branchingcrossroads - Tumblr blog

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Realized that I feel obligated to wait for permission before I'm "allowed" to be strong. I haven't been letting myself act strong or confident. Part of me expects that the moment I do, someone will attack me, try to take me down a peg. "You think you're so smart? Want me to remind you of all the stupid things you did over the years?" "You really think you can do this? No you can't! Trust me, I've seen enough failures from you to know!" "Well maybe your opinions would be worth something if you got your act together. What are you even doing with your life? Do you really expect to be taken seriously when (your living space is a mess / you don't work full-time / you dress for comfort not style / you refuse to get your crooked tooth straightened / insert any other arbitrary criteria here)?" And I'm afraid that if someone "calls me out" like that, I'll buckle. Because it's true, I have done stupid things in the past, and I have failed, and I don't have my act together ((not that I'd let anyone touch my crooked tooth or rope me into a full-time job)). And these kinds of arguments have been used against me in the past when I couldn't fight back. ((I tried, sometimes. It would be used against me and just make things worse. There was no winning. The only thing to do was surrender and wait for it to be over. To listen with contrition, nod and shake my head and apologize in all the right places, until the mockery and yelling and finger-pointing run their course.)) It was safer to be small and meek, to doubt myself and defer to others. So that's what I did. What I was trained to do. And now that I'm allowed to fight back - when I can give myself permission to fight back - I don't know how. My brain shoots me down before anyone else can.

Yesterday I wanted to tell my person "I'm proud of myself for ((handling a situation))", but what I managed was "I guess I'm kinda proud of myself?" (((I was on the verge of adding 'not that it's a big deal', before my person cut in with "I'm proud of you". My brain went 'oh, I'm allowed! They agree, so I'm permitted to think I did well!' and then I had no trouble feeling confident and proud. About this specific situation. For the moment. (Because god knows, being told 'you did well' now doesn't mean it won't later be used as evidence of your selfishness or arrogance or laziness. 'You took one step in the right direction and you think that gives you bragging rights? That you never need to work hard again? That people will just respect you forever after?') )))

(And don't get me started on all the times I told people "actually, my pronouns are they/them", and consciously willed myself to stop talking,...and couldn't help adding a quiet little "if you don't mind" >__< )

But guess what. I don't need your goddamn permission. I don't have to wait on your goddamn approval. Maybe I'm not ready to act on it now. Maybe I don't know when, or if, I'll actually believe it. But I'm starting to think that maybe one day I will.

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From today's conversation with V.

- I have to say, you are the most reasonable angry person I've ever talked to. - Thanks! It's the trauma.

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Been reading some H/C and talking to my person and attending a program and thinking, and,,,

"You need to get better so that you can start being useful again. You need to get better so that you can pull yourself together and GET BACK TO WORK." (('work' meaning 'whatever's expected of you', not necessarily 'job')) You can get a reprieve while you're weak, but as soon as you are stronger, you'll be expected to work yourself to the bone again. It never ends. “Just (...) and THEN you can rest” always ends up being a lie. You can't say “no, I don't want to get back to work” (or even admit it to yourself) - that's selfish and greedy (or at best 'weak and useless', or 'whining' or 'exaggerating' or 'trying to get attention' or 'feeling sorry for yourself') - "you think you're the only one who has problems? you think YOU're struggling? you think you have a right to complain when you've got it so easy? you think others have to wait on you hand and foot? how dare you - aren't you ashamed - burdening others - bad bad bad stupid unacceptable"

You can't allow yourself to feel better for a while or do something enjoyable, because “if you can do this, clearly you're fine, stop malingering and get back to work”. (eg. “so you want to (play a game/learn about a topic/etc)? why aren't you putting that energy into (looking for a job/cleaning your home/meeting more people/etc)?”) ((Unless the activity is something 'sanctioned' and 'socially approved', in which case you CAN participate, but you can't show (and therefore feel) much enjoyment or energy or motivation or skill, otherwise “if you can do this, clearly you're able to do all kinds of things, now get back to work”))

And since your brain caught on to the pattern, it learned that: "Getting better is unacceptable" "Getting better only leads to more pain, exhaustion, useless struggling" "Getting better means you have no excuse" "Getting better means people will resume expecting more than you can give" "Getting better means people will go back to holding you to a standard you can't meet, you'll keep falling short, they'll keep getting angry at you or disappointed or frustrated" "Getting better means losing whatever sympathy you're getting" "Getting better means losing whatever help you're getting" "Getting better means losing whatever reprieve you're currently allowed to have"

So things that 'help' feel like a threat - they are tools to make you 'get better' so that you can be pushed beyond your limits again. So that you're able to push yourself beyond your limits again. So that you can be hurt again. So that you can go back to letting yourself be hurt. To ignoring when it hurts. To squeezing yourself for every last drop.

And part of your brain doesn't want that. 'Getting better' is a threat.

So there's a level of resistance even (especially!) to the most basic things that are helpful or positive or comforting. And you don't even know why. You're hungry, the food looks good, but for some reason you can't bring yourself to eat. You'll feel better after you take your meds, but you find yourself just staring at the bottle for minutes at a time before you can make yourself open it...only to then sit there with pill in hand, willing yourself to just take it already, what's the holdup, what the hell Branch, you KNOW this will help, just do it. You used to love going into your hideout, it used to feel safe and comforting - now even imagining it stresses you out. Hearing "it's OK, you can do it, I'll help, I believe in you" makes you panic, and you don't know why. This is supposed to be encouraging, so why are you suddenly frantic to make the person give up on you? (Because on some level it feels like- not even a threat - a sentence. “It's OK, now stop whining before I lose my patience. I know you can do it, stop pretending like you can't, I'm not letting you weasel out of it. I'll help you do it or I'll MAKE you do it, but you're getting this done whether you like it or not. I believe in you, you better not disappoint me.”)

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...I’m getting a divorce.

- “Do you have a family?” - “Actually, I’m married to my job.  By the way, if you hear me shrieking and sobbing in my office, don’t be alarmed, it’s just a lovers’ quarrel.”

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Goblin food of the day: Caesar not-salad. Recipe: Grab some lettuce leaves from the garden. Rinse well. (Munch a lettuce leaf. Discover it’s bitter from water stress, because goblin garden is cared for sporadically. Find a clover leaf among the lettuce. Rinse it too and eat it.) Microwave some frozen grilled chicken strips. Put a grilled chicken strip on a lettuce leaf. Add some Caesar dressing. Wrap the leaf around the chicken strip. No cutting required. Nom.

Goblin treat of the day: unripe raspberries. Because who has the patience to wait a few more days when they are already turning pink.

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…thought of a crossover AU between “Echopraxia” and “Mostly Harmless”, and now I can’t un-think it. Arthur Bruks stumbles through space with help from Ford Moore, Random Sengupta is on a misguided-but-heartfelt quest to find meaning and/or payback, all of them unwittingly following a script orchestrated by Portia Mark II…

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Home.

Tomorrow I’m going home. Tomorrow I’m going either home or insane.

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Tomorrow I’m going either home or insane.

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No longer feeling fearless and listening to nothing but “Days N Daze”. It was good while it lasted.

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My world has gone insane. I don’t know any other way to put it.

A scary-but-minor choice led to one thing, that thing led to another, and, well,,,

The cages and dead-ends and deep holes that my brain ended up in / cocooned itself with aren’t looking like my final destination anymore. And now that I see a possibility of escape, they all seem so much more,,, arbitrary? optional?

Don’t know how long this will last, and that’s scary. It’s not all up to me, and that’s scarier. But, well...

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Realized that there’s one medium of “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy” that I wasn’t familiar with. Now playing the game. (In small-ish chunks. With frequent breaks to air out my brain.) (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN2PLZG/the-game-30th-anniversary-edition)

((somewhat-spoilers below for “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy” game))

Fell in love with it at the Babel Fish puzzle. Each step being a breakthrough, thinking “I’ve got it!!“, and seeing that yes, I was right, this was the answer!.. ...part of the answer. In some ways, the game feels like the closest I’ll get to getting into the head of one of my favourite authors. The first "port door” puzzle was a little frustrating, then funny. The second “port door” puzzle was quite frustrating, then hilarious. Getting the Improbability Drive working has been the longest/most frustrating part so far, but today I finally managed it. (Connecting everything together was easy. Realizing that you don’t need to connect EVERYTHING together was harder.) I’ve been repeatedly tempted to look up the hints, but held off so far. The payoff (when I finally find the answer) is worth the frustration. ((Does this count as building distress tolerance?..)) Also, the sheer joy of guessing the Thing’s properties, and discovering that yes indeed, you can use it to break the laws of physics and common sense!

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Discovered that “positive nihilism”/“optimistic nihilism” is a philosophy in its own right, and not just a term to throw around when trying to describe, say, Douglas Adams’s writing. Finally, a worldview I can get behind! Not to mention it explains what appeals to me so much about some of my favourite characters/books/authors.

I’m already halfway there. Just need to work on the “positive” part.

--- “I’m a nihilist, so forgive me for coming off harsh, but I think this needs to be said.” Ford closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened them again, he said conclusively, “Everything you're worried about? It doesn't matter.” Arthur scoffed. “Excuse me?” “You heard me,” Ford repeated. "None of it matters. All that jazz about the point of life?  Well, it just so happens, there is no point to life! Some existentialists like to spout crap like, 'There’s no purpose until you give it purpose.' But even that’s a lie. "Let me tell you what life is, Arthur. Life is stupid. It’s convoluted and confusing and hilarious and terrifying, and no amount of wishful thinking or goal-oriented attitudes is going to change that.” (~“So Long, and Thanks For All the Gender” by heliocentricity, AO3)

--- “Once you make peace with just being a lump of meat on a rock, you can stop stressing and appreciate the rock.” (~“Sunny nihilism” article, “The Guardian”)

--- "... You must have come here for some reason." "Well, I—" Milo began. "Come now, if you don't have a reason, you must at least have an explanation or certainly an excuse," interrupted the gateman. Milo shook his head. "Very serious, very serious," the gateman said, shaking his head also. "You can't get in without a reason." He thought for a moment and then continued. "Wait a minute; maybe I have an old one you can use." He took a battered suitcase from the gatehouse and began to rummage busily through it, mumbling to himself, "No... no... no... this won't do... no... h-m-m-m... ah, this is fine," he cried triumphantly, holding up a small medallion on a chain. He dusted it off, and engraved on one side were the words "WHY NOT?" "That's a good reason for almost anything— a bit used perhaps, but still quite serviceable." (~ “The Phantom Tollbooth”, Norton Juster)

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- “Do you have a family?” - "Actually, I'm married to my job.  By the way, if you hear me shrieking and sobbing in my office, don’t be alarmed, it's just a lovers' quarrel.”

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Nearing the end of “The Crying of Lot 49″, and I can only assume I’m as confused as the author intended. PS. “Genre: Postmodern novel, paranoid fiction“ Well at least it’s not classified as comedy. Considering my recent track record, I was starting to wonder.

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I've finished Echopraxia. Validating to see Peter Watts noticed the same fridge logic issues with Blindsight vampires that I did:

"Pretty good hack right?" Admiration mingled with fear in Sengupta's voice. "Can you imagine what those fuckers could do if they actually could stand to be in the same room together?"

He shook his head, amazed, trying to take it in. "That's why we made sure they couldn't."

"Made? I thought they were just you know. Really territorial."

"Nobody's that territorial. Someone must've amped their responses to keep them from ganging up on us." Bruks shrugged. "Like the Crucifix Glitch, only - deliberate."

"How do you know that I haven't seen that anywhere."

"Like you said, Rak: it's the only model that fits. How do you think the line could even breed if their default response was to eviscerate each other on sight? Call it the, the Divide and Conquer Glitch." He smiled bitterly. "Oh, we were good." - Echopraxia.

Yeah, not just how they'd even breed if they were like that, but as I kind of touched on previously, "how did any vampires survive their childhoods?" is a huge fridge logic issue with the "vampires kill each other on sight" thing. It makes no sense for a highly intelligent hominid species to kill each other on sight because humans are possibly the most intensely K-strategist animals on the planet and we're like that because we're smart; human babies are extremely vulnerable and dependent because of the big infant head problem and human children need a long period of learning and lots of attention for that extended phenotype of culture to be passed on. Vampires would need a huge exception to the "totally selfish and super-aggressive toward each other" rule just to explain how any vampire survived their childhood, let alone to explain how they managed to develop and maintain any culture (like that click language they supposedly had), and having culture is one of the primary advantages of being smart. And if vampire children were at all like human children I can't even really see it working with just a mother-child bond, for the first years at least there's probably going to need to be at least one other "parent" (father, grandmother, aunt, whatever) to hunt while the mother is stuck with the extremely dependent young child, so that implies that cooperative relationships between adult vampires were possible and common.

Really, the implication is right there even in Blindsight itself, in the part where it speculates that ancient vampires had a language and specifically a language designed to imitate natural sounds so they could talk to each other while sneaking up on prey and you can hear traces of this in modern vampire vocal tics. That implies ancient vampires hunted cooperatively, talked to each other substantially, and had their own culture!

The book suggests this was a genetic tweak (the index mentions alterations to facial recognition mechanisms), but I think it would make a lot of sense if a lot has to do with differences in upbringing. This is the way Echopraxia describes the social environment modern vampires are kept in:

Every vampire ever brought back from the junkyard: scrupulously isolated from their own kind, every aspect of their environment regulated and monitored. Hemmed in by crosses and right angles, mortally dependent on precisely rationed drugs to keep them from seizing at the sight of a windowpane. Creatures that, for all their terrifying strength and intelligence, couldn't even open their eyes on a city street without keeling over.

...

He shook his head. "They'd never have met. Vampires are hardly ever allowed in the same wing of a building at the same time, let alone the same room. And if they did meet they'd be more likely to tear out each other's throats than draw up escape plans."

So, modern vampires have been raised entirely by people with a radically different neurotype (humans) who have no idea what parenting styles a vampire child would respond well to, in total isolation from any members of their own species. This sounds to me like a recipe for profound social and psychological maladjustment.

Imagine you're a member of a species with low-trust social intuitions and you've been raised by weak, slow, stupid, timid people you intuitively recognize as prey and who are very obviously afraid of you, and then you meet a member of your own kind; a stranger as fast and strong and smart and fierce as you who can credibly look at you and think "I can take them." I bet you'd feel really threatened!

So, yeah, I think plausibly the primary reason ancient vampires weren't so psychotically aggressive toward each other is they had their entire childhoods to get acclimatized to dealing with people with about the same capabilities and mindset as themselves and develop emotional and psychological resources for that.

I like the idea that, like, ancient vampires were profoundly not nice people (for one thing they literally ate people, for another thing given Siri's emotional reaction to Jukka's mannerisms I really doubt most of the ancient vampire DNA in humans got there consensually), but modern vampires are like a Flanderized parody of them with a lot of their worst traits amped up to eleven, because they're kind of like feral children. Like, if an ancient vampire met Jukka or Valerie they'd be like "oh my God, you poor messed-up feral child, what happened to you?"

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A “cup of decaf and a caffeine pill” kind of day.

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“What next, will it turn out that ‘Cat’s Cradle’ is also considered comedy?“ Looked it up, and, well,,,... I’m honestly baffled. I want to sit down with someone, read it together, and compare notes every few pages.