The Illusion of Desire

Fun fact – I’m ashamed to want food. Not just to eat it, or to ask for it, or to prepare it, or to obtain it, or to posses it (all things I have various forms of aversion to), but ashamed to be hungry and want food. It’s proof that I didn’t manage my day correctly, because a good human wouldn’t be in this state. If other people are hungry it’s evidence of my lack of care for them, and if other people aren’t hungry it’s evidence of my inhuman need. Being hungry is the first step of my body betraying me into actions I cannot control, and good people aren’t betrayed (by their body or other people). Being hungry is a precursor to the unpleasant tasks of negotiating or scavenging for food.

This of course ties into my feels about dissociation, since that’s a form of bodily “betrayal” – a word I think describes the scenario where my body chooses survival against my will. And you can see how believing that only bad people are betrayed means that bad treatment from people who are expected to provide care (or even just honesty) is proof that what you wanted is wrong. There’s a lot of interconnected depth here, 100,000 ways I’m wrong about the basics of being a human, all self-reinforcing in a system of beliefs I’ve been building for decades ¹It would have been really handy if someone pointed out one or two of these things earlier in the process. I tried to teach two toddlers how to not be hungry, in the hope of helping them be good humans in a way I knew I never could. Tried to stop them from being like me. And it sort of worked – I did save them from some things – but not like I … Continue reading.

In therapy I did LI about feeling ashamed to want things. Like boundaries or modesty or clothes or food. There are a million variations on that topic over many periods in my life, but I picked sort of an amalgamation story from about age 5. As you might expect this story includes child abuse so skip it (6 paragraphs) if that’s not for you. I do intend to cut down on the number of such stories over time but there are a lot ²I tried remembering not terrible things from before I was 14 – last weeks therapy homework – and it was pretty difficult. I can construct a couple of flashbulb memories about strangers doing something to make my life better. There was a waitress who used her patriarchal power to force my grandfather to let me eat when we were out for … Continue reading of things I need to reprocess so it will be slow.

When I was young I regularly went to garage sales. It was my main source of many things, including clothes ³And trash for the various trash games Mother asked me to play. I’ve mentioned some before but just for reference I mean the one where I had to spend my $0.10 on literal trash so that I wouldn’t have any money. Or the one where she brought me trash and asked me to sort through it, pick out the things I liked best, replaced my old possessions … Continue reading. So at garage sales I was interested in clothes, particularly since I could often accumulate a few coins and in the 1900s at a garage sale $0.10 was enough to buy some things. Usually not socks or underwear (rare for garage sales in general) and certainly not useful shoes, but a shirt or shorts maybe. If you had a quarter maybe even pants.

In order to allow my purchase Mother would often invent arbitrary and changing rules. I couldn’t buy things the first place we went. Or if she didn’t like them. Or if she thought they were overpriced. Or if I was too excited, or not excited enough. Or I would have to negotiate some way to have a thing, with some sort of sacrifice or performance or trade. If you don’t buy clothes, and spend your $0.10 on me now, maybe I’ll buy you $0.50 worth of something else (definitely not clothes) at the next one.

One of the performances she demanded was to try things on. To be clear this was not related to ensuring fit, it was a ritual designed to let her complain at me and maybe deny me a thing. And typically I needed the sort of clothing I was buying so fit was not super relevant to me ⁴No one had ever explained how it worked. I knew of my own past and from my care of infants that clothes were sometimes sized by age. But this didn’t really work by the time I was 5 and I didn’t understand how it could be different. And didn’t want to talk about it because talking about how clothes didn’t fit made Mother unhappy with me, … Continue reading. So no one involved imagined this as way to choose clothes, merely as a way to earn or be denied access to them.

One day she demanded that I try on a pair of shorts I hoped to buy. Sometimes it was sufficient to put shorts on over my other clothes to complete this ritual, but that was not the case today. So reluctantly I took off my pants. Reluctance is never the right choice for compliance demands ⁵This is true whether or not you intend to comply – be decisive. People who demand compliance live for the interaction where you show discomfort before acquiescing to their demand. Deny them this to make your mental health better and minimize future harassment. They won’t respect your defiance but they will at least not get to feel good about … Continue reading, but I couldn’t help myself. There’s never a time when changing clothes at a garage sale is good (unless that’s your thing) but I was particularly worried about it today because I didn’t have any underwear. Which wasn’t a choice I made – I didn’t have any even sort of clean underwear available that day. But I wanted the shorts, so I did it.

Between the original argument with her about trying things on and the obviously unhappy and half naked 5-year-old this of course attracted some attention. I don’t have a clear view of what exactly happened, since I was already pretty far into my panic, but I remember what I was told on the way home, with a furious and embarrassed Mother. She told me how I had made her be embarrassed, by going out like that. How I should feel bad for having done it. How people would think I needed diapers. How it’s never okay to be naked where people can see you. How I should have reminded her that I needed clothes. How I had hurt the people at the sale. Seething and terrified she bundled me home complaining the whole way.

And of course there were punishments afterward. I couldn’t go to sales. I had to let her pick things for me and pay for them whether or not I liked them or could use them. I had to be inspected as part of getting dressed. I had to wear clothes that were too small because I was a baby. And eventually it became a story she shared about how bad and dumb I was, when she wanted to tell other people about me.

As you can imagine there are lots of feels about this. And about all the situations that involved some of the same parts. But the one I was working on today was the shame I had for wanting to not comply. One of the reasons I did comply is because I believed Mother when she told me that defying her was wrong and made me a bad person. So the fact that I wanted to was a problem. And we were in public so everyone would be able to see the way I wanted a bad thing. They would know I was bad, and I would reveal myself and embarrass Mother ⁶Careful observers might note that my noncompliance would have made her life better, in addition to mine. Would have avoided me being revealed (as a victim of abuse) and would have avoided embarrassment from we (as a perpetrator). Such details are not relevant to the way the situation was evaluated. Narcs have two understandings of any situation … Continue reading.

That sort of shame for wanting things is a big problem for me. It affects almost all aspects of my life. I have learned to “overcome” it – to make myself do things even when I’m ashamed or afraid or both – but that’s not great either. It just means I spend a lot of time doing things I feel bad for wanting. Or doing things I’m not actually prepared for, or able to cope with, or able to have support about.

In survival situations being able to ignore your fear is a great asset that can save lives. In regular life it means that people think you are “brave” in the same way they think you are “strong”, wherein they refuse to acknowledge the way it was hard, refuse to offer support during or after the event, and praise you for not sharing your fear or shame with them. It happens to me as a old person – it happens to lots of people even with comparatively simple trauma – but parts of it are extra hard to take as a young person. It reinforces the idea that you should be silent about the pain, that you should simply disregard some of your emotions because they’re wrong or bad, and it proposes a world in which things never get better because this will only be demanded more often as you get older.

I was lucky enough to create a world view that allowed me to have the shameful desires and emotions instead of merely repressing them. It has many advantages, in terms of my availability to empathize with people, and to recognize and respond to my my own emotions. I never had to live a life where I tried not to have certain feelings. But I did have to do them all alone, had to save them for hours or days until I could be sufficiently alone to try to deal with them, had to never react to them around other people. This is one of the ways I grew so dependent on being awake and alone at night, because if I didn’t get that time I couldn’t deal with all the inhuman responses I needed to have.

Experiences like these also taught me that I shouldn’t bother to do anything about my fear or anxiety or shame. That those feelings shouldn’t have any bearing on what I do, shouldn’t make me delay decision or action, and that if they did I was lazy or otherwise inadequate. Selfish for letting my feelings be visible to others. Immoral for wanting the things that gave me those feelings. And so I learned to act without fear, threatening myself with shame to make it happen. I had lots of access to shame so it was easy to build up enough to make all sorts of things happen. Eventually I used it to teach myself to not want things. Not even things I needed. Not even food or physical safety.

I want to be able to use this skill for good. Both in my life and in others. It’s one of the ways I’m good with emergencies. It’s one of the ways can demand a lot of my mind and body, even though they are both in bad shape. It’s one of the ways I can be confident that I will accomplish a thing, even if I hate it the whole time. But it’s also the way I can’t be kind to myself about being afraid, can’t have help with it, can’t ever use it as a reason to not do something. It’s the way I imagine that I have to do bad things just to stay alive, that I am dangerous because I would never be stopped by fear, that I feel obligated to do the work other people find too hard.

But I can pull apart the two. I can help people – including myself – do things that they are afraid or ashamed of. I can not only help them feel less afraid, but I can help them do things even when they are. I can choose situations where putting my fear aside lets me do something dangerous but valuable. I can defer my feelings to deal with an emergency and still be able to have them later. I really like to imagine myself as someone who can help people do things they want but are afraid of. That they want to want but are ashamed of. And I can do many of those things with them, so they can have my support the whole way.

I do a bunch of that for other people already, but I should be careful to not ignore my feelings when I do. And I do too much of it for myself, wherein I decide a thing must be done and simply stop regulating for my own fear. There are probably lots of things I currently hate doing not because they’re always bad but because I’m afraid they will be and don’t do anything to consider or manage my fear. I want to be a better Taliesin, not just in that I enable people to do more, but in that I help them pick better things to do.

This feeling was brought to you by the letter J, who helped me see that I want to reinforce confidence in decision making, not just the ability to question it, because both are vital. And by the letter E, who thinks that all the trauma I put into being unflappable is directly valuable, and who lets me talk about it in context so I can deal with the ways I gained these skills. This feeling is also a thing I should apologize to Shanda about, because sometimes it makes me resentful when fear is a barrier between what you want and what your are doing.

Met with E today and discussed the wilderness and preparedness and the distribution pattern of a sneeze. Talked about the shape of sharing and how the bits fits together. Played some VR (Job Simulator) and had some pork. Tried a bunch to keep Dog calm while you were here but was mostly unsuccessful.

Talked with DerbyK in real time. Mostly venting about the injustice of the patriarchy and the oppression of young people. I’m glad you made time for me. Do it again when you can and we’ll talk about tea and the oppression of young people.

Chatted with DecBot ⁷not sure about this name, but we’ll see for the first time since the 1900s. We’ve definitely interacted a few times in the middle but only hardly enough to be connected on FB (once it was invented). They wrote asking for logistical support – reminding me about a thing I promised and never did – but also asked after me. And engaged when I replied, since I’m always too genuine to let people do small talk at me. We talked about the hopelessness of insufficient success and the motivations of self-care. Maybe we’ll do it again.

Missed M today. Which isn’t unusual or unexpected but I had gotten used to the daily new facts and feels. I was pretty verbose on Wednesday though, and pushed through some of the logistics I had been saving for my own first calm day, so probably a day off is good for the average Zach load. I hope you’re enjoying your short time off, and that you’ve got a fun weekend planned.

I’ve got a busy weekend planned. Tomorrow I’ve got robots and shopping and robots again and a Dog walk and packing for the weekend, then back at it the next morning with party face colors and travel and a party and more travel, then a day out of comms while I pretend to be a rural telecom and more travel. I should probably eat someplace in there too. And book a train ticket so I can feel confident about getting home on Sunday night. But I’ve got my other transportation worked out, and a plan for most other bits, so it should be okay.

The day job was fine today. I had enough time to do all my meetings and still advance the plot on other tasks. And to see Shanda for few minutes before she left. I’m a little worried about being back on the queue next week and not having time off this weekend and being alone all week. I do better with work when I’m not alone, both in terms of getting started and in terms of stopping before 2 AM. But I’ve already scheduled the following Monday off so I will at least have a second to recover even if the week is hard. But sometimes the queue is light, so maybe I can just spend 3.5 days working on my BZ report (and thereby not getting fired in July).

Shanda left today and did tons of travel. Dog was not very happy about this and cried a lot after you left. Even though I was right there with him in the same spot I was before you left. I think he was upset by the suitcase, which I used a lot since he’s lived with us. In any case he was pretty twitchy today after you were gone, even with lots of attention. You had a hard time yourself, getting sick before you were done traveling. Which also meant we didn’t get to talk much. I hope you can rest tonight and feel better before too long. If you don’t feel better at least try to talk about it, so you can have help – watch some @BPS from bed because they will let you want help and compassion [fig 1]. Miss you.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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