The Tower: Weekly Reflections on a Personal Project
Tuesday Reflections on my journey towards a computational model of dissociative amnesia
Week of June 2nd through June 8th
On Monday night, I realised that because of a certain orange Oompa Loompa, Brazil had changed its rules. While British citizens can go in for 90 days without any type of special visa, Brazil had implemented a retaliatory policy making American citizens get visas. This meant I couldn’t just go in with mu American passport as I had my whole life and my sister had done just a year before.
Now here’s the really fun part. A tourist visa application to go to Brazil is a very fast online process which one can receive in a little as a day. But as a dual citizen, I am not allowed to get a visa, or so I learned. I had to use my Brazilian passport, which was expired. I found a way to go still, which is free and simply required up showing up at the consulate with my ID documents where they would give me an instant one way approval to go to Brazil where I could finally set up all my adult Brazilian business. I got everything set up and woke up extremely early with my birth certificate (clearly stating my mom was from Brazil), my passport, and my airplane details. I showed up extra early wnd was even let in extra early. I gave them all my documents. I want it noted before we get into this mess rhat I am actually very organised with my documents which all stay together in a special space and I always know where they are. I just hadn’t had the time or forethought to go to the consulate at random to get my Brazilian things in order. I get there with this and every old ID my mother had dug up with Brazilian info on it.
Unfortunately, they say rhat because I was not registered to vote, they couldn’t find me on the system. The only thing that would save me was my Brazilian birth certificate.
“If you don’t have your birth certificate, you’re essentially not Brazilian” (okay can I fill in the tourist visa application then and save myself the stress?).
But fine, I thought. Maybe my mom will have that. I force her out of bed at what was probably 4:15 in the morning. We spend the next 2 and a half scouring every document we own, even getting my dad into the situation. We find my sister’s birth certificate. My sister’s passport. I find every drivers license and passport I had ever owned. Every vehicle registration. BPR. Tax documents. I even find pictures of my old school ID in Peru.
And yet in all of the countless documents, none of my Brazilian documents.
I left the consulate in an extremely sour mood after spending this year getting myself well set up and organised, after having the most extensive preparation last week, it was like God struck me in the most obscure and annoying Achilles heel He could find.
A tourist visa would have been a 5 minute process. My thing is days to weeks of a system reset. How is it harder for a Brazilian to make it into the US than an American right now? Thats the real question.
THANKS AGAIN DONALD TRUMP
If you’re abroad, this is your sign to get your passport renewed immediately or go register to vote.
In my distressed and psychologically tortured mood that had me questioning my entire existence, I stopped at a coffee shop to read more of my AI book.
In my distressed and psychologically tortured mood that had me questioning my entire existence, I stopped at a coffee shop to read more of my AI book.
This project, as insane and random of a thing as it was, is oddly the smoothest as most reliable process in my life. It’s everything else that needs to get its act together. I read all about how the Hopfield network was invented and the actual physics behind it. I remember this winning a Nobel in physics two years ago and everyone was incredibly annoyed at how an AI thing had won physics anything. I remember a lot of very irritated LinkedIn comments. So for the naysayers, John Hopfield was a physicist, the lead up to the Hopfield Network was based on a theoretical physics framework and while the patterns are meant to mimic neurons, it is closely inspired by Ising model which explores ferromagnetic states in a 2D system. I’m gonna pretend I just knew that off the top of my head and wasn’t just as confused as my fellow LinkedIners at the time.
I was very inspired. It’s one thing to model some brain parts on something that exists. It’s a whole different thing to actually make a whole system from scratch. It was reallt fascinating to learn how he did it. I was actually reflecting last week on how python is only 30 years old and is a staple of modern life in a way we can’t imagine it not being. How creative do you have to be to generate an entire new technological system like that? It’s so interesting.
My sister called me during my reading to tell me about her first big fashion marketing gig which was in half an hour. She was doing videography for a London fashion week event. It’s unpaid but it was a big opportunity. She was telling me about how she was going to get to meet a big fashion magazine CEO and was very nervous. I told her what I’ve been thinking about recently, about how men are socialised to see themselves of worthy of throwing themselves into big conversations with big people but girls are not. I’ve been too nervous to even ask for more conversations with supervisors I have had over my academic career because I didn’t want to eat into their precious time. It’s a blockage that stops girls from getting ahead.
But hearing her do something aligned with her dream life perked up my mood a lot. I feel like if someone in the family is getting their vibe up, it resonates that energy for the rest of us. It made me feel like maybe I wasn’t doing too bad somehow. Like she and I were going to make it out okay.
This chapter actually helped me understand energy and iterations immensely and everything they set off. In the actual physics equivalent, this magnetic force would keep things flipping until the energy was at a minimum, at which point it would reach a stable spot, regardless of whether they were all flipped in the same direction or not. It reminded me of one of these guys:
They don’t click and clack forever. Eventually they run out of speed and they all hang still in the same spot. Obviously they’re getting impacted by gravity but it’s at least metaphorically speaking the same idea. And I guess this stable spot, the attractor, becomes like the “gravity” in the system for all the next rounds. Metaphorically speaking, im not a physics girl. Let’s see!
Actually since last week, Ive been imagining how I would teach certain things more and it hasn’t been rhat scary. I updated my beginner reading list and got visions of future syllabi. Actually it’s kind of fun if you just think it’s you talking about stuff you like.
All that energy runs out and the system settles in a comfortable spot, like running out of steam after a nice run. And then comes the noisy pattern, which is like salting a slug or pinching someone in the arm. It starts squirming around until the nerves relax and if everything goes right, the system lands back where it’s supposed to be from the beginning.
But maybe you threw a little too much salt on the guy and now he’s laying on his side and can’t get back up again. Or maybe I pinched you too hard and you flew out of your seat and ran off into a whole different chair to escape my wrath. Noisy patterns are like an uncomfortable push that forces the system to start moving again until it can get back to its comfortable low energy baseline. It reminds me of this Brazilian childhood banger:
Avó is the iconic stable attractor rhat always goes back to her spot while the other noisy pattern animals try to mess her up. The iterations of vacas and Julios might increase, but she’ll always go back to her bordando.
Luckily, because I had to stay at home another day, I got to hang out with my sister.
After we finished our little chat, I went right back to the consulate.
We finally got the birth certificate and confirmed that I am in fact… a Brazilian citizen! It’s official!!! EBAAAAAAA!
I watched “The Perfect Man” with Hillary Duff. The plot of the movie is that a teenage girl is tired of her mom moving them to a new house and city every time her relationship blows up. This movie is so fantastical and almost utopian in 2026. The amount of down payments, mortgages, and new jobs to find in the blink of an eye… It filled me with jealousy and admiration.
Where I’ve been in the last two weeks has been a classic “Tower moment”, as the tarot community calls it. This is a moment, accompanied by the innocuous presence of the Tower card, where your entire foundation crumbles from beneath your feet and you are thrown into the world fresh and raw as a baby again. Their appearance in a tarot spread makes any seasoned tarot reader instantly groan and shudder in horrified anticipation when it appears in their own life. But in the long-term, they are really not the bad thing you think they are. Tower moments are a sign that something was rotten under the surface, or that some aspect of your life was getting stuffy and stale. Sometimes they can even represent the crumbling of tradition or a societal structure. In fact, this week has been quite a tower moment for another person, in a very building specific way.
Classic Tower moment.
My life always falls like that. It’s never one issue at a time. It’s usually everything in my life collapsing inwards until I pop up in a new situation higher than before. The world pushes me forwards like I’m some spiritual rocket launcher every time. Never a slow little roll forward in a baby carriage.
Last week, it was the news that I would probably need to move by August. That sent me looking over my finances and thinking about how I needed to make my income more sustainable. My cat seemed on the verge of death at this point — barely eating and lethargic. I wondered if this would be the best time to let her go, as she’s been happy here and I didn’t want to move her again, not only for her but also because it’s hard to find a place allowing cats. But the minute I told her this in words, she had the most magical comeback, complete with a voracious appetite and a sprightly demeanour. Okay then, I guess I have to plan for her too. Then, this Brazil thing revealed all the structural issues underlying my place as a Brazilian citizen at once. And on Thursday morning, my coworker said we had 8 weeks to get the company in a better place and see more growth. So we need to push, push, push at max effort. The same max effort I need to finish my final paper in two weeks. The same max effort I need to finally finish this insane project because all of a sudden the deadline is not that far. The same max effort I need to find a new flat and a new job. The same max effort I need to financially survive the next few months as every person I know decided they needed to visit me or have a visit from me in the same exact summer.
Torture. Always like this. I always move at the same time I’m finishing a job, or for example, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to afford London and might hang around my hometown a bit more, only to hear two days later that my best friend had to close out her lease at the end of the month and I would have no place to stay within 3 weeks, thus forcing me to move anyways. At least I know Trump is going through it too.
I’ve been inspired this week by how many science moments that led up to my project came from ideas people had given up on or straight up didn’t believe in.
This has been a story of underdog ideas at pretty much every point, all the way up to mine.
The place cell, discovered by John O’keefe, was apparently laughed at or not particularly seen as tangible when he first started presenting it. But his paper was cited in maybe 1/3 or more of the ones I read for this paper. He made it possible to understand things like encoding and consolidating, which are the basis of how we learn and store memory.
And on Thursday on my way to the airport, I discovered that even neural networks were almost given up on if not for people like John Hopfield. Belief and persistence seem to be very important parts of science. It’s more common than I thought for people to not be very on board with your idea until the end.
I think in metaphors. That’s just how my brain works. Anything im doing, reading, watching reverberates through my life. That’s why I love to write poetry.
Reading about the low energy states that these magnets and my Hopfield networks fall into was giving me some unexpected wisdom about my own current frazzled energy. In both cases, energy eventually falls into a basin at which point the pieces, neurons or magnets or otherwise, are at their lowest energy point and at this stable. If given another output, like the noisy pattern, which is similar but still different, it sets the network moving again but always falling back into that same pattern at the lowest energy point. It becomes like the gravity of the network.
It had me thinking about what my own lowest energy point was. As in, what was my easy internal baseline that everything fell into? What was the state that took the least amount of energy? The irony is that for me, that was worry and anxiety. It just felt like the easiest thing. You could stick in any type of success, any type of growth, and I still felt pretty much just like that. That was the point of my very first reflection. It’s what I’ve been working on the most in life. Could I generate an attractor on the inside where my lowest energy state was trust and relaxation? That way even if the plans went askew or things looked different than expected, I would still fall back into that no matter what? Right now, relaxation is something I’ve had to train myself to do. I always jump towards a stress spiral, self-blame, and internal doom. I assume the worst of myself and of life. Maybe over time, the easiest and most low effort mindset could be to assume things would go well and jump towards problem solving from a place of trust.
How would a Hopfield network do that? Do I feed it new data? Is that what I need to do? Do I start inputting all the successes i conveniently ignore? Better self talk? Just start from square 1 inside and look at today as the very first day of my life with a whole new set of circumstances? That’s what I mentioned last week. If I looked at what I had today as my starting point, I’d be pretty happy about my potential. Maybe that’s a better thing to adjust my system to. It was still pretty attuned to life 4 or 5 years ago. These are new challenges i keep dealing with like continuations of old ones, like my life is this constant negative pattern i can’t find a way to escape. Nervous systems are a lot like our weights system. They want to find one place to go and keep bringing you back there.
I was back to the piano teacher the minute I got on the plane. It’s been sitting off to the side in the midst of this tower crumble and learning. I’m not a naturally fast reader of classics or things that at important. I stop to consider a lot. I integrate everything into the deeper parts of my life. A fun book i can read in a few days but I just can’t devour important things.
The piano teacher is tough as well because it has this flowing, camera pan feel to it. It’s a very natural book with a lot of world building. There’s no quick paced dialogue. Actually there’s no dialogue, in the typical sense. I have to stop and go back a lot to figure out why we’re talking about a butcher or something all of a sudden. I would say it’s quite a challenging read for that reason, but beautiful and worth it. I will probably have to read it over and over again over years to get the full scope. Klemmer and Erika feel like a stick of dynamite in the background of a big world. Tension builds and then you’re off on a whole different exploration, knowing that something explosive is on its way to happening in the background. It’s suspenseful and a little agitating, like edging the reader along. I just want to push the damn butcher and old ladies out of the way of my view of this catastrophic event.
Erika reveals in this reading session rhat while she tortures everyone around her, she would do anything for someone who made her obey. I read a post someone made this week on how BDSM is one of the most popular kinks in the west because it leans into power dynamics relevant to colonial cultures. In wondering why Erika won’t just do herself the favor of finding this dynamic for herself, you run into rape culture again. She is not meant to want it. She is meant to be subjugated into it. She does not want to want anything. She wants to be manipulated and coerced into what she wants, like her mother does to her.
I’m not going to try to claim to be a BDSM expert here because it’s honestly outside of my general scope of expertise. But that tension is most definitely at play between Klemmer and Erika in these chapters. They engage in a lofty debate about the nature of art and music. Klemmer believes the essence of music is the sensuality, the feeling, the passion. Erika believes drama to be too easy.
Schubert verses Schumann.
In defense of BDSM, I did watch The Secretary for the first time last year and it was very tender and romantic in every possible way so I won’t generalize too much.
But it is prone to be devoid of feeling in the wrong hands. I read that people nowadays look down on people who are “vanilla”, as in not very interested in having very shadowy or subversive sex. They say women these days are societally pressured into desiring sex that emulates abuse and rape. It reminds me of a time a fellow female friend decided to make a Tinder account. She definitely does not present herself on her profiles as being particularly wild. Her pictures are very cute and fun. Nevertheless, a man slid up on her profile and his very first message to her was “I wish I could choke you so bad.” I was flabbergasted when she showed me this. I obviously have nothing against people getting their freak on and having fun consensually. But for the first message you send to a strange woman you have no relationship to to be so violent is very bizarre and threatening. To me, it demonstrates the type of entitlement and expectation men have that women ought to be into violence in a sexual relationship just as a regular
baseline. That is not appropriate, regardless of how okay it is for people to explore consensually with people they trust.
Klemmer has never seemed to want that very much. It’s more Erika’s realm.
Now, again this is complex in this context because Erika is the woman here. But the author does highlight the ways that Erika is not very much a woman in any way but technical. She does play a strangely masculine role in this context. She is even the only woman at the peep show. Klemmer’s smooth face and youthfulness actually lend a certain femininity to this dynamic that is a touch missing in Erika.
You know the difference between the piano teacher and the Secretary? Despite the power at play, you still sense that the main characters are emotional equals. The power is given willingly for the sake of pleasure. Thats the problem with the coercive normativity of BDSM in modern sex culture, which is that it largely goes from male to woman and that Carries a sort of omnipresent inequality that tarnishes the purity of the consent. But in the Secretary, there’s a sense of rawness, where the main guy gives something of himself too that he was not expecting to give. He has to be brave and new with her. And that lends an equality to their relationship.
Sometimes I wonder if in a rape free world, we would still see sex as synonymous with power and control. It’s deeply entrenched in our classic archetypes. The sign Scorpio, or the 8th house in astrology, is the sign of sex, power struggles, and shared finances.1. What a complex collection of themes. They’re concepts that are closely intertwined for us in a collective consciousness sense. Does that make them inherent in the way we believe they are? Are they natural emergences of our observation of human behavior? Or a useful and socially cultivated collective tool?
I personally think we superimpose that archetype onto nature, and that’s why we treat rape as natural. I don’t think animals actually think about power when they have sex if we’re being honest. I don’t think it’s an intentional attempt to dominate another animal in the way we see it. I think sex for animals is something that just happens without much thought (but I’m no biologist so who knows).
I saw two doves recently getting it on in a tree (what a train of thought this is right now). They were making out which I found quite cute. I’d never seen animals do that. All of a sudden, bam. Before I could avert my eyes to give the little guys their privacy, they were just doing the do… for about 10 seconds. It was over before it even began, pretty much. They instantly walk away from each other. After a second, one bird grooms the other a little bit, and receives no special attention back. They walk away from each other like nothing happened and that was it. Is it bad that I felt kind of sad? Like wow… okay that’s it? You’re not going to exchange numbers? No cuddle, no nothing? I don’t know, I felt a little bad for the bird that tried to do a nice little post-sex groom as well. She tried. It was the girl bird. Really classic, actually. It kind of ruined my mood a little.
Anyways, the point is that I don’t know if this whole patriarchal domination drama is really happening in the heads of animals, as much as we treat it as natural or essential. I don’t know if it’s inherently a sex thing. It kind of might be an us thing which is fine too but maybe something worth considering. Does someone have to be giving up power in sex? Does one person have to be lower? Can both parties just feel in unison or is that not possible?
This was hands down the worst night I’ve ever had on an airplane. I was in the aisle seat in economy. The guy in front of me was completely laid back. I’m pretty tall so my legs were barely fitting in the space. My usual tactic is to lay something on the little table in front of me and sleep on that all night but it was too cramped and reclined for that. I had to stick my legs slightly to the side meaning every half hour someone bumped into them making me feel guilty and startling me awake. My thin pillow was not enough to protect me and the recline was just enough to be uncomfortable when someone else did it but not enough to be comfortable to sleep on. It was like trying to sleep standing on a slightly bent wall. I was so claustrophobic.
Economy class is great motivator to work hard. It suck so bad. You pass rows of business class people in cushy seats and make it back to your torture chamber of a location to lay in for 11 hours. It feels like the hostile architecture of plane rides. I was actually starting to feel aggressive by about 4 in the morning and resisted the urge to kick the seat in front of me forward repeatedly to make space for my legs.
Luckily, I got to my mom’s in one piece on Thursday and had a really nice frolic around Rio with her.
The most Brazilian sight in the Universe
My dissociation was really bad the first few days of the trip. I don’t know if it was the relaxation giving me space to process a bit more, as tends to happen to me. Or if it was that being somewhere new was overstimulating my already overstimulated brain. Or if I was already dissociating at home and didn’t notice because I was used to it and didn’t have people around all the time to really give me some contrast.
It has actually improved a lot over the years inside. It used to result in disorganized thinking which has gone all the way away. It was like my brain was on speed and my body was gone. Now it feels like like it takes a lot of energy to make all the necessary systems work at once and I run out of battery fast like an old computer that heats up. It’s hard to be in my limbs and process the world around me and listen to a conversation and meet relational needs at once. If I’m talking and hanging out, I can’t also be in my body. It’s too many items to track at once. I’ve actually thought a lot about this and have been dying to do some research on how high arousal changes our attention and the way we track items internally. I have a feeling it really pares that down significantly.
This has been getting significantly better over time by letting myself put my computer in “sleep mode” aka doing absolutely nothing. I lay with my eyes closed and listen to no music, just look out the window or lay in bed. This is my soon to be scientifically backed dissociation healing method. You let yourself enter in quiet wakefulness or non-REM sleep so your brain actually has space to consolidate some of those experiences versus constantly keeping yourself hyper-aroused through constantly doing more, learning more, or working more. One of the biggest switches I’ve implemented to accommodate this is letting myself go through life slower and at my own pace. Navigating life with this condition has granted me lots of my own unique wisdom and one of those bits of wisdom is that there is an abundance of experiences out there. There is no lack of things to see, items to buy, and friends to meet. Often people treat our early 20s like a finite source of fun and happiness that is due to dry out by the time we reach our 30s. By then, we are meant to be absolutely miserable and ugly so right now we have to go full speed ahead without rest. That is kind of a psychologically torturous message to send young people like myself who are healing from something that limits our energy or forces us to slow down for our health. I often felt pushed to go, go, go until I was in a really mentally painful spot.
In fact, last time I came to Brazil I had no language to explain how I should navigate this condition, in part because of the lack of science. My sister is like a powerhouse of energy. Ever since we were young, she loved to go out, talk to people, and explore new things. When we were last in Brazil, I wanted to keep up with her pace and I pushed myself a lot to “live a little” and not waste my life. By the end of my month, my PTSD was in a really bad flare up and I had lost all energy and strength to enjoy Rio by the time we arrived here at the last stretch of our trip.
I’m here for a little over two weeks this time with better knowledge of myself and a little more wisdom. And this time I know that if I follow my body and stop when I need to stop, I might not see everything under the sun, but I will feel present and joyful in places that are significant and meaningful to me. Also… will I be dead when I’m 30? Definitely not. I’ll be in and out of Rio my whole life. No need to burn myself out seeing everything.
On the other hand, I’ve been reflecting this week on the strange experience it is to have another time so hardwired into your body. I went through this traumatic experience in 2020 right on the cusp to beginning of COVID. To this day, every time I walk into a crowd or a full restaurant, I have a brief moment of panic that I’m not wearing my mask before I remember that the average person has not worn a mask for about half a decade. You can just feel the dual presence of yourself and your old self walking through the world simultaneously.
Sometimes it bothers me a lot. I frequently sit and try to tell my brain, “Okay, my guy. I’m relaxed. I can take it. Just show me everything now. I promise I won’t even freak out or anything.” It results in pretty much nothing because unfortunately it does not work like that. But hey, I try at least. Our minds and bodies have a type of read on the world that we don’t always have. It rarely feels like we, our conscious selves, have as much control as we think we do. “They’re” ready when they’re ready, not when we say we are.
You know, I actually try at these. I try to write something good every week, because it matters to me. And I try really hard at my project. I don’t just want to pass. I want to be excellent. I want to do something useful, that is lasting, and that transcends my normal, everyday life. I find the pursuit of that goal spiritually fulfilling. You never know if you’ll reach it, but that’s one of the central joys of life — the mystery and the suspense.
Sometimes it embarrasses me to try to do something smart at something. We live in a world of increasingly low effort. People want to be casual, they want to optimise and reduce effort. We like things that are fast and fun, a lot of us. Advertising look increasingly less like an art piece and increasingly more like a 24 year old with a ring light telling you why you have to “run, not walk to pick up this new product”. It’s marketable to seem amateur and even cheaply made.
I put a lot of effort into my life. I try hard. I read a lot. I learn a lot. That used to be kind of the point of life. Like the effort and the joy of the reward that comes from that effort. It used to be the goal to make something high quality and to dedicate your life to mastery of a craft. The goal now is to see how much you can reduce the quality and still get away with it. You’re meant to leave laughing at the stupidity of your audience or your consumer. Those poor chumps, look at how low they’re willing to go. It’s a little sad and I do think that mentality trickles down to the rest of us when we try to do something of high quality and merit. It makes you feel disruptive, abnormal, or even kind of stupid. It’s a funny shift. Smart and intentional and in it for the love of the game is an awkward thing to aim for in 2026, whether you actually hit the mark or not. Everybody is busy trying to sell you a course on why you don’t have to be any of those things at all in actuality.
If I don’t have that hope and that vision that I might do something of great quality and importance one day, something truly requiring immense effort and intentionality, I don’t know what I will have left of me, if we’re being honest. That’s who I am. Thats the bulk of my spirit and how I move through the world. That’s why I’m alive in the first place.
I mentioned in a previous essays how profoundly the words of Audre Lorde have impacted me and been a guiding force throughout this process as a woman — letting my body guide me towards knowledge, towards centering the progress of other women, and towards living up to my highest potential. This week I’ve thought about “Uses of The Erotic: The Erotic as Power” again. I’ve been reflecting on how she characterized excellence.
It is never easy to demand the most from our selves, and from our lives, and from our work. To go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society is to encourage excellence. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.
This internal requirement toward excellence which we learn from the erotic must not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor from others. Such a demand incapacitates everyone in the process, for the erotic is not a question only of what we do. It is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. For once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and fullness and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavours bring us closest to that fullness.
The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children more possible and more rich. Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavours, my work becomes a conscious decision— a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered.
Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. And the lack of concern for the erotic root and satisfactions of our work is felt in our disaffection from so much of what we do. For instance, how often do we truly love our work?
This work has been my deepest call to embody my own erotic power and produce excellence. I read this essay in my copy of “Pleasure Activism” by Adrienne Maree Brown. Inside of it, I wrote an annotation — “xxxxx”.
This week, I’ve been reflecting on how fighting for freedom is a source of the deepest imaginable creative power. Your spirit is just there, ready to receive through whatever means possible. It’s a truly divine quest.
I do believe every person should strive for excellence in some way through whatever avenue they have available to them. It makes you feel alive. I don’t like to be absolutist about things like AI. Obviously I used it myself for something I felt was really important for the world and it was immensely useful. It can be a powerful tool for things like science. But I do think that the general pressure to outsource our work in even the simplest, most enjoyable areas of life is a robbery of our own erotic power — the pleasure inherent in our tasks and the joy of striving for excellence. It reduces work to work and activity to activity. It strips our daily tasks of the divine, soul energy required of to produce things that feel good.
I said a few essays ago that our current world robs us of our erotic power. If Lorde’s words are any testament to this, it is deeply intentional to deprive us of our eroticism. It is a dangerous, exciting, joyful source of energy in each of us that makes life worth getting up for. True eroticism destroys systems that don’t feel right and creates new ones that make our bodies feel satisfied inside. That’s the power in “It feels right to me.”
The chronic stress from my trauma and life setting-up years led to a bit of a hormone imbalance. It spiked my testosterone levels a bit, according to my last blood test, creating a myriad of minor issues like difficulty losing weight. I haven’t had time to test if it could be PCOS yet, but I’ve been trying to implement some lifestyle changes accordingly to see if it’ll help.
One effect I noticed over the last few years is that I’ve been quick to irritability. Walking through the London Underground has me like this guy every day:
I also found myself have more explosive bouts of anger in general.
Two months ago, I decided to try to start practicing radical acceptance. When I would catch myself unnecessarily irritated at crowds of people in the tube, I would take a deep breath and think “Wherever this is meant to take me right now, I accept.” I don’t think moving from New York to London helped, in my defense. People here walk significantly slower and they struggle with the concept that you’re supposed to stick to one side of the path and stay there. They love to walk up the wrong side of the steps. So I think that specific one is sort of a mutual issue.
Brazil has been a good place to practice radical acceptance, as it’s kind of a national attitude. But vacation is a good time for that anyways. I’ve been struggling with my body as I’m actually quite active and eat a healthy diet but have still struggled to lose weight recently. Even so, whatever my body is right now, so be it. Wherever we want to go in a day, fine. Am I going to come back to an absolute scramble of a summer struggling to keep up with everything? Fun, let’s go with the flow. It’s been helpful to remind myself that the worrying is the real issue, not the external parts. Worrying feels like the best thing to do, but it rarely is. Worrying about my body will only make the issue worse. Worrying about my finances is only going to make me feel paralyzed. So radical acceptance is probably my best step forward right now.
I mentioned a few reflections ago how this project has been like what I imagine pregnancy to be. Recently I’ve had videos on my feed of a woman who has dubbed her baby the “world greediest baby” because she is always craving a large sandwich with a myriad of strange ingredients. She jokes that actually pregnant women are only meant to eat about 300 extra calories per day but somehow she constantly eats much more than that. I thought about how our bodies know what we need for reasons we don’t understand. Maybe her baby will come out particularly big and then the extra calories will make sense. My mom craved peanut butter like crazy when she was pregnant with me. She gained a lot of weight. I did turn out very tall with big feet. Peanuts are good for brains which is why she has a big brained baby too. Thanks mom.
Anyways, the point is that this inspired me to let my project need what it needs because as irritated as I’ve been at the level of sacrifice this has taken, how it feels like it topples over everything else in my life with its weight, and how frazzled I’ve felt making space for it, maybe it’s not a me thing. I’ve been pretty annoyed recently because I started this project 7+ months before the other students in my program which made me think I would have something done early for once. Now the normal deadline is approaching and I’m set to be just on time. So I just worked a thousand times harder for … I don’t know, let’s see. I had no time to make friends or date. I dressed like a bum for over a year and barely exercised.
I essentially lived like a very grumpy science gremlin.
Truly, I feel like a pregnant woman having the most uncomfortable and all consuming pregnancy. Maybe it’s a genuinely big baby and it needs that. Nobody looks at a big, healthy baby at the end of the line and thinks “damn this is cute but maybe I should’ve eaten less fries”. Right? RIGHTTTT????
On Monday, I went out for a solo stroll in Rio.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
My mom warning me of the dangers before i went off on my own
I ended up finishing the chapter of my neural network book while out.
Some nice studying ambient noise
My thoughts have been drifting back to next year a lot, by which I mean September onwards. Doing this paper is about as far of a specific plan as I’ve made for life. I feel like I’m jumping into the abyss once it’s done. I don’t really know what I’m going to do with myself. It’s been an underlying dread. Another annoying Hopfield metaphor because I need to squeeze in as many as possible before this project is done — I feel like my energy hasn’t reached a stable minimum yet. Or maybe it’s approaching that and that’s what I’m afraid of right now. The stagnating.
I’ve pretty much given up on getting this in early now. I want to get into all the math and learn every bit because I’m starting to get a sense that I could say something interesting or useful about sparse coding in a Hopfield network as well if I get it well enough. It could be interesting information but what do I know. This could be standard procedure. I was starting to miss my oversized pad of paper back home that I like to learn on. I was getting lost in the variables by the end of the chapter.
Next week will be dedicated to finishing “The Piano Teacher” so I can leave it with my mom and cementing in my understanding of Hopfield network math. I’ll also be finalizing my metrics for my recurrent excitation models. And finishing my qualitative analysis paper for master’s. And locking in on my job. And enjoying Rio and quality time with my mom. AHHHHHHH!!!!!
Astrology is very political too. I highly recommend the book “Postcolonial Astrology” for anyone interested in that)