Self Creation: Weekly Reflections on a Personal Project
Tuesday Reflections on my journey towards a computational model of dissociative amnesia
Week of May 12th through May 18th
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
That’s where I started Tuesday. Studying for my Thursday exam was going… not the best. We had to learn enough material to potentially write about anything from a range of 10 different themes, closed-book, so no notes, and somehow also be able to write in-text citations from memory for these themes.
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
I went back to studying over some of the themes I felt most comfortable with (I actually was much more present this semester) and when I went to look over the powerpoint, all of a sudden I was seeing 75 slides of things I’d never hear in the lecture. It was going from joint gaze studies to something about chocolate to pictures of koalas? I don’t even know. The toughest part is that I have to make sure I have enough of information about whatever potential question they could ask about each theme, since they could ask any number of mini themes. I had pretty much concluded that I was doomed by then. Whoever decided to make us memorise in-text citations… count your freaking days, I’m coming over with a pitchfork and torches.
My favourite lecture from this class was actually the one on shared attention. I made a while theory of Dissociative Identity Disorder just following this class. I’ve theorised that DID consists of pockets of attentional clusters of unconsolidated information, like inner frameworks, that can be drifted between in the same way that we modulate attention on a cloudy day, making our top down predictions more relevant than bottom up. Alter switching, going from one “self” to another, would simply be from that attention modulating from one cluster to another. A lot of times, people can actually be in two states at once. My guess is that when certain traumatic themes emerge, these are extremely arousing, making them extremely hard to consolidate, particularly when DID patients are experiencing these situations continuously. But the repetitive nature of these themes and events makes individuals begin to create arousal clusters that made it easier to make a good top down prediction when something extremely arousing happens. I haven’t worked out all the details, but that’s my initial thought. It was in part inspired by Michael Graziano’s attention theories.
Studying it again was bringing up even more questions. There was one phrase: “Shared attention states lead to greater cognitive resource allocation that results in broader and deeper cognitive processing”. It was referring more to joint gaze, which is not as relevant in DID because there are no eyes to see. But I thought about the experience of multiplicity, where people feel as if they have a “court” or inner selves they are connected to and this made me wonder if the “social” nature of DID might have some connection to how the brain actually processes information itself. Maybe it could utilise this deeply held element of how we process social attention to better allocate cognitive resources as well and consolidate trauma in a more organised way. Maybe a fragmented person could learn to “synchronously co-attend” internally to important information. Maybe making these different pockets act like “selves” is not only a natural consequence of how we experience attention, but also serves the purpose of helping the brain greater process the most necessary bits of information and consolidate them later by creating this internal “conversation”, as social attention not only changes how we allocate resources but also how well we remember something and how amplified the experience feels from a sensory point of view. At the same time, it could be “distributing” arousal around and stopping the individual self-system from getting overloaded. I also wonder if intense dissociation can make individuals struggle with entering states of joint attention and belonging, and if an internal self system might reduce the stress of struggling to enter states of shared belonging to a degree. According to my studying, “The loss of connectedness (shared attention) is existentially threatening”. I learned in developmental psychology this year that social rejection like bullying can actually elicit the same reaction in the brain as genuine psychical pain in children. Developing an internal system of selves might reduce that pain.
I’ve been dying to study Dissociative Identity Disorder. I don’t know how or when but it’s one of my big future research desires.
One thing I hope people can get one day from me having recorded my experience is that future girls can look back and see that the person who worked hundreds of hours by themselves for them to have more was not an old man, or a 40 year old upper class White woman in a black and white picture from a textbook. It was a girl just like them. I turned 24 and went out with my little sister. I felt sad when I worked so hard on my project that it messed up my skin. I put together a last minute vampire costume complete with eyeliner fangs. I worried about my love life. I went out to a concert with my friend and came back home to learn how on Earth a Hopfield network worked.
It was not someone random or completely unrecognizable. It was me. I needed feminism. I needed to be that feminist. I needed to be that scientist. I filled the shoes that needed to be filled.
It was not someone behind close doors you will never know. It was me. I know you. I am you. I felt that passionately about it. I wanted you to have more. I wanted your daughters to have more. I don’t have a daughter yet but I want her to have more.
I spend time on Pinterest too. I wish I had a cute matching exercise set. I still haven’t found the best lip color for me or properly learned how to contour or set my foundation. I’m on the hunt for my first Jellycat plushie. I haven’t had my first real long term relationship. I dream about having a matching keyset with someone one day and moving in with them. My favourite gym song is “Angel” by Pink Panthress. I just started walking at an incline on the treadmill because someone on social media said to. I had a mini poster of Justin Bieber in my locker in the 6th grade. I have a recurring Snoopy obsession. I spend a lot of time picking out the right cover for my playlists. I once tried and failed to learn the Renegade TikTok dance. My celebrity crush is Bad Bunny. I have an extensively curated whimsical sticker collection. I was a K-pop stan at fourteen too. My bias was Vernon from Seventeen.
It was me who survived rape. It was me who was failed by a skewed justice system. It was me who suffered with severe PTSD that disrupted my relationship to reality because I couldn’t deal with the pain. It was me who went out into my early 20s without enough help because of a history of male psychologists calling me hysterical, fantasy prone, and socially suggestible. It was me who planned glow ups while feeling my hormones slowly falling out of balance because I was so chronically stressed all the time. It was me who wanted to pretend to an influencer while I was reading academic articles and doing anything I could to find something to help me because I couldn’t imagine losing my entire teens and 20s to the feeling of nobody believing me, understanding me, or listening to me.
It was not a male scientist who came to save my day or yours. It was me, a 24 year old girl, who listened to herself and her girl friends dealing with the same thing and believed them.
A man will not be the one to come to your rescue all the time, or even most of the time. Often, it’s going to be you and girls just like you. Don’t turn your back on them, hinder them, or forget about them because when you do, you’re doing the same to yourself.
Girl’s girls do more than lend each other pads and come over with ice cream after a breakup and protect each other from creeps at the club. They do science for each other. They fight the patriarchy for each other. They change the justice system for each other. They go into politics for each other, build schools for each other, and write new ideas for each other. They don’t listen to men saying mean things about what girls are about. They believe each other and believe in each other.
It was love at first sight…
After my exam on Thursday, I took some time to breathe and take a look at my life. Life felt more open and full of possibility.
I didn’t get to do my adulting session in full on Tuesday so I did that.
I also took some time to think about the future of my YouTube channel. What I wanted to do was make fun aesthetic vlogs. I’m a pretty artsy person and I liked getting into making things ornate and beautiful. Not gonna lie, my vlogs are probably the deepest treasure in my life and a spiritual investment. I’m never going to regret having gotten such an important record of this precious time in my life. It was raw and organic and grew with me.
But I haven’t really gotten to delve into the craft of making my videos. That was supposed to be the original intention but I simply didn’t have time. I get free LinkedIn learning through my university so I started an Introduction to Video Editing class. I’ve also been struggling to make good social media content at my job which I’ve never had issues with but I don’t honestly know how to edit short-form content that is engaging so I started a course on that too so I don’t dread my social media meetings every week.
I felt kind of stupid about my YouTube channel a lot because it wasn’t to the standard I was wanting and it wasn’t content that would be popular. It’s very specific and personal. But it was something important to me and I thought it would not hurt to record and was of value to me. I just felt in my gut that it was the right thing to do, especially as I saw the project actually growing. Sometimes perfectionism can wait and it’s better to just start even when you’re not 100% where you want to be yet.
I started a second YouTube channel for my travel vlogs. I think that will be a better place to practice editing as I go on some fun trips this summer. My life has very honestly not been the most “aesthetic” this year anyways. The reality was that I was working extremely hard, did not dress that cute and didn’t have a bunch of extra money hanging around for hauls or anything. I think now that life is winding down, I might start practicing noticing my life from a cinematic perspective and taking extra note of what makes an interesting video.
When I was in high school, I actually wanted to be a documentary filmmaker. I interned two summers in a row as a production assistant, and was an assistant to a photo journalist one summer in college. I would still love to make a documentary one day or some type of nicer series. I’ve been trying to pre-enlist my sister, who is an extremely talented photographer who does video as well for when we’re in our 30s or maybe our mid-40s mid-life crisis.
I thought my senior thesis, which I wrote about the overlap between spiritual healing spaces and psychological diagnosis, would make the coolest documentary ever. I’d talk to people with schizophrenia all around the world who are active mystics and those who had spiritual psychosis and never went back to religion again. I’d talk to people who have been through “spiritual emergencies”, or alterations in how they experience consciousness that result in personal healing instead of a disorder. I’d talk to Jungian psychoanalysts helping people through a “Dark Night of the Soul” (Carl Jung was a fascinating but complex character (in many different ways) that toes this line I’m interested in quite a bit and his ideas have been “borrowed” a lot by modern day New Age spirituality). I’d talk to people who have had Possession Trance Disorders and such, and those who have just been in a Possession Trance that is not a disorder (the relationship between pathological and non-pathological dissociation in particular is a massive realm of discourse and psychology literature on its own).
I think it would make the coolest exploration of what “healing” actually is, what it looks like, and how we define our relationship to ~the psyche~. A lot of people sell “healing” these days and I’m not sure all of them are truly the best ones to do it. A lot of us are going on dedicated “healing” journeys, but healing is an extremely personal and complex idea. I think it might also reveal what it looks like to decolonize psychology a bit and leave some space for mystery, and where a little more research and scientific backing might be useful, on the other hand. Maybe. Way in the future but it’s on my bucket list!
I always felt like I had the most nonsensical sounding name. Raquel is a very old school Brazilian name. It’s not even a particularly popular one in modern times. And Turner is the most Anglican possible last name ever. Put together… i think I might be the only one in the world to have it. I used to want to want to hyphen it with my middle name, Rocha. I feel like it kind of rounds it out. But it never ended up happening.
It’s very symbolic of my uncomfortable racial identity, which Ive explored a lot this year. Like a weird sore thumb of a name.
Nobody ever knew how to pronounce it. I got Ra qwell, Ray qwell, Rachel, even an odd Rebecca.
Thats also impacted how I define myself and express myself.
I have a very studious personality but my cultural heritage is very important to me. I have a more bohemian, spiritual side but I also love a really structured, put together, classic look. Im always buying clothes for one side of me and wondering how on Earth they’ll match the other.
There are a lot of studios and hardworking Brazilians but I don’t feel like work is at the heart of Brazilian culture like it is in the US where hustling is everything. Brazilians are great at relaxing, playing, and enjoying the little things. In East Asian culture, for example, kids are pushed extremely hard by their parents to make good grades, even working 11 hours, just to come home and have their parents call them a disappointment for an A-. In Brazil, school is just half a day of good, hard work and you’re out. My mom is happy that I’m successful but she’s always asking me if I wouldn’t rather be out playing, having fun, getting in a cute relationship. She doesn’t really care for me to be working all the time and Bs are a source of pride, not disappointment.
So I haven’t always known where to look for representation of me, an over achieving, good grade loving, Brazilian American. What do they dress like? What do they do?
Personally, I love reggaeton. I love Brazilian funk.
I love Sufjan Stevens and Joni Mitchell. I love me some Mitski and Princess Nokia.
I love frank ocean, except I can’t listen to him too much because his music makes me sad sometimes.
And I love Marisa monte, The Tropicalistas, Maria Rita and Caetano veloso.
I love tea. I drink more Yerba mate than coffee because I’m too anxious for the caffeine. I love astrology and tarot cards and I can’t decide on one religion i see as the ultimate truth, like many Brazilians, though I do put God first. I see no point in a 10 hour study day. I work really hard for 5 hours and do much better with than than i would with more. But if it’s between a medium grade and a great grade, I’ll stay up all night to go the extra mile with my Yerba mate in hand. I was the most type B of all of my American friends but I grew up to have the most serious task to do and I feel like I lived up to it well. When Spring and Summer roll around, I just want to be outside listening to music in the sun, work be damned. I used to see it as a bad thing but I think it’s in my DNA.
In summary:
I happened to decide to read a book of daily devotionals i hadn’t read for a while and this was the page
It’s funny because it’s the same theme and idea as the sermon I watched in my reflection last week. I guess it’s been a bit of a spiritual theme recently.
It’s been resonating for me because I’m extremely independent to probably an unhealthy degree. I don’t reach out for support much. I’m very immersed in my own life.
I reached a point with my own PTSD experience where I felt like I was past the point of people understanding where I was or what I needed. My journey just got really deep and personal. Honestly, if I told a therapist “I need to find the root cause of dissociative amnesia to heal and I will do anything to find it with no experience to show thus far”, they might have told me I was getting a bit too obsessed and needed to ground a little. But I did it, didnt I? And it was so healing. So I’ve kept a lot of this to myself. It’s just been my own path.
Once I was on that journey, I didn’t often have much guidance. I had no teacher or supervisor. It was just me. It really deepened my spiritual commitment because it was just me and God left at that point. I asked for it and God delivered and guided me through from beginning to end even though it felt impossible.
Recently I’ve felt called to trust more and fall back on my faith as I reach what has been the most intellectually difficult bit so far. I guess that’s the message I’ve really gotten from my spiritual learning recently. Stop being hyper independent and depend on God a touch more right now. Stop overthinking so much. Stop trying to force through your own devices. Just be.
I resonated with this message about being self made. Ive been thinking about it a lot this year. Everybody relies on someone at some point. God does provide. One reason of many that I think spirituality has lost its place in the U.S. is that it requires you to let go of the idea that you are the master of your own life, and it requires you to release your hold over the idea of private property. That’s why our Christianity is a distorted one surrounding private property at the center. And that’s why spiritualities that exist in other parts of the world with ecstatic states, mysticism, and releasing control over your own soul are rare and frowned upon. It’s not in our nature. We like to stay in strong control of ourselves. We don’t lose ourselves in church. I remember winning a scholarship senior year that was given out by a Black American church in my hometown. It was my first time going to Black American church. And trust me, people lost themselves in God there in a way I had never seen before. In White American church, you sit and you listen. You don’t merge with God, become at one with God, release everything inside of you and channel God. It’s very European of us, how secular even our religion is.
I’m happy to say God did this work for me. He did. What does it matter who did it as long as it got done and it was helpful? It’s a very capitalist mindset of us to think otherwise, like we need to patent everything we do. Like the act of receiving and sharing and being of use is not enough. It needs to say something about our identity. It needs to be part of our persona. I actually let go of every piece of my old identity to get this done, became absolutely nothing, and let it all grow from there to be who I needed to be to do this work. Because it would be useful of me to do so, wouldn’t it?
But on a more secular note, no one makes it without someone who believes in them at some point in time. My aunt gave me the money to get my flight and survive London for the first few weeks. She saw me trying to crowdfund and told me to take my GoFundMe down. She’d recently gone through a divorce and gotten a settlement. She told me if I didn’t take part of it, she’d have used it on unimportant stuff. I don’t think that’s true but it’s the most important gift anyone ever gave me and I’m so thankful. I survived New York as an undergrad because my god mom who died when I was around 7 left me a college fund that grew so that I would have money when the time came. Without her, I would have had no extra funds because I grew up low income and my parents didnt have college money saved for me. When I got to London, the mom of the boy i Nannied talked extensively with me about my psychology interests because she was a psychiatrist. She gave me her copy of surfing uncertainty which is the book that taught me about computational neuroscience.
Who worked the hundreds of hours with no pay to make sure this project happened? Me. Who payed all my rent and utilities? Me. Who worked 50 to 60 hours some weeks when I first moved to London? Me, obviously. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t get myself here. I’m not a nepo baby by any means. But I don’t really believe in “self made” to that degree. I wouldn’t be here without people who listened and cared about me along the way. Nobody makes it anywhere in isolation.
I’ve been trying to do some cognitive rewriting in the meantime.
The last few years have been a horrible stress bomb for me that changed how I showed up in the world significantly.
For years, I had internalised the idea that I was crazy. Doing this project was another one of my “craziness” symptoms until I saw that it was working out and even so it’s been a hard thought process to shake. It’s been nerve wracking, like until I see the finished product, it’s still a potential failure or delusion.
Telling someone who has been gaslit about a trauma, that resulted in complex symptoms that kept them in the abuse in the first place, that their disorder is false or that there is something internally skewed about them is a very complicated thing to do. Your mind is supposed to be a sanctuary or a place of refuge. Mine felt like a danger. Anything I thought or felt could be some massively skewed inner problem that would derail my life. Nothing was trustworthy. I was skeptical of everything for years. You can’t escape a danger that is coming from inside so life felt inescapably dangerous all the time.
I’ve had to look back on the last few years and rewrite a lot recently. There wasn’t a lot of danger at all. What there was, though, was a lot of awareness. I didn’t see it as such for a long time. I saw it as potential delusions and a messed up brain. What it was was intelligence, sensibility, dedication, care, and good intuition. I think that’s going to take quite a while to sink in all the way after seeing myself as a crazy person for so long. My experience understanding my trauma, trying to advocate for myself, and trying to enact changes that would support myself were powerful and deep understandings of the world as I was living it. My mental health issues were natural, sensical reactions to a body that was in a constant state of arousal without proper mental health care, in a world with an oppressive stigma.
I’m not crazy.
My body is usually the last place to get somewhere but I want it to feel and really understand one day that I am not crazy. I am not in danger. My mind is not dangerous. It was the thing that saved me and navigated me through life exceptionally well. I navigated life exceptionally well with a massively difficult condition. I’m going to have a master’s degree soon. I changed my whole career. I supported myself financially all these years through debilitating stress and confusion. I am not the one to doubt. I saved myself.
This last part of the process has been slow going and agonisingly intricate. I spent an hour and a half on Saturday sifting through the detail of biases and how they receive signals and it fried my brain just a tiny bit.
I went to a friend’s house on Saturday evening to help her set some things up for her new small business. She told me an anecdote about a woman at her church who taught her how to make her website. She said instead of making it for her, this lady taught all of these women from her church group how they could make their own website, for free on her own time, going step by step for months. If there was a future issue, she wanted them to feel independent and know how to fix it themselves. I thought that was the sweetest thing, alongside everything I was hearing about this woman. She was talking about how this lady is in a very good spot in life and works hard to make sure to bring other people there as well. That inspired me a lot. This group is so sweet. I always love to hear stories about their little community.
Anyways, it was inspiring me on another level, which was that though these issues have been kind of arduous, I do think it’s nice that I’m truly getting a real learning experience in how to actually build and troubleshoot a neural network. It hasn’t just been AI doing the work for me. In troubleshooting my mistakes, I’ve had to truly take apart the models piece by piece and understand each line of code.
I’m actually glad because it’s like the phrase, "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." I was worried that if I let AI do everything and it worked, I wouldn’t really know if I was cut out for a real computational neuroscience program.
I also wouldn’t have the know-how to genuinely, from a systems neuroscience viewpoint, understand why certain complex issues were happening in my model so I could authentically explain them in my results section. This issue has forced me to actually delve into the more mechanical aspects so that I know how to use them later, and I know that I have the ability to do this again one day. It’s not just some AI slop fluke. That’s good for me since I internalised pretty young that I was not a good STEM thinker. In actuality, I just needed someone to slow down and spend a little extra time breaking down the abstract bits, which is a luxury not really afforded at public school in a family without money for a tutor. That weakened my math and science muscle a lot and gave me a bad foundation for the rest of my time in math, while also giving me a bad internal narrative about my abilities.
But if I learn the basics now, I’ll always have a good foundation and my abstract thinking skill will get stronger. I also get to walk away feeling 100% satisfied in the knowledge that I did this myself. I don’t have to feel some awkward shamefulness that AI did something entirely for me. Kaggle user abirhasan1703100 wrote the base (thank you to this underrated icon for his contribution to trauma science), Claude patched issues, I did the creative thinking about how exactly to get these mechanisms onto a Hopfield network and asked for changes like sparse coding and what percentages those ought to be in, which Claude wrote for me, and then I did the troubleshooting on top of that to actually fix and explain some of the more complex mechanisms occurring inside the model through the issues I saw. It wasn’t hand-coded by me at every piece or anything, but I feel really good about that. I think that’s actually pretty much within the norm of how computational neuroscientists do it anyways. So yeah, I’m a real systems neuroscientist. Boom, mic drop.
(Me to Claude, my master’s program, and this random dude on Kaggle)
I always have to make one random interlude about something weighing on my mind but can we please talk about how weirdly traumatic little kids’ content is in Brazil. Like what is this:
It’s about a pig who drops his toy and falls out of his bed trying to grab it at which point a monster appears and forces him to sing a song. He has to keep constantly singing until his voice goes hoarse at which point his mom will notice he stopped singing and come back to help him. This was the source of my sister and I’s childhood traumas. Like why? The lighting. The puppets. So horrifying.
This was my personal least favourite as a child, which made my mom laugh, only perpetuating the cycle of horror:
THIS BOOK IS NOT FREAKING CUTE. IT IS HORRIFYING. I hated this woman’s face. So much. It’s about this aunt who is obsessed with getting her baby nephew to smile at her. Miss ma’am, have you ever heard of coercion??? Consent?? GO. AWAY. My mom read it in this exact intonation in the video too. Like a little squeaky “teeee teeeeeee ah”. The best part of the book was when the aunt finally gets mad and says she’s going to go away and never come back and the nephew finally smiles. I was extremely there with him by that point. This whole thing just looks like some kind of serial killer found footage. I can barely watch it today. Was this a collective trauma or am I just sensitive?
I loved Cocoricó but Dito and Feito made my stomach drop and gave me a really bad feeling. What are they even supposed to be?
They gave me “Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared” vibes before it even existed. Warning, this one is actually meant to be disturbing.
To be a Brazilian 2000s kid is to be mildly traumatised by weird creepy puppets and costumes. It builds character. As a side note, I only ever saw “Alf” playing as a little kid in South America so while he’s not Brazilian, he’s getting added to my list. Just creepy.
(We had definitely moved to Peru by then, where I lived from about 2005-2007, so here is an experience accurate Alf)
On Sunday, I cleared out my Google Drive and found some very cute old footage of me and my family.
I wish I had the picture for this one still. It was a very cute picture of my mom.
This week consisted of a lot of studying followed by a lot of slowing down and feeling in the background of my reflection. I felt a lot this week. I think I needed my body to catch up to where my head was a little. I’ve been feeling the need to get in alignment.
My adulting session was also a little scattered through the week this week because of finals. I did make some good steps though along the way, like getting a new debit account that was easier to access and organising my Google Drive, which I’ve been procrastinating for a very long time.
I have a good feeling about next week though. I woke up in the night early Sunday morning running through thresholds and h’s and things and fell back asleep. I even caught a little cold at the end or something on Sunday night, which tells me my body is slowing down and catching up after a very adrenaline fuelled year of grad school. I think next week I’ll finally make a big jump in this current part of my project as I piece apart the little bits and see how they plat into each other.