Higher Guidance: Weekly Reflections on a Personal Project
Tuesday Reflections on my journey towards a computational model of dissociative amnesia
Week of April 14th to April 20th
This week resulted in a big shift which threw off my productivity for quite a few days.
I started this week by sitting down to read my Bible for a while.
My relationship to God and how I choose to worship Him has been quite a journey.
I am somebody who loves learning about other people’s spiritualities and has deep respect for every system of thought. I love all things mystical and divine. I love spiritual art and I love the surrender to the unknown. Hearing what other people find to be essential about what we are is fascinating to me. I’m someone who is always seeking out truth and never quite satisfied that I’ve settled on it fully. To me, each system of understanding higher consciousness reveals a unique dimension of the human experience that isn’t quite captured in any one place.
Buddhism celebrates detachment and inner knowing.
Christianity centers faith and good action.
Religions like Umbanda and Candomblé embrace rhythm and surrender.
Paganism sees power in the feminine and the natural world.
Hinduism finds connection in the sensual.
And atheism finds the secular fulfilling and special by essence.
I’m always in awe of the amount of systems there are in the world and how each one brings up some other unique and beautiful aspect of life to find truth in. Because of that, it took me a long time to settle into a way of worship that I could commit to.
I started to see myself as a spiritual person when I was 18, like suddenly I could see an element of the world that hadn’t really clicked for me before and suddenly my spirit felt like it came with a set of instructions.
I wasn’t a big fan of religion back then. Instead I drifted into a sort of discombobulated love of “The Universe”. I felt like the universe was conscious in its own way and that it had a will and a perception of some kind. I felt like you could ask it for things and you could love it like a mother or a friend. God felt masculine and stuffy. The Universe was a freeing, beautiful, feminine thing.
Now here comes the problem. “The Universe” didn’t have anything tangible to guide me along. “The Universe” was transcribed to me by teenagers on the Internet who were in the same boat as me. And I was a very smart person with a lot of wisdom who also struggled with mental health issues that already made me feel outside of myself and hard to follow. And that meant sometimes it was hard to determine what on Earth “The Universe” really wanted from me. How do I relate to the universe? How do I give thanks to the universe? That was all up to me to “follow my spirit” aka my unwell brain that just wanted to feel okay. And my tarot cards could only take me so far when it came to understanding what to do when I felt spiritually challenged. They weren’t universal nor tried and true. No hate to my tarot cards, but they just weren’t the method for me.
It was a complex choice for me internally to follow a religion because I didn’t want to feel spiritually restricted. I wanted to feel free and connected to my femininity and I wanted to also love the mystery and the chaos I had learned to embrace in my own spiritual path. But I also wanted to feel grounded and mentally safe. In essence, I wanted boundaries. So it felt aligned for me to commit to Christianity and it happened naturally over the course of about two years. I started saying God instead of “the Universe”. I started wanting to try to read the Bible. I started sitting outside of church and praying. And finally I decided to get baptised.
Christianity was what I needed as someone who moved through a lot of complex issues alone and needed the structure. It’s been good for me to have a tradition that feels tangible, where I can seek out physical answers, rather than just relying on my own mind. That got complicated for me when I was struggling with mental health issues. And as much as I worried that I would love touch with the ethereal femininity of my own practice, I actually came to find the Bible deep and strange and beautiful. I don’t find it stuffy nor lacking in magic at all. It feels just as mystical as the other religions, despite the practices not seeming so outwardly. I just think we’ve stripped it of that ethereal quality in a lot of Protestant sectors because it didn’t make sense for us culturally. But I love it. I love the angels and the miracles, splitting a piece of bread into a big crowd, the ritual of communion that has a sort of symbolic spirit to it, and the sort of chaos and order of God which was just what I loved about “The Universe”.
And I say “He” when I refer to God but honestly, I don’t really see God as a person nor as a man. To me God is a life force spirit that pulses through each of us, full of knowing and wisdom. When I hear that God created us in His image, I see it in a more abstract sense, that we were gifted consciousness that is present in God but we don’t share with our animal friends in the same way. We also create. We also feel called to enact our will on the Earth.
I found The Bible encourages me to follow my spirit still, just with a few more limitations. And it encourages me to break tradition when tradition doesn’t seem loving or aligned with my knowing of God. Jesus questioned the religious leaders of his era all the time. He didn’t blindly follow so why should I?
I’ve found peace in actually reading the scripture myself versus listening to what people with an agenda have to say about it. And I don’t see the other religions as wrong or bad. I just see this as where God knew I needed to be. God is truly mysterious but what I know of Him from the scripture is not to judge others or to put them down. My stance on converting others is that God speaks to each of us and it’s not my duty to correct them on where God has told them to be. That’s deeply personal and He usually has reasons for everything. I like to embrace the mystery in the diversity and let people be where they need to be unless they ask something of me. I just try to embody God in how I move through the world and let that speak for me.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t struggle to embrace Christianity and don’t still grapple deeply with it often. It has openly been used in ways that are completely opposite to my values. People have used it to harm others, subjugate others, or pressuring them into betraying the form God guided them towards in their heart. The way White Christian nationalists has used it is despicable to me. The way I see all spiritualities is that there is a light version and a dark version. White Christian nationalism is the “dark magic” of Christianity to me. I see more beauty and truth in a light Pagan than a dark Christian and I stand by that. I don’t think just because you call yourself a Christian means you are truly standing by Christ in any way nor that you are automatically a better person. I don’t know how people were even able to turn a Middle Eastern man’s message of universal love, pacifism, feeding the hungry, and exalting the humble into subjugating minorities, supporting billionaires, and committing more hate crimes but… The Devil works hard but White supremacists work harder.
I see my own values deeply within Christianity. If someone tries to put me in a position of power, I want to wash their feet for them instead. I want to feed the hungry and always open my door to a stranger. Christ said the wealthy would have the hardest time entering the kingdom of heaven and honestly, He was saying that before anybody on social media today. He would be appalled to see the way His name is being distorted by cruelty. I guarantee you half these so-called Christians would hate the guy if they met Him in person and that truly makes me sad. Manipulative people will take absolutely anything to keep themselves above others. They have no care for purity nor for anything spiritual. They will sully anything beautiful without a second thought.
But my grappling has also taught me something deeper about myself. I’ve always felt that I see God the most when I was in the midst of a complex challenge. I didn’t feel God at all when I had nothing to question, no push towards a calling. My spiritual journey came with a hard push into massive issues within myself and society. And what I’ve come to grapple with the most has been intense deep for a moral black and white answer. I want perfection, and a clean delineated truth. And Christianity has not been that, which is why it was where I needed to be. There’s so many complex manifestations and so many tough questions to ask. I asked God often why He put me here knowing my values. Why not somewhere with less social baggage, somewhere where my place felt cleaner and less complicated?
I’ve always been someone who struggled to do things just for me. I have a strong sense of morality that has guided me through life. I try not to see other people through that lens but when it comes to my own self, I can be obsessive and brutal about making the perfect choices. I weigh so many options in my head, never satisfied. I care a lot about being a “good person” but I’m always finding the worst in myself.
I’ve had this same back and forth issue with AI. On Monday night, I found out that Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT was accused of sexual abuse by his sister. I believe her, and I’m not swayed by the rebuttals and counter lawsuits because I am a survivor and I have been through the justice system. I know how abusers will spin you around and push their societal power back on you. I know how they will always deny their actions. And I know that the justice system is massively flawed and will go to the greatest of lengths to not give survivors their justice. Especially after having been through a Title IX trial, or a gender-based misconduct trial at my university where I was a complainant against the man who raped me, I don’t see these cases the same at all. I know how it is. I know they do not want us to win. I never attach to the opinion of courts anymore.
Choosing to use ChatGPT for my project was already complex for me because of many reasons. I was not an AI “fan” at all before starting to use it. I don’t like the push towards reliance on a system that is environmentally unsustainable. I don’t like that we’ve begun neglecting our creativity. I saw this image this week showing an exponential rise in a phrase very commonly used by ChatGPT:
I don’t like how employers are trying to replace us with a very imperfect algorithm in the midst of a job market crisis.
But I knew that I had something very important I could offer that would truly change the lives of survivors in medicine and in the justice system. I knew it was more important than ever right now. I knew I could propel my own lived experience and the knowledge I’ve grown from navigating my PTSD into a place where it would be immensely useful… if I could just do something no one would imagine I had the experience to do. So it wasn’t a “morally perfect” decision. But it was one that would do the most good, in my eyes.
My Christianity and my relationship to this project grew at the same exact time. They’ve been inseparable. And that showed me that my biggest spiritual lesson to learn right now was to embrace some grey areas and to take what I need from the world sometimes. Nothing in the world is without baggage and complications. It’s about how you use it and what you do with it that matters.
It reminds me of another Bible verse: “Every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit”. That’s how God shows us what is worthy of our time and what is rotten inside. The wisdom I’ve taken from that is that it’s better to see what outcome you’re producing and what the impact of your work is than getting obsessed with picking yourself apart. Nothing is really inherently one thing or another. Money isn’t evil but it can produce evil circumstances. Governments are not inherently evil but they can produce evil outcomes. Religion is not inherently evil but people can produce evil with it.
What has it done for me? Personally, it’s helped guide me and give me the faith to do something massive and beautiful which required a lot of internal containment and focus. And in the same way, AI is not inherently evil. It has already changed medicine in countless ways including this way. Doesn’t mean there’s not other harm being done in other areas.
And sometimes, excessive moralism can bear some bad fruit too. Being on the Internet is hard for me sometimes because it’ll use it to nitpick myself into oblivion and I internalise a lot. This time in my life has really been a struggle in learning to ruminate less and accept my own incapacity to be perfect. I’ve healed a lot from that in the last year particularly because I’ve learned to let myself be selfish and put my own needs first sometimes instead of constantly obsessing over my actions. It’s a hardcore work in progress for me still. I’ve gotten much better at spending more time enjoying my own life and less indulging in Internet culture. I don’t know what’s trending. I don’t circulate watching video essays and opinion pieces. I watch those extremely sparingly. My YouTube is mostly calming lifestyle videos and reading vlogs. If I want a good opinion, I read a book or listen to a podcast. If I’m going to be political about something, I try to keep it as focused and impactful as best as I can, which is a work in progress too. I’ve given myself permission to not feel like I have to give all of me all the time, and to use the internet as a producer versus a consumer rather than feeling pressured to see what everyone has to say. That’s kept me sane. Listening to so many opinions all the time is exhausting, especially as someone who really cares. Feeling like i had to have a strong opinion about things that are ultimately minuscule really sapped my energy.
And I’ve given myself more permission to selfishly indulge in what works for me. I’m not going to sit around and be stigmatized in mental health literature because people don’t like AI. And I’m going to be a Christian if that works for my mental health and my spiritual path. It’s not all perfect all the time and people do bad things with both systems. But I’m not. I’m using it to do good. So I’m not going to sit around and obsess over it like I’m doing harm on someone else when I’m doing the best I can with the tools I have. I’m grateful to be here and I’m grateful to have gotten those outlets and opportunities as someone who struggled with a lot of suffering. And if people judge me for it, my next spiritual growth direction is learning that that’s okay. Sometimes I think the Internet has given us too much entitlement over each other’s decisions to the degree that we internalize the opinion of everyone else even when we’re not special or important to that degree.
That’s been my own honest growth process as someone who practically grew up on the Internet. I’ve gotten better at cultivating patience with others, reacting less, focusing on what matters, and letting the rest pass me by.
I’ve also been better at accepting that not everyone will share your opinion and that’s part of life. But if you’re looking around at your own output and feeling better, producing good things, and being honest with yourself about who you are, you’re honestly not doing too bad. This era of the world has actually helped me a lot by giving me a better sense of what the metric is. It’s not me being the worst person ever while everyone else is a perfect being of light. There are a lot of shockingly awful people, a lot of people who are in pain and influenced by harmful ideas that they’ve adopted to survive themselves and the world, and lots of imperfect people trying their best. It’s really just me versus my own judgement at the end of the day. Me doing something morally light grey is minuscule in comparison to the types of crimes we are bombarded with everyday. But the way corporations and governments push back their responsibility onto us will have us thinking we’re single handedly destroying the planet with a straw or with an important science project when they cause massive amounts of harm everyday intentionally. Our individual guilt runs deep when it’s really those in power that should be bearing this weight. They are the ones manipulating religion for their benefit. They are the ones amplifying it for racism and to line their pockets. They are the ones offloading work onto an unsustainable system and laying us off to save a buck. The problem is not one girl trying to find peace and sanity in chaos and I try to remind myself of that when I can.
Completing this project in the midst of “normal life” has been a difficult process because making moves that would ease the burden for me also require additional work and energy I haven’t had. I’ve been going incredibly hard at life since my undergrad years just to just survive. Having PTSD at a competitive university was like having a part time job I didn’t get paid for. After that, my housing situation launched me straight into moving to London and I worked the hardest I ever worked in my life — while still navigating my PTSD. I was completely financially independent which was a struggle. Since then I’ve been working for my pay, my masters degree, this project… It’s been pretty thankless. There’s not often a real break.
I thought to start applying to some grants at this part of the process because it would be great to pay myself for the work that I’ve done to a degree but I’m exhausted and it’s like learning another skill on top of everything I’m already doing. Grant writing is demanding and I’m a bit on the inexperienced side to really be approved for many of the grants I find online. I’m sure there’s something I can apply for that I would be eligible for in a roundabout way but it’s been hard to know if the amount of time I would put into applying would even be worth the energy when I’m so close to done anyways.
So manifestation it is instead! In my wildest dreams, I would love to take a year to actually rest and unpack everything. I thought my two years post-undergrad would be that for me and circumstances carved out a different path for me. I’m a big believer in the idea that we are always right where we’re meant to be and everything happens for a reason so I took it with stride and the momentum I built in those years got me here. I’m extremely satisfied with that. But I would also love to lounge around with no pressure, go to therapy, read, and go a full week with no work demands. I want to find a new rhythm for my own mental and physical health and just breathe a little.
The biggest difficulty of the last few years has been that life doesn’t stop for our emotions. I have rent to pay and a degree to finish and etc etc. This has been my constant plight for years. I actually wrote this in my journal way back in 2021 when I was first consolidating my trauma memories in a bigger way and navigating PTSD.
I feel a lot better now but the sentiment remains: the world just keeps on going. School doesn’t stop for you and work doesn’t stop for you. I hate losing my momentum so I just burn out instead without stop.
The world can be pretty cruel when it comes to accommodating our inner tragedies. I remember finishing my Title IX trial and receiving the results, which were disappointing, disempowering, and felt like an invalidating waste of time. This was in the first week of December, around two weeks before my first finals season of senior year. Everyone was bustling off to the library to study for finals and I was crying my eyes out and trying to pick up the broken pieces of myself. I reached out to a person in my institutional support system, asking if I could please have a longer extension and submit my finals at the end of winter break because I had just ended a Title IX trial and was dealing with a lot of grief. They told me a Title IX trial was not on the supported list of reasons a person could ask for a longer extension. That was an intense shock for me at the time. Why on Earth would the most emotionally intense and retraumatizing culmination of years of my life battling my abuser on campus not be on the list of reasons one could ask for a little bit of extra time on assignments? And right at finals season, no less.
After much stress, I was able to get my therapist to write a letter on my behalf saying I needed that extension for mental health reasons. But I was shocked at the expectation that someone would just walk that experience off and keep going. It was taking all my strength to finish my four years at university and not take a leave of absence. Nothing felt normal for me anymore. My entire life was changed and countless hours I had spent on speaking at interviews and writing rebuttals, even taking a full week off classes for a final hearing, amounted to very little. I was angry and upset and depressed and just trying to figure out where to go next on the inside.
Survival sexual trauma taught me that the world is not particularly built to handle the intensity of grief. It’s not made to handle the way your whole world stops. It just keeps spinning and takes you flying with it.
I’ve also learned that these systems are not built with the perspective and experience of survivors in mind. We are an afterthought even in the processes made to deal with our very struggles.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my own future as a survivor recently. I’ve sat heavily with my experiences at university and how set back I felt, as a student and in my career, as my own mental health experiences drained me from the energy required to do things like apply for fellowships and (even now) apply for grants. Survivorship is so much more than just mental health and the justice system. It’s also economic. I pushed myself to the point of intense inner turmoil to finish university in four years. But a lot of people end up dropping out of school or taking a leave of absence to heal. And many people survive a sexual trauma later on in their own careers and struggle to maintain productivity. They lose job positions or even businesses in the aftermath of trauma. The effect of our pain costs us livelihoods.
As I was hunting down some potential funding, I searched “grants for survivors” on the off-chance I might find something relevant to me and found a lot of emergency grants for people trying to leave abusive situations. I was glad to see those and those are very important. But I want to see grants that help survivors thrive academically and economically. That really gave me a future vision to aspire to. Nobody really thinks about what happens in the post-aftermath. There’s a period of time post-trauma where you’re surrounded by resources on where to go next, which clinic to seek out, who to speak to. If you’re lucky enough to have a strong community, they’re heavily there for you in the beginning. And then… the world keeps spinning. People go back to normal life. But you don’t feel normal at all. You’re still healing and the world still needs changing. I thought, “We need a grant for that.” People need to go back to school. Businesses need to be rebuilt. Changes need to be implemented. You’re stuck with all this anger and passion and movement and desire for change and a viewpoint that no one else has. And where is the support for that?
That’s the space I started this project in. And there needs to be a grant for that.
I also thought about how there needs to be more professional networks for survivors! I left college with an unfinished senior thesis and no clubs or fellowships to show. All my energy was spent on survival. Just graduating was impressive enough to me, given the mental state I was in. That’s something the average employer could not understand. But we would. In the future, I would love to give survivors jobs. I would love to give them career advice or some contacts. Connection is strength and there’s power in numbers.
The patriarchy, which disenfranchises all genders of survivors, is made to keep us set-back and quiet. It depends on us feeling broken and never recovering so nothing has to change. Our success needs to be built on more than just resilience. It needs to be built on scholarships, grants, careers… MONEY. We need infrastructure. That’s how you build power in the system. The patriarchy might not treat our futures as important. But we can.
These are the things I’ve been thinking about heavily as I move forward in my own career and start to see success just over the horizon. We don’t see enough survivor success stories. We see tragedies. But we can network and build success amongst each other.
Wednesday was consumed by a horrible omnipresent phenomenon called “The Swirl”. It is where everything is important at the same time and I can’t figure out where on Earth to even start so I just spend the day feeling like the world is spinning until I am able to hack away at something and at the end of the day, I still feel like nothing got done.
I ended up deciding to hack away at my project. I did some thinking and troubleshooting and ended up successfully implementing pattern separation into my model. How do I know it was successful? Because at the lowest levels, my model was experiencing some digital delirium akin to what one might see in dementia, which is known to be accompanied by low acetylcholine (ACh).
As these things go, the swirl did not go away. It was actually heightened.
This is intense.
I need to finish this.
I have work to finish.
Are you studying enough for your finals next month?
Everything feels important!!!!!!!!!!!
I just want to lay in a random room and stare at the wall with nothing else to do. No other requirements. No other obligations. Life feels so big recently.
As complex as the project I’ve been working on is, recently it’s been looking at my simple tasks for work which has felt like looking at high level calculus. I’ve been trying to set up a mail merge for all of the contacts we’ve made. It’s so simple in theory but in the world of intense emotional importance I’ve been in, I just can’t get my brain to work for this.
Brains are machines that are very good at figuring out how to dole out resources. I’ve been continuing to write an essay for my masters program on long term memory. Today I was outlining a part on Synaptic Tag and Capture, a hypothesized system through which brains put special little protein tags on certain synapses that tell it what is most worth putting the resources into consolidating for later. Brains have a finite number of energy and materials so this system makes sure the most important parts get top priority. Recently, my brain has been struggling to put the energy and resources into any task that is not doing this project, and processing this project. When I try to get my other work done, it seems to turn the motivation down to zero and suddenly that intense focus I’ve had for my main task is nowhere to be seen. It’s been really hard to find my mojo, as much as I’ve been trying.
That’s been the story of my life pretty much. This whole story arc from PTSD to healing to this project has been like a laborious boulder in the middle of all of the “normal” things I need to do. It’s been an unpaid job from beginning to end. I’ve been begging God for years to please make it stop and instead of being like “Oh okay cool, you can just hang out now”, He’s been like “Sure girl, just do this massive miraculous feat and you’re set”. Which is TBH pretty much how God goes. The whole thing has felt pretty Biblical to me, honestly. Like God… this wasn’t what I meant…. but alright, I’m grateful for the gift.
One of my favorite Bible books is the Book of Jonah. It’s a tiny little chapter with a story I think we all know about Jonah and the whale. God tells Jonah to go tell some people off because He’s not very happy with them. Jonah is not into it and runs away from his fate. Does God let him off the hook? No, obviously not. He creates a massive storm that ends up with Jonah getting thrown off a whale and eaten. There, Jonah begs God for forgiveness and is finally spit out on the shore. God tells him the same thing again — he has to go tell these city dwellers that they’re wicked for their own good.
Now obviously after you become whale food, you’re not gonna try the same thing again. So he goes this time and does it. He tells them their city will be destroyed if they don’t change the error of their ways in 40 days. And the people are terrified and change their ways.
But Jonah was not into it. He didn’t like being the one to deliver this message and he’s incredibly angry at God. In his frustration, he asks God to take his life.
The next part is a little comical from an external perspective but I’m sure it wasn’t funny to Jonah. He lays in a shelter to see what would happen to the city. God makes a big leafy plant grow over his head to give him some comfortable shade and Jonah is happy. But overnight, God sends a worm to eat the plant, and horrible, hot sun to shine on Jonah’s head just to amplify the effect. Jonah wakes up even more annoyed and tells God again to just take his life.
God points out to Jonah that he didn’t even make this plant and he’s all in a fuss about it wilting. Should God not have done what He needed to do to protect the people who were His to protect when they were going down the wrong path?
This story has been very personal to me as I’ve gone along this journey. I get angry at God all the time for having gone through negative circumstances and for the busyness of this mission. It was bizarre to go through something traumatic. It was bizarre to land right in one of the most contentious spots in psychology through that illness. And then it was bizarre to realize I had the personality and skillset necessary to do something about it — in the middle of one of the weirdest times in history to be a survivor. It has felt scary and predestined and honestly that has made it feel a touch inescapable. I thank God for the gift that He gave me to help survive something and come out of it empowered and with opportunities. And sometimes I complain because I feel out of control and like the circumstances are not my choice. I often want the good parts of the journey and the miracles, like the plant God gave, without the kind of sacrifice and willingness to go along with the plan and enact God’s will for Him. I do a lot of asking, “Why me?”
Honestly, the nice thing about spirituality is that it makes space for the kind of offbeat experiences that are kind of hard to logically explain. When I read these stories, they make me feel like I make sense in a way that I don’t feel when I try to explain myself to the world around me. And that’s given me guidance. This is a journey I would not have gotten through without being deeply spiritual. And it’s helped me to understand God deeper than from listening to podcasters or people without a very kind heart that will twist the Word to their benefit. I saw that when survivors were struggling how they are right now, God provided a solution in the form of me and what I could give. And that showed me that He would never stand behind the types of dark and twisted people using His name in vain.
It also made me feel like He loved me as a woman, and wanted to give me power and strength and direction. He didn’t want me to be subservient or to relinquish my fight for more. Not at all. And that’s why He took my darkness and exchanged it for a talent which would sustain me and my family and other survivors. That’s how I see it. When I’m looking for God, I look to my own life and I see God there and it’s not what abusive and bigoted individuals say at all. It’s something beautiful and mysterious and surprising. It’s not something I can explain in any other way.
I’ve never seen God so deeply as I have here, right now, in this.
On Thursday, I decided it was incredibly urgent that I take an emergency trip to the Keats House in Hampstead.
When I was around 11 or 12, I started indulging in my mother’s period drama addiction with her. We’ve seen the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice maybe 12 times together and that’s not an exaggeration. In fact, it might be an understatement. We love, we love, we love Mr. Darcy.
But it was Jane Campion’s “Bright Star” that really captured my soul and set it on fire. My mother had already watched it a few times in the background of my life back then but I had never stopped to care. However, I walked into her room in the late afternoon one day and it was about half an hour in. Curious, I decided to sit and watch.
“Don’t watch this one. It’s too sad,” she warned me. I assured her I’d be fine. And it was tragic. But I was captivated. I was madly in love.
I had the entire soundtrack on my iPod in middle school and I would listen to it after school while looking wistfully out the window. I memorised most of the letters and the poems by heart. I can still recite them.
“Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammeled me, so destroyed my freedom.”
“I almost wish we were butterflies and lived but three summer days. Three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”
“Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well as she is famed to do, deceiving elf.”
“I met a lady in the meads — full beautiful, a faery’s child. Her hair was long, her foot was light, and her eyes were wild.”
Imagine a 12 year old girl with this goofy looking hat on mumbling poems out the window on the school bus. That was me.
I was a weird little preteen. But I’ve never once stopped loving that movie.
I don’t get up to Hampstead Heath enough since moving to London. But when I feel lost here, a visit always reminds me of the magic of the city again. I see Fanny Brawne and John Keats by the ponds and dipping in and out of the trees and the world feels like poetry again.
When I first moved to London, I had a moment where my money dipped very low. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do next so I ended up deciding to stay in a hostel for a while to figure out my next move. I had a massive load of suitcases to take with me on an Uber all the way from Edgware to South London. I couldn’t find any Uber driver that was willing to take me on that trip. Instead, I popped in the address for the Keats house and lo and behold, an Uber appeared. I went there first, and then hunted down my next ride. But in the transition, it felt like one of my spirit guides wanted to call me in first for a moment of reassurance. I felt Keats’ spirit encouraging me that I was meant to be here and that I just needed to relax and get a bit inspired. And from that hostel, I would follow a trail here: volunteering. A nanny job in South London I would only have gotten from being around there, where I met a family, who would give me “Surfing Uncertainty” to read. Learning about neural networks. Starting my project. Subletting that same family’s house and having a more comfortable place to stay to finish this project. It was like a stack of dominos already ready to fall. I just needed a little slap on the back in the right direction. So that little stop felt a bit magical.
I was always thought it was so special to end up in the same city my favorite poet lived without really planning to. My poetic heart likes to think that he wanted me as near to his heart as he is to mine.
When I got to the Keats House, I had a little sit on the bench just to do some “musing”.
Mentally drifting off had me thinking of a line from one of Keats’ letters: “A poet is the most unpoetical thing in existence”. It brought me back to my reflection last week, where I spoke about the untranslatable part of each of us that is always dirtier and more discombobulated than we can communicate. So I had a little chat with my spirit guide John and told him how I felt broken into a bunch of little pieces sometimes and it gave life a bit of a grimy feel. I asked him if he could give me a bit of assistance or a nudge in the right direction.
I think I loved John Keats because I was a fairy lover too when I was young. I had fairy everything. Books about fairies. Fairy birthday parties. My best friend and I would sit on the playground making fairy houses with the honest intention for them to be inhabited. We would dig dirt out of the ground and pluck sticks to make little huts. Eventually some more friends started doing it with us and before we knew it, it had caught on. Suddenly the whole class was obsessed. At that point, we had to take a step back and just shake our heads. The whole venture had gotten too corporate. Where was the love? Where was the original vision? We were even overthrown as leaders and new people who were not fairy lovers such as ourselves had completely taken over. Such is life.
My fellow fairy-loving friend and I would also call each other after school and on weekends. We would leave little fairy offerings in the window and they would mysteriously “disappear” in the night. She would call me so excited that the fairies had accepted the offerings. By then I had already stopped believing just a touch but I hung on for her. It felt important that I did.
At this point, I wanted scientific evidence. I would watch videos of people who claimed to have found fairies and mermaids. I was a bit skeptical but found the evidence potentially promising.
So when a few years later I learned of an adult man, a Romantic poet, who loved fairies too, it felt like kismet. It just made my little girl heart happy.
To this day I haven’t lost hope that I might see a fairy one day. I’m dying to visit Ireland at some point. If they’re anywhere, they’re probably there. And until I rule out that possibility myself, I’ll let myself have a bit of faith.
After leaving the Keats House, I had some lunch and wound up in a matcha shop.
I’ve been reading “The Piano Teacher” this week. It’s been interesting in the midst of all of this thinking on the patriarchy and survivorhood to read a book about what is essentially a female rapist. I’ve just been getting into it. It takes a very long time to even get to the introduction of the male main character because the author is very invested in setting up the life of Erika, a repressed piano teacher with a domineering mother.
Right off the bat, there’s been a lot to sit with. First of all, I’ve been comparing it to “Lolita” which is another literary classic about the inner world of a paedophilic rapist. Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert tells his own story. But Erika’s story is dictated by an external narrator. It seems fitting, given her domination by a mother who weaves her life for her. The real horror of “Lolita” is that you are forced to see the world through the eyes of what is from afar, an absolutely horrible man, while his internal dialogue creates a sense of normalcy around the perversion. But the external narrator in “The Piano Teacher” adds a more complex tone to Erika’s tale. I’ve been reading slowly but steadily in anticipation of how her gaze is painted with her victim, which I think will really show me why the external narrator is important.
Second of all, Elfriede Jelinek’s writing is incredibly beautiful and cinematic. It is not even overly descriptive but it just has movement to it. It makes sense that it made a good movie. I can easily envision a camera panning from scene to scene.
Next, I’ve found it a bit comical given my reflections on God this week to have Erika described in a unique uppercase pronoun. She is not “she” but “SHE”. She is not “her” but “HER”. It certainly gives her a special deity-like presence within her own tale. It amplifies this sort of “specialness” Erika’s mother has superimposed on her. She is always telling Erika that she is an individual and cannot be dominated by anyone (except her mother, of course). She is encouraged to sabotage her students, never letting any of them surpass her. She is a piano “genius”, despite being the scourge of the neighbourhood for her piano playing. The capitalization emphasizes that everything is about Erika, like a petulant child centering the world around herself. It feels very characteristic of the predators I have seen out in the world.
Erika’s position as a teacher also had me thinking about sexual violence as a reflection of power and not necessarily the essence of a gender or human nature. We don’t hear as many stories of female assaulters not, in my opinion, because women are by nature less inclined to assault, but because we are not often found in positions of power and the power that we do have is still influenced by a gendered power dynamic. I’ve seen many stories in the news lately of female teachers raping young male students. Teaching is one of the main true positions of power women find themselves in over men within the patriarchy, particularly because of the age difference. It makes sense for the stories to be proliferating there. If women were in positions of power more often, would be see the same phenomenon? There’s a strong possibility. I don’t think women are in essence kinder or more goodhearted, as much as I love women. I’m not sure that men are rapists by nature, though they do love to tell that story to justify the behavior — that something intrinsic to them makes them rapists and we just have to live with that reality. In fact, this is the exact story that makes us less likely to support and believe young men. It makes them less likely to recognize abuse in their own lives as well when we protect the idea that men are aggressors by nature.
Much of what we call “nature” — gender, race, personality — is deeply influenced by the stories we tell each other about who we meant to be. It is only after the story is written that we go out looking for confirmation of our bias.
What I do think is that men find themselves more often in a position to manipulate their station in life and they have a community of people around them to support the behaviour institutionally. That’s a very different thing from being born to be rapists.
I was still struggling to work after a while so I just went out for cake and a frolic.
I laid in the grass for a long time before I got a gut feeling that I should buy myself something. And when I’ve asked a spirit guide for something and I get a gut feeling, I try to follow it to a T.
I ended up in a book shop where I let my soul guide me. It ended with these three selections. Seems I needed to get a little bit of beauty and romance back into my life.
I haven’t cooked a nice meal for myself in a long time so I decided to take my first stab at French cooking with a nice potato and leek soup and a cucumber salad.
It felt refined and intentional, and really brought me back to myself. Cooking is one of the few times my mind really turns off. All in all, exactly what I needed.
All week, I struggled to get myself to work on anything. I’d been trying to troubleshoot a transfer of my first experiment into something called “sparse coding”, which is where my patterns are mostly 0s with a few active 1s here and there. It was going pretty much disastrously. After a day of intense freeze, I went out on Friday for coffee with someone in my life. It came up in conversation that they’re a caretaker for their mother with Parkinson’s Dementia. It felt really relevant to the week I’d been having. Out of curiosity, I asked her what her mom was like and she walked through the changes she’d had since developing the disorder. She said she’d lost a lot of emotions like empathy and had gotten more averse to change. She hated crowds and was more prone to irritation. She asked me if I knew someone with dementia. I told her about a very dear family friend who had their memory start to fade away in just the last few years and had to move away. I was actually thinking of her this week because she loved to cook big, beautiful meals for us and was like my image for how I wanted to live my adult life. She was always very refined and gave her life a classical, romantic feel that was so special to be around.
I don’t know enough about dementia to know if I did anything important with my model or if it was just a cool and realistic side effect, to be honest, but I found it interesting to find dementia-like output in my experiment. It’s not really what I was looking for. I’m always wishing I had 10 more years of experience so I could frame what I’m finding better.
I took some time when I got home to read a bit more about dementia, perusing the different types. I read about Lewy bodies dementia, and how it could cause people to hallucinate. It seemed very relevant to what I had found in my network with the random 1s that seemed to appear out of nowhere rather coming from a real mixture of the existing patterns. A bit of research and digging around Claude with my own results so that I could understand them better revealed that while people knew a lot about the surrounding aspects of what I had modelled, what was unique about my results was what Claude called the “geometry” of the memory and the chain of events it outlined. It was most important that I had found that the hallucinations or confabulations in my output was made of combinations of memories that were impacting how my weights worked. Claude said this would help other researchers learn the best timing for intervention and what those memory failures were caused by outside of simple memory lapses. I felt a lot better after getting a bit more knowledgeable because my lack of understanding was making me feel overwhelmed and at a loss. I didn’t want to fumble something potentially useful.
I celebrated by ordering a seafood boil, which I had been craving for months, and watching my current obsession, SpongeBob. It was a little guilt inducing but we all know the Krabby patty secret formula is crab meat anyways so I’m not even doing anything Mr Krabs wouldn’t.
Finding a little bit of information about dementia by accident has further demonstrated to me how one kind of stigma or oppression can stop us from getting more done for people of every situation, even those that aren't actively stigmatized. In trying to seek out the answer to dissociative amnesia, I was also able to get a little bit of missing information about dementia.
There is probably so much more information about medicine that we can learn from tackling disorders that are considered “feminine” which the male majority of scientists typically don't really care to study and don't care to fund. We might have a lot to learn about the body from disorders like endometriosis or PCOS or Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder which could otherwise not be found. And yes, they should be studied just because it’s the right thing to do. But they should also be studied for the benefit we reap collectively from knowing the human body on the deepest of levels. Our biology is deeply interconnected. Learning more about female hormones could also carry a myriad of other potential benefits, as would unpacking other disenfranchised groups’ issues. Why are Black women three times more likely to experience pregnancy-related death than White women?1 Why do 1 in 4 Hispanic people experience high blood pressure?2 Science is unfortunately highly skewed and largely managed by a single majority population, which means that there are often not enough people with the incentive to go after solutions for issues that are not as impactful to them. My own issue was an example. I struggled to find anybody actively working with dissociative amnesia specifically. But as a survivor, it was highly interesting to me. Sometimes people pass up on things that might have great universal benefit, but don’t seem immediately interesting or important to their population on the surface.
The way we speak about white supremacy has also been on my mind this year, and it’s led me to a similar conclusion. We are taught to see eliminating oppression as just for the good of the oppressed. But that's not the case at all. We often ignore the ways that oppression causes universal harm that we just accept as “part of life”.
There are a lot of ways that White people also suffer under White supremacy, for example, even if they seem to have a benefit on the surface. The racism we use to hold back others also ends up reflecting back to us. We end up entitled. We see our own features aligned with Blackness to be uglier or a source of self-hate. We struggle with curly hair or curvy bodies or wider noses, doing whatever we can to hide them. We avoid accountability and fail to deepen our intimacy with community members who could really change our lives.
Similarly, a lot of issues that men struggle with, such as inability to talk about their mental health or feeling like they have to be on guard all the time, are also a product of the patriarchy. By hating femininity, men don’t give themselves space to soften up and embrace their own.
It’s the same with ableism. All of us will be old one day and will probably develop a disability. All of us are one bad accident away from having our lives changed forever. I always think back to the time I sprained my foot on the first day of my Title IX trial and was stuck with crutches for the week. By chance, I was living in a rare form of student housing that could only be reached by steps. It wouldn’t even have though twice about it all year if not for the sprain. Because of that, I couldn’t even get myself downstairs to grab a food delivery all week. In that moment, I wished more than anything that I had some kind of elevator or something to help me feel mobile.
We all have an interest in reducing stigma for each other's circumstances and battling each other’s oppressions. None of our struggles exist in isolation. And when we fail to attest to the needs of one group, we're also hampering ourselves from getting information that might benefit us greatly too.
Studies have shown that rats who are actually able to escape a stressor fared better in the long run than rats who could not escape a stressor, even if it was frightening for them in the moment. Being trapped in a box or restrained creates a myriad of unique stress effects that can be longer lasting.3
That fact has popped into mind here and there when I navigate my post-traumatic world as female survivor. Sometimes, the powerlessness you feel watching the circumstances of other survivors and the pervasiveness of rape culture can make sexual trauma feel like the worst inescapable stressor ever. It can feel very hard to know how to heal in these circumstances as you are forced to watch other people go through the process of seeking justice over and over again and failing each time. And your risk of going through the same trauma again is always there as a woman particularly. Being able to work on this project and do something, move my hands, keep my mind running, has really diminished my sense that the stress I experienced was inescapable.
Even so, every once in a while, I still get hit with such a massive wave of anger that I have no clue what to do with. The toughest part of PTSD is that it's like your stressor gets frozen in time because in the moment, you felt like you couldn't really do enough or process it the way it needed to be processed. But by the time you’re ready to comprehend it, you're already somewhere new and the real stressor is nowhere to be found. There's no one tangibly around me left to fight or bite or hit. There's nowhere to run away from anymore when the situation is inside of you. So when the anger comes up again, I don't always know what to do with it. And that can make it feel inescapable too.
Usually the anger just strikes me sometimes at random when I'm going about my day, often in the most inappropriate time and places like at work or in a crowded tube station. The anger hit me again on Sunday. It felt like a wave that just sucker punched me in the stomach and no thought process or encouraging word could ease it.
So after work, I decided to go out and breathe a little bit instead of going straight home. I’ve been trying to remind myself to do things that make my body feel good, like go out and lay in the grass to get some springtime sun.
I've really been wanting to change my exercise routine a bit to try to find something that helps me to harness my anger and to utilize it because I actually think anger is a useful and powerful emotion. I've been reading more Audre Lorde this year, who was a Black lesbian feminist. I've really liked hearing about how she related to anger. She saw women's anger as a powerful tool.
We are often taught as women that our anger is not okay, that we shouldn't fight back, that we should stay quiet. We should just heal around the circumstances of our world and let things be as they are, because “that's just how it is”.
And that's not how it should be at all. It should never be “that’s just how it is” when it comes to the safety we feel in the world. This project has been one of the biggest ways I’ve utilized my anger because I can channel all that rage into knowing that something is going to get done. It’s healed me that there's a productive way forward and that I'm not stuck. The situation is not inescapable.
A lot of times when women are angry, we get treated like we're stuck or obsessive, or we just need to let it go. That's a way the world manipulates us into ignoring our pain and our struggle. Of course you seem obsessive when you have to ask a thousand times for a change that never seems to come.
To think that we would not be angry and just move on is completely delusional and I’m tired of pretending like it’s not. There's really no way for me to look at this situation and not feel angry. I would have to hate myself completely to not feel that way. Of course I'm angry that this happened to me. I'm angry that the mechanisms of my trauma were used against me. I'm angry to see how the justice system at my university operated, and that it let this person get away with what they did. I'm angry that my abuser smugly continued on campus, and that when they tried to approach me or tried to interfere with my life, I didn't feel protected. And I'm angry to have graduated only to find out that this university had a long pattern of this behavior in the cruelest and sickest of contexts. I'm angry to have immediately been hit by a new wave of survivor stories that didn't get their needs met.
I'm angry about the Epstein files, and I'm angry that our president is a paedophilic rapist. I'm angry at a world that preaches “family values” and yet never actually does anything for women nor children struggling with sexual abuse. And the more I actually read the science of trauma, the angrier I become because I see how inadequate our systems are, how little effort they exert, and how little people care. The answers are right here and nobody seeks them out. It’s pure laziness.
And the anger keeps growing, but in it doing so, so does my sense of my own worth, the value I give my voice, and my own confidence in the fact that I can do something. I used to direct a lot of anger inwards towards myself. I felt like everything was all my fault, or I was wasting everybody's time by trying to complain about something so awful. I was angry that I was just a “crazy”, “hysterical” woman. I would all that hatred towards me. But the more I've embraced my anger, the more I've seen that the anger should really be going outwards, and I've wasted my time directing it at the wrong place. And that is also anger-inducing.
Ive been thinking about the weight people dump on survivors like we’re just there to carry all the heaviness for them. It's not fair that we bear the weight of other people's failures to meet us where we need to be met. That feeling should be on them, not on us.
I've thought a lot about institutional gaslighting and the way our government and many more of our systems try to stop us from speaking out about what's happening. They try to twist the story back onto survivors all the time so that we feel ashamed. I've thought a lot about the medical gaslighting that was going on within psychology and how it stopped other disorders from getting their needs met. And it's made me feel angry and also weirdly guilty for being angry and guilty for speaking out and wanting change. Because at the end of the day, people will twist all of that desire to hide what they do onto you, so you feel laborious and like you’re killing everyone else’s fun and good time by talking about what’s really happening.
People think survivors are there for you to offload all your discomfort onto. We take it so you don’t have to change. When we push it back on you, we’re obsessive, disruptive, difficult, and vindictive. I’m sorry, did I sign a contract saying I’m here to be your “discomfort sherpa”? Are you going to pay me for that? Or were you just expecting me to do that emotional labor for you, you poor defenceless rapists and millionaire institutions? Boo freaking hoo. Accountability just too much for you soft, sensitive souls to handle. I got it for you, right? Let me handle the therapy bills, the classes I paid to miss, the anxiety medications, the hit to my intimate life in a youth that I won’t get back. You guys relax, get comfortable. You want a coffee? Should I bake a banana bread or something? Should I fluff the pillows?
I've also thought a lot about all the women that have turned away from feminism in exchange for a"soft life", a term that has been used by women who embrace a traditional lifestyle where they don't work, and they're taken care of by a provider so they can stay home and enjoy nice activities and pampering.
This entire process from surviving to busting my ass on this paper while supporting myself has felt anything but soft. I’ve felt so hard inside and angry and shut off and isolated. I’ve felt dirty and gross. I want more than anything to have a soft life too. I want to feel soft too. I want to feel innocent. I want to feel protected. I want to feel at peace, but there's no peace to find when you're a survivor in our current political climate. It's hard to build a “soft life” in a world that won’t look out for you. I've felt angry at the selfishness of people who will prioritize the softness of their life, while taking on ideologies and mentalities that put other women at harm because they don’t think they’ll be affected.
It’s a cruel and ugly betrayal. We all want to be soft. I want to be soft too, but I haven't been able to be soft when I'm fighting for my life and my rights everyday. The weight of people's “soft lives” are carried not by providers, but by people like me, women like me who have actually had to feel the weight of what the patriarchy is really about.
I am working ten times harder to make sure that other people get the kind of care that they need, so that when somebody else who has turned their back on me for their “soft life” gets into a negative situation, they have the protections made by me, who had a hard life, to make sure that they got what they need.
The patriarchy didn’t go away when you decided to stay home and roleplay with your boyfriend; you just left me to foot your bill. If we would all carry the weight a little bit, maybe I could have a soft life too.
In my horrible, angry mood, I decided to take my hard earned money and treat myself to some soft girl energy with what I had.
There was so much nice stuff to see but my anger was disrupting my day. I just couldn’t relax.
So this time I called on another spirit guide, Audre Lorde. I asked for a bit of guidance to help me integrate my anger because I just couldn’t do it today. I spent some time just laying in the grass and doodling until I felt a lot better.
Afterwards, I took some time to scroll through the WhatsApp group of a friend who invited me to her church. I mentioned her in last week’s reflection. The first time I went to her church was an interesting experience for me. She is from Mauritius so I didn’t expect that when I got to her church, everyone would be mostly Nigerian. I got there early and felt extremely nervous because … well, to be honest I was the only white person there and I had no idea how her church worked. As I was waiting for her, people started speaking in tongues. I didn’t know what was going on because I’d never seen people speaking in tongues in person before. I thought they were just speaking another language. Only afterward did I put two and two together. Finally she got there and I went to sit with her. I was really worried people wouldn’t be happy I was there or they would feel confused like I was intruding on their space. But at the end, they asked everyone new to stand up, which was me, and everyone came and gave me a really sweet greeting and a hug.
I haven’t been very active with going to her church because I work on Sundays and honestly I see some parts of worship a bit differently, though I’ve really admired the congregation’s faithfulness a lot. But I do go every once in a while to see her and be part of her community because it’s something really important to her life. She’s somebody who inspires me a lot.
She added me to her own church mini group so that I can go to Bible study with her sometimes on Tuesdays when I get the chance. What I’ve found God in even more than the sermons is the way that her community shows up for each other and supports each other. I was scrolling the group chat by chance today and admiring the kind of encouragement they sent each other. They’re happy to make websites for each other, braid each other’s children’s hair, or offer advice on parenting and whatnot. That’s been what’s inspired me the most.
Life can be really hard and isolating. Particularly in the West, we don’t always build that sort of support network with each other. She went through something really difficult a few years back and was left to parent all by herself and support herself financially entirely. She said that church truly helped her make it out and build a life for herself. I can really see why when I see the kind of people around her and how they never feel burdened when it comes to showing up.
Every culture has their own perks and downsides but being American, it can feel really hard to reach out, like relationships are very transactional. We’re always dropping more precise and elegantly crafted ways to essentially say “you’re being too needy.” But for her community, showing up is a joy. Being of service to each other is just part of life, like a natural extension of loving each other. I think of how much I would have benefited from that when I was going through something hard. Even having friends who loved me, I was always doing so many calculations to determine whether I was overstepping, if I was framing my struggles correctly as to not cause harm, or if I had over-asked for help. I felt like a burden constantly, even though I was dealing with so much alone. I think that’s something we can really learn from African communities in the U.S. Americans often complain about the lack of community but spend more time learning how to keep theirs from overstepping than actually investing in it. Where are the TikTok therapists teaching people how to make others feel even more at home or the best phrases to say to make sure your friends come over when they need you?
And thats when my gut told me to message my friend and go get some tea. She kept telling me to come whenever I wanted to and I never took her up on the offer but I’ve been feeling a bit isolated so I think thats just what I needed.
When I got there, she was already wrapped under the blanket with her friend and kids, hunting down a Bollywood movie. I stayed all afternoon as more friends stopped by, watching hands gently unbraiding, and talking about everything from hair appointments to Carnaval.
I stewed a little at her house over how I’ve been struggling to make new friends since leaving university. In the same way I try to make playlists and feel like I come up blank, sometimes I get around people and don’t feel like I have enough to say. Which is ironic considering I’m in the midst of such a powerful experience. But it’s like I’ve had a hard time translate a piece of me these last few years. I struggle a lot with feeling not enough so I wait around for a moment to connect when I feel like I have enough to say or I look good enough or I have enough money. But today I remembered that I should just show up even when I don’t feel like enough. Nobody has the level of expectations for me that I have for myself. And sometimes my presence is all that is needed.
I told someone at this friend’s house today that I was 24. They responded that I was just a baby. I always feel better when people tell me that because sometimes I feel significantly older. It’s hard being young and feeling like you have to wear the shoes for yourself that people older than you won’t fill for you. It doesn’t make you feel like a baby at all.
I actually think that when I see Greta Thunberg sometimes. She’s younger than me but I can see that she carries a really weighty feeling to her. I thought that when I saw her going to Palestine particularly. Sometimes I think of her and really hope she’s doing fun stuff in her free time and enjoying her youth alongside all the hard work she’s doing for the world.
This has been a really hard era to be young. The world feels like it’s crumbling to pieces all the time. We’ve never felt such intense moral responsibility over society because of the Internet and yet it’s never been so explicitly clear that corruption is what is holding us back from overcoming our biggest challenges. It really makes you age quicker. I saw a young man who was only 20 years old recently running to be deputy mayor of a London borough. He kept his mind right on the real issues rather than succumbing to identity politics. I think people much older than him could learn a think or two.
I felt really proud and I’ve also thought about the roles my generation has had to fill the second we turned a bit more adult to make sure the world would be okay. The corporate greed has been astounding amidst a climate crisis and some of the most disgusting displays of sexual violence we’ve ever seen coming from people who are meant to be our leaders. It’s a heavy world to inherit. I feel guilty and anxious all the time, like I’m not doing enough even when I’m already sacrificing some of the most lighthearted years of my life for a change.
In my struggles this week to get enough done, I’ve been reflecting on my own productivity. You know what? I actually get a lot done when left to my own devices. I did this entire project myself. I’ve written weekly reflections, built up a YouTube channel, and completed a masters degree all while keeping my bills paid. But my productivity has still felt pretty up and down.
I remember reading about how top athletes go through periods of intense work with periods of intense rest, which helps them go harder and stay on top of their game. It also reminded me of Cal Newport’s “Deep Work” where he demonstrated how we would do better if we did a few hours of focused, intentional work a day versus the productivity dribble of normal life. I’ve resonated deeply with that. What I really crave more than anything is to have periods of intense work that require deep thought, and then to go off and process life. I don’t personally think we are given enough time to process the world and the information we learn. We’re always pushed towards 10 hour study days, long work hours with constant busy work. Because of that, I’ve seen my intuitive need to pull back and spend time engaging in deep reflection after a job well done as a side effect of my ADHD or as a sign of un-productivity. But some of the best work I’ve done this year has been done just like that — and I’ve actually been months ahead of my deadline as a result.
I don’t work on this project for hours a day. Almost never. Sometimes even I pull back for a few days and spend time just processing everything and forgetting it for a little while. And I always come back fresh and creative. The only times I ever hit a slump are when I get obsessive and feel like I need to keep pushing it. This week was an example. I spent daily bursts trying to troubleshoot why my recurrent excitation experiment was not working when I moved it to sparse coding. It has resulted in nothing. So I’ve decided that rather than pushing it, I’ll breathe, step back, learn a little bit of other information that could be useful in my paper, and then come back to it. And I know I’ll come back fresh.
I’ve always struggled with the idea that if people just let me “do me”, I could be endlessly productive and creative. I think a lot of neurodivergent people feel that way too. We have a unique rhythm and flow that can be just as productive, more in impactful bursts than in steady streams of tasks. Unfortunately, because of how work life is set up, I find myself feeling lazy and unproductive even in my most fruitful era of life thus far because of an off week. Actually, those “off weeks” are some of the periods when I shift my perception of life and what I’m learning the most.
People see individuals with ADHD as people who are constantly seeking “more”, like we need to be stimulated all the time. What I personally want, actually, is to do more with less. I always struggled to manage seven different completely different classes when I was in middle and high school. I want streamlined, impactful, and aligned. I want to really excel at what I’m best at. I don’t want less loose ends to constantly be tying up in a thousand different areas.
I really struggle to shift between a job in one theme, a class in another, and a project in something completely different. Neurodivergent people are not the best at “mode switching”. We either do too much of it or we get lost in transitions. I would always struggle as an undergrad in finals season because it was like everything got dumped on me at once while I was processing the fact that my semester was changing, and I was about to go home, I had to pack, I had to get my room ready… It didn’t bother me or upset me but it definitely left me feeling unfocused. I’ve found myself meeting my deadlines with ease in my masters program in the UK because rather than a week where everything was due at once, my assignments are spaced out over a long period of time, each with their own weeks. It has really helped curb the overwhelm of having many high risk priorities in a short period of time and not knowing where to start or how to tackle everything. Too much mode switching in a short period of time!
The irony is that I think ADHD people do our absolute best when we are in control, and we have focused streamlined activities that we are passionate about. That’s why we can make great delegators and leaders.
It reminds me some of the neuroscience I learned this year. I wrote a paper on infant learning a few months ago. One big question within this sphere is whether or not infants crave novelty or familiarity. They common consensus is that they seemed to crave novelty for the most part, but every once in a while, they oddly craved familiarity. One researcher hypothesized that infants who are exposed to a new stimulus will continue to attend to it until they have fully encoded it. This means that if an infant was able to wrap its head around what it was looking at, it would quickly crave the new thing. But when they weren’t given enough time to wrap their head round the item, they continued on with it until they were fully able to process it, thus seeming to crave the familiar item. It sounds funny to say I relate to that, but it kind of reminds my of my ADHD brain. Sometimes my mind wraps it’s head around something quick and I’m zooming off to the next thing. And sometimes I want to process where I am fully before I can actually get my next task done, and until I can fully wrap my head around it, I feel frozen in a state of overwhelm.
My hot take is that we don’t get enough time to process life, neurodivergent or not. The other bit of neuroscience that I learned this year that backed this was my very own work with Sharp-Wave Ripples. These ripples are in charge of helping us consolidate information we learn throughout the day. They are active during quiet wakefulness and non-REM sleep, cementing in everything we learned while we were encoding new information.
Our current world has us always alert — always scrolling, always working, listening to an audiobook, listening to music. We very rarely do what people in the past did — sit in silence on a rocking chair, take in the sounds of nature on a quiet walk, or take a snooze on a hammock. As a result, we are all overwhelmed by the world all of the time. I would imagine that we spend a lot less time consolidating our experiences because we are rarely in “quiet” wakefulness. We never turn off.
There is currently a trial going on against social media moguls, accusing them of intentionally creating an unhealthy addiction.
And I agree. But I think the addiction is so much more than just self-esteem issues, data theft, and bombardment with advertisements. It’s also robbing us of those key points in the day when we are meant to be consolidating everything we learned while we were out and about. Instead of entering quiet wakefulness, we spend a lot of time encoding more information that will not be used in any way because it’s not actually arousing enough to even be remembered (another bit of neuroscience there). We waste away on our phones with big chunks of the day we have no memory of and don’t actually internalize the important stuff as well as a result. No wonder we all feel like life right now is overstimulating, massive, and too big to handle. We are stuck in a state of low arousal for hours a day that have no use to us but a lot of use to advertisers. Tell me one important thing you learned from scrolling two days ago. I personally don’t remember one thing I saw yesterday in my “cigarette break” of a scroll.
Since learning about how we encode and consolidate information, I’ve spent a lot more time encouraging myself to do restful activities with nothing on in the background. No music. No audiobook. No podcast. Just laying around. It’s been hard for me because of my own mental health but it’s really the best thing for me with my PTSD of all people, if my study holds up until the end.
It is an act of rebellion to engage in a practice of reclaiming our quiet wakefulness periods in a world of constant arousal. But I really would feel like I’ve lost something if I’m scrolling on my phone rather than taking in nature silently on a rocking chair when I’m in my 80s. So best to start practicing now.
This week was dense with a lot to reflect on. I’m nearing the end of my experimenting and will soon have real numbers to report. I have an upcoming meeting with my supervisor and a lot to finalise before then in my annoyingly defunct sparsely coded experiment I’m switching over. I’ll be learning a lot of new terminology and doing a lot of reflecting. So my goal for this coming week is just to hold on tight and stay sane while I make some big shifts that will get me over the hump to the end of my project.
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