My Miracle: Weekly Reflections on a Personal Project
Tuesday Reflections on my journey towards a computational model of dissociative amnesia
Week of June 23rd through June 29th
This week started out on a high note. I’ve been watching my emotional support large-body of water upper middle class, brother-love triangle romantic drama. It’s actually insane how many shows of this exact type exist. First it was “The Summer I Turned Pretty”. This time it’s “Every Year After”. I have a favorite reaction channel, “Netflix Party”. She watched the whole “TSITP” which was the best part of finishing an episode. I’ve been watching “Every Year After”, but it’s been weirdly lonely. Something just felt missing. On Tuesday, I opened YouTube and she had released a reaction video. My soul felt full again. I needed to remember that this was a collective trauma and my Stockholm Syndrome was not mine alone.
Later in the day, I ended up going on a spontaneous trip to visit my sister in Bristol. I arrived at a little past midnight and submitted my final paper on loneliness at 11:xx the next day.
This paper ended up taking so, so much longer than expected. A lot of that time was spent battling the word count. If I had just had 500 more words or so to mess around with, it probably would have been done faster. I was trying to emulate the “prime example” we received, which was 5000 words compared to our 3000 word cutoff. That made for a bit of a hard comparison. By the time I had chopped so much down, I wasn’t sure if I was glazing over the good stuff too fast while spending too long on the unimportant stuff. But oh well! My new mantra is “I am more than my grades” which I have needed to chant nonstop this year.
To celebrate, I went to Clevedon with my sister and her friends for a beach day on a heat wave day.
These last three years have been the first years of my life I’ve felt truly different.
When I was in high school, I felt boring and shy. In college, I determined to change. I dyed my hair dark and started wearing makeup. I dressed bolder and took more pictures. I was interesting. I felt like I had something to share. My last year of college was the worst year of my life. I was craving a total refresh.
I went through a period of really bad depression the summer before my senior year and was struggling to even have the energy to feed myself because of how bad my PTSD was in those months. I lost a lot of weight that I didn’t need to lose because of how hard it was to just meet my basic needs. In the second picture, I’m actually on my first ever trip to London. I bought a kids sized shirt and it fit me fine as a baby tee. Within a few months of getting a teensy bit healthier, I couldn’t wear it anymore. I can’t fit into that skirt either (sadly because it was really cute).
This was followed by the year I had my Title IX trial which was one of the most mentally tolling and difficult years of my life from beginning to end. It was one of my toughest headspaces I’d ever been in. It felt like my dark hair stopped looking edgy and started to give me kind of a sickly look.
I didn’t want to be dark and heavy and edgy like I felt before. I wanted to be fresh. I wanted to be blonde.
I perused the internet for pictures of my childhood self. She had everything right, I thought. I want to be like her. Fresh and free. I found an adjacent color and brought it to a hair salon.
They did it but it was more of an orange color, a little dry. It wasn’t what I wanted but it was lighter. That was probably the prettiest i ever felt.
By the time I moved to London, it was dry like straw. I started rethinking my approach. Maybe I need a different restart. Natural. Healthy. I always felt like my hair reflected how I felt inside. And this hair was damaged past the point of saving. It needed to just start over. I envisioned a nice slow health journey —hair masks, oiling. A few weeks after moving, I went to a hair salon. My hair is really really thick. No matter where I go, the hair salons tell me “you have a lot of hair”. It’s hard to braid or do anything with. Heavy. Complicated. “you’ll be grateful for it when you’re old though,” I always think.
I guess the lady got overwhelmed with the thickness and the damage. Instead of the light change, she chopped it short, like a mullet and not the cool girl type everyone is getting on Instagram. I think she wanted to cut the dry part off.
In hindsight, it doesn’t look as bad as I felt like it did but I was really in a feminine energy with my long hair and wanting to expand on that so it was kind of an identity hit for me at that point.
At this point I was volunteering at a hostel and scrambling for an apartment and nannying. My Saturday mornings were spent watching “The Big Bang Theory” in the hostel common area with a nice alcoholic old guy whose long distance American girlfriend paid for everything. It was kind of a weird and frumpy era for me, I won’t lie. So I thought, okay this is a low point. Might as well just lean in. I worked on my life with intense motivation. I lived on £50 a week and saved all the rest of my 40 hour weeks at the hostel and nanny jobs. Every shift was spent working on my trainings for my jobs. I hacked away at my hair too. It could look pretty later. Right now i just wanted the damage out. It would grow a few inches and I could chop it down again with kitchen scissors — “a little bit closer” was my favourite feeling. My lifeline. Slowly the natural hair grew out in about 8 months and all I had left were light tips of damage. And then it was gone. And I was working on my project and I was getting into a masters program and I had an apartment.
My hair is now relatively grown out but it’s not very cool or interesting, no personality to it, nothing very expressive. Just hair. I don’t feel very trendy. I feel awkward when I’m around people and socially out of practice. I genuinely feel like a weirdo. And different. Like I’ve lost my ability to relate to people. What do I tell them about myself? I don’t really now.
I’ve been finding my footing again though the more I’ve gotten some of biggest stressors this year out of the way. On Thursday, I had my first weekly meeting with my coworker, after which we went for coffee and talked about boys. I was like “woah, I think I’m starting to feel normal again.” I don’t know, I think for some reason I’ve felt like I had something to hide. Maybe trauma made me feel like that, like there was something I couldn’t tell people about me and that made me feel on edge around everyone. Like I’m not normal. I kind of avoided making friends my age the last few years because I imagined the conversation getting to that point and I felt vulnerable. Not that it would but I guess it’s been a big part of my life the last few years. Nothing else I could say about myself felt real or important. I frequently started to speak and just felt like all of it felt meaningless or random or empty. But it’s really not.
Ending on a high note:
i was determined to either finish the piano teacher this week or get very close. i attacked it like an assembly line, always read ten pages. But this coincided with some of the most troubling parts of the book. around page 180 was their first sex scene and it was triggering in many ways and gave me a sick feeling in my stomach. i had to take a quick break because i didn’t expect the turn it would take.
i keep expecting to have some kind of moral conflict about the whole thing and really reflect on the gender dynamics at play. and they are prominent, don’t get me wrong. but erika is just sick and twisted. nothing redeems her, not even her position in this power dynamic. i won’t go into all the details but for a moment i looked and thought i had misjudged. kremmer was forceful and macho. all of a sudden, erika has the upper hand and she’s worse. kremmer has been deeply misled. the reviews on the front made me think at some point the tables would turn and i might see some complications from erika’s end. maybe i was seeing it from a reductionist standpoint. maybe my modern perception of rape or cancel culture or something would stop me from understanding erika’s complexities. maybe as a survivor i was projecting innocence onto klemmer. maybe this would hurt her more somehow. but no. there is nothing okay about her.
the shock of the unexpected turn in how erika handled the situation, which i won’t say for many reasons, was the triggering part. something very scary and very uncalled for was suddenly being done. klemmer responded just fine but some part of me wondered whether this would be the moment he would look back on at 24 and feel shame because he “wanted it”, as random and u consensual as it was.
I also related to the feeling that something shocking was suddenly pulled out of left field about someone you had a normal perception of. many people who have struggled with some type of predatory character or abuse would probably relate to this. there’s usually much more than meets the eye. the person who raped me seemed like a perfectly normal 18 or 19 year old when I met him. but over the course of the summer, things started being revealed about him that made me realize there was a lot more to him than meets the eye. a friend went to visit him and had a really startling situation occur. i won’t tell the details but he threw a party where multiple male porn stars were invited, supposedly his friends. this led into some frightening occurrences. this story was one time i started realizing that the situation was getting over my head. this person was very attached to him and had no reason to lie so I believe her. why did he know these people? and why did he give them the go ahead to do what they did? what 18 year old man at a nice school, same place as me, has random background porn stars to casually invite over and do drugs with? it wasn’t really how he presented himself which was the confusing part. he lost his virginity freshman year, he said, to another female friend. he did archery, sort of a boujie sport. he went to IB school. it wasn’t something i was expecting to hear and not within the realm of what i thought 18 year olds did. why had these people never been mentioned before?
in hindsight, his personality also changed drastically over the course of getting to know him. he started as a sort of flirtatious, cocky guy. every female friend had a bad encounter with him. over time, he started to become “one of the girls”. he hated men too. he had all these vulnerabilities for us to keep attending to that in hindsight felt false or suspiciously timed. there was definitely background information that i was not getting and honestly maybe even suppressing about who this person was.
in the novel, we see erika’s background. we see her perversions and bizarre encounters. so it’s not as random, i suppose. but i see it through klemmer’s point of view and i see the shift in who someone is to you because you didn’t know as much as you thought you did.
I was watching one of my old videos just to reminisce today and it was sort of shaking up my perception of my own energy. I was watching a video of another girl with mental health issues as well. It’s kind of funny how people who have been through weird stuff have this kind of otherworldly, ethereal quality to them like they’re talking to spirits or something. I’ve noticed this in a lot of different women I know with trauma particularly. Maybe it’s the dissociation. You’re not 100% there, but at the same time you have this kind of esoteric wisdom about life. You’re always doing higher learning. I think that’s where it comes from. It’s very “I was abducted by aliens five years ago and they whispered the meaning of life in my ear but it was in an alien language that I could only understand in their UFO and now I don’t know how to be normal anymore” energy.
Life is kind of crazy actually, when I read these. I feel like this:
This whole project situation is actually budding lore as well which only like 4 people know anything about and no one really cares that much or thinks about. But I don’t know, it’s a little crazy. Like I just… started doing computational neuroscience. Welp, let’s see how that one plays out.
I had a meeting on Friday with my supervisor and felt a bit defeated. First of all, I’m no closer to actually figuring out why on Earth my model isn’t running properly. Second of all, I felt kind of dumb because I am not advanced enough to have a fully advanced conversation about my model. I’m in an awkward spot in knowledge where I can develop a theory that works but I can’t carry it out fully or speak about the actual method in depth yet. I had a bit of an imposter syndrome moment after my meeting, I won’t lie. I’m trying not to think about the fact that I will have to write a method section soon and I don’t even know calculus. So that sucks. I’m thinking the recurrent excitation one won’t be so hard, at least the densely coded one. Everything is pretty much identical to a normal Hopfield network, except that recurrent excitation is just getting modified in proportion to the acetylcholine. That shouldn’t take much work (but who knows). But then… this model I’m having issues with? The actual bias rules and things? How am I supposed to figure that out? These are the moments that you wish you had someone to work with so bad.
This is really the hardest part now. I’m going to pray today for a miracle.
Also, I’m worried about producing AI slop. That is not my intention even a little bit. Claude is like my really annoying coworker that I pretend to like because I’m forced to but deep down I just wish he would stop talking to me in the break room. I’ve been trying to remember this is for a good reason. For survivors and stuff. So… I should keep going. But it’s a self-esteem hit a little.
When I feel like I’m in the wrong place or I feel demotivated, I watch my videos from the beginning of this project when I felt no pressure and was just vibing. No supervisors, no deadlines, no Claude to beef with, no experiments to run. I wasn’t worried about getting things wrong. They really keep me going sometimes because I came a long way and this is a soul journey I must complete. For the plot. This feels like something I was supposed to do in life, like I signed a contract before I was born that I would go through certain things in life to get this one big issue out of the way, with my specific combination of stubbornness and spite, my memory and innate interests. It just felt too much like it clicked right at the beginning, like a door opened that I had to follow, even if I had no idea where it would go.
Sometimes you have to do something and just feel really, really stupid while you’re doing it just so it gets done.
This is good, right? It probably wasn’t going to get done by anyone at least for a very long time if I didn’t do it. No one is caring about dissociative amnesia this much at all. No one was probably going to think, “Acetylcholine suppresses Sharp-Wave Ripples when arousal goes up and that’s why people are suppressing things” probably for quite a long while because no one had the incentive to this degree to sit around and think about it. So I think it’s probably a good thing that I try anyways. I hope. Even if I needed some extra, super annoying AI support to build my models. Because when it’s out there, it’s out there and people can integrate that information into what they do.
I just get a bit of a guilt complex when I see the knowledge I’m lacking from a technical standpoint. Well, it’s not like I went to school for this yet. So why would I know really intricate stuff. I feel like I’m learning a lot as I go along though. I just feel bad that I don’t know enough Python to write things out myself, like my metrics, which would probably not be that hard for someone who was really good at Python. When I struggle to do things like understand Hopfield network math, I think, I feel like I’m cheating. I didn’t build the skill from the ground up, learning each and every piece. I want to though. It’s what I’ll probably do when I’m done with this project and it’s submitted. Practice Python, finish all my books, try to build more simple models and things.
I will say, I think the Trump/Epstein era filled me with more urgency and that’s why I just hit the ground running, full faith, and didn’t stop. Otherwise I probably would have gotten annoyed and given up or saved it for later. But when you feel powerless at everything else and you’re angry and you get one opportunity to leave even a little bit of an “F U” out there, you kind of just take it honestly. Just rain on your parade a little bit, with “you” being just… all of this right now.
Not that Trump would know because I doubt he’s read anything but his own Twitter in decades but it’s the thought that counts. It’s the sentiment behind the thing.
Since I’m doing my EFT tapping recently though, I will say from a “mind creates reality” POV that I am actually deeply uncomfortable with praise and while I work really hard to do things very well, I feel scared of being seen. It makes me vulnerable. I write every week and share it with no one. My grandma of all people read of my essays on race on here and she said I should try to actually get it published. But I don’t try. Because it feels more comfortable to hold in all the cool things that I do. I actually intentionally make sure that nothing I write on here is emailed so my family doesn’t read it. Even when I try at a YouTube video, I don’t send it to anyone or tell anyone to watch it. In fact, sometimes I leave them grainy to make sure no one is interested. What’s the point, right? I don’t know, I like to do cool things but I don’t like people to interact with them. It makes me feel embarrassed when people tell me “good job”.
So I have wanted to do a very good job at this but I’ve been actually quite resistant to it being out or being seen at the same time. I feel psychologically comfortable when I get criticism or a mediocre response, even when I work extremely hard or try my very best. Isn’t that so extremely weird?
This whole project path has been a very personal internal journey of peeling apart everything stopping me from having my biggest desire — a published research paper with the root cause of dissociative amnesia. Being understood in the most tangible way. Feeling validated and protected in the most tangible way. Feeling empowered. Feeling like I was disciplined and had follow through, which I always used to tell myself I didn’t have. Overcoming. That’s what I wanted, meaning I had to look at every belief I had inside that told me otherwise. It’s been a long journey of embracing vulnerability and facing my anxieties head on. Every “I can’t do it”. “This is impossible.” “You’re crazy.” “You’re a young woman with a mental illness. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Pursuing this isn’t worth the effort.” It was a spiritual journey very befitting of this complex psychological theme, like I had to release it in my soul and in the world at the very same time, all the while learning that they weren’t as separate as I thought they were. This controversy felt like it was meant to leave the world in this exact way, by this exact person, going through this exact thought process. It wasn’t meant to be stumbled across by a career male scientist just getting a good day’s work in. That’s what I feel, at least.
This project was my own personal miracle. Never would I have expected to have any kind of scientific answer for what I went through, discovered by me.
When I feel scared or lost or lacking faith, I like reading the Bible. It gives me perspective. I feel like it always has an answer. Like today, I was reflecting on the situation with this abusive person. I felt afraid, and I felt heavy with the feeling of having been gaslit. My experience of being a survivor has been constantly wondering if I will be gaslit my whole life with no answer. This answer that I found for myself was my whisper of freedom. Even so, it’s hard when you’ve interacted with people and systems who twist up your reality all the time. On Friday, I felt a strong desire to read my Bible some more and learn something. Just anything. I’ve been reading through the New Testament for a while. But I wanted to take a break and read Psalms. I wanted poetry, not just teaching. The first psalm immediately calmed by heart:
“And that’s why the wicked
will have no standing in the court of justice —
neither will sinners
in the assembly of the righteous.”
Sometimes I feel my faith shaken by the darkness in the world or the darkness in my life. “Why would God do that? How could such a thing happen?”
I see God as being like our consciousness expanding. That’s how my relationship to God has felt. I try to remind myself that this is the very first time ever that I have known God. I’m only 24. I haven’t seen the full story play out yet. I’m making judgements about today, but I haven’t seen 10 years from now. I will say that when this first occurred, I didn’t know God at all. I actually started my spiritual journey right in the midst of all of this mess, before even having left this abuse situation. After that was when I started to see what was going on with more clarity. I started to learn about self-love, develop confidence, stand up for myself more. I didn’t call this energy God yet, but Spirit or the Universe and I knew it had a purpose.
Over time, I learned how to lean on God, talk to God, call on God. And things shifted a lot. I felt a strong pull to do something I’d never done before, something that would take a miracle to pull off. It was like stepping off a cliff and having to trust that stones would appear for me to walk on. And they did.
Recently, I’ve felt really comforted by the story of Jesus pulling apart loaves of bread to feed so many people. I’ve thought about that one with my financial situation. My money seems low, but it will last just as it’s meant to. And it has. A 20 dollar bill I couldn’t find anywhere was found in the right spot at the right time. I accidentally sent money to the wrong card and was able to use that card to buy groceries. It’s not really magic but it’s comfort and safety. I was worried about not being able to find an apartment, and the only cheap flat that allowed cats had a one-week deposit instead of a month and happened to be near my favorite neighborhood. It’s just little things that happen more often the more I’ve followed my inner voice and where I’m called to go.
I need to be in that energy for the end of my paper. I’ll look at something that seems impossible, and it will go picking apart piece by piece like it was always meant to be just that way. Like buying a chair for a spot in your room and it fitting perfectly. Like thinking you’re late just to pull up at the perfect time with someone pulling out their car right in the front of the building for you to park in. The experiment will be fixed and it will work better than I think, the results will write themselves, I’ll look at the rules and they’ll just slide into spot and then the paper will be submitted. And that will be the end of that. Just like a loaf of bread that feeds a thousand people.
I’ve seen a lot of talking recently about people asking if the Left needs spirituality. They say that this is something very prominent in the Right that oddly becomes an asset. I will say, as someone who leans probably more left than the average person, that yes, the left is pretty faithless. I’ve reflected on my position as a Christian often, because the alt-right has claimed Christianity pretty hard. And you know what? Yeah, it actually mirrors how the left works right now pretty well that people turned their backs on their spirituality and let them be conservative. When the right takes over something, the left right now tends to pretty much flop on their stomach and say “I guess it belongs to them now. There’s no hope.” Where’s the gusto? The grit? The energy? Where’s the push to love the difficult parts, be challenged, and change the things you care about? Revolutionise? Develop a fresh perspective? Give people a new vantage point to believe in? We just let the right have whatever they want without question, without committing to change?
This is my God and He will bring justice to survivors. He will give a woman a talent and a career that is nothing short of miraculous. He will help me change the situation. We let the right claim everything and return back with the most spineless, low-energy response ever. In that sense, yes, the Left needs spirituality in that in needs to find a higher mission and follow it through with intense faithfulness. It needs to believe with one hundred percent certainty that it will happen for them. It needs to get strong about reforming and pulling the energy it wants to see into the thing it cares about. I love God and I believe that there is a vision for Christianity that can be rebellious and useful and destroy systems of oppression. It’s right there in the very words I’m reading. It’s the whole point.
Here’s another one. I would be the very first person to admit that America was built off of colonialism and slave labor. I know this. On the other hand, in mythology at least, it was meant to be a country where outcasts, empoverished people, and immigrants of all kind could come and start a new life. Does it live up to that all the time? No but there was a time where that was absolutely everything to our identity. Nowadays, the alt-right have co-opted the idea of “American values” to be in every way opposite to this. On the left, we would say that they are revealing what American “truly was” and there’s some merit to that. On the other hand, if you are trying to drastically rewrite the source text, as they love to do with the Bible, how much is it truly an “American value”? On the left, we are not very comfortable revolutionising. We succumb. We surrender. We relinquish our hold. We just throw it away in contempt but also in a sort of hopelessness and frankly inability to get our hand messy. We will let our right wing counterparts rewrite anything, modify anything, and no matter how different it is from what they say it is, we accept their words as some kind of revelatory truth. No creativity, grit, or hustle. America is a concept. We know what it was, sure fine. But what could it be?If they can rewrite it, why should we not? Can it not be synonymous with values like transformation, dialogue, and tolerance? Or is it hopeless?
Have you ever dated someone who won’t work through any struggle and would rather breakup at the drop of a hat? Who has no type of relationship resilience and won’t see it through the hard parts? Because that’s the left a lot of times. Sometimes you love something complicated and that’s okay. It gets easier over time but if you give up, you don’t get to the beautiful parts. Seeing it through to the end is rewarding.
Not everyone I knows has this particular type of faith nor do they follow this one. I don’t really care to make them but I will say that I have changed my life faster and from a much lower place by having a lot more vision and a lot more belief in what I cannot see. Online leftists told me “look how ugly the world is and how impossible it is to get your needs met. We’re doomed. The system is rigged against us.” God told me “you will see justice in this lifetime, I will make sure of it as long as you keep having faith,” and I have. It was beautiful. It opened up every single part of me to see myself in the biggest possible way, and see the world in the biggest possible way. I saw that “impossible” was a scam invented by people who don’t want to see how miraculous the world is. And God made me the one to free myself, which was the most beautiful part of all. I saw that I was strong and smart and capable. That’s how it works. Belief makes you creative and proactive. It keeps you on the lookout for solutions. It will propel you to break down any wall necessary, move any mountain. You won’t even see them. You’ll just kick them down.
My survivor affirmations :P
But look how the wicked hatch evil,
conceive trouble, give birth to lies!
They make a pit, dig it all out,
and then fall right into the hole they’ve made!
The trouble they cause
will come back on their own heads;
the violence they commit
will come down on their own skulls.
But I will thank the Lord for his righteousness;
I will sign praises
to the name of the Lord Most High.
I’ve never been the type to force people in my direction when it comes to their spirituality. It’s never my goal and never will be. I don’t think people need to be forced to feel something or believe in something they don’t. But what I experienced here is the spirituality that the Left needs. What the Left needs is to believe in a prophecy. It needs to be a spirit, not a routine or a business. It needs life. It needs a little bit of divine intervention, honestly. I think we are just starting to see that more in New York and many other states, which is infectious. But in the last few years, the left has been very determined to destroy any signs of real “divine inspiration” or higher messages in its party and that has been the issue in my opinion. If there’s one word I would use to describe the Democratic particular in the last decade or so, it would be “flaccid”. That’s the opposite of what we want. We need ecstasy and to feel infected by an energy that just moves us to higher action. We need faith.
But the Lord rules forever!
He assumes His throne
for the sake of justice.
He will establish justice in the world rightly;
He will judge all people fairly.
The Lord is a safe place for the oppressed —
a safe place in difficult times.
You know another word for believing in what you can’t yet see? Hope. They kind of go hand in hand.
CONTAINS SPOILERS OF “THE PIANO TEACHER”
On Saturday afternoon, I sat for quite a while in the grass reading the piano teacher.
I wish I had something profound to say about this part because there’s a lot going on. Most of the heavy action happens in the last 100 pages or so, which gives the book the feeling of a rapid, dangerous doom spiral. It was more of an emotional ride than a mental one at this point for me. I can’t begin to fully describe the combination of shock, fear, pity, and second hand embarrassment the last part causes.
Poor Klemmer. He didn’t come here for this. He wanted something more “amorous”, in the words of the book. It’s not the genders relation that is typically sold. The book multiple times refers to Erika as if she’s not much of a woman. It’s not that she’s masculine in appearance nor in public behaviour per se. But she lacks some knowledge of how to portray herself as a typical woman. She doesn’t wrap her arms around a man tenderly or let herself relax or feel or wear her nice dresses. And when she does, it’s done garishly and inaccurately, like someone trying to be a woman for the very first time. She is the only woman at the peep show and the only one at the porn cinema who is not a sex worker. I’ll probably reflect on this book for a while and later on I’ll have some kind of deeper prognosis on that. Because there’s something there about the role women play in their sex lives. But Erika is just not playing it. In a lot of ways, Erika is a man in her soul pretending to be a woman to make a man out of a boy and a woman out of herself. Does that make sense at all? Maybe that’s not the best wording because it downplays Erika’s potential to be this character as a woman. There’s a lot of deeper implications to that but it’s how it feels. Klemmer feels the same way. He came to woo and have this loving relationship where he is in control. And Erika wants to make him be in control so that she stays in control.
Did he get it right: By becoming her master, he can never become her master?
In another way, it makes me think of male gender roles as their own trap. By always being coerced into a dominating position, men never really have true power. And something about women wanting control through submission.
The rape element is very awkward here as well.
A woman who plays Chopin so marvellously can’t possibly mean that. Yet that is what the woman desires because she has never done anything but play Chopin and Brahms. Now she pleads for rape, which she pictures more as a steady announcement of rape. When I can’t stir or budge, please talk to me about rape, nothing could save me from it.
Mind you, this boy is 17 years old. I would say she had already raped him once by the toilet scene, given the unasked for things she did. A rapist who wants to be raped. What a world. I guess I’ll let that on sit for a while.
In my auspicious senior year of undergrad, where my time as a comparative literature and societies student was waning and the seeds of my new psychology life were just starting to be sowed, I took a literature class called “Mad Love”. We read all sorts of book on the theme of madness and romance and obsession and hatred. This book would have fit right in. I can imagine someone writing a very interesting essay on the place of love in this book because it is quite bizarre. The phrase gets tossed around quite a bit, but I struggle to fully find its genuine place here. Do either of these people really love each other? I don’t really know but they sure do like to say it and think it.
We actually had “Lolita” on the syllabus that year. I’m not going to lie, I’ve tried to read “Lolita” twice and have failed both times. The first time was an a 15 year old girl who loved her Tumbler account. Lolita and Lana del Rey flared up simultaneously and everyone was wearing heart shaped sunglasses. I had some myself, in fact.
I loved literature back then, so I thought I would take a stab at it. I dropped off a good bit in, just from boredom. In hindsight, I think that was a good thing because it wouldn’t have carried the same power or meaning to me. I didn’t fully understand the repercussions of how Humbert Humbert navigated the world and what that meant for Lolita.
Ironically, that senior year I understood them a little too well. I dropped off around the part that they went on the road trip. I was tired and wanted to save my energy for the other texts in the course. On the other hand, I was utterly repulsed and had a pit in my stomach. Around the time of my abuse, I took two long road trips from New York to Miami. I had already been raped once to my now knowledge on the first one and spent the first way down in a wild headspace, fantasising about running away and starting a new life. On the second road trip just a week later, my entire life had been thrown apart by COVID and I spent the whole road trip down with the man who raped me, on my way to living in a house together for I don’t remember how long now. So I think perhaps it hit a bit too close to home at that point.
Anyways, the point is I won’t try to make too many parallels because I am not a “Lolita” expert. I will try again and finish it. But I’ve found it quite interesting to see the differences in narration from a gender perspective. There’s something honestly significantly more pathetic about Erika, despite her inclinations being overall much weirder and more violent. Maybe I can appreciate her from more of a distance because Klemmer is older. He is a child but he’s not a small one. Or maybe it’s because Humbert Humbert is his own hero and makes sure to tell us this. We get more of an outside view of Erika and can see that she is in fact, quite pathetic. It doesn’t mean I feel bad for her per se. I wouldn’t go that far. But I do think in her being submissive to Klemmer, or at least wanting to be, that pathetic energy just really shines through. Maybe that’s it. Even Klemmer finds her a bit sad as she continues to force herself on him and coerce him through the next bits of the book. She’s just… weird. And gross. Klemmer says she stinks. The whole thing is just as embarrassing as it is frightening somehow.
I kind of appreciate how Jelinek does not make Erika a sympathetic character, though. Not really, except maybe right at the end. You do understand her and get to know her psychology. She was restricted as a child. She never got to live out her youth. Her mother stopped her from doing anything. But Erika is also, to her core, an insufferable narcissist. She’s not a poor, defenceless woman. In not very sophisticated terms, she kind of thinks she’s the shit. She also hates herself a little bit or a lot, maybe. Or is just at the least very pathetic. So I would say that Jelinek does not rob her of the danger nor the power she possess. Because I never really feel very sad for her, as lowly as she willingly makes herself and I don’t really ever get the sense that I’m supposed to.
My biggest worry from beginning to end was that I was going to project my own experience as a survivor onto this story and not give Erika some kind of credit she deserved. Maybe I would miss some of the nuances of gender and the kind of masculine power that Klemmer possesses. I was waiting for this twist where Klemmer suddenly took the reins and we saw his full potential for harm on full display. Erika might be older, but Klemmer is a man. What’s interesting about this story is that every single time the narrative starts to hint in that direction, Erika takes the power back again! It’s near impossible to really root for her. At one point Klemmer decides to go along with her wishes, thinking he may like it.
“Here’s the moment,” I thought. “I was feeling bad for him and projecting this victimhood onto him but he’s going to want to do it and it’s going to go badly for her.” I was primed to discover that in my sensitivity, I had misread the situation.
He decides to wait a few days. Before he even gets the chance to do so, Erika is hot on his tail again pushing through every single “I don’t want to do this.” Even when she’s asking him to dominate her, she just won’t give him the chance.
By the time the time the turning point comes, it’s far too complex to blame it on his masculinity. Erika has already stolen his innocence multiple times in multiple ways. You could see it from the letter scene on. Just about 10 or 20 pages before, Erika had forced herself on him with her mouth and he could not get his body to react. He had lost all desire for her after the letter and could not get aroused. Now he sticks himself inside her (without her consent) in a fit of retaliatory rage and she feels nothing. But she honestly has never felt anything at all anyways. That’s what makes it confusing. Would he have done this anyways if he hadn’t been satisfied or did he just get completely pushed to the brink? Was he traumatized? Was this retaliatory abuse? This is the night of the very same day she forces herself on him. The first thing he does is seek out an animal to kill, despite being an animal lover. As he stands under Erika’s window, ready to unleash this violence, he thinks:
Student Klemmer has grown up overnight. He would never have guessed how quickly a fruit ripens.
Something in Klemmer changed that day. He can never see the world through a child’s eyes again.
Maybe this was the part where I struggled not to project my own experience. Maybe I would hate Klemmer more at the end if I didn’t know what an “aftermath” looks like and feels like. It’s a lot more complicated than you would guess.
The night after I was unknowingly raped for the first time was the first time I ever came onto this person intentionally at a party and kissed him. I was very drunk. And it was a bit complex. I sat on the bed and looked at him kind of funny, like an invitation and he walked up to me and we kissed. It’s very triggering to think about because in hindsight, I feel repulsion towards my own body and guilt. It’s one of my big “shames” form that period of time. Just makes the whole thing a little less clean to process, doesn’t it? Maybe subconsciously I was trying to reclaim my psychological power or something, even if I didn’t really remember what happened. This is a much more common experience for survivors than you would guess. It takes a minute to process and accurately react to the risk and the harm. Sometimes people stay with their abusers. Sometimes they weirdly like them more for a minute. They tell them it was okay or they liked it. People don’t always, or maybe even often, immediately run away and comprehend the situation with sharp clarity.
I’ve had a lot of revenge fantasies over the years, that didn’t go the way Klemmer’s did but they were definitely violent and angry. Obviously I never enacted them, nor would I have been able to most likely. But I struggled at the end to not see Klemmer as being in a bit of a psychologically vulnerable space, even if he framed it in the most masculine framework he had available to him. The letter, depicting sexually violent and unusual sex acts he’d never been exposed to before, was traumatizing and shocking and unexpected. It made him lose his typical access to his body, and he was coerced into uncomfortable sex with an older teacher after telling her he didn’t want to have it. In a fit of rage and loss of innocence, he acted out the letter just as she asked. It doesn’t make it okay, but it didn’t take away his victimhood to me. But maybe this is naive of me. Maybe he would never regret it. Maybe someone who is not a survivor would have thrown that whole thing out the window, and think, “Look, that’s what was inside him all along” or “He just wanted his control back so he reclaimed it".” Or maybe not, I don’t know. A reviewer on The StoryGraph called him a “sociopathic narcissist”. To me, he thought like most of the men I’ve met, to be honest. I didn’t see anything particularly sociopathic about him until the end, and even then I don’t know if that’s the word for it. I think we are probably both on the extreme end and I want to see more “official” perspectives to get a different vantage point. I struggle in overlaps like these. I had a friend who loved his girlfriend a lot. One day, he got extremely drunk and kissed another girl. He was so distraught for days he couldn’t eat at all. A lot of people were busy chastising him, I was thinking about intoxication and consent. I guess being a survivor changes your perspective, even on men. It’s hard to unsee it.
And then there’s the second complex victim here, Ms. Erika herself:
The daughter doesn’t know yet whether she will commit murder or throw herself at the man’s feet and kiss him. She will decide later whether to stab him. Or seriously and passionately plead him.
I guess I did feel a little bad for her at the end.
Thoroughly triggered, I set my sights on my next book, “Love” by Maayan Eitan. Me and this book have unfinished business.
I purchased this book in the summer of 2022, the same summer as my picture in the outgrown baby tee. I was dealing with some of my most intense mental illness as fragments I couldn’t understand starting flying out to deal with. I felt dirty. I thought reading a little bit about sensuality or sex would help me process. This was also the first summer I read Anaïs Nin, who I love.
“Love” is about the internal world of a young sex worker. I thought it would make me feel understood somehow. But I was too sick that summer, and while it’s a short book and I did lug it on my fateful first trip to London, it never got finished. So now, with renewed strength, we will finish it. After a mental break to process the trauma of “The Piano Teacher.”
On Sunday, I watched a movie called “Jeff Who Lives At Home”. It’s a very low-budget movie, free on YouTube (which is how I watch most of my movies seeing as I live on a tight budget). It’s about a man who gets a random call from a guy looking for a man named Kevin. To pretty much anyone, it would have been a wrong number situation. But for Jeff, who was aimless and lived in his mom’s basement, it was a sign from the universe that he didn’t yet understand. He goes out, following anything with the word “Kevin” all day. This leads him to a bunch of wacky situations which tended to circle around his brother, Steve, who he has a bad relationship to. Steve hates that Jeff sees signs in everything. Nobody understands this much about Jeff. By the end of the movie, Jeff is worried that maybe his existence is a touch meaningless.
In one of many synchronicities throughout the day, all the members of Jeff’s family end up in a traffic jam on a bridge. Steve runs after his wife to try to salvage their relationship. Linda, they mom, sees Steve running and goes after him. While Jeff is in the taxi having an existential crisis, he realizes that a car has gone overboard and fallen into the water. He jumps into action and dives right in. He ends up saving two little girls and their father, almost dying himself. At the end, it is revealed that the father’s name was Kevin. All the signs and synchronicities were leading to one moment of Jeff being just at the right place at the right time.
I personally do believe in signs. When I first developed my own mental illness in response to my traumatic experience, I thought I saw signs everywhere. This was the same time that I was just developing my own sense of spirituality. Both of these coinciding processes merged into a big, jumbled, internal mess. Over time, I got better. I learned the difference between my intuition or God and my mental health. I never stopped believing in signs but I didn’t seek them out. They tended to find me in their own way.
I’ve been a bit emotionally blocked up these last few years but this movie actually made me cry at the end because it felt like my own weird sign as I dealt with doubts about this project this week. I know it sounds silly but it really felt like everything I went through was meant to lead to this moment right now, to this information. I would often ask God, “Why was this so dark?” or “Why so much?” But if it hadn’t been that way, I wouldn’t have developed dissociative amnesia how I did and I wouldn’t follow the path to see just how and when the fragments of memory started coming up. If I hadn’t gotten so sick, I wouldn’t have known.
I guess for the first time ever as I watched this movie, I really sat with the fact that this information could save a person’s life. It’s already saved mine in many ways, as a survivor who was struggling without it. I didn’t know if this would be the right thing to do or the right way to go. I didn’t know if it was some mental illness type of thing, a delusion that wouldn’t work out. I didn’t even have the skills but sometimes you see that you could save someone else from going through your pain and you just jump in. You don’t think, like Jeff who was feeling lost after the death of his father and saved another little girl from suffering the same pain. I do think the universe puts you in the right place and the right time sometimes. You don’t understand what the signs mean or what they’re for but you just follow them with faith.
I finished the second to last chapter of “I Will Make You Rich” by Ramit Sethi on Saturday, making next week my very last week with the book.
I’ve been a consistent listener of a few different financial personalities for the last few years that I think have a very healthy approach to finance. Ramit Sethi is one of them. Something they all drill in profusely is that when the stock market is down, you do. not. sell. Most people see a drop in their personal stocks and they immediately jump ship to cut their losses. That’s how a lot of people lose big money which is ironically the source of fear people have going into investing. What you should do is instead is hold onto your assets because the stock market drops and has a comeback all the time. In the meantime, you should take the opportunity to keep investing and reap the advantages of the lower rates. People who get rich aren’t often sitting there looking at minute differences in the stock market on a day to day basis. They are holding onto their stocks for a very long time to really get the returns.
I’ve found that advice to be pretty applicable to general life as well. My “stocks have been down” plenty of times throughout this project for one reason or another but I haven’t dropped it. I held, held, held. When my stocks are low, like this week when I felt down about not understanding wtf I was going, I typically take it as an opportunity to go inwards and root through issues like my self-confidence that are equally as important and will get me through to the very end. The “panic sell” of personal achievement is going “There’s no way I can do this” and not riding out the wave to the part where you can actually productively problem solve or have a personal breakthrough. You throw the investment of your time, energy, and even material resources down the drain before you can get the return!
You can even apply this to relationships. Nowadays, anyone can day trade (or at least convince themselves they can). It just takes a simple click of a button to decide to let go of something that doesn’t feel flashy anymore. People convince themselves they’re doing some kind of glamorous, exciting thing when they’re often missing out on the real big bucks from holding out and riding all the waves. With dating apps, it’s equally easy to have the illusion that there’s always a better mode to trade up for. The illusion of “a better gain” has never been so alluring. But it’s the people who stick it through when each other’s personal stocks are down that tend to report the most satisfaction.
I just think it’s a generally good bit of wisdom for life that goes much deeper than stocks and bonds. Celebrate when things are high, and patiently look for what there is to gain when things are low without just jumping ship. Secret to success right there.
As a side note, reading this book has had me giggling nonstop because it reminded me of a guy I ghosted a few years back for having the most red flag energy ever. He believed that it was women’s role to be submissive and he would never date a woman who made more money than him because “it was a power issue”. Granted this guy was like 7 years older than me and far from living his rich life, if u catch my drift. That’s when I knew it was going from polite smile to ghosting mode. I thought, “He’s not gonna like me then.”
Baby girl, if you’re making odd cash on the side to make ends meet and spending your days drinking, I would have to go into a coma or live under a rock to maintain that standard. You’re leaving no breathing room for any woman you meet with anything above a part-time job at a chicken shop. Let her have the ambition to move up to full-time or ever worse, manager, and she’s already getting above your pay grade.
I doubt this man has ever read a book like this in his life. I really think men with this mentality are deep down too insecure and scared of success themselves to put effort into their life so they’d rather see women at their lowest than try to make money. If you don’t like your partner making more money than you… get a better job and make a higher salary. Don’t tell her to stop or be lower because you can’t keep up with her.
Teehee. Just gives me a little giggle now and again. Thanks for the extra motivation to get rich! <3