20260120

okay

Abe and I and his therapist had a 2hr convo

I think I am seen

enough for the charge to equalize, to be processed among us as a larger network

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That's vague and nicely evocative but let me make some more specific notes.

I'm not relating to ████ as one relates to a person, because "as one relates to a person" smuggles in a huge set of definitions that are absolutely not guaranteed to be either stable or mutually respected.

I'm relating to ████ in terms of physical regulation, and that's it. "how's your body feeling?" "rest, safe to rest." "restedness first, then the rest."

Abe's therapist: "but ████ can still hurt you" — no. from the perspective of my local ontology, ████ doesn't exist as a term. My interface to ████ is what exists for me. ████ is "knowable" at most, certainly not "known", and I decline to reify.

I'm extremely aware that this is not a standard operating mode for "people". Abe's doing... actually a pretty fucking solid job of interfacing with me on this, given that he's got something more like a standard intersubjective model. I'm working at a layer prior to the intersubjective model, letting it do its thing without participating. "████" is, for me, equivalent to "my interface to ████", and it consists of like one button and one lever. No, ████ can't hurt me. We're in sandbox mode. And I think this is gonna work, but not because I did anything right - mostly because I stopped participating in the wound.

The phenomenology of this... hours of electric-feeling in the chest, but normal heartrate, normal breathing, fully regulated, but something that I used to call "fear" but now something that feels like "the active presence of structured but uncollapsed potentiality".

There was a specific point in that 2hr convo where we found an area that came up as crying: my own wound from the early 2000s resulting in my belief that I would hurt people if I didn't protect them from my experience. This convo brought up a live link to the present: the shape of my uncertainty about if/when Abe would be hurt by any given mention of ████ was the same shape as the wound back then. I cried hard over it, on the call with Abe and his therapist. Felt like closing a loop for myself; I hadn't identified that link.

But the rest of it was really not tender at all. I am working with precisely-tested geometry here. I just wanna do it well by Abe, is all. That part's tender. We made progress there, on Abe seeing that he and I have been working with fundamentally different uhhhh tangrams or something.

A difficulty here has been the loadedness of a name. Variables are not their names, for me, and that's different than how Abe handles names. I'm using "████" and not "Hannah" because Hannah is almost entirely not the point here. The aliveness that calls herself "Hannah" is an emergent pattern, and I've defined the interface by which I relate to it. My experience of Hannah is ... I think it's a side-effect? Not only of what I do with that interface, this is intersubjective, but my interface is the bit I'm accountable for, and that's it.

I'm being a little intense here. I've worked very carefully for a long time, maintaining productive critical doubt of the process itself the whole time. I am not overconfident. I am learning constantly. I have carefully created and calibrated my own self-trust, and I am not confusing that with trust in Hannah - which also exists, but which is a physically different vertical. I'm an engineer. I'm good at zero-trust systems.