Mar 7

 I have been quiet. Am quiet. I do not know what's going on. I am disconnected. But not disassociating. Anxiety et al has dropped away. To. Nothing ? A numbness ? I don't know. Nothing particularly engages. I noodle around in a game. A simple loop. Do a thing. Get a thing. Simple world. Simple rewards. Simple tasks.

I don't know. If I were to take a shitty guess. And it is a shitty guess. I would say. It is some odd combination. Of. Fatigue. And overload. Of giving up. Of the entire parliament of debate and exploration and everything just falling silent. Program complete. Outlook understood. But. I haven't fallen into some self destructive removal. A lot of my cognitive functions have just... packed up. And gone away. Leaving. The caretaker in charge ? Simple sweeping. Up and down the halls. Without a sense of not being challenged, bored, too simplistic. Just. Low level zen.

But it isn't a comfortable quiet either. It's not some end point at peace with the world kind of zen. I get the sense it's more like an end of the world quiet zen. Fatalistic. Without being fatalistic. Not melodramatic. And there is a deeper component here that goes beyond the cognitive thinking about it. Something very deep. Which. I would take a guess again. That this is the deeper bit of my pattern matching. The deeper bit of my hypervigilance. The one that doesn't communicate in words. But reads things. And understands. And outputs vibes. Sometimes, very rarely. The cognitive bit doesn't catch up with what the vibe layer is saying. It's not emotions. It's more. Like. Antennae. That don't communicate with words. Sometimes. That layer picks up things that are way ahead of the cognitive layer. Relationship trajectories for instance. It can often take time for my cognitive layer to catch up. But sometimes. Environmental. I can get. A sense of which way the wind is blowing. Before the storm arrives. I don't know. Perhaps my antennae, rightly or wrongly, have picked up an end state in the face of which all other twisting and suffering becomes redundant. If I didn't know better. I would say some part of me knows the end date. I don't even clearly know what that means. What does end date mean. End of me ? Of all of us ? Of the way things currently are ? The status quo ?

I don't know. And. I am not thinking about it particularly either. Quiet. The cognitive bit has up and wandered off. And taken the anxiety with it - mostly.

I am in uncharted lands. I don't know how long this lasts. Or whether it's permanent. I would guess it's not permanent ? But I have no basis for that other than, well, historically it kind of fits. 

In any case.

Despite the no thinking. Today. Something clicked together largely out of nowhere.

I understand why grief hits me so hard. I understand why some people think I have an uncanny memory. I understand why my therapist gets confused and says that some of my experiences sound exactly like "proper trauma".

All of it is just me. How I am. And I get the mechanism now. The nuts and bolts.

It starts, of course, in my childhood.

The hypervigilance. The environment that demands I am extremely observant of the people around me. My safety and "survival" ( in shrink terms ) requires I get good at reading people - especially, the bad bits. I need to see the storm coming.

As part of this. I also develop a formidable capability to model things. I run forward simulations. If this. Then that. And also that. I build likely outcomes. Probabilities. The groundwork is laid for me to experience the world as simulation.

As I get older I use this sharp knife in my drawer. I learn to build models. To simulate. I can build things from first principles. Not rote memory. I know how it works. And can rebuild it from scratch. Sometimes I do exceptionally well at things because I am not remembering. I am rerunning the simulation. I remember all the inputs. Not the by rote outcome.

This gets sharpened hardcore. People realise they can ask me things about things. And somehow I know.

I have a career which rewards this. I end up often being used as the troubleshooter. Come in. Learn. Simulate. Solve. Give it back to them in a neat box. This further sharpens the knife to a soft savant adjacent quality. This is my neurodivergent spice. Not autism. Simulation.

I end up with a mind that is stupidly adept at world building. Not just a memory. But a high definition recall. I Can remember the light. Where people sat. What the breeze felt like. What it smelled like. And I live that simulation.

It means I can recall conversations - along with the memory of words - in stupid detail.

I dont remember it.

I relive it.

I am back in that space. At that time. Experiencing it all over again.

And for bad things.

For awful things.

I also do this. In detail. I relive it. In first person. Like a rerun of a perfectly saved game level. And it isn't the memory. It isn't the thought. I get to go back through time. And rerun that day.

And my emotional side of it gets to experience that all over again. Like it was new.

And it is terrible.

All of this. Makes me great at understanding things. About learning things and picking up things better than people in their own domain can. Because people tend to learn things by rote. I learn things by simulation. I do remember things by rote. Sometimes. But mostly. I am coming at things from a very different place. People get stuck in something technical. Because their memory fails to recall something. Cannot simulate forwards. I don't get stuck because I have all the components and just recreate the world and go live in it. Then come back and tell them what I saw. It is different. But. Challenge me to remember a set of rote facts about something historical. And I won't do great. In some domains I am also good at this however. Annoyingly. But even here. I tend to remember the shape of things. The formation.

In fact.

My entire path through life. The crunching from first principles. Through theology. Psychology. The human condition. Always going backwards. If this then that. The nuts and bolts simulation. This is me. 100%.

It is powerful. But it cuts in both directions. It gives insights. It also allows you to replay trauma in graphic detail. It also allows you to run terrible simulations of prediction.

And all of this.

Because I had to learn to interpret, forecast, predict in order to be safe.

Volatile environment. Produces something that is keenly sensitive to signal information and simulation.

Ok.

I get it now.

In fancy terms. Psych terms. Neurology terms. It is this :

strong episodic simulation + hyper-vigilance + long practice modelling situations can make memory feel almost like a reconstructed environment rather than a recollection

The Matrix. Versus a photo album.

With this knowledge I get a handle on the shape of one bit of my suffering. It is. Just the shape of my mind. What it has learned to do. It has pros and cons. Nothing more than that. Not going insane. Understand that. And learn to work with it.

I already am very well aware that things can be good and bad. That capability can both outcome good and bad. Walking can take you where you need. It can also walk you over a cliff. Be mindful of that. It doesn't mean the world is entirely broken because you can walk over a cliff. It means. Be mindful of cliffs.

Simple.

When put it like that.

As ever.

The doing. Is a different thing.

But still. Clarity. I understand. Important. Half the battle. 

This week at therapy. I started with the fact I had been talking to the therapist 30 minutes before the session started. The simulation of you I said. You'll have to catch me up the therapist drily noted.

But. This is what I do with everyone. I talk to instances of them in my own head. Full conversations. Modelled on their viewpoints. Preferences. Strengths. Weaknesses. All the time.

And. With the greater insight of this is how my brain has been trained to work. It makes sense.

Sometimes. I can get lost in these things. Like being in a movie completely. My surroundings fade out. And I am entirely within that place. I used to do this  a lot. I used to do it at critical points walking the dogs in the dead of night. Walk for miles. Unaware of where I was. 

Hmm. 

Crackers.

Also. Beware of repeatedly training yourself to do something. 

Also also. The fancy term for this is called absorption. If you have high absorption you likely find yourself disappearing into books, films etc. Engrossed to the point of everything else fading out. 

The term lost in your own thoughts is this. I guess for me I get it a lot. Or another way of putting it. I have repeatedly done this and inadvertently trained myself to do this a lot and hard. Just. Excercising the leg muscles. Like learning how to hold your breath in a dive. You get better the more you do it.

All of the above is also why I am an empathetic monster. I feel peoples pain. Not in abstract. As a lived simulation. I walk in their simulated shoes.