Spiritual Nausea: Weekly Reflections on a Personal Project
Tuesday Reflections on my journey towards a computational model of dissociative amnesia
The energy this week was intoxicating from the start. Gray, dreary London was turning warm and the sun seemed to be amplifying the smells of the grass. I love the smell of fresh cut grass more than anything. I spent more time in the beginning of this week working outdoors and just luxuriating in the sun.
As I’ve fleshed out this project, I’ve often felt like my own theory in motion. My work has been a personification of me or me a personification of my work. As I’ve entered a spring of my life and shed some weighty anxieties, I’ve organically found myself reconnecting with my early life. It’s like everything is pouring out like water from a cup. In other words, I’ve been consolidating my experiences, feeling more embodied, and making more associative connections. The Sharp Wave Ripples are rippling and the recurrent excitation is finally up again.
For the last few years, I’ve felt like my senses have been turned off and my anxiety has consumed my ability to reflect. It was like I was locked in a container that nothing could enter. It was survival all the time. But recently the smell of the grass has brought back obscure underlying memories of childhood summers. The feel of the air had me mapping out trips to the central library for books I read when I was 11 or 12. I woke up from a nap the other day and images of my childhood home flashed through my head — the tress through my window, the heavy wooden bed frame of my parents’ room.
This one was more about the feeling than it was the location. My childhood home was sold in a flash in a period where my mental health was at a low. The whole thing was like a free floating blip in the zero gravity journey through the world dissociated as I was. But I woke up this week and there it was, crisp and HD, and I felt okay. I felt grateful and at peace for the time we had with it.
And as I read about de Marcken’s zombie protagonist sifting through the apple and plum trees this week (I’ve been continuing to read “It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over”), I thought of my backyard which was like a small jungle of fruit trees my parents had salvaged and left to grow without obsessive spraying or pruning. All spring and summer, we’d have plums and nectarines falling to the ground and rotting. The apple tree, on the other hand, never really fared very well. It was a runt my mom really just felt bad for and rescued from a local Lowe’s. And we had a willow tree that started as a gangly little thing and grew massive, trespassing into the neighbour’s yard.
We moved to my neighborhood, Battery Park, during the 2008 recession. We weren’t meant to be there very long. My parents planned to move abroad again. But we ended up staying in my hometown in Richmond, Virginia and making a life there. In my last six years or so in the neighborhood, developers caught on to the prime location and the beauty of the area and a madness of house flipping ensued. Historic old plastered walls became plastic siding. Colours were repainted. A more upper class population moved in and changed the general nature of the area. My friends’ parents growing up would often not let them sleep over at my house because they perceived the area as “dangerous”. But by the time we were selling my house, there were upscale pottery galleries and specialty coffee breweries popping up alongside the Black owned restaurants and barber shops.
We held off selling our house for quite a while because my mom loved the house in all of its historic beauty. She wanted us to have something to come back to one day. Our house had a beautifully antique but significantly more run down appearance than the rest of the neighborhood as it started to “elevate” from the house flipping. People would frequently drive by with paper fliers offering to buy our house from us. They’d come by in cars just looking for prime real estate and someone desperate enough to take the cash.
After years, we finally decided it was time to go. My parents had already been separated for 4 years by then, and my dad had not lived in the house for all of that time. I was graduating university and my sister was moving abroad. My mom was depressed and ready to move back to her home country in Brazil to find her happiness again. She needed to let go. At the end, it was sold for a reasonable price, but much lower than it could have been sold for if we had had money to maintain it over time. Only a flipper would have really bought it in the state that it was in. My dad and grandpa were our “contractors”, resulting in some very homely looking renovations. Our front room had a bump in it the hardwood floor that I personally loved but technically was not “up to code”. And when my dad drove back around a few months later to send us pictures of the buyer’s renovations, they had completely gutted the backyard, including our beautiful fruit trees and willow tree. Guess they weren’t very attractive to potential buyers. But to me, they were some of my favorite parts of the house.
This week, I finally took some time to invest in really basic YouTube equipment after over a year of making videos. I started my YouTube channel with the intention of making fun vlogs of my life and sharing the productivity skills I was learning as someone with ADHD. What happened instead is that I ended up capturing one of the most massive, emotionally ridden, and exhilarating experiences of my life with a myriad of webcam tools and my busted 5 year old iPhone. This resulted in some very home-video-esque vlogs with a grainy sort of feel to them. I rode that wave because this was the most important experience of my entire life and it was so intimately tied to my healing journey as a survivor. I wanted to save these memories for later because I felt they were important so I just used what I had and didn’t worry about being perfect or catering to what was trendy.
But my project will likely be over soon and I want to spend some time doing what I didn’t have the tools and time to before, which is improving the quality of my editing and planning some fun videos that are a bit more lighthearted.
There were many times that I actually cursed myself for not buying a mic sooner or a nice vlogging camera. But I’m a financially independent 24 year old, first of all, and it just didn't make sense for my life to purchase those as they’re a real investment. You can see that I still haven’t purchased a vlogging camera yet as they’re pretty pricy and my new iPhone is fine for now. I also resisted the urge to get a really cheap version of a mic or camera on Amazon because if I’m going to get tools, I want them to last. And lastly, any ADHD person can attest to the feeling of deciding you’re going on some new life path and spending £300 on equipment for it, only to completely forget about it a month later. Being on a budget actually helped me work on this ADHD trait significantly and I would say that by now I’ve really mastered the art of waiting for signs of my consistency before I invest my time or money. But I think over a year of YouTube videos in the midst of a busy life is a good enough sign that I will get a return from my investment in the form of happiness and good memories at the very least.
On Thursday, I spent some time drafting a final essay on long term memory for my masters program. I was lucky because a lot of the literature review I had written over last summer and this year for my project strongly overlapped with this prompt and I could already answer it off the top of my head. All I had to do was transfer the literature from my own list to the prompt brainstorm and it was writing itself. I’ve been immersed in putting my neural network together for the last two months, so it had been a minute since I had actually perused my own texts. But something about it was bringing up that same excited/nervous pit in my stomach as I looked over how much I knew and how many gaps I could fill in the literature I read. Every hypothetical and gap I had scattered around my texts felt like it could be greatly supported by the information I had brewing. It felt powerful. And way too big for me. Sometimes I wish I could just hand over my finished answer to someone who knew better and could do more with it. I feel too young, inexperienced, and inadequate to be handling what feels like the secret to my own academic universe.
Sometimes, it makes me feel ill at ease and it’s definitely been a massive pressure on my head. That thought has been my own little secret which makes me feel uncomfortable anticipation. I haven’t wanted to get ahead of myself, so I haven’t shared that feeling with anyone. But on the inside, I feel like I’m holding something heavy and important that I need to handle with dignity and respect. As much as that incentivises me, it’s also been isolating and nerve-wracking. I feel like I need to do a good job for it to live up to the size of the problem. It has a neuroscientific, psychological, and social value that I sometimes wish I had 10 more years of experience with which to handle.
In the afternoon, I went to the park for a quick sit in the sun with my book and a homemade popsicle. There were crows hanging out around me, which was really adding to the atmosphere of my book as de Marcken’s character threw her crow mummy into a dark, ominous hole.
I hit my afternoon slump and decided to make a moringa latte. I first had a moringa latte at a coffee shop near my house and thought it sounded like a strange combination but it was actually not bad. Recently I bought some moringa tea at a market from a vendor who told me it was a good energy booster. He told me in Nigeria where he’s from, students will chew on moringa seeds to give them energy while studying. Never tried that myself so I have no idea if it works but moringa does have a lot of health benefits and it’s a good alternative in the late afternoon when I just crave a latte.
Afterwards, I got back to work on my project. Usually I chat through my videos and it’s a fun process for me. But I’ve been feeling a bit of silliness-block towards this one. It doesn’t feel silly now that I have results forming. I feel incredibly serious. The effect was amplified by writing my essay and seeing all the spaces my work could fit in the literature I read.
What I found after some troubleshooting was that as the ACh was going up, the energy was also going up, creating a “flat” environment that made the numbers hard to recall. I found it pretty interesting how it seemed like there wasn’t a place with partial recall. I was hoping that at some point on my ACh scale, I would see a midway point in what could be remembered. But with a fresh mind the next day, I realized that the output was actually presenting that differently than I expected. Rather than one memory having partially incorrect numbers, which would really just mean the memory was corrupted, one of the three patterns in my network was actually unable to recover at all while the others were able to recover perfectly. This is the equiavlent of being able to remember part of a story but not the full thing. After some further troubleshooting from a line of code that had an incorrect number, I was seeing even more nuance in the results. Rather than a sharp downwards trend at around 0.7 ACh, I was already seeing some failures to produce total recall by about 0.3, with only a two-thirds of the patterns being recalled. By around 0.4, that was only a third. By 0.5, the system was failing to remember anything.
This finding has implications not just for total dissociative amnesia, but also for other contentious elements of trauma research like memory fragmentation. If arousal is high but not over-the-top after trauma, it still means that people might not remember the full scope of the story while remembering a bit of it.
I’ll be honest, I’ve never really fished before. But this part of my experiment has had me feeling like a fisherman reeling in a massive fish. I’ve been pulling and pulling and slowly a big picture is coming together that has been better than I even imagined. And I’m not done yet.
After these two results came through, I was feeling under the weather for the rest of both days. I’ve mentioned in other reflections how an overwhelmingly good thing is still overwhelming. This process has taken all of my willpower and now it’s working and I can’t even begin to process what this is going to mean for science, or for my future. I just have to move forward with trust and gentleness.
The psychological impact of this for me has also been massive. I haven’t even had time to really digest some of the internal elements of my own story. Somebody did something to me and I couldn’t process it until much later, except through an initial intense, abstract emotional pain that manifested in so many scary ways in my life. I lived through high stress for years, always wondering if I was lying, mentally broken, or psychologically ill. I felt like I couldn’t trust anything I thought just in case some part of me was creating illusions about the world. I tried to bring my story to justice and had to watch the same man who had hurt me and barred me from receiving the kind of care I would need for the aftermath of that experience lie in front of everybody about my truth and my character — and he got away with it. I have so much inside that I never fully processed because I couldn’t even trust myself. And sectors of psychology were backing the idea that I was just fantasy prone and had an internal personality flaw that would lead me to create this story. And I wasn’t even wrong. I can write that and see the words but I haven’t even begun to fully process how messed up and disturbing that is on the inside.
It was insane to have to teach myself an entire subject in my own time with nothing but my own logic and mental support just to feel like I could believe myself and finally heal. I’ve been dying to go back to therapy and try out EMDR so I can integrate all of this madness. But this process has actually changed my perception of myself so drastically for the better that I’m glad I can walk into a beautiful, cool, bright future as well as heal from this experience.
It’s been nice to be out of classes with a remote job so that I could have a little bit more flexibility to process this. Because having to support myself while going through school and do this has been incredibly emotionally “arousing” as well. And on the other hand, sometimes I feel so much hopefulness and excitement about something so big and so mine, that it’s really hard to muster up the motivation to get my “real” work done. I want to lay around and process and get sun and do nothing. And I have been doing lots of that but with a pit of guilt and anxiety in my stomach as I do it that something is falling off to the side. It’s been hard to muster up the focus to do “normal life” when something so big and exciting and hopeful is happening.
As I’ve unpacked the intensity of my inner world that has coexisted with the story I’ve creatively packaged about this period, I’ve reflected a lot about the untranslatable part of each of us that gets lost with time.
I watched a low-budget film rendition this week of Leonard Cohen’s love affair, called “So Long Marianne”. Watching it really highlighted to me everything I’ve been feeling.
The album “Songs of Leonard Cohen” always reminds me of my childhood with my parents, who are divorced now. There’s parts of ourselves and other people that we only get one time and then they’re gone. The new part of my parents are not in the Leonard Cohen songs anymore. They’re off in their own tunes now. It reminded me of British anthropologist Robin Dunbar who said that the most number of people we can ever have a stable relationship to is 150. I wonder if he accounted for the fact that every person I know has been at least 6 people each.
And as I watched the world of Leonard Cohen unraveling on screen, I wondered what Cohen would think. I always look at my own story and how much dirtier, more complicated, terrifying, and bizarre life is than what we ever see on screen. The weirdness inside each of us that never makes it out is an integral part of who we are — but few people ever really know it. I was reflecting on this yesterday as I read “It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over”. There’s something maddening and bizarre and difficult about reading it, like you’re inescapably intimate with a soul in the midst of unraveling. I think if we were to really show the story of a life with any accuracy, it would feel something something like that. That’s how mine has felt for the most part— disorganised and terrifying, symbolic and forward-moving. It’s something only I can understand in its entirety. Rather than make me feel isolated, that reflection has always given me peace. There are parts of Leonard Cohen that nobody knows but him, and they left with him. He kept something of himself intact. He never gave himself away to be devoured.
My relationship to technology has had me circulating that thought as well. At a certain time, it gets intertwined with us and who we are and it’s impossible to go back and restore something of ourselves. It shapes our souls. It’s funny how technology is always sold as an addition but we trade so much of ourselves in the exchange. I’ve grown up with the rise of the technological world as we know it now. Sometimes I wonder how much of what I think of me is me and how much is just the world of machines. How much of who I made of myself was from growing up and how much of me is the loose boundaries between me and the rest of the collective? We grew up together. That’s something I’ll never know the answer to. It has had me thinking about the feeling of holding a deep realization inside and letting it die with you, never sharing it one time. In a world of constant proclamation, it feels liberating. I like to think that someone out there has the secrets of the universe already and I hope to God they never ever share them. How beautiful of a thought would that be.
I was meant to have a more superficial self-exploration this week and frankly… I’ve been flopping. In case it wasn’t already obvious. The plan was to go out shopping and get new clothes and maybe find a fun new life drama of some kind to get lost in, which I haven’t had in a long time. And instead, I’ve been getting the most life-altering scientific results and processing my life story.
What do I do to salvage this week’s mission?
I haven’t really known how to dress myself through this massive transition in life. My sense of self feels like it’s in such a powerful state of transformation that I’ve been waiting for the dust to settle. The central self-perceived facets of my personality have shifted drastically.
Last week I thrifted a vintage green turtleneck. The colors reminded me of my Brazilian heritage and brought out my skin and hair well. It looked smart but it was still colorful and fun. Those are all the elements I’ve been hunting down for my own personal style. I used to have more of a Boho, edgy feel to me. And that’s still a part of me deep down but not really the essence of who I’ve become.
I recently made a Pinterest board called ‘Brazilian academia’ after reflecting on how dark academia doesn’t embody the elements of the academic tradition I love and was beautiful but eurocentric.
I was a Portuguese studies minor in undergrad and took almost every class the Portuguese studies department had to offer. We spent our days dissecting Tarsila do Amaral and antropofagia, the linguistic roots of Brazilian Portuguese, Glauber Rocha, Lélia Gonzalez, and so much more. That exploration will always be a massive part of the academic I am today.
Looking at my own board inspired me to see myself stylistically as a Brazilian-American academic and to hold that part of me with power. Brazil is so much more than just beauty procedures, beaches, and steakhouses. Our style is a lot more than Brazil t-shirts bought off Shein and booty shorts made in China. I’ve kept the image of a Brazilian academic in the back of my mind when I go out clothes shopping because I want more people to see Brazilian academics out in the world. Brazilians have already offered the world so much in terms of progress and substance that gets buried under a consumeristic Western vision of us.
I took some time to consult the fashion gods aka my favorite iconic Brazilians, as well as my color analysis wheel (I’m a deep winter).
I ended up with a Vinted haul of bright colors, sundresses, and arm bangles that blended my favorite parts of these looks with my own studious, Virgo sensibilities.
It felt like it was heading in the right direction at least. Now I just need to grow my hair out longer to really capture the essence.
On Saturday, I woke up to some intense troubleshooting to implement sparse coding into my Hopfield network in preparation for some of the next changes I would make. Afterwards, I went out to get clothes for my first Mauritian wedding!
Mauritius is heavily influenced by Indian culture. As a result, their wedding ceremonies are incredibly similar. That meant I had to hunt down a saree for the ceremony.
I met the person who invited me when we were both working in the same house. I nannied and she would clean. I later was given the opportunity to sublet this house when the family moved away, but she continued to come by until we had transitioned the house completely. She’s a single mother with four kids, which is a level of stretched thin I can’t even begin to imagine. She could tell I was a touch isolated and invited me to her church. She moved to London at the same age as me and understood the solitude of your first few years in a new country in your 20s. I ended up going to church with her now and again for the companionship and to get to know her life better. She ended up telling me all about Mauritius and invited me to this wedding last summer. I figured the plan would fall apart or wouldn’t pull through but lo and behold, I’m heading there in August with her family. In exchange, I’ve watched her kids for free now and again on days when she needed to go to work or there was an emergency. In fact, she needed an adult on Wednesday who would be willing to climb up some tall ropes courses for her 13 year old’s birthday party because it was out of her comfort zone. So I said “Sure, why not”. I thought it would be light work but I was hiding my terror by the top ropes.
Anyways, Saturday’s trip was a lot less adventurous, consisting of rummaging around various Indian dress shops and doing a lot of “oohing” and “aahing”. I ended up with a salwar kameez for the Saturday before the wedding…
and a saree for the day of.
Buying my clothes made it all feel real and I can’t wait for this upcoming once-in-a-lifetime experience.
After a stop for chicken biryani and some tea at this friend’s house where I was introduced to a lot of new Bollywood music, I got home inspired to keep working. I ended up anchoring in on my old texts and documents and drafted up a solution for how my new acetylcholine (ACh) function would produce the upshift and downshift in sparse coding. I decided to make a second pattern, so that when ACh was higher, it would bias the network towards the “real” pattern that was meant to be learned. But if ACh was down, it would create mixed states, blowing up my pattern with 1s that were present in the “fake” pattern. This was inspired by my morning troubleshooting, where I was continuously frustrated by extraneous 1s in my output. At one point, I was able to get 2 out of 3 of my recovered patterns to come out perfectly, with one in the middle still overloaded with 1s. It turns out I was having an issue which was very common to Hopfield networks, where my patterns were settling into “spurious attractors”. In other words, it was recalling what I had wanted it to in my second pattern, while also combining some of the 1s from the first pattern in my network that should not be there. I figured this would be the exact type of issue one might run into if ACh was on the lower side.
This was confirmed by rereading “Acetylcholine and the complex interdependence of memory and attention” by Alexandra L Decker and Katherine Duncan, who wrote that when ACh was higher, it stopped surrounding neurons from activating each other, creating a cleaner memory that was less influenced by other memories.
I fell asleep exhausted but extremely satisfied.
I felt unwell on and off all week, just nauseous and tired. Every time I started to feel better, the feeling would quickly fade within a few hours.
This process in my life has felt a lot like an exorcism — the YouTube videos. The science that just keeps streaming up as if from a spring of water. It’s felt like just expunging something from deep inside of me. I have a friend who told me about the time her witchy mother put her in a bathtub full of saltwater and later that night she started throwing up clear water. Not stomach fluid. Just water like something was clearing from inside of her. That’s how I’ve felt.
At work on Sunday, an image came to mind that represented how I’ve been feeling and I was struggling to remember it. I searched “spiritual vomit” and scrolled through a splattering of religious imagery that was touching on the feeling.
I finally found the picture I was trying to remember in an article called “Religious Vomit: Our Bodies, Our Gods” by David Titterington. It explored the spiritual element of expulsion, from creation myths to birth. He spoke of how in Japanese culture, vomit was both disgusting and divine. It was here that my memory was jogged: No-Face from “Spirited Away”.
And then I remembered earlier in the week how the zombie protagonist in de Marcken’s novel had vomited out a hunk of black stuff until she wasn’t hungry anymore. Actually, remembering that bizarre connection put me in a bad mood. This has been a strange set of weeks, like everything is a bit too on the nose and I feel like a magician is pulling a scarf out of my brain and it just won’t stop. It’s been an intense push of my own life-force energy, or axé, to use a phrase Brazilians might understand. I’ve felt spiritually drained and also like I’m in some possession trace I have to conclude.
Feeling like something else is guiding you to do something, like a higher force is dictating your art or your writing, is actually on the spectrum of dissociative experiences. But many people in the midst of creation have felt that same feeling. It stops feeling like it’s really about you or from you or anything of the matter. It feels like you’re borrowing from the deepest source in the universe and all you can do is be thankful without taking ownership. But it makes you feel used too, like a vessel. Creation is a symbiotic relationship. Pathologize it all we want, but thats how it feels. You just have to ride it out until whatever is meant to be done is done and that’s that. It’s terrifying and exhilarating and sometimes you want to run away from it or make it stop but at the end of the day you just have to let it take its course and trust you’ll be okay at the other end of it. And that’s pretty summed up the last half decade of my life. Can’t tell how much of it is really me in this physical form sometimes but I’m grateful for the journey.
I spent some time finishing my book when I got home. After remembering the vomit scene, the resonance had started giving me a bit of paranoia and I needed the relief. The ending was unexpected and spiritual, both claustrophobic and cathartic at once.
Afterwards, I picked my next book but I knew I had to choose carefully. One had led me to unpack my space in the patriarchy of the dating world and sent me on a spicy little adventure. The next had me delving into the world of memories housed in my own healing zombie brain. I carefully eyed up “The Piano Teacher” and “The Modern Fairies”. What next? Did I want to delve into my own shadows and explore the world of power or did I want to risk the pull to join a secret society? Big question. Either way, it seemed the world of the erotic was pulling me in. I just needed to decide which direction to take that in over the coming weeks.
I figured that while I was purging the end of this project, I might as well really put my foot to the gas petal and come out the other end lighter with a fairy tale to read. Spiritual vomiting, right? Let’s get it all out. So I settled on “The Piano Teacher”. I’ll just stay away from any concerts or piano stores until I’m done. And start next week when the dust settles from the beautiful zombie madness I had just spiritually immersed myself in over the last two weeks.
The real vomit finally came on Monday at 4 am. It felt like a relief after days of feeling ill. This was my first time being really adult sick, meaning I ran through every potential person I wished was there in the moment — my mom, my best friend, my non-existent spouse — and at the end I just cleaned myself up by myself. It really had me thinking of the value of relationships I avoided. Tinder wasn’t looking so bad right about then.
This week’s sickness pointed out to me the ways this experience as a survivor encouraged me to see myself as a liar about my body in other spaces. About a year and a half after trauma, I started feeling sick all the time. I couldn’t get a clear answer for months as to why these issues were occurring but doing my own research, I cut out gluten and dairy and that seemed to do the trick. Even so, I was constantly convinced that this was some other form of lying woman neuroticism. My gut issues were just anxiety. I was just getting influenced by the internet like all the other lying women. So every once in a while, I would test my limits again and again I’d feel sick. So I’d believe myself for a while and the cycle would continue.
On Wednesday, I ate gluten again like it was a mind over matter issue. What has ensued has been days of unwellness. I convinced myself all week that this was a bout of anxiety and it wasn’t that serious. I powered through it at work, as I went on my shopping trip, and as I worked on my project. It’s actually rare that I get this sick but it feels like an unavoidable sign as I start pulling up real scientific evidence of my experience that maybe my awareness of my body is actually quite sound and I’m not as neurotic and socially influenceable as a misogynistic world might have me believe.
I was actually offered an endoscopy when I was 20 by a doctor who said I should look further into it and I ended up not taking it to avoid a $200 charge and because deep down I didn’t want to fuel my inner female melodrama I had convinced myself I was in the midst of. I decided I would just figure it out myself, which was the motto of my post-traumatic life. Surviving a sexual trauma changes your relationship to yourself and the world on such a deep level. I stopped trusting practically any system to really support and understand me and dropped the entire job on myself, even though I had been taught by the world around me that I was an untrustworthy narrator of my own experience. That made me a tricky person to put the trust onto but that was the choice I felt I had. I kept a lot to myself and never told anyone anything in case I was crazy about… pretty much everything. My stomach issues were crazy. This project was crazy. My dreams were all crazy. It’s been a massive process of unlearning the inner doubt as I grow into myself.
I laid down in the bath and in bed for a while after throwing up and had a really cathartic feeling that it was time to start seeing myself as honest and clear-sighted. I walked through so many past situations in love, in my mental health story, and in my career and reframed them with the acceptance of my awareness as valid and suddenly the world seemed safer than it had for a long time. For the first time, it felt like my internal foundation had not been as choppy as I feared for so many years. And I fell soundly asleep.