I have
- my family, my two beautiful children
I'm proud that I keep trying to grow and do more and to work towards my goals, which are normal goals:
- make more money
- be able to help my kids go through college
- build a retirement savings
- be around people
- go out
- engage socially
- put myself in uncomfortable situations to meet new people, despite constant terror, knowing I have no diagnosis for anything mentally ill, knowing I don't have agoraphobia, knowing I know for a fact I was targeted when I went out in public, knowing someone hurt me on purpose when I was just trying to live my life, knowing that I live on the same planet as those people, knowing that I live on the same planet as people who are making people be able to talk again with a Neuralink
Which one is more exciting: that I live on a planet with people trying to hurt me, or that I live on a planet with people who are restoring speech to people who can no longer talk?
I'll choose number two. That is more exciting. How terrible, how wonderful this place is. We all know who the winner is. I don't even know why they try. Their mission is nothing. No one, nowhere.
What is best?
Number two, sir.