social.noyu.me

if there's one feeling i've spent the last year or two or three of my life trying to feel less often, it's the sort of... kind of suspicion that makes the barriers go up in the mind. the wall in the head that appears when someone seems like they might be the Other. i hate it

i assume this must be a common experience but i do not have a name for it, but it's like...

when you see someone make a point you think you agree with

and then you check their profile, and they seem to be of a Different (e.g.) political persuasion

are they... threatening?

but also an unwillingness to even fully understand what they're trying to say, like the content itself is somehow potentially toxic and you're in the same room and aren't wearing a mask

i do not mean threatening in a purely practical sense. if the likes of Ch*ya R*ich*k were to appear in my mentions, i would backpedal as hard and fast out of that as i possibly could, because interacting with them means people are about to send death threats to your house

i also do not mean threatening in the sense of obviously politically hostile. if someone pops up and their entire thing appears to be "i want [the likes of you] dead" then, obviously, i'm not particularly inclined to want to deal with them, even if the conversation is cordial

i don't mean even that the person is tedious, or annoying, or whatever.

i mean something i don't have a straightforward word for: psychologically threatening. a kind of terror that i must not allow their words to reach me.

this also isn't just or even primarily about politics

i think i can only really describe it with one of those visual metaphors. that it is like the doors are closing in the mind and there is an attempt to limit one's vision so one cannot perceive all of the person. i look towards the person like a small and terrified creature.

anyway

this is how i used to be about people from "tpot"

i am not this way about people from "tpot" any more

it extends to other things, too, of which i cannot currently find examples. but removing this fear of the other allowed me to open the mind and experience more things

oh, relatedly: do you experience this fear when you can't tell what group someone falls into? i probably also had that before. i think this is also bad. a healthy mind can't only engage with that which it thinks it already understands

david gerard has a lot to answer for. he's good in his intetions, but not in the practical effect of his words and actions. he is a poor soul who has lost his way and which people tragically keep following out into the wilderness

i do not wish to speak badly of the wilderness. it is an enchanting, strange place full of wonder. but one must not wander into it without a plan, if one wants to find themselves back in civilisation at the end

this thread is not about one guy. i don't want to make it about one guy. i'm not seeking to attack him. but it has particular relevance to my own story with this, so i have to mention it. i hope you understand

oh, this thread is also about the "Monogatari Series" by "Nisioisin"

but it's also about a lot of other things i would struggle to name because i am blessed, Blessed, with having spent something like three years Out of this world of constant suspicion and In the world of the living

it is so incredibly strange. there is this whole existentially terrifying egregore that i was a part of, in many different shapes and forms, that defined some great half of my emotional existence and online experiences for so many years, but now it is gone along with the memories

it is like my own mind is protecting me from being dragged back into that world of pain. genuinely it is very bizarre. there is in fact a hole in my memories here. it is very difficult for me to access those previous emotions. yet i remember all the other stuff in my life!!

you shoot the cop in your brain and the city around him starts to dissolve into goop, the fabric of reality starts to twist into a whirlpool around you, you find yourself thrust through a wormhole into another plane of existence, and you wake up in a field of sunflowers

does any of this make sense? i must sound crazy here. i think if you've never been through it, it must seem completely unrelatable. but it's just. god. what happened to me. i'm happy, but also... life is such a funny thing, isn't it?

fun fact is that "makes the barriers go up in the mind" is an immediate giveaway that i speak other european languages and don't purely exist in an anglophone cultural space. this is called inalienable posession and i keep phrasing stuff like this, using "the" instead of "your"

oh, also: a friend has reminded me, as she often tends to do, that this kind of suspicion exists for a good reason, and i am lucky that i have lost it without it fucking me up. and i can't disagree with that. the naïveté of my embrace of the world is not truly naïve

as much as i hate to say it, i do think the folks who want certain profoundly psychoactive substances [which i didn't use to get here btw] to be illegal are actually right, even though the people who want them to be legal are also right. i can't claim to know the best compromise

this world is such a strange thing

and so we dance, and so we dance, swooping in closer, parting farther, back and forth and on and on and on, the endless performance that is the universe

oh, a possible name for what i'm describing might be a like… “psychological immune response”. people describe this kind of thing something like this? i have not lost my psychic immune system, but i think it was overactivated and has downregulated a bit these days, for better

if i may indulge further in this metaphor: i suppose if you actually totally lost this kind of psychic immune system, you'd have the psychic equivalent of AIDS, right? and that'd make you really vulnerable unless you had other tools to defend against hostile psychoflora

now, what are “other tools” for defending against “hostile psychoflora”, hikari? thank you for asking. i imagine they would be the same ones that we use to deal with real-world diseases when the immune system isn't enough: isolation and compartmentalisation.

wait people call these psychofauna normally right? uhh. i'm not sure if viruses are fauna or flora. i'll stick with psychoflora for the moment because it sounds prettier and i like it more.

anyway: there's this thing called “dissociation” that achieves compartmentalisation

and i guess if you looked around you you'd probably notice that people without well-functioning psychic immune systems have to resort to these other tools to protect them against these things. that's just a hypothesis.

anyway i'm getting sidetracked, hope that was interesting

@hikari (i mean if there's a person i _don't_ trust to decide whether psychoactive drugs will fuck someone up or will be necessary for survival, it's a doctor!)

@hikari ([but i also find the folklore surrounding the same substances utterly insufficient for creating a safety oriented culture around them, so like... yeah, shrug is best i can do])

@whitequark is it not exactly because they are the person society has created for making such decisions that they are also potentially unsuited to making such decisions? is this not a tragic paradox?

@hikari @whitequark I mean, I think most people pushing for legalisation are doing so in non -prescription form, because while there are positive things to be said for doing them in a medical setting, there are also many negative things to say for the same

@erincandescent @whitequark yeah i was thinking about this recently, if they were to legalise psychedelic use then the least harmful way is if the medical system can potentially recommend with asterisks it but never offer it directly as a normal "treatment" with normal treatment "consent"

@erincandescent @whitequark (and so on and so on. it should not be "prescribed" or "scheduled" etc)

@hikari @whitequark I think for a lot of these I'd say they should probably be just generally available from a pharmacy, perhaps after reading and confirming understanding of an information form

And probably for MDMA in particular with pre-prepared supplement packs incl. timing guides

@erincandescent @hikari i think it's vital to have a source like that, yeah, but i also think that MDMA in particular has a way to be uniquely psychologically dangerous in ways most things available from a pharmacy aren't--for the exact same reason it's useful

i dunno what a solution is. i wouldn't fight against its availability, of course.

@whitequark @erincandescent i resent this idea normally because of how it's been applied to transgender people having legal autonomy but i do feel like a pre-registration "reflection period" before getting access is not the worst idea

@whitequark @erincandescent which is, incidentally, something that various places do for buying firearms? and i think we can agree that firearms are also high-variance tools, potentially dangerous to give to someone in the right/wrong mental state

@hikari @whitequark there's a clear difference when the reflection period is say a week Vs when it's two years

@hikari @erincandescent none of the issues i have encountered first- or second-hand would have been solved by a waiting period

@whitequark @erincandescent mm. i still hope it would do something towards forcing some reflection but

@erincandescent @whitequark @hikari having previously followed these debates, what hikari is suggesting seems vaguely what Oregon tried to do with psilocybin facilitators (who are not medical or mental health workers), but they obviously still had to America-brain it up. what erin is suggesting seems to be one of the legalization stances we saw typically coming from european activists

@hikari part of me wants to say "absolutely" while part of me knows that in a lot of places doctors are far less monstrous than they are in the west

i know how i _feel_ about this but i also don't _know_

fun fact: the only doctors in [redacted] who've treated us poorly were... the doctors in the gender clinic. everyone else were at least very professional, before or after changing the gender marker

@whitequark the purpose of the gender clinic is what it does

@hikari they took about $500 to give us all of the required documents in under a month, so what's it mean to take a bit of medical abuse in exchange for that

@hikari is the concern "just" "suggestibility"? in our experience, that... doesn't actually work in any of the remotely direct ways (although what can/does work would be intentionally shaping someone's "information environment" (to steal a term from Irenes) *surrounding* the usage of the substances)

@hikari The suspicion exists for a reason, but it will also warp your perception to see more of what you are looking for. It's a tradeoff. And it's not suspicion's fault. Suspicion, doubt, mistrust, are tools, which, like all tools, need *you* to know "How much of this is a good amount to apply? How little would be too little so that it gives me no benefit because it never warns me of anything, and how much is too much, so that it again gives me no benefit because it just beeps at everything?"

@mandelhorn yup

@hikari leaving an "all-consuming" worldview is an experience we relate to, but we can't relate to your vibe of getting a _lasting_ sense of magic

@r i have a feeling you're still like, lost in some particular ways, and you'll only get the magic once you're out of those places, but i don't know how to get there. i thought i was pretty okay for the longest time, but i just didn't see how not okay i actually was

@hikari dunno, we're still trying to find it. the thing is, we distinctly remember living in the magic. it was *while* we were *in* the all-consuming worldview that we consistently had it. we didn't leave of our own choosing, we were essentially forced out by capital-P Political™ forces, but now we can no longer return

@hikari one problem with most of our conversations with people in our circles nowadays is that none of these people actually got to experience that past edition of us

our life very well could've gone completely differently, possibly up to and including not being a girl-shaped creature

@hikari it makes perfect sense

@hikari funny indeed <3

@hikari okay I think this actually helps me get it and yeah, I've been trying to stay away from this fear for as long as I have been aware of it

@KurisuVanEdge ahh cool!! it's funny, i approached it from the political angle, but i realised some time ago that it also applies to some part of my engagement with culture, that they're really different forms of the same thing. so i assume there's other spheres it can happen in too

@hikari honestly, it may just be my brickhead being unable to transcode your metaphor for the way my brain works, but I kinda don't think I can really relate. I mostly just put people into three categories, which are people that seem cool (which may or may not include people that have things I could consider "red flags" but see as harmless), people who are dangerous (like politically or physically dangerous), and people who seem harmless, but not like I would vibe with them.

@KurisuVanEdge it's possible that others just don't have this experience! i've gone from having gotten it constantly to getting it very rarely, almost overnight, and so it's clear it might not be a fundamental constant of human experience

@hikari sometimes, but we try hard to let go of it because... mm

we grew up in a deeply harmful belief system that hurt us a lot, based on deontology and dogmatism. as part of finding our way out of it we learned to recognize all the behaviors we'd been taught that "protected" us from ideas that might lead us to insight. this kind of thing was one of those behaviors.

@ireneista ohhh yes, i'd never thought about how a similar process goes on for religious stuff (for example), but i almost certainly had this same feeling about non-Christian things in my pre-atheist era

@ireneista or, well, i had thought about that process, but completely separately; i had not had the thought “the shape of the [scary online people] thing is the same as the shape of the [scary non-religious people] thing”

@hikari ah! yes. yes for sure. we're happy to have drawn the connection for you, then!

@hikari I’d not considered it, but I feel like many or even most people live most of their lives in a headspace like this. (I won’t claim to be immune to it either.)

@hikari in our experience this has *always* been downstream of perceiving "actual" threats similar to the examples you've tried giving. what has changed over the past few years is the details of this threat perception