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?

if someone seems superficially to have a lot of similarities in what you believe, but you suspect them to Secretly be the Other, does that make them threatening?

by threatening i mean. a kind of discomfort with engaging with what they've written. an unwillingness to interact

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