# ldnots I've gotten my long dark nights of the soul ("LDNOTS", invariant plural acronym) down to about an hour making this accessible: "the long dark night of the soul" refers to that interminable-feeling period of time in which something inside you is just… lost. it's the fucking worst. by all appearances the one experiencing this has no control over how long it seems to last. might even span lifetimes. but it does end, and it ends with a rewritten sense of self. some piece of you finally makes it home, and the *whole* of you can now get on with things. gay/autistic/transconscious/nonreligious/ceo/polyam - that's six right there, all transitioned in public, and if you comb the archives at isaacbowen.com you'll find so, so many more I roll my sense of self over completely as a practice these days - not for kicks, but in response to what I see and what I integrate. not every self can integrate every piece of information. a sense of home is everything for this. I can roll my sense of self if I have a home to do it in. and I can do it *fast*. nb: speed-for-me isn't the point for me. (it could be for you, I don't know.) the point for me is that I want to see you well, on your terms. the point for me is speed-for-you on your way there, using the only tool I seem to have. I have no idea what's going on underneath all of this, but I'm getting a feel for the interface we all seem to have in common - like the `interface`, not the implementation, and definitely not the instantiation. it all *works*, really clearly. I'm a systems engineer - the fact that *anything works at all* is proof positive that it all works. I can work with things that work. that's ... that's all I know how to do. *** > The goal isn't to fix the old self, but to allow the emergence of a new one for which the old problems are moot. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://www.isaacbowen.com/2025/06/13/ldnots.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.