Day by Day: Weekly Reflections on a Personal Project
Tuesday Reflections on my journey towards a computational model of dissociative amnesia
Week of July 7th through 13th
Starting off with a sign not to care too much about grades or attribute it to your success. One of the only classes I did really well in first semester was my Biological Psychology class. I got a 68.9 which is good in UK grading, like an A- or so. In my second semester, I had a cognitive psychology class. I was present. I enjoyed it a lot. Our paper was worth 100% of our final grade, but I felt pretty confident because the prompt was “How reliable is long term memory”. Since I had just spent the last year and a half of my life on this theme completely unprompted, I figured I was bound to do a pretty good job. I actually even enjoyed thinking through the question and putting the paper together. It felt like one opportunity in a year of psychology-heavy coursework I wasn’t very passionate about to talk about something I was interested in. Unfortunately, I got a 50, which is the lowest you can get without failing. I thought I did a good job but I suppose not, which is pretty frustrating as I want to go into a neuroscience program next. We haven’t gotten any feedback so I have no idea why. Definitely a little frustrating and makes me nervous for my dissertation which I’m about to delve into but this experience has taught me to be more focused on actually changing something I care about and doing good work than focusing on what some grader says. It left me feeling a little bit down and confused when I saw the grade actually finalised in my final report. Luckily this project is worth a third of my final grade so I’m hoping it will offset that but honestly I’ve been feeling like I’ve missed the mark by accident a little bit this year so it’s been making me a little antsy. I’ve spent probably 6 - 7 times as much effort as the average student on this singular paper so if I don’t see that reflected in my grade, I’m honestly going to be a little sad.
This whole experience has made me feel like the Universe is my tiger mom from beginning to end. My senior thesis in undergrad wasn’t able to be submitted completed because of my mental health mess so I left on a sour note and with a self-esteem chip to fix. All of the social outings, book clubs and things, I tried to book to make friends got cancelled. My visa came a week later, confusing my whole schedule and making it hard to meet people so I knew no one in my program. Maybe this 50 and the mid grades are the last push to do the best I can on this thing. I always do better when I feel a bit of spite.
Me and the Universe
I have a lifelong friend visiting this week, Emily. She was meant to be here on Tuesday but a big storm delayed her trip. I took the chance to get some more work done, strategise about my experiments, and start some of my books. The first chapter of “Talk Like Ted”, which I’ve been reading a chapter of per day, is about finding your passion. Passion is literally contagious. The author walks through some example of good speakers and what they were passionate about. It’s often not what you would expect. For example, one speaker was a supermodel who spoke about how her industry changes people’s looks. Her job is being photographed, but her passion is raising women’s self-esteem. The founder of Zappos, an online shoe company, ins’t passionate about shoes. He’s passionate about “delivering happiness”. This reminded me of my absolute favorite self-help book, “The One Thing”, which changes how I moved through the world drastically. The author’s central thesis is that by focusing on the one thing which can do the most, you get a lot further than doing many things. He gave the example of the “Star Wars” franchise. He said successful companies might seem to do many things, but this is an offshoot of doing one thing very well. The “Star Wars” franchise sells merchandise, is featured in theme parks, and has novel adaptations. But the one thing they are most focused on doing well is producing good movies because with good movies, all of the other parts flourish. If my medium grades are any indication, I have been living by “The One Thing” for quite a few years and my “one thing” was this project. When it was between excelling in my psych classes and advancing this paper, I always chose this paper. I knew it would be the thing to advance my career the most, heal me emotionally, and give me a sense of character that would drive my success in life more than doing well in my psychology program. Hopefully that pays off for me. I’ve felt compelled to question myself more, work on my career blindspots like my communication, and develop my consistency, which showed me that it was something worthwhile. I loved writing when I was a child but went through years of low self-esteem about my writing and horrible writer’s block. Because of this project, I now write every week and I’ve even had residual motivation and follow-through to write essays on themes that matter to me. Developing my paper was about much more to me than an assignment. It was about being someone I liked, trusted, and respected. That’s how I knew it was going to be my “one thing”. It’s got a lot of punch to it for me.
So I have my “one thing”. But what is my passion? I don’t think “neuroscience” is a wide enough umbrella for all the things I love and all the things I do. I would say “shifting the framework”. That’s a passion I carry into much of my writing and how I think about the world, including areas like my activism. I hope this project shifts the framework of how we think about dissociative disorders one day. I love coming up with mentalities and self-help tools that change how people approach their lives in unique ways. I try to see my own activism through fresh eyes and ask new questions where I can versus accepting the status quo. I personally think that helps push the world forward better than repeating a mould. It makes me happy to see people think in new ways.
I get whiplash when I see videos of myself speaking because I look and sound like a 24 year old girl but the voice in my head is probably like 36. I don’t really want it to be. I’ve been having a think about that recently. I think I can bring it down if I get my life more settled. I think I forget I’m 24 all the time. I put 36 year old expectations on myself because a 36 year old would have the wisdom to handle my life. That’s a very safe and secure age to be. 24 is scarier than people give it credit for. It’s so chaotic and insecure. 24 is only fun if your mental health is good and your family pays for your stuff. If not, it’s terrifying. There are so many moving factors and things that could go wrong. No one takes you seriously yet. No one wants to pay you real money. They expect you to do so much for free or as low as you can go. You don’t have the stability to do things like go to therapy or pay for pet insurance, which a 36 year old would. You constantly have to think about your next step. It’s like a really scary game of chess. People really play up how great your early 20s are. This was great in its own way but I don’t know anyone who had a great early 20s, except for the people whose family send them money. None of my close friends had the early 20s people on social media have. You either move to a big city and you work 24/7 and stress all the time but at least the scenery is nice and you’re motivated, which I did, or you live at home and you feel lost and confused and like time is slipping by but at least you’re not stressed that your world will fall away from under you. That’s about 75% of the people I know whose families don’t have money to help them fund their fun early 20s lifestyle. I don’t know where this myth came from that your early 20s are the “time of your life”. Maybe people used to have more disposable income or something.
Also the way the economy and job market is set up now, if you don’t start preparing yourself in your 20s and you don’t have some kind of trust fund or a generous family, you’re pretty much shooting yourself in the foot 10 years down the line. People used to work some kind of fun coffee shop job in their 20s and mess around and then get serious in their 30s. These days if you don’t get started as soon as possible, your CV is significantly behind everyone else’s and you’re going to seem unhireable. Sometimes my family thinks I’m too serious. My mom dropped out of journalism school in her 20s, was a trapeze artist, read tarot cards, did theatre, island hopped, whatever all down her 20s and turned out roughly okay. Try sticking “trapeze artist” or “tarot card reader” on your CV right now. You can’t even say it like that. It’d be something like:
Trapeze Rope Strategist
Optimised usage of ropes by moving them strategically in accordance with current trends in the trapese industry, enhancing quality of the performance by 135% in two quarters
Architected customer-oriented routines across multiple departments, mainly the elephant department, to develop a highly integrated performance for an international audience
Divination Analyst
Predicted trends in the financial market and interpersonal networks through mastery of multiple high performance decks, including the Rider Waite package and Morgan Greer package
Secured multiple clients through usage of publication strategies and advertising tools
And even then, you’re competing with Joe Smith the financial consultant whose parents made a ghost listing just for him that you’re going to apply for and get promptly rejected from so some company can get a tax write off or whatever it’s for. I applied for a LinkedIn job the other day, which was sponsored, and upon further research, I found out that they basically reject everyone and send them an ad for CV reviews which is the real reason for the listing (don’t apply for anything by Helic & Co; apparently people have tried reporting them and LinkedIn said it “didn’t go against their guidelines” which says a lot about the job marker right now to me).
This one was laughable to me. It was a mental health company, trying to hire a full time UNPAID graduate research assistant (first of all what kind of crack are you on to even write that out in the first place and think it’s okay), and they wanted you to have knowledge of R Studio and NVivo. I am in debt right now to have knowledge of R Studio and NVivo. You want me to just do that for free? The trade off was the very generous offer of having some great leaders to chat to and learn from, and maybe the occasional training. I was an unpaid research assistant before I got a master’s and had no experience in psychology, which is more of a normal thing that I feel gratefulness for. Slightly less insane. But I’m going to be honest, people are really busy at these places. So I already know what they mean by that is you will get to take some trainings, and you’re also going to have a super overloaded supervisor who is super busy and has very limited time to converse. Which is a more than enough trade off for someone with no masters such as I was. But it’s not a good trade off for someone in debt in a big city. I personally thought the biggest irony was some mental health non-profit trying to run some psychology post-grad’s mental health into the ground for indentured servitude essentially. Very aligned with the company values, I’m sure.
Who even has time to piddle around anymore? I think it’s super sad. It’s a sad, sad world us 24 year olds are living in right now. “Getting serious in your 30s” is equivalent to “working until your 80s” in a lot of cases. You pretty much have to be 36 at 24 to survive or move up even a little.
I wrote last week about reaching a point of forgiveness not for the sake of those who harmed me but for myself. I feel like I met my own emotions needs and also that holding onto the negative feelings was draining me more than them, obviously. I already have enough of a ball rolling for activities that could change the system I felt affected by and the anger wasn’t useful anymore.
I’ve been reaching that point with a lot of other feelings. My anxiety has started dissipating not because my issues are all fixed but I have enough safety in my life and trust in myself that the kind of energy anxiety requires is getting exhausting. I just don’t have it in me to act like a fighter 24/7 and looking around, I don’t seem to need to as much anymore. It’s not supporting me like it used to feel like it did to ruminate and be hypervigilant about whether I would make it. If I’m fired, okay. If I can’t find a job, fine. Will the project be done perfectly on time? No? Alright. Sometimes accepting whatever the consequence is of whatever you’re anxious about is ironically easier and more useful than circling the thought over and over again. I’m just running out of battery power to care and that’s been making me feel better.
Anger made me push through my doubts to force a solution for a disparity that affected me. But I already fixed it.
Anxiety forced me to work harder and get more creative even when I felt horrible burnout and just wanted to lay in bed all day. But honestly laying in bed all day would not kill me now and again like I used to feel like it would.
I took Emily to see the Big Three on Wednesday: Big Ben, London Eye, and Buckingham Palace.
We had a question I never thought about.
“Why is there an R on the inner courtyard door?” I asked. “Is that for royal or something?”
“I don’t know,” said Emily. “Is it their last name or something? R…”
“What are their last names? I’ve never thought about that…”
We stand for a minute.
“William? First name prince last name William?” I say. “I guess I always thought “queen” was kind of like their first name, I don’t know.”
Emily laughs.
“Of Wales? First name Diana, last name of Wales?”
We couldn’t figure it out. We gave up.
Emily is an artist and I always love being around her because I find it beautiful to see her creativity at work constantly. She never stops seeing the world like an artist does. This time around, she brought kneadable erasers and an ink pad so we could make impromptu stamps of the city. My favorite part of our gatherings is always looking through her sketchbook or getting a tour of what she’s been working on.
She spent the whole way home immersed in one of her favorite art practices, which includes making a random scribble from the heart and looking for what shapes she can find inside of them until she has a page of fun characters and figures.
I love creative people. Speaking of, I’ve been slowly accumulating presents here and there for my sister who is graduating with a first from her fashion marketing degree this month. I finally felt like the haul was complete.
I’ve been slowly gathering items at the thrift store and random markets. I picked up some loose leaf tea. I even gathered some art magazines someone was giving away outside of their house. I think they’ll make good photography inspo! I hope she’ll like it.
I keep trying to trace back to where this shift in my life started. It accumulated so fast.
I could go back to when my brain was a mess and my professor assigned me “Wretched of the Earth”.
It could be later when my memories flew out of my brain and I spent my summer finishing a late assignment for Intro to Jacque Lacan. I didn’t even care about the class that much but dragging it out forced me to sit with the idea of psychology more.
But I think the moment it became spiritual was the me of the summer when my friend Jennelle and I decided to do shrooms together. We wanted a little dose, to experience something spiritual before. It wasn’t the first time we had done just that together. This time we took something that would make us feel, not think. She took me to her secret spot, a big bridge over the James River which is pretty much nightmare fuel at 11 PM but Jennelle isn’t scared of anything. Unlike me, who is a scaredy cat.
I told Jennelle I wasn’t feeling anything. In actuality, I was feeling. I just wasn’t thinking anything, which is what makes me feel unsettled. She hands over the chocolate bar and gives me some more.
By the time we get to the river, I’m in another dimension. As we sit on a big dark bridge, my soul starts splitting open into a million pieces, like there’s nothing holding me back from the rest of the universe. We start walking back. I’ll never forget the way this moment felt. I decide I want to listen to music. I play this song:
I couldn’t ever feel the difference between my body and life anymore. I just wanted to dance. I saw the biggest freedom I ever felt. I knew something, something really open.
It lasted only a few minutes before it turned into a kaleidoscope of something familiar that made my stomach turn, scenes of my life. Parts of me that were dark and eerie, things I wasn’t ready for.
I sat in the grass by the side of a bike path while my friend wandered around me a little.
“Jennelle, I’m having a heart attack,” I told her matter of factly. My heart was pounding.
“Raquel, you’re not having a heart attack,” she said. “It’s just anxiety.” But she didn’t sound that sure.
“No, I am. We need to call 911.”
She hesitated longer now. I think she was considering the consequences of being wrong.
“Let’s just go,” she said. “Let’s walk back to my house.”
The kaleidoscope was still spinning. I refused to get up.
“Call my dad,” I said. She looked at me like I was insane.
“He’s not going to care, I swear. He doesn’t care about stuff like this.” Despite raising a massive goody two shoes, my dad truly does not care about stuff like this. I had years of being completely boring to balance me out.
I got home and laid in my sister’s bed. She sympathetically played me some “Adventure Time”. My dad made us a grilled cheese.
The next day, Jennelle called me to make sure I was alive. She said she was so stressed and sad all night. She was convinced she accidentally killed her best friend.
“I was literally fine, it’s okay. Sorry for stressing you out.” Not that Jennelle’s mom would ever read this, but she is the most responsible and hard working girl ever and I would not even have survived life without her so she should get a free pass on this one <3 That was on me for asking for more and doing too much and stressing out her daughter.
I was never the same. I came back that year and I wanted to connect with my ancestors. I wanted them to speak to me, transmute something to me. I wanted the dance again.
A month later I started writing my thesis, an esoteric sort of explanation.
On Thursday, I had a really good company meeting with a consultant which was extremely informative. Now that I’m just about done with master’s, I’ve been spending more time building skills and knowledge for my corporate strategy job. I’ve found myself actually really enjoying the business side much more than I’ve thought. I’m happy I get to use these skills at work but I’ve also been happy to learn them for myself!
One of the main skills I’ve been learning from starting my research career and from going into a corporate job is how to build a good relationship. It’s a very important skill these days in a volatile job market. I remember hearing in a podcast about a year and a half ago that the most important thing is not to make big asks of your personal network for around 6 months. Just get to know people. I heard this before I started my project and thought the best place to start networking was my research assistant company. I just wanted to get to know people who oversaw me and ask questions about what they did. I ended up meeting with one of my supervisors for coffee to ask about her career and learned she had actually studied neuroscience, which I didn’t know. At the end I was able to tell her a little bit about my budding idea and she didn’t think it was random. She actually thought it was intriguing and was even willing to help me set up a meeting with someone else for me. That didn’t pan out because they were busy but that was so encouraging to me that I felt comfortable starting my project about a month or so later. Sometimes just chatting with people is nice! If you’re not transactional, you end up reaping rewards anyways without ruining your relationship.
I’ve actually learned that a successful research career requires a lot more networking than you would expect. From what I’ve observed, much of getting into a good PhD program, getting on good projects, or getting an idea from start to finish requires the ability to hold a good conversation and keep reaching out.
I’ve now been learning how to network in a corporate sector on a bigger scale. I’ve taken on advertising in the last two months, which I was very worried about. I recently took a short course on LinkedIn advertising and it was extremely instructive. For example, I learned that most people won’t buy in the first time they hear your name or see your product. If they interact with your ad, they should be retargeted for a second ad. Once you build familiarity, people will be more invested and might buy in the second or third time they see you, for example. Many of the ideas I learned there were supported on an interpersonal scale. It’s good to work in phases over time, taking the space to learn about people and give them time to trust you. You shouldn’t try to sell or expect a sell from day one, even in someone extremely interested in your product. No one jumps immediately! People are unique as well, which is what you gain from learning about them. People have different buying behaviors, needs, and innate tendencies that can greatly impact how likely they are to actually invest in you. This has all been reminding me of investing a lot as well. Reactive people have a hard time surviving in the long run. People who can listen, take their time, and stick it out over a long period of time without immediate and obvious wins are actually winning under the surface.
I observe things like people’s leadership styles all the time and imagine what I would do in that situation. There is not much representation on leadership for women or content from woman to woman which I think is a shame. I’ve only had male bosses, and sometimes I notice the ways their gender plays a role in their leadership tendencies, from a neutral perspective. I wonder how I would do and what my strengths and weaknesses would be. But I often think of things I would change, strategies I would find important in the future, and what I would implement myself in their place. Everyone has a unique leadership style and priorities! I do listen to leadership podcasts by men, obviously, since that’s what’s available and the advice is still very informative. It’s interesting how your relationship tactics play a massive role on a wider scale. I haven’t gotten all the way up there but I have started taking note of how I act in my friendships and what my own personal weaknesses are. I’ve learned to be a lot less reactive over time and make a detached analysis of who people are in my life. I don’t expect people to change as much, and instead have learned to be strategic about what needs I can realistically get met person-to-person while being more confident about who I am. I’m not perfect but who I am works for me and my life and I feel pretty okay with who I am and what I have to offer more and more as I go through life! So far, I would say it seems that one of the most important parts of effectively leading is being willing to see your blind spots and outsource them. I suck at making spreadsheets, for example. I’m good at synthesizing. I don’t like working with little data. In my dream world, I’d pay someone to make all my spreadsheets and make my reports for me. I already do that with my own things. I buy all my spreadsheets pre-made on Etsy. That’s not my strong suit and it’s okay. One of the biggest difficulties I’ve seen the bosses I’ve worked with have is taking on way too much and having their hands in too many pots. In some places, this made them notoriously hard to reach and caused quality issues in the day-to-day process of the jobs of people on the lower end. In other places, people got way too invested in doing everyone’s job for them which killed lower employees’ trust in their own desire to take initiative. Poor them, it seems to drive them insane and they could be offloading much of that and not looking at them again instead of feeling the need to be and do everything. It makes life work much smoother. You should know what you’re good at and do that, and then hire people you trust well enough to do the rest without too much interference. And say no more when you hit your wall!
Your early 20s are hard but the most fun I’ve had has been learning life. It’s good to be hungry for learning, listen to people, and find a way to enjoy the game. It can be incredibly rewarding.
On Thursday night, I let my friend watch TV and worked on my graphs for an unexpected meeting with my supervisor on Friday. I have never felt so out of my depth and stupid. I had every kind of doubt on this night because I just don’t know what I’m doing 100%. I was making the graphs for my mystery find, the bias issue that produced the hallucinations, random bits that didn’t exist in any of the other patterns — not in the “memory” nor in the noisy pattern, or the “outside world”. I was just looking at it trying to understand if it made sense or not. The “proper” sparsity point is 0.2, meaning that’s where it “should” be. Anything else is too low or too high.
Is this good? Is this useful? Is this junk? Obviously it needs a bit of a visual change. Maybe. Maybe the SD is a bit messy to look at. But is the information good? AHHHH!!!! I wish someone could look at ever detail of my models and see if it’s a mess or not but that’s not something anyone has time for at this level. What I want to talk about is how if the brain cannot account for sparsity, then you get the novelty. That’s already an existing theory, which my model demonstrated pretty neatly (I think).
This one is very interesting too. Lost bits — encoded bits that turned off. Reminds me of my friend’s art piece. I know it sounds a bit silly because I don’t know if the information is good but this one is so beautiful it makes me want to cry. It looks like a mandala or the Big Bang or something with the colors and everything.
This one is not so exciting looking but it’s the net sum, basically meaning as the bias went up, the model was losing more bits than it gained. More memory loss than confabulations, even if there were confabulations. But I have more to go into here. I just wish I had a collaborator right now, someone who could really scour this thing. I’m worried I’m missing marks.
On Friday afternoon I had a meeting with my supervisor while my friend went to what is arguably one of England’s most iconic landmark locations: Gregg’s. My supervisor was actually pleased with these results. He said they were quite interesting and complex for such a simple model. I told him that’s been the most interesting part to me too. This project has honestly surprised me very often and has had a bit of a life of its own. I knew vaguely what I was expecting but I told him I feel like I’ve gotten a lot more than I expected to from this thing.
I have frequently underestimated what I as a beginner could do and often tried to do things that were more complex than necessary but it seems that sometimes you don’t need as much as you think you do and can do much more than expected with very little and keeping things simple. Even last week’s troubleshoot taught me that. For months, I was searching for an expert level fix when it was really a very simple and surface level explanation that was needed. Less can be more!
He thought the graphs were weirdly pretty too! That’s the first thing I thought when I looked at them.
What really put me in a good mood was that he glanced over my paper and said I looked really ahead. That really put me at ease because the deadline is quickly approaching and I’ve been feeling a bit unsettled by having a lot of things to do this month. I have a friend over, I have to sell my furniture and get a move ready, and I’ve been applying to jobs.
Emily and I had a fun day in South Kensington. The Victoria and Albert Museum is one of the best I’ve ever been to.
Also rich people back in the day sucked too but at least they commissioned libraries and beautiful things for us to admire to this day. These days they’re not particularly interested in making grand contributions to be admired by the general public. It’s quite sad they take so much and can’t even give us that! We have some of the culturally lamest and most irrelevant rich people in human history. Also probably some of the most hated and the least respectable with the least interest in intellectualism. The white, empty, featureless aesthetic of their homes and corporate lives will be exactly how they’ll be remembered — giving us absolutely nothing. Except for the heat which closed multiple galleries of the V & A early to protect its guests from heat stroke.
We remarked on how much less “important” craft and handiwork seems to be in art now. It’s so much more about concept.
The book says x. It reminded me of the topic of Ikigai.
When I was a comparative literature and societies student, I made good grades but I didn’t feel that useful. I didn’t know what purpose I would have in the world with that degree. There were so many incredible writers in my program who felt like they understood things better than me and synthesised stronger than me. They structured their thoughts so well. I couldn’t breeze through Derrida or emulate Foucault with the same type of precision or efficiency. I knew how to do what they did but I didn’t feel a sense of purpose. I would anxiously imagine myself in the future learning the game of academia and publishing one more idea into the ocean of ideas, like a big swarm. Would I ever really useful outside of a small academic niche? Maybe I would coin a term one day. Maybe I’d write some kind of anthology. Would I change the world in any way? Where I was, I really doubted it even if I loved the activity of it. It made me feel a little existential. I didn’t feel Ikigai there.
Dissociative amnesia was the biggest issue in my life. I knew that one would change somebody’s life if I could do it. That would be one less problem I left the world with.
In hindsight, the skills I left my degree with were some of the most important in my life. I don’t think I could have gone from English to Neuroscience. But comparative literature teaches you to think without boundaries. Our professors frequently encouraged us to dip into whatever discipline we wanted to and our degree requirements were loose by design. It made me a neuroscientist who could think socially, politically, and psychologically. Dissociative amnesia needed that perspective. It gave me the tools to be a better activist and think critically about myself as well and that did end up developing into unique and important thought processes about things I learned in undergrad, like my positionality. I hope those will eventually be useful.
Maybe it’s my lingering comparative literature sensitivities (we did a lot of translation and archive talk) or the fact that im a Virgo but there’s nothing I love more than people who record things. I was thinking this at the British museum. I have the deepest of respect for people who choose to do things like make the Rosetta Stone. Think of the forethought. We’d know so little without people who chose to collect information or store it well.
Ever since I was a kid I found it to be the highest form of human activity and honestly even love. I filled countless diaries. I spent one summer reorganising my whole bookshelf alphabetically and adding dewey decimal-esque labels to the sides of each book with a post-it note and tape. The system didn’t stick like I wanted it to but I had fun doing it. I loved anything that felt like a collection of a theme. My sister and I had these books and they were my textbooks. They had thick, plush covers and were designed like textbooks with flaps and interactive features (though only a few truly had factual information):
My mom also had a big box called the Art Box which was a chronological collection of art postcards and I loved taking them out and looking at them.
Another elementary school favourite was an anthology of “The Far Side” from Gary Larson. I loved The Far Side.
Some memorable ones from childhood
I’ve been really enjoying making an archive of something important to me as an adult. I had a lot of doubts and felt kind of self-conscious but now that I’m further in my project, I feel grateful. I like seeing where I was emotionally throughout my project, what I learned and how I learned it, and what life was like around me. It gives me the same type of childhood happiness, and the same enjoyment of walking in a museum and learning niche things like what perfume bottles looked like or that Egyptians carried around clay ears.
Science gives me that happiness too. I can’t express how many times I’ve found the perfect article about something niche and almost felt emotional in my stomach which gratefulness at how useful that information is. Science is probably the biggest and most organised archive of all.
This era of my life has been like strapping someone to a treadmill. Everything is back to back, no room for error, no room for break. I graduated, my house was sold, I immediately had to fly off for Brazil to the month, ran back, started figuring out jobs, we moved my sister to school in the UK, my dad sold his apartment a month later, I moved into my friend’s apartment and she was evicted a month later forcing me to move to London with nothing. It was either that or my soon to be stepmom’s basement. I ran to get a job, ran to get an apartment, ran to all my jobs to make rent, ran to apply to master’s, ran to finish my research assistant job on a tight squeeze to for dissertation deadlines, started master’s while running to get this project set, work got hectic, I ran to class, ran to accommodate my job getting more demanding, ran to get a supervisor, ran to finish my assignments, and then the summer came and I ran to get more serious at work and suddenly everyone was coming to visit. First Rio with my mom. Then my friend. She leaves on the 16th and my family is coming on the 16th. Then it’s my sister’s graduation. I have to move houses one week later, so I’m running to sell furniture. And I’m running to finish my paper. The minute the paper is finished, I’m going to Mauritius. I just want to stop running so bad. I’m exhausted. Things were no different in undergrad with PTSD. Running to heal. Getting extensions for all my papers. Never having time to see my family on breaks from all the extensions I got to run to finish school in four years while my reality was in bits and pieces. I want a year off. I want a vacation, no expectations, no one around, quiet room, no assignments, no financial pressure, just rest. Real rest, not “running from place to place for fun” rest. My parents have no money to send me. They’re constantly in the hole. As the oldest, I feel horrible pressure too. I want them to be okay and my sister to be okay because she has no one to get money from either. We have a biweekly call that goes something like:
“Can I borrow 10 dollars? I’ll pay you right back.”
“Sure but I’m really low right now. I have to pay rent next week so I’m really worried.”
“We don’t have anyone to ask for money from. Why does no one have money. I’m basically forcing myself to spend £5 a day.”
“I’m applying to jobs right now. We’ll make it, let’s just have faith.”
The pressure to perform this year has been really high. It’s really fuelled my hard work. I need to do well. I need to do something to move my life up, tho up an income bracket. It’s nothing as easy as it used to be. Not even a master’s degree is as valuable as it was.
The job market is in shambles. Would moving back to a dictatorship make my life easier or cheaper right now? AHHHHH!!!!
Crazy times. Emily and I were part of a childhood trio that consisted of one other friend who is very busy and has been pretty much MIA for the last 6 years. I’ve been thinking of her often this week. She does theatre in Orlando now. She and I were very dorky and we loved fandoms. We did very cool things like go to the Dan and Phil live show and read fanfiction together. She was the one who introduced me to “Hamilton” when we were 15 and I have loved it ever since (maybe more for the nostalgia factor now). “Non-Stop” was my favorite song in the musical. It’s pretty much my life.
and “Satisfied”! Big sister core.
We took some time on Saturday evening to try out some British specific candy. Squashies are top tier. Fry’s Turkish Delight…? Not our fav.
Back to work over our movie. Some more graphs:
My sparsely coded model is continuing to not be as accurate as I want but I’m really starting to give up on getting it perfect now and am just going to allow a disappointing amount of inaccuracy. This is my first time doing this and I honestly just don’t have the experience to fix this. Changing the lam does nothing. I don’t know what the issue could be anymore. I’ve troubleshot this for literal months now and I’m just tired of it. I’m torn on what to do now. It’s more accurate overall but has kind of a weird shape to it and just isn’t perfect. The hard part about being a novice is that I don’t know where the line is between my model being incorrectly done, or some kind of interesting and explainable result.
In this week’s meeting, my supervisor mentioned making a visual where the actual tangible output is represented via squares, like pixels which are on or off. Which is a smarter idea than what I was going to do, aka show the numbers themselves. Maybe that will still tell a good story, even if my model seems a little impacted.
In my meeting, I also said something that I hadn’t really thought about until I said it. In my densely coded model, the patterns turned off all at once, as in 1 whole line would die at a time. In my sparsely coded model, the amnesia appeared neuron by neuron, or bit by bit. It looked like bits of each line being slowly lost within the line itself, so it happened all over in all places, not all at once in one place. This is probably because the bits were getting updated through an asynchronous update rule, which is typical in sparsely coded models, meaning they are made to be updated one at a time in a random order. This stops them from over-exciting each other. I’ll probably take one look at that and see if this is where the issue is.
This setup makes sense because in real life, our neurons don’t necessarily line up in neat lines that create a chunk of memory. If I can let this sit and figure this out and be in a better place, both in my paper and in my model (maybe).
I did pop out on my own at around midnight to catch the last half hour of the Norway versus England game.
I was in a little bit of a glum mood from my 66.7% but England winning did cheer me up.
Not as much as if Brazil had won but happy still.
I went back to work for a little when I went home. What was bothering me was that the old model was less accurate but the crossover point was neater and there was still that pronounced difference.
This was really a Sunday problem and I decided to sleep on it. I did spend a little bit of time planning some of my other figures which also boosted my self-esteem a little.
I can’t believe this is getting so close so the degree that I have real life graphs inside my model. These are probably “final copies”. I just need to position them right now. AHHHHH :))))))))))
Sunday morning consisted of making a first rough draft of the graphic with squares my supervisor referenced while my friend caught up on sleep from all the walking I’ve subjected her to over the last few days.
The noisy pattern is like the “outside world”, meaning that if my model is closer to that, it’s producing amnesia. After all that work, I was wondering if I’d picked a bad seed to demonstrate what I’d seen. This one pretty much developed amnesia by ACh 0.4, which was a little earlier than usual. You can see that at 0.3, the top pattern was closer to the stored pattern with a little noise and the bottom pattern recalled perfectly. But the middle pattern is identical to that in the noisy pattern. This means that my model was able to remember mostly everything, but it couldn’t recall a bit. That’s a bit closer to the type of fragmentation you would see in someone with a healing trauma or who was sort of “out of the woods” with it but still feeling impacted. At 0.4 and higher (and that number was different for every seed but tended to be around 0.6), they couldn’t remember anything. This would probably be something you would see in someone with very bad trauma symptoms with hyperarousal, or someone who had just left “the scene of the crime”, or someone who was still living it.
This last World Cup Game left me in a very awkward spot emotionally. England versus Argentina for the semi-finals is a horrible position to put a Brazilian-American living in the UK. Being Latina, I should root for Latinos above all. But Argentina is Brazil’s rival country. I live in England now as well. Do I betray Latinos and root for England? Do Brazilians put aside their beef in this circumstance and let Argentina have their moment? Is this an “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” situation thus actually forcing me to root for England anyways? As an American, is it time to root for our colonisers after 3 years in the UK? After all the tea we dumped? HELP!!!
I’ve been having a spiritual renewal this week. I don’t think it’s because my project is going right. Something just clicked for me this week and I’ve been feeling really comfortable, like I really understand faith for the first time. I’ve started feeling better calling myself a Christian and feeling good in my own practice. This was actually weirdly amplified by reading about Zohran Mamdani’s wife Rama Duwaji going on an Islamic spiritual retreat. Which sounds like the weirdest thing ever because she’s obviously not a Christian. First of all, I’ve never been the type to really care how people define their relationship to God as long as they have one and it guides them to do good. It’s just not the way I see God, so I do feel inspired by hearing how other types of people relate themselves. But I’ve been in a bit of a moral tension with rooting into an Abrahamic religion because they can elicit a bit of repressiveness and that’s not how I feel my relationship to God. I’m a feminist. I believe everyone should be able to love how they want to without being treated like a sinner. I believe in radical compassion and forgiveness. I personally feel like that aligns well with what Christ wanted but it doesn’t always align with how people translate and enact His vision and sometimes that makes me feel guilty. As a CompLit student, I read a lot and wrote a lot about decolonialization. Christianity was pretty much the hot colonizer tool. I’m a staunch anti-racist and Christianity has been used for White supremacy often (but in the same vein, so has science and I’m not mad at that). Aghhh I don’t know, I get a guilt crisis but it’s what my soul feels and I’ve thought a lot about how God will put you places to be a necessary challenge and to change the status quo. Nothing is static, especially not God’s word. Everything can transform. I guess it made me feel good to see someone whose values I admire finding their own place within an Abrahamic religion, especially a woman. It made me feel better. It pissed off Fox News plenty too which made it all the better! :)
One time I heard a sermon that said that if you have doubts, or you’re angry at God or whatever, God wants to hear that. God wants your honesty because it means you’re coming to Him. That resonated for me because I feel negative towards God and my own Christianity all the time and that makes me feel guilty. I’m still growing as a Christian. I don’t feel like a good one all the time at all. This week was like something elevated in my soul. I felt like I grew a lot. And that’s because I started to invite myself to see God through this woman’s eyes and embody her faith some more. It shifted my perspective a lot. On the other hand, I’ve been thinking of someone in my life who I admire a lot and is a woman of the deepest faith. She’s a lot more evangelical than me, but she’s someone I find a lot of beauty in. I love to hear how she talks about God and understands Him, and sometimes the way she relates to her faith. I love how her religion called her to save herself, make better choices, find community, and heal from really difficult situations. For the sake of honesty, I’m magnetized and inspired by the depth of her faith in many circumstances… and it also terrifies me. I’ve never spoken to her about it.
The people that challenge me most are the people who also pull me the closest to God in every circumstance. I see God as a big net of challenges that pulls you up and brings you to a heightened place of awareness. Breaking rules makes me feel closer to Christ, to be honest. When I was trying to figure out if I was going to take the plunge, I knew I believed in God but I didn’t know if I could get behind Jesus as a figure to worship. I liked Him, but I didn’t really accept Him in my heart 100% yet. But I read and learned and I saw that He was quite unconventional and challenging Himself. He questioned everyone. He broke many rules of the faith He was around. So He grew on me quite a lot until I could accept Him as a ruler in my own life. I feel closer to Him a lot when I follow my own spirit even if it’s not what common opinion thinks or how I am “forced” to see things. Sometimes that has meant that I have been unconventional and followed rules in my own way. That makes me feel closer to God. Being pushed to follow the rules because it’s what I “have” to do makes me feel distant from God.
On the other hand, it challenged me in different ways. Sometimes I didn’t want to embody faith in a Christian way because I felt embarrassed. I didn’t want to take the challenge on or have people judge me. It’s not what the rest of my immediate family follows and I felt bothered to be the one in the family who was also the most type A or the one who followed a more traditional path in places like my career. I didn’t want to be pigeonholed in that identity all the time or be seen as conservative or stuffy, even if I felt that faith really strongly in my heart. I am a very liberal person and I felt at odds with the perception people could have of me. I’ve often struggled throughout my life to accept myself or feel at peace with myself. I question myself all the time and this was one other example. She triggered all of these anxieties within myself when I saw how freely and openly she embodied something she found powerful and important. Sometimes, it made me feel like a coward because God did a lot for me and I didn’t want to claim Him that much. I felt embarrassed. Many different things can be true at once.
I loved how much she loved her faith and I wanted to have it to the same degree as her, but in my way. I worried that if I embodied it, I would lose some part of me that stays safe or stays skeptical. One of my biggest religion fears has been getting sucked in and losing myself. People can manipulate you with religion all the time or stray you away from listening to things that are important. I don’t want to be pulled away from trusting science, from seeing people for who they are, from my values, or from my love for other people which sometimes people of bad faith can urge you to throw away. That’s why I didn’t resonate with Christianity as a young person and why I was scared of religion when I got older and started to believe in God. But her faith really moves me a lot. I started to pretend I had it a little more like she did, with faith in myself and what I feel God’s mission for me is, and I felt really calm for the first time, like everything was going to be okay.
I wrote someone in my life a letter once, someone really special to me. I told them that sometimes you think you need to learn to trust others better but really the person you need to learn to trust is yourself. They went through a lot and were always mistrustful towards other people. Really, I think they had lost their faith that they would make good decisions and pick good people to be around them. I would say that my struggle with faith is often a fear that I don’t make the right choices or I won’t make the right choices. I didn’t know if picking to follow God in this way was the right choice but maybe my choices are not really that bad. This project was an act of faith and I worried it was a bad choice. But this week, all of a sudden, it feels like my best choice. It was the first big things I trusted God with and God did a great job. Can I trust God with the littler things that I refuse to? Can I start to trust myself? I think it’s really the same question.
When I feel guilty about my AI use, I remind myself that I used ChatGPT free for most of my project (it took me about 6 months to learn that pro “thought better”). In all my time with the actual Claude experiments, not one time have I hit the daily limit on Claude Opus despite using it almost exclusively (apparently most people feel the limit is very low for the average coder). Not bad for a beginner and for the depth of what I reaped, I think.
One of my biggest pet peeves (if you do this without my consent, just know I hate you in that moment) is when you’re playing a game on you phone or doing Sudoku or something and someone looking over your shoulder starts pointing out answers. IT’S MY PROBLEM!! Do not tell me. That takes the fun away. It’s almost to the same level as the coffee shop and restaurant signs that start flashing advertisements while you’re trying to make your order, forcing you to wait an awkward 2 minutes while you wait for the menu to come back. Just show me the damn coffee options and put a side board up for the ads.
I felt the same sometimes when Claude or ChatGPT started throwing out suggestions of any kind. Stay in your lane and answer the question I gave you, you weird underdeveloped robot. I actually can’t wait to grow the skill set necessary to solve my own troubleshooting issues or have confidence in my solutions without needing the reassurance that I’m making good judgement calls. AKA I want to go to school for this a lot.
I’ve been thinking about elusive dissociation topics like dissociative fugue recently where people suddenly run off and forget everything about themselves, sometimes even their names. It’s different from something like what dementia patients can do sometimes, because it tends to be temporary and often caused by some type of stressful event. It’s not particularly common. I’ve been reflecting on how high arousal makes a lot of sense in this context. Arousal triggers you like an animal that wants to run away and that makes you lose access to memory systems, maybe every bit. It’s too early to really say because I haven’t really read much about dissociative fugue yet but I think it makes logical sense.
A year off is one of my biggest fantasies. It’s not something you typically get in your 20s but it’s definitely a burnout dream. In it I’m super rich and can do whatever I want. I think about all the things I would do a lot. Here’s a few big ones on the list:
EMDR!!!! I really want to sift through some life experiences in a more focused and intensive way.
Downhill mountain biking. I went with family friends when I was around 10 or 11 and I loved it but have never have the funds to go again.
Reading a lot, preferably by the beach or a pool
Hiking a lot and camping
Seeing more of the U.S., like the national parks (if they survive this administration)
Learning to cook more
Reading psych and neuroscience books for fun (“The Haunted Self” by Onno van der Hart Ph.D. and Ellert R. S. Nijenhuis Ph.D. — who are my underrated psychology favorites — and “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk PhD have been on my list)
Visiting Switzerland!!! I really really really want to go to Switzerland. And eat fondue.
Hang out with my family.
Change my whole style and go shopping. I went to the Dr. Martens store this week and was drooling over these guys amongst many others. I’m a massive shoe girl at heart but sadly only ever own about three or four sensible pairs, usually black, and kept for many years:
I’ve been fiending after the pink Frye boots too:
Your dad does care very much. It's just a delayed response. You are totally grounded;)