# a walk in the dark, or, a brief diary on mental illness, or, spiders loom larger when one is glued to their webs

_published Sat Aug  3 07:40:13 UTC 2024_

a photo in monochrome of a generic hallway. its fore and back ground are dark and shadowy and its midground is blown out by flourescent lighting[0]

Tonight I had a proper walk about. I let my feet take me wherever they felt led to go from the Hammer museum back to my hotel. I did not give in to fear. I reached a place of peace. I thought about horror movies in the shadowy sculpture garden outside of the UCLA theater. I thought about horror movies as I was spooked by a woman standing among the sculptures for a photo opportunity. I was spooked because she stood very still with her back to me and I assumed with full innocence that she was a sculpture. She was not. I enjoyed the scare and welcomed the frisson. Earlier, as Force11 was ending for the day, I stood at my laptop. A man sneezed nearby. Another attendee was in front of me. The sneeze echoed around and the attendee yelped and jumped and grasped at their torso. It was genuine fear.

"I thought it was. I thought something terrible had happened," they gasped.

The sneeze did not bother me as I was on the cusp of entering my place of peace. I think such a place is required to truly enjoy horror. Later, I walked down whatever dark path I felt like seeing. I reflected on a unfortunate experience with trespassing years ago--a misfire of my urban exploration hobby. I was doing something unwise in that moment that I regret doing and should not have done. However, it is equally true that (in my ignorance of my surroundings) I was doing something that I enjoyed: existing in dark, liminal, unmapped space. I have been on a collection mission to identify the activities that inspire joy in me. The list is short so far and I treasure each entry like an unearthed artifact from a dead, gilded age. "Quietly walking around a large unknown environment in the dark" is the most specific entry in the list so far but I am happy to have found it; I am also happy I can now acknowledge the error while appreciating its context (nota bene: i caused no harm or damage, i just wandered into so
mewhere i wasn't supposed to be thinking it was somewhere else and got caught). Crossing the line into transgression had not been necessary to generate joy; it was a mistake. Historically, I have been unable to sort these feelings out from the intense shame and terror of having committed a mistake like that in view of authorities. The extent to which it was an honest mistake depends on how you scale clemency to levels of intoxication.

Returning to my hotel room, I had every good intention to sit and write by hand in my journal. I was tired, though (the wrist-wrapped self-surveillance tool says 16,686 steps), and the bed seemed inviting. My laptop also seemed inviting. Computers used to bring me joy in an easy and automatic way. While I am not prepared to add them without qualification to the new joy list I am comfortable saying that they have at least reached a joy probationary period. I feel at home on my computer tonight like I'm settling into a comfortable sweater. I have spent today and yesterday at a conference. Conferences are another thing I can remember finding joy in long ago. Since 2016, however, I can only recall them as disillusioning and disappointing experiences undone by my own paranoia and fear. This one felt good. Ironically it felt good in part because I kept my laptop handy and allowed myself to slip into cyberspace whenever I wanted to dip out of the world around me. I worked on slides (before my talk) or on code here 
and there (after my talk). I did meet several interesting people at this event but frequently needed to turn from the flesh world. Not hide; not flee; not smother; not escape; just shift away.

There is a longstanding daydream I have. I imagine that I am lying in my bed but my bed has been placed at the center of some kind of bustling activity. Usually I imagine the auction house where my dad worked for forty-some-odd years and where I and my siblings all worked while teenagers. On auction night there was constant motion: My dad, like a stage manager, instructed us movers what to get and where to stand. There was to be no delay in between the sales of lots. His directions were clear and sure. I felt like I was part of a dramatic engine, ticking away scenes with the exactitude of a pendulum. It was soothing to know exactly what my place was and what I should be doing. This informs my daydream. I would use it to fall asleep as a teenager. I would get home from auction nights with throbbing feet and buzzing, sore limbs. I would lie down and shut my eyes and still see the warehouse swirling with lots moving on and off stage. My role was to sleep, though. I was supposed to be in bed regardless of what s
wirled around me.

The daydream has since taken other forms. Most common is a busy intersection. I imagine my bed is at the very center of Shibuya crossing, for example. No one in the dream ever questions me or wakes me. Cars smoothly navigate around me. I am accepted as much as I am ignored. I'm not invisible -- no one would ever crash into me in this daydream -- but I am spared the torture of engagement.

Being around most humans is work. I toil in their mines. Most humans behave in ways I find inscrutable. I have to stare and study to find meaning in their smiles and winks and idioms and motions. Such things are without any _a priori_ meaning to me. I am in any conversation as if I'm stroking the contours of the Lament Configuration[0]: perhaps a way forward will open, but it will bring pain and pleasure indivisible. Such is socializing.

Today I realized my computer was my bed in the bustle of the conference. I felt like I was supposed to be there, jacked in, even as I was still aware of the fleshy commotion around me. In the early 2000s, when I was a teenager, my extended family still got together with regularity. I neither despised nor disparaged this. However, I could only handle so much of it. I did not know what to say to anyone. As soon as the material parts of dinner were over I would promptly get back on the family computer. It was situated at the open border between the living room and dining room (it still is, though with a 90 degree rotation). I can clearly remember the sensation of my family being around me. Like the auction daydream it was comfortable. I listened to and internalized conversations even though I was not engaging directly with them. I was on their fringe while my primary senses melded with the screen. It probably seemed rude. Perhaps my family didn't notice. I don't know.

My brain is injured. It is not damaged in a physical sense. Rather, I have been diagnosed with complex PTSD. The practical effect of this is my being sent into severe panic by innocuous triggers. Human memory, as I have experienced it since childhood, is a sublime graph (as a computer scientist, when I say graph, I mean a series of nodes connected to each other by lines like a subway map). I cannot intuit the boundaries of the graph. I can only traverse it from a node randomly accessed via sensory input. A smell might remind me of an autumn day on which I walked home from the bus stop with my neighbor from china who loved Jesus who died on a cross shaped like the "t" in "texas" which at one time was the farthest west I had ever gone in America which is a country where my stuff is. Each of these memories is a node; each sensorial or phantasmagoric overlap a line between them. PTSD means that some of these nodes are cursed. Being led to such a node means that my muscles lock, my throat tightens, my eyes dart a
nd quiver, my focus explodes away like a family of frightened deer. Complex PTSD means that I have many cursed nodes each subtly pointed to in surprising ways.

Given this psychological premise, imagine what happens if a cursed node is also on the connective path to a node that I associate with joy: The joy becomes inaccessible. Sensory input that should result in joy results in panic. Luckily, this can be healed, though it is a long and torturous process. It requires traversing memories and accepting that some will inspire fear. When one does inspire fear, I have to proactively re-associate the memory node with safety and security. I have to climb into bed while the panic gesticulates around me. I have to open the laptop while the carnival of souls shuffles around me.

My two days at this conference have shown me that this healing proceeds and I write to acknowledge that such healing is worthy of celebration even if its pace feels glacial. If your brain is injured like mine I hope this is encouraging. If not, I hope this inspires empathy or at least curiosity.

Either way, I encourage you to gather yourself and go take a walk in a dark place.


h[0]: Lament Configuration	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hellbound_Heart
p[0]: a photo in monochrome of a generic hallway. its fore and back ground are dark and shadowy and its midground is blown out by flourescent lighting	https://tilde.town/~vilmibm/smalldark.jpg