Oxumaré: Weekly Reflections on a Personal Project
Tuesday Reflections on my journey towards a computational model of dissociative amnesia
Week of June 9th through June 15th
We went to the terreiro. I’m kind of a bad Christian in that I see God everywhere. I see Christianity as one gateway to loving God and understanding God. I truly do believe Christ knew God and transmitted God as his son. But I think God is bigger than Christianity or any other box we can use to understand Him. I have trouble not believing other people’s ways. To me everyone knows God through a different lens and not all of them are how God wants to speak to me. I don’t know how they all fit together because I am not God. God is bigger than I have the capacity to fully understand and I am skeptical of anyone who tries to tell me that they are an authority in God except Christ.
My mom likes to go to the terreiro and I don’t see it as fake. Not at all. In fact, Ive had my own weird experiences. One night I had a dream rhat two figures came to me in a dream. They showed me a picture of Africa and showed me how Africa was the root of the Earth. One of them was an afro-Brazilian woman with short curly hair and the other was not a man or a woman but both. The woman opened a book and showed it to me. It was full of wisdom that I could read in the dream but didn’t remember when I woke up. The androgynous one gave me a hug and told me they were my father.
I had no idea this existed at all. I didn’t know every orixa at all but I looked it up later and found out that an orixa existed that was neither man nor woman. I promise from the bottom of my heart that I knew nothing about him so it was a very magical experience for me in the morning. I probably wouldn’t have identified with him just by picking him out of a list as well but the description of his children has matched the life journey I’ve been on a lot. His children tend to be quiet and persevering, sacrificing anything for a goal and with endless patient to reach the things that matter to them. They do what they deem necessary without too much thought to the consequences and they have a strong desire to live well. Despite being overall good-natured, they are prone to the occasional burst of anger (which has gotten me into some interesting situations over the years).
The paper that turned into this Hopfield network by some twist of fate was actually started as my undergraduate thesis which was on possession trance rituals in Afro-Brazilian religions. I started it in 2022, which was actually the year of Oxumaré, I later learned. I went from reading about axé and xār to coding and talking about dentate gyrus and stuff. It was pretty random. Some part of me, despite being a Christian, feels like I have some spirits meddling in my life a little bit. In a good way though. I often feel like they’re using me. Sometimes I do things that just feel bigger than me in ways I don’t expect.
You’d be hard pressed to find a Brazilian without this exact fusion relationship to religion of any kind. Even the terreiro was playing Hare Krishna music for some reason. My mom was telling me some things about my oldest aunt and how she was telling her it would be good to go to the terreiro more.
“Is she okay with it?” I asked her surprised. My oldest aunt practices Hinduism (and my youngest aunt practices some sort of evangelic Catholicism and yet when I went to her house as a kid she made me watch a whole movie on young Krishna).
“Yeah of course she is,” my mom said. For whatever reason I didn’t think she would be.
That’s Brazil for you. We have a very Christian population but no one seems particularly bothered by the equally pervasive Yoruba religions. Christ and Yemanja are equally scattered all around Rio. In fact, Umbanda, one of the Yoruba religions present here, is actually a fusion of Yoruba and Catholicism. Each of the orixas came to represent a different saint which helped enslaved people maintain their religious traditions under pressure to convert.
Brazil is a place very comfortable with fusion of every kind. We’re not as attracted to hard separations and delineations of any kind. And I feel the same way. Protestants often dislike Catholics even though they follow the same rules. The only God I really know is the one inside me and He says He’s everywhere and He’s giant and too big and beautiful comprehend with a measly human mind so all we can do is try our best and love radically as I can no matter how much pushback I get. At least that’s what I learned from my time reading The Bible.
I don’t practice candomble or Umbanda because I just haven’t really felt called to in my life. I see religions as a vessel God uses us through. God is a ruler many people call different names, and He has different ways for each of us to worship so that we can enact His will on the Earth in the way He sees fit. That’s my non-traditional view. I didn’t ever think I would be a Christian but that’s where God called me and I felt that really deep inside so I accepted. Whatever God tells me I always follow with everything in me, even if it’s uncomfortable or scary or doesn’t make sense. And it’s been a powerful experience for me and what I needed through this time.
I mentioned in the reflection before last that I already have a tendency towards a leaky brain, and not feeling like I know where the edges of me are and where the spirit world begins. That’s something I’ve never needed much help with. In fact, I needed the opposite. I was suffering with that mesh-y self uncontrollably every day. I already channel things a lot. I would often think things that would soon after happen. I was everybody’s tarot reader and spiritual advisor in college. I would guess things that would happen with frightening accuracy. This whole project thing was another one. I saw it in my minds eye and it made no sense but I followed it to a T and it grew and grew. I knew I had to do this project and I gave everything of myself, sacrificed everything, even though it seemed impossible. Who would expect a comparative literature and societies major to find the root cause of dissociative amnesia and build a neural network of it herself with no formal training? They would probably think that was impossible, at least with the frightening speed that it happened. But it wasn’t. So I’ve never struggled to channel things or to find Spirit at all. What I couldn’t find was where I started and stopped. That’s why I think I would struggle with practicing candomble. I needed a safe and powerful box and that’s what God provided for me, like a good home to come home to on the inside with good strong bricks. I got tired of feeling like my soul was a leaf being blown through the wind. I felt confused and terrified, like I didn’t know where on Earth my spirit was.
Me and the terreiro cat having a little moment! He crawled right in my lap.
But that’s why I said yes to go to the terreiro for a healing.
Once the incense started floating around the room, I started yawning hard.
“Eeesh, that’s a sign that the spirits are affecting you,” said my mom. “People who are sensitive to spirits always start yawning when they’re around. It’s not sleepiness. I yawn a lot too.”
People started singing beautiful music about the orixas. They came by with smoky incense and had us pass our hands over ourselves to spread the smoke. Then the healing started. First the older and disabled people went to sit on stools while the practitioners passed their hands over them spreading light energy. Then came us. I sat down at a stool as a person dressed in all white put light energy on me. I didn’t really expect how it was going to feel but I won’t really try to describe it. I was hoping it would help relieve me of some of the horrible, intense stress I had been feeling for a long time. A lot of different thoughts passed through my head but the main one was that I was not alone. I always felt like I was passing through life extremely alone and the weight of everything was heavy on my shoulders. That made me feel a lot of stress because when things got hard, I didn’t really know what to do with my feelings. I had a lot of situations in college where I tried to reach out to people for support and I felt like people disappeared or weren’t there. Sometimes I went through issues where I felt like nobody could really understand no matter how many times I tried to explain them. And sometimes, there was no one to reach out to, like with this project. It was something very personal that I didn’t have access to resources about for a long time. That put a lot of stress on me. But when I was at the terreiro, I felt like I wasn’t as alone as I felt. It was a simple feeling that left me with something to meditate on.
Afterwards, I sat down and watched other people get their healing. I reflected on how many different religions felt like people could heal with their hands. Jesus healed people of their maladies too and taught us that we could heal with our hands as well
. Reiki, another spiritual practice from Japan, also taught people how to move light energy with their hands. It’s a common practice.
In my undergraduate thesis as a comparative literature and societies student, I was comparing possession trance rituals in Afro-Brazilian religion to those in the Black Primitive Baptist Church, which is a sector of Calvinism in the United States. They practice foot-washing rituals where they enter a trance and are possessed by God. Through my research, I learned about ìpòrí, a word in Yoruba for the spirit of the Big Toe. In some forms of ancestor reverence, the big toe was seen as a place where your personal consciousness formed a link with ancestral consciousness. In the Black Primitive Baptist Church (and in the story of the New Testament), feet also carried a big spiritual importance. In their possession trance rituals, feet washing brought the practitioners into a heightened spiritual plane and acted as a source of the possession itself. I thought if this as I sat barefoot in the terreiro.
I’ve always been fascinated by the places where religions overlap. It seems that some spiritual truths just carry over and spill into many places. Hands heal. Feet are a place of spiritual communion. Our words and thoughts can create realities. Altruism and self-sacrifice are the holiest human activity. We are all here to free each other from what binds us. Those are the axes through which I see and feel God the most.
I really truly wish I was one of these people with hard, impenetrable conviction for one path or a hard truth I followed. But God made my life so spiritual and put so many different loved ones with so many religions around me that I really struggle. It’s like God made me a nice big house and sometimes I come downstairs and my cousins are randomly on the couch or I open the door and they just come barreling inside. I love them even if they live their life differently so what am I supposed to do. I’m not going to move to their house but I won’t kick them out if they’re family.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my identity this Brazil trip.
I’ve been thinking about being half Brazilian.
My sister and I used to get into this dumb back and forth when we were little about who was really more Brazilian:
“I was actually born in Brazil. You were born in the U.S,” my sister would say. I thought about that one when I was getting my visa sorted. Her American passport has Sao Paolo as her birthplace so she had a much easier time getting in and out. She probably wouldn’t have had the same issue I did.
“Well, I can actually speak Portuguese. You can’t,” I would retort. I knew that one stung a little because she wanted to be able to speak Portuguese a lot. Her first language was actually Spanish because by the time she was old enough to learn to speak, we had moved to Peru. I had the privilege of learning to speak Portuguese in Brazil so while we both understood Portuguese and were spoken to in Portuguese our whole life, I had more fluency.
Obviously, looking back, none of that really matters. Neither of us are more Brazilian than the other because Brazilian is not a metric. It’s a nationality.
This month is also pride month which has brought about the ever-present shame of my internalized biphobia. I’m bisexual so this is technically a month for me but unfortunately I am bi-bitchless. As in, I have not dated anyone of any gender seriously. So it’s still one for one. Unless you count my 8th grade boyfriend of 3 months (who could forget him).
I’ve considered that a lot over the years. This month makes me feel guilty every single year. I have been incredibly focused on many aspects of my life over the last few years and that list has not really included the fun parts, like my self-expression. I feel first of all, burning shame at my own sexuality which I’m still working through to this day. So I never really know if my goal is to “look more like my sexuality” and if it is, I’m failing. But then what does it mean to look like a sexuality anyways? The other question constantly on my mind. I haven’t dated a woman in a real and long-term way. So I look around at my gay friends who are really out there living a full gay life and I feel kind of guilty, like I’m inserting myself into a conversation or into a space that I don’t have the credentials for.
In my defense, I have had lots of real reasons to not deepen those parts of my self right now, such as brokeness, working constantly, and sexual trauma which gave me crazy intimacy issues. It’s not me trying to be fake or anything. But I still feel bad every pride month like maybe if I was more immersed in my identity I’d be out partying and this would be a really big part of my month right now. And it’s honestly not. I forgot it was pride month. I was thinking about my project and school and my writing and a whole host of other things that are more important to me right now than my sexuality. Some people don’t have the privilege of forgetting, I guess that’s what I keep thinking about. So I feel bad.
But thinking about being half Brazilian and thinking about my bisexuality (because as a Gemini moon I’m forced to hold every duality to ever exist in my measly human body) also made me reflect on how the parts of me that I’m carrying right now are important and special and for those, I’m 100% there.
I have some Internet people that I watch that struggle with serious mental illness (many are queer women as well, in fact). I like to make sure I watch their videos so they get the support. Some of them have been homeless and some have been survivors and I like listening to their stories about life. I have one in particular who is around the same age I was when I was struggling the most with serious mental illness and I really see my old self in her a lot. I’ve reflected often this year on how one of my big future visions of life is to be good representation for younger people who struggled with a period of serious mental illness or with trauma. Going into my just budding career as a neuroscientist with lived experience, I’ve thought about how my current self is embodying many of the things I was really crying out for on the inside at a younger age. I wanted to be believed. I wanted my perception of the world, which was different and often isolating, to be something of value. I wanted to feel like how I saw the world was not broken but special and interesting to explore. I wanted to be smart and perceptive. I wanted people to see me as truthful because especially as a survivor, I felt like people saw me as dishonest or a bad narrator or internally skewed. A lot of young people feel like nobody understands them. When you’re a young person with a serious mental illness, that feeling is amplified times ten because oftentimes, people truly don’t understand you. They’re not informed about what it means to live inside your head or what to do or how to relate to you. And it can be really scary.
Going down this path and doing this project was terrifying as a 23 year old who was still about 75% in that spot because I was worried that this was just another one of the “broken” and internally skewed things I was doing. Was I manic? Was this some type of grandiosity? Was it a delusion? I wasn’t really sure but I knew I couldn’t live without this anymore. I felt like no one was listening to me or helping me so I just had to do what I had to do at that point. Because I couldn’t live a lifetime of not understanding myself or seeing myself as a liar. So I took a leap of faith and decided to believe myself, even if the literature and the world around me was telling people that I as a survivor of rape who struggled with intense dissociative symptoms post-trauma was not worth believing. Somebody needed to see me. Somebody needed to believe me. So I chose to be that person.
And soon, the narrative around me started changing. Suddenly those wacky, bad connections seemed like maybe they were a unique and useful tool I could use to do things differently than other people. I thought in pathways that the average person didn’t think and made jumps in my science that other people didn’t seem to make. I was full of information about my mental illness that researchers usually paid other people to get. And I was full of it for free. I saw that not only was I honest, but I was extremely perceptive. My viewpoint was incredibly powerful and valuable. That was so incredibly healing to me. It changed my sense of self-worth drastically. For years, I felt terrified of my own mind. All of a sudden, it seemed like it could pay the bills for the rest of my life.
Psychology is a growing field that is always changing. A lot of people struggle with getting support for their serious mental illness because they don’t want to see themselves as broken. They don’t want to see themselves as diseased and they don’t want people to treat them like something that needs to be fixed or corrected. They want to be valued and understood exactly where they are. It’s a two sided issue. Oftentimes, the type of support psychologists and psychiatrists offer is necessary and life-saving. On the other hand, people with Serious Mental Illness are treated like a secondary voice or a byproduct. Our voices can be overwritten incredibly easily because even mental health specialists can see us as “diseased”.
I found this exact mentality present in the literature on dissociative disorders. People overwrote our descriptions of our symptoms and what caused them and labelled us fantasy prone instead. That rendered our experience of our own disorder as unimportant or non-trustworthy information — even though it is our experience that we are living. I felt like because I was struggling with certain aspects of how I experienced the world back then, people stopped listening as closely. They didn’t stop to really sit with what I was saying to the degree that I wanted them to. But when I sat with it, I saw that there was a lot of great things to hear and to learn. It didn’t mean that everything was perfect or that I couldn’t use more support. But people were quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Nowadays, having a lot more agency over my experience and wisdom about how to navigate my mental health needs, I would love to go back to therapy to try something like EMDR, even to talk about the confusing parts of my post-traumatic inner world. But I hesitated to go to therapy or discuss the more serious cognitive distortions I had when I was in my earlier 20s because I was very anxious that people would see me as “crazy” or flatten my mental health experience without getting to know or believing what was going on inside. I worried that if I opened up about the ways that I was struggling to understand and process the world, I would lose a safe space to have necessary conversations about my traumatic experience. This was partly fueled by my own trauma of being a survivor of rape. Without science to explain my dissociative amnesia, I was particularly vulnerable to people trying to deny what happened to me, which already happens often to survivors who didn’t even struggle with dissociative amnesia. But I had also internalized that stigma myself. I was afraid that I was so psychotic or mentally ill that I had made something up, despite the fact that my symptoms were specific to and coincided with the same time that I experienced the traumatic event. I was terrified of my own mind and had a very difficult time trusting how people were going to take my experience. I wanted to have control over it. I was dealing with trauma symptoms but I was afraid to be gaslit by someone else after already having been gaslit so much by the people who abused me and felt as if my story was twisted and misused by the justice system I navigated. Even though I wasn’t in neuroscience back then, I also felt in my body that there was more to the story then what was available to me about my PTSD and that knowing become this research. So while PTSD did distort the way I thought and I had cognitive distortions in different areas, a lot of what I was feeling and perceiving about my experience itself was true and worth exploring and getting to know. Navigating any type of medicine as a female survivor is very difficult in our current patriarchal system, which is sad because that’s when you’re at your most vulnerable and in need of higher guidance.
I did a great job guiding myself down a really confusing experience and surviving at life, even though struggling with a serious mental illness made me question every move I made. My perception of the types of internal needs I had were valid. I did need science. I did need to be believed. I didn’t just need to be treated as a flat diagnosis — I needed to be treated as a woman navigating a real and complex social phenomenon that extended past myself and into places like psychology and the justice system.
There are plenty of other serious mental illnesses deserve the same understanding. While medication is an important and useful treatment option that deserves to be destigmatized and embraced, a lot of people also need even more desperately to be put into a community of people who understand them or to transmute their symptoms through art or any other number of useful inclinations people with serious mental illness have all the time. Lack of desire to medicalize one’s experience is not always aversion to treatment or a symptom of a disorder. Often times, there really are other underlying emotional needs that deserve to be listened to and respected, like wanting to have agency over one’s own body or wanting to embrace one’s unique perception of the world. People deserve to have their needs met, not written off or pathologized. People with Serious Mental Illness also deserve to have a strong and primary voice in their own mental health care. They don’t deserve to feel like an item people impose ideas onto without their consent. Many of us have already experienced situations like that which got us to where we are in the first place.
Over the last reflections, I’ve mentioned many times that I have been trying to see today as the first day my life to really reap the benefits of all my hard work. If I were to look at life today as the starting point, I would feel pretty good about where I am. That’s been giving me a strong sense of optimism about the future recently. It’s been a lot of boring consistency and hard work over the last few years. But I hope from this point to build a life that is more fun and joyful. I believe that young people with serious mental illness deserve as many role models as possible who not only understand them and who are also joyful and living a life full of abundance. They deserve people to relate to that give them an exciting and desirable image for the future than goes beyond survival. That has reminded me to seek out lightness in my own life. SMI can feel intensely heavy. But life can be colorful, triumphant, silly, and joyful just around the corner. It does not have to be heavy forever. That’s an anxiety I’ve seen reflected in many of these young people in the Internet who are sharing their raw experience — that they are doomed for life. And they are not. I thought the same exact thing when I was 19, 20, 21 and felt like I couldn’t tell where the thoughts in my head were coming from or how to stop them. I feared heavily for my future. And now I feel pretty good about it.
I guess that’s where I’ve been right now. I might not be decked out in rainbows or head to toe in the Brazilian flag right now. I’ve been building my own identity in my own unique places that are more important to me right now and that’s okay too. There’s no race to understand myself or to prove I belong somewhere.
This week Ive been thinking about how it takes a million failures to succeed and the minute you get out there and start failing, the closer your successes become.
Also there are countless people out there following the mould to a T who are getting the same amount of visibility as you so it’s better to do what feels right then to squash your vision to fit what others are doing, even if it takes a while to see that vision play out.
Ive just started getting a little bit better at editing and invested in a few things for my videos like a mic. I started my YouTube to make fun videos and ended up dedicating it to capturing my project just because “it felt right to me”, to mirror last week’s reflection. But it’s been a fun time to start getting into the aesthetics and actually aim towards being seen. I operate off gut feeling a lot and I’ve been right enough to know to do it. Sometimes I wonder if they’re a worth it thing to have up or if I should start fresh somewhere else if I want to make more mainstream content as a hobby. They’re not something I’ve expected anyone to be interested in now or stick around for. I guess I just started doing them because I wanted a space to talk about something I was excited about but too nervous to talk about with anyone else because I was worried it seemed crazy. But by the time I captured my hypothesis, it was really sparking a lot of joy. I didn’t expect to do that and it made me happy. I started really liking to see the story of my whole experiment from beginning to end like that. It just made my soul feel really full and it felt unique. I liked going back and hearing what random things I was thinking about or worried about during that period. When you think “science experiment”, you think some serious dudes in a lab coat silently dripping chemicals into a beaker. So a 24 year old girl trying to scrounge up money for pizza just made me laugh and it made me happy. That’s why I didn’t edit it down to the minute details and scrap the rest. I kept it a time capsule of me trying to navigate it a touch blind and just put them up for the sake of motivation. It really kept me going to see it growing like that.
Obviously I didn’t expect anyone to watch them in the moment because unless you have the full context, it seems kind of random. But I think if you did have the full context it would be a pretty interesting story. I personally think this was a particularly interesting science gap as well because it was controversial and had a social element to it. So I thought it was a worth it thing to keep for the future. Maybe one day I can crunch them down or use them in some way shape or form to tell my story.
This has been a weird year for me because I did something really big and difficult and I want something in my world to mirror that back to me and there has not been that. This is the most shocking thing that ever happened to me but life has pretty much gone on as normal. I don’t know who to talk to to ask questions like, “Is this really happening? This has to be a big thing, right? Because no one does this.” It’s been exciting but also painfully overwhelming. I don’t have experts around me to ask these types of questions to, from a more personal angle, and no one around me is expert enough in what I’m doing to give me that response. I’ve really been dying to finish this paper and try to publish it because I think that will be the real test and it will open doors for me to actually engage in that conversation. Or at least to show people around me that I’m doing a real and serious thing that is actually worthy of conversation rather than a whole bunch of youthful hype and daydreaming. I want to feel seen and truly understood for the first time. I want people to really comprehend what this time in my life was about for me and who I am and what it means to be me. It’s a serious, heavy, and strange experience but it’s also exciting and full of magic and wonder that I struggle to translate to the world around me. It feels like grit and resistance and refusal to live in a world I hate. It feels like hope. It feels urgent and necessary. For the first time in my life, I want to tell people what’s going on and I want them to believe me from the inside out. I’m not crazy. I know what I’m talking about and I know what I saw and what I felt. It was real. I might have to perform a literal miracle as a young female survivor of abuse for people to take me seriously or listen to my joy or pain with open ears, but it was real. I know what I’m talking about this much to do this whole project from start to finish on my own and not waiver one time, even if it meant I’d be friendless or dateless or my skin would get messed up or I’d spend years having no fun. I’m telling the truth.
This week I’ve gotten lots of stories on my feed by chance of historical stories of survivors. Here are some that really inspired me.
People try to act like women these days are “man-hating”. Look at history. We’ve been holding that rage in for millenniums.
This angry woman Kali represented enlightenment itself in Hinduism. Some of the most revered women in human history have been wrathful and uncontrollable. It’s not a 21st century thing. An angry woman is the freest, most powerful, awakened force in mythology. She is enduring and unforgettable. She is embedded into history itself. She transcends the limitations of the human world into something higher and eternal.
I’m really nervous as the time comes to turn my paper in. I’ve had lots of circumstances this year where I thought I hit the mark on a paper and didn’t get beyond a very average grade. I’m worried to submit it after working twice as long as everyone else and get an average grade again for writing elements. I could make it too broad or the writing could not hit the mark. This is a really important thing for me so I really want to be good. I threw a lot of time and energy into this for a very long time.
The thing is that most of the time, an assignment is submitted once without the ability to go back and forth with feedback. That’s not the way things go when you’re actually submitting research or doing a PhD. I’ve been trying to remind myself that and that average people have careers too so there’s no actual requirement to be excellent. People get low or medium feedback for their whole lives. Not every scientific article is a masterpiece of science and it gets the job done anyways. Not every STEM person is a perfect writer, just like I’m definitely not perfect at statistics. It’s supposed to be a learning process.
After a year of mediocre grades from not being that focused on anything outside survival and this project, I really want one 70 or above. Just one. I learned countless new subjects to get this done. I even had to learn Python. I’ve not been that focused on the rubric because this mission is highly personal and did not start as a school project to begin with. I’ve been focused on hitting the mark I want to hit for the gap I’m trying to fill. I’m trying to avoid another me moving through the world without this information. But deep down, I would like one really stellar grade because it’s been disheartening to be on the lower side all year. I keep wondering if my confidence level in what I’m doing is too high. That’s my anxiety. I want to do some reflecting on how to account for that very real possibility as a beginning STEM writer.
This was a paper I felt like should be done by someone with a lot of experience to fix an issue that was very important. What I would want myself would be a paper done by someone in a very nice research position, maybe seven years of real research experience, a post-doc, with a nice grant. That’s why I’ve been feeling a lot of pressure to perform at that level. It is a problem that deserves that level of knowledge. But I should also be realistic and know that I’m not at that level experience-wise and my best is all I can do right now with what I have.
I’ve been really frustrated this week. I don’t like to compare my spiritual path to other people’s, but I would say this has to be one of the top most draining and difficult spiritual journeys ever. I’ve been trying to crawl my way out of it for a long time and it’s just constantly draining and difficult. I have had to work myself to the point of exhaustion over and over again and then work even past that point. I still can’t figure out the whole financial abundance thing. I’m still feeling like life keeps shifting at my feet and I’m drowning again. I have had to really call on every last ounce of faith over and over again for years. And the results really have been amazing. I found myself in the most unexpected way. God realigned my whole entire life, started me on a path with a skill I wouldn’t have even known I would be good at, showed me how smart I was, how determined, how consistent, got me writing again, and forced me to confront my deepest potential I didn’t even know I had. But I’m tired. I’m so extremely drained. And it’s not even over yet. I still have to finish this paper but I also have to figure out my whole entire life. I have to get a new job again. I have to move again. My body is drained. I’ve been dying to do more specific therapy for years and it’s not in my budget. I still need to make friends. I’m just tired of asking God for more. I’m tired of needing spiritual guidance. I want to stand on my own two feet without constantly asking God for another handout.
I want the “laying in a flowery bathtub in Bali”, live-laugh-love spiritual journey. Instead I got the survivor to scientist, I’m going to throw you in the ocean and you’re going to have to learn to swim spiritual journey. The confronting every dark piece of yourself and turning it on its head spiritual journey. It’s not really that fun but at least it’s real and hopefully universally useful.
On Friday, I took a break from my final paper to go on a walk and ask for a bit of spiritual guidance.
I took some time to talk to God and set out some future visions. In the end, I opened my bag and found a little more money than I thought I had buried at the bottom of the bag, but even more importantly, I found a paçoquinha I hadn’t eaten yet. #BlessedAF
I feel deep inside like if God gives you the tools and the strength to do something important, then you have to do it. If I can make a change, then I should.
But sometimes I look around at other people my age who don’t work like I do inside and I wish I couldn’t see any of it. I wish I’d seen less and understood less. I wish I couldn’t connect dots like I can. Sometimes I wish I felt less internally empowered, even though it’s a gift. It’s made it harder to find myself in other ways and it’s also tiring. When I’m trying to determine how to present myself and what it means to be me, sometimes I feel like I have too much information and too many options. I question myself and who I am mercilessly all the time. I see through my own issues all the time. I feel like I know too much to deflect or say it’s not my problem and that means I’m crticizing myself all the time. I’m not that good at conforming. I want to create and do something new. Sometimes it makes me feel unsafe or unstable, or abnormal. I wish I could use one of the great pathways people already created for life, follow steps more, but I’m just not good at that. I wish I could shut my eyes to the world around me and have fun, focus on the simple things in front of me, save the serious stuff for later. But I just can’t. Because I see a solution and I already know I can do it now so it just feels wrong to leave people suffering because I feel lazy or want to focus on me.
And I need to expand. It’s not that I don’t know how to be like everyone else. It’s just that it makes me feel bored and itchy and anxious. I need to be really stimulated all the time or I want to crawl out of my own skin and doing what everyone else is doing is really boring because you already know what’s going to happen because people have done it a million times. I wish I could turn my brain down with a magical knob about 37%. I think I would be happier and feel better. I wish I questioned things less and accepted things more. Being smart is supposed to be a mediating factor for certain illnesses and things and I do think it’s helped me function better through hard circumstances but I also think it’s made me unhappy in other ways because I can’t shut off the part of me that sees that things are wrong and that something can be done.
I reflected a lot this year on how people actually need problems. We need something to do. And sometimes when you’re really smart person but you don’t have a very real difficult thing to do, like a hard job or a big world problem, you take all of that problem-solving energy and pour it on your own life. You make everything in your own life really difficult to solve, even if it should be very simple.
If I’m not dedicating my time to solving lots of big problems, I’ll make my love life a really hard problem to solve and I’ll make my emotional problems a really hard problems to solve. I’ll make my self expression a really hard problem to solve. I’ve seen this a lot with lots of smart people in my life. They get obsessive and controlling and nit-picky about things that are not very serious at all. But when you’re spending all that energy actually solving real big problems — volunteering, or picking apart a science problem, or writing some music — you don’t have any energy left to make hard problems of your normal life. You’re properly stimulated so you don’t go seeking stimulation in little things to get your problem fix.
I had lots of interesting thoughts about problems this week. I was telling my mom as we walked around Rio how everyone has problems all the time. You can’t escape them. But in a life you hate, you have problems you hate. And in a life you love, you can have problems you love. I was telling her that sometimes when I’m trying to “manifest”, I’ll take a moment to imagine and write down the kinds of problems I have in my dream life.
“Now I have to deal with this tangled mess of tax stipulations because my million dollar check is coming in. Ugh so annoying.”
“The person who manages my beach house had to cancel last minute before the renter got there.”
“My dream partner who I’m madly in love with hopped in the shower 30 minutes before we were supposed to leave and now we’re running late for reservations to this Michelin star restaurant. What’s wrong with them.”
“I have too many job offers coming in and they’re all too good. Now I’m feeling really conflicted and I’m so stressed out.”
These sound unrealistic to me right now but I deal with a lot of problems right now, in the life I have considered not enough for me, that I once dreamed of.
“I have to move to a new apartment with a spot for my cat.” At one point I begged God over and over again to just help me figure out moving my cat to London. I was worried the whole time she would have a hard time in the plane and was paranoid she wouldn’t make it.
“I have to job hunt again now that I have my master’s degree.” At one point, I was terrified I wouldn’t make it into any master’s degree program and was scrounging together the money in case I needed to pay for more applications. I even went all the way to a church courtyard twice to pray in the most desperate state imaginable.
So it really isn’t as far off as I think and I can already guarantee you that I will probably treat those problems as holding the same kind of life-altering magnitude that my current serious problems do. So if my future self is reading this, it’s a sign to stop whining and complaining, you jerk.
I’ve been doing some interesting reading on loneliness this week for a final paper and it’s had me thinking a lot about the men’s mental health crisis which I reflected on two weeks ago. I mentioned I’ve been wanting to do some reading to increase my understanding and get a more tangible perspective. I’ve found some really interesting concepts reflected in my reading.
I read about how loneliness is not inherently bad. In fact, people like Maslov, who created a famous hierarchy of needs, actually believed that loneliness, or solitude, could be a positive state which encouraged individuals towards self-actualization, or getting to know themselves in a deeper way. I mentioned in that reflection on how I’ve had quite a lonely time over the last few years as I’ve been working really hard but have found this to be true overall. I rewatched a video from one of my favorite musical artists which I first watched in high school last year and she referenced the term “spiritual solitude”. That term resonated for me a lot. I’ve had such a spiritual shift in my life this year. It’s even been hard to know how to present myself because my sense of self is in such a deep state of transformation right now. I don’t really know who I want to be friends with or how I want to dress or what I want to do. It’s also been a very intimate time in my inner world. Most of what I could share about my life right now and what’s important to me feels vulnerable to share. This hasn’t felt like a very relatable time to share with new people and it’s been pretty all-consuming. That’s just my reality right now. But I think everyone goes through at least one solitary window in life. I’ve tried not to identify with it very much. It reminds me of “Wintering” by Katherine May. She speaks about how everyone has seasons in life and while people often have the worst opinions of winters — cold, lonely, internal seasons — they can often be powerful and necessary windows for growth.
But I wondered (both for my paper and for myself) what made some people approach loneliness as a beneficial state and what made others feel negative and out of control. This was a common phenomenon within incel communities. Their loneliness became emotions like resentment which were ironically amplified in community together rather than alleviated.
First of all, I read a term in one paper which felt extremely relevant to manosphere and incel communities — dissociated loneliness. It is one type among many types of loneliness
Dissociated loneliness has the most complicated form of loneliness by origin, manifestation, and experience. The genesis is determined by processes of the identification, the alienation and their sudden alteration even towards ones and the same people. From the beginning, the person identifies himself with another person taking over his lifestyle, following precisely, having complete confidence. After a complete identification with the person, there comes a sudden (separation) alienation from him, which reveals the real attitude of the person towards himself: some qualities of the personality are accepted, whereas the other qualities are totally rejected. Once the projection of the rejected qualities is reflected in the identifying person, the latter is immediately entirely rejected, there unequivocally occurs an alienation. The feeling of experienced loneliness is acute, painful, and realized. This form of loneliness is a part of states of the limit because it has its expressiveness in the norm.
I found this very relevant to how incels are both immersed in toxic masculinity and identify with its rules and yet hold a strong resentment towards the norms imposed by toxic masculinity and towards masculine men in general. They want to be them, identify with them and their values, and also hate them.
Of how dissociated loneliness expressed itself, the paper said this:
In the case of the dissociated loneliness, the individual that experiences this form of loneliness is firstly oriented towards the past, thus losing touch with the reality (time ratio), moreover he does not have enough confidence in the surrounding him people, to initiate new contacts or new relations, they become introverted, that is why they do not show goodwill (human nature), their visions on the human nature are quite limited, they do not want to find out anything new, they do not get informed, but instead of this they manifest a pronounced criticism (cognitive ratio) and when they are offered another point of view, they manifest barriers of self-defense, they are not able to understand themselves, to perceive their own emotions, hiding them under the mask of social norms which guide them. An element that characterizes them is the lack of self-esteem (self-acceptance). A very important parameter is the self-actualization and self-regard, which is an indicator of mental health and the integrity of the individual. The low rate of the parameter may indicate that the individual has some elements of neuroticism, anxiety, lack of self-confidence.
Kind of sounds like the incel community and manosphere, no? A much more actionable answer than I had before.
A fun Día de Santo Antônio/first Brazilian game of this year’s World Cup! We tied :’)
My mom said “This is how it is here when we tie. Imagine when we win.”
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how much being a smart girl SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!! Especially when you can make connections the average person doesn’t. I say correct things all the time and nobody LISTENS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
People overlook what I say all the time. I lay out exact path by path step by step intuitions with incredible accuracy and even when I demonstrate this to people over and over again, they still don’t listen to me. It sucks so bad. People see a 20 something year old girl and I think they expect some type of foolishness or something. I don’t know what it is but I constantly feel like people do not listen to me. Unfortunately I think that may be a forever part of womanhood. Look at the archetype of the “nagging wife”. No offense, but there’s a good chance whatever she’s nagging about is accurate and you’re just not really listening so now she has to tell you one million times. When women are right about things, people ironically seem annoyed. There’s a whole archetype in straight relationships about a man not listening even when his wife is completely right and somehow she’s the annoying one in the situation. Sigh.
There’s also the classic story of a woman sorting out that she’s been cheated on from a stray glitter piece or a slip up in a word. Shakira literally figured out she was getting cheated on from a freaking jam jar. Men get annoyed that women nitpick the little details down to the fine tuned pieces and with frightening memory-levels in an argument. And yet we are supposed to think we wouldn’t make the best scientists, detectives, literary experts, accountants, lawyers, or any other number of male dominated jobs requiring intense attention to detail. The biggest lie ever told.
On x day, I submitted my final paper for my masters minus my dissertation. I determined to try a new exercise based on my recent thought process that if I were to start where I am now as if it were the first day, I would feel very confident. Instead, I kept comparing to when I first moved to London. At that point, I had a limited amount of funds. I had no idea where I would live or how I would work. I was still struggling with a lot mental health struggles I didn’t have the language to understand. I was about to work my first research assistant job and was very insecure about jumping into psychology from my previous degree. My biggest life dream at that point was to find the root cause of dissociative amnesia. I never thought I would be able to do it but it was everything I wanted. I thought, if I could manifest one impossible thing, it would be that. I saw myself as an undisciplined person with no follow-through or consistency. I had low faith in myself. And I needed to get into a master’s degree.
I determined that on this flight to London, I would act as if I was moving to London for the very first time. How was I moving there this time? I have a masters degree, pretty much. I have a corporate remote job already lined up and apartment ready to apartment hunt in for the next two months, instead of the two weeks in an AirBnb I had last time. My cat had already flown in and was waiting for me (last time, she had to stay with my dad for 6 months while I figured out how to get her there). I have a UK phone number. I have two bank accounts. And I could genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, say I already had the root cause of dissociative amnesia found, an entire experiment written and ready to go. I didn’t need to learn any new skills for it. I didn’t need to feel insecure or wonder. It was already there waiting for me with no type of faith necessary. Not bad, me! Absolutely amazing and secure starting point. Sounds like it will be a very easy move to London for me.