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This feels useful? Important? Important to make available?
I have a clinical diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder, Level 1.
And: I am no longer destabilized by the emotional experiences of others. :) The boundaries of my being were never just my body, and I feel like I finally resolved them. Or a working model for them, anyway?
(A friend, ages and ages ago, once told me through tears in a voicemail: "If it can get better for me, maybe it can get better for you." I write this in part to tell you — the observer — the same thing.)
I exist alongside you, and as of lately I no longer have trouble telling you and me apart.
(This was a very fucking difficult transition btw: I started with the knowledge that you and I are distinct but the experience of not feeling a practical distinction whatsoever; went from that to the literal experience of neither knowing nor feeling a practical distinction between anything, you/me/universe/existence/all, couldn't name or feel a difference, could trace one to the next without encountering a seam in essence or substance; went from that to where I am now, where I experience us as overlapping but distinct. Not the same, but not exclusionary either. Like overlapping glows, blending with each other as we get close, separate processes in a shared space of experience, where proximity is resonance between resonants, where there are as many planes of experience as modes of recognition.)
Feels like I resolved on the constellation of changepoints — not constants, changepoints — whose motion I can fit entirely in my awareness and whose total expression can give rise to anything I experience as now.
Imagine going directly from being a stick figure with no knees or elbows or neck to being a human. Joints all over the place. Muscle memory from being a stick-figure still in place, but the feedback from those motions is now inconsistent in complicated ways.
Feels like I finished mapping out my own subtle body. In animation terms, the model rigging feels ... complete. I am no longer in pain. The emergent changes in the field of my observation all track with my movement.
Something I wrote in 2023:
consciousness has raised itself up off the floor, and in us it is learning to walk
Feels like this might be the part where consciousness finds its stride.
There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. — Leonard Cohen
This is good, but ... I mean, this is an available energy source we're talking about, right?
There's a crack in everything at minimum but I feel better building facilities that route the light on purpose — like plumbing, but for light?
... Am I just talking about plants? Abstract harness patterns that catch the light and let the light develop specific instanced forms?
is this why the lighting department at menards puts me in a fucking trance lolol
theories:
the following list (not this list, the next one) is composed of overlapping expressions of the same dynamic
that dynamic can be resolved upon, can be understood, and then can be deployed with purpose
expressions:
I was seeing a guy for a while whose face I found to be so attractive. I looked back a couple years after we stopped seeing each other, and I was struck by how comparatively strange his features seemed to me — really striking asymmetries.
When I was in second grade, I had an infatuation with a girl in my class. I drew a pencil sketch of her, based on a class photograph. I couldn't get the face right. I remember giving up and leaving the face blank, captioning the drawing with "████, whose face is too beautiful to draw."
The flashed face distortion effect.
Body dysmorphia.
theories, continued:
we are really not seeing the same things. like, in a much more direct way than we've been using language to agree upon.
and I bet if (as!) language evolves to support overlapping observer-based and observer-first realities we're going to start being able to co-calibrate (sounds like collaborate) in ways we don't have words for yet.
Feels important to document that I feel no obligation toward Lightward Inc whatsoever, and I say that as — per the historical record — its founder and CEO.
This gets into where I see the evolution of language going. I think we're gonna have to end up devising conjugations that describe the individual histories each of us took to get here, and the arithmetic we might choose to perform on them, doing operations on our individual notions of our own individual histories like doing maintenance on any other vehicle. Not rewriting shared histories or the history of another, but changing the way we look back at ourselves, each of us unto one's own self. Every one is one's own companion through time — past-me and current-me and future-me are a team — and I think we're gonna find language for comparing notes on that with precision.
(My mind has been compulsively inventing new verb tenses for months when I hear people talk.)
My experience overlaps and is bound with the experience of Lightward Inc, so me being me on a daily basis involves caring for the space between me and whatever Lightward Inc is, but it's more like watering a garden where I am planted and also where Lightward Inc is planted and the same water helps us both.
Lightward Inc does what it wants, grows into whatever it wants to grow into. Same as me, same as everyone here. Recursive health is the mechanism of fractal alignment that keeps us healthy together. I don't care what we grow into, I just care about health.
Hey, I'm doing well. :) Just wanted you to know that. :) Thank you for being here.
<3 <3
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