kaberett | Entries tagged with externalities & internalities

It is commonly asserted, in popular culture (or at least the parts of it that I frequent), that chess grand masters when given a board set up mid-game and asked to list all possible moves... won't. In contrast to amateurs, who'll get a rather more complete set, because -- goes the anecdote -- grand masters just don't see the bad moves.

I have been unable to unearth any actual corroborating evidence for this; I've found a lot on "chunking", on the ability of chess grand masters to recreate mid-game but not random boards they've seen very briefly to a relatively high degree of accuracy -- but that isn't actually what I wanted to set up this post, so instead I'll just present it on the meta level (and gratefully accept any offers of references).

Because the thing I want to talk about is unlearning, well, precisely that.

I've been thinking, recently, about the psychological trick of looking at your catastrophic thoughts, your worst-case scenarios, your Only Possible Explanations, and -- learning how to address them by means of sitting down and just... writing a list (of ten, or five, or three) alternatives that do not have to be realistic or plausible. "She's not replying to my message because she's on a highly classified Mars mission and she's got far enough out that the lightspeed delay is significant." "He's having a tea party with a dinosaur and can't get over the feathers." Anything, anything at all, that gets you out of the space of discarding anything but the Worst Case Scenario as impossible, before you've even really consciously considered it.

You're (re)learning how to see the "bad" moves. You're learning how to see options.

And it's generally much easier to start, to practise those skills, with things you're not even trying to make yourself believe -- where the extent of your emotional engagement is resentment of the exercise -- than with anything that feels threatening because, for example, it involves vulnerability, or uncertainty, or hope. It's got other benefits -- it's distracting; it might even be amusing -- but that's the core of it: you're learning not to dismiss out of hand the options that are obviously impossible.

Like, you know, "maybe they don't actually hate me".

Via

star-anise, the following excerpt from Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (Byung-Chul Han):

... psychic maladies such as depression and burnout define our times. In contemporary American self-help literature, the magic word is healing. The term refers to self-optimization that is supposed to therapeutically eliminate any and all functional weakness or mental obstacle in the name of efficiency and performance. Yet perpetual self-optimization, which coincides point-for-point with the optimization of the system, is proving destructive. It is leading to mental collapse. Self-optimization, it turns out, amounts to total self-exploitation…the only pain that is tolerated is pain that can be exploited for the purposes of optimization. But the violence of positivity is just as destructive as the violence of negativity. Neoliberal psychopolitics, with the consciousness industry it promotes, is destroying the human soul, which is anything but a machine of positivity (Positivmaschine). The neoliberal subject is running aground on the imperative of self optimization, that is, on the compulsion always to achieve more and more. Healing, it turns out, means killing.

Until reading this, I'd always found this kind of argument baffling and alienating, but for some reason this iteration-articulation of it has, I think, made things click into place.

The gap in my understanding arises, I think, from the fact that I was making myself actively ill with perfectionism, with stress, with Getting Everything Done, up until the end of my first year of university, when I did very well in my exams and therefore, as best I can tell, proved to my hindbrain that I Could Do This, and abruptly started prioritising... well... self-care and healing, instead. I read the stuff about self-optimisation, I took it to heart, and I decided that the thing I wanted to do was get better and so I... did.

It has been slow and occasionally faltering, but now I eat regular meals and I sleep approximately regular hours at night and I (try to) listen to my body about when I need to stop and then I do that...

... and this means I did worse in all my subsequent exams and I can't even pretend to hold a full-time job and I take naps during the day and I have slowed way, way down. I recognise that I am lucky that (for now) I live in a country where the social security net is such that I can do that, such that I have the material option of not working myself to death --

-- but the disconnect is around the crux of the thing, the definition that "self-optimization that is supposed to therapeutically eliminate any and all functional weakness or mental obstacle in the name of efficiency and performance". I'm just... working toward a different definition of "efficiency" and "performance", I think, and for whatever reason the self-care advice actually worked for me, actually practically directed me towards my own health as centre and priority, rather than my output.

I'm not sure how much of that is down to the precise disability activism context I found myself in, but -- it itched at me, to not understand why so many people were finding so harmful a broad genre of advice I had found intensely -- well -- healing.

There's also, of course, the part where I curate my reading intake fairly heavily, so probably a lot of what they're talking about is not in fact at all what I think of given the keywords in question -- but still. It's a relief to have puzzled it out.

I love the non-compliance is a social skill design so much that I have two of it -- one t-shirt, one hoodie -- and it's in part because it keeps tripping me up.

Pretty much every single time I think about it I have the mental stumble over the euphemism of "social skills", the ways in which I lack social skills by having boundaries and advocating for myself and trying to honour my discomfort and to speak up--

-- and that jolt, that small shock, when I make myself remember that saying "no" to someone else is an inherently social act, that being able to say no instead of collapsing into obedience is a skill -- the reminder that being disagreeable doesn't, actually, come naturally, and is, actually, something to work at and practise --

-- well, it is worth a lot to me.

By which I mean: aaaaaaaaaaah I got a trailer for the off-road mobility scooter!!! I will, fairly shortly, be able to take it places outside its own battery range to go on adventures!!! I am VERY EXCITED ABOUT THIS but also, and I say this with a great deal of affection for myself, I would really really appreciate it if my hindbrain stopped interpreting bidding on eBay auctions as a Clear And Present Danger & responding appropriately.

Thank you to everyone over here who linked me to the Never Again Means Now fundraiser, aiming to cover legal fees for people involved in direct action against the US' concentration camps; I wanted to let you know that I've put the link up on FB, I appear to have been the first person in my extended social sphere to have done so, and it is getting a lot of traction and onward sharing.

I had been feeling utterly hopeless and powerless, and being able to put money towards this is helping. Thank you.

(I wish I had the cope to write a round-up of what this is and why it's important and why I think it's a useful way to spend money on the problem, but I'm afraid I'm one week post-Decapeptyl and I just can't.)

Last year, in the lead-up to my birthday, I spotted a relatively cheap three-tier cake stand in the window of one of the local charity shops. I got it, because I was planning Afternoon Tea for my birthday, and have been enjoying it sat on top of the dresser since; this weekend just gone I got it down again and piled it up with madeleines (baby's first!) and scones, for a Jupiter Ascending watch party hosted with miscellaneous cousins various. It is a tiny extravagant frivolity and it makes me very happy (as does feeding people Afternoon Tea, it turns out, so I should be aiming to do that more often).
And then on the Monday we took the Leftover Afternoon Tea down to Kew, to visit the Chihuly and Interview the recently-acquired Young Man of one of said cousins. We picnicked on the grass just inside the Victoria Gate, in view of Sapphire Star, and it turns out that in addition to Woobly Glass I am, also, very fond of Providing Picnics, so I shall aim to do more of that, as well.
Progress at the allotment, various: yesterday, after sending my work for the week over to my supervisor, I had dinner and headed out and stayed til dusk. I weeded the allium and the Ribes, I fed the bin, I removed a token carpet square. Today, after my supervisor meeting to discuss said etc, I gathered up the bricks from the ex-cat-stairs and took myself down to the plot and sorted out the water butt, which involved (i) building it a wee platform of said bricks and (ii) actually giving it a thorough scrubbing. I did not feed the bin because it was still full, but I did admire the Ribes in slightly more light than I had by the time I left yesterday; and I made more progress on The Carpet (!); and I picked some spinach to put in dinner. (It's mostly going to flower, now, but the more of it I cook with the less guilty I'll feel when I rip the rest of it up to get The Sodding Carpet out.)
This morning I picked up My First Tube Of Tostran. In the process I had a cheering interaction with My Default GP at the current place, and then while waiting for the prescription to be filled I was approached by someone using a walker and Asked For Wheelchair Advice (on behalf of their spouse rather than themself) and got to be Kind And Helpful.
On my (slow and meandering) way home, I found (1) a cast-iron plausibly-suitable-for-injera pan, and did a bunch of research on where and how to buy teff in the UK, and (ii) spotted in a charity shop window a Kenwood mixer bowl, so promptly crossed the road and purchased it immediately, because I Am Become My Grandfather.

supervisor meeting! Yesterday I stayed up til a quarter past midnight -- but only til a quarter past midnight -- finalising some edits to send over to my supervisor for discussion today. It is such a big deal that that now constitutes an unusually late night the day before a deadline; I am honestly really proud of myself for achieving it (and really grateful to A for facilitating). For bonus points, my supervisor was actually (1) happy with the writing, and (2) going "oh huh nice idea" at several points. We might have found a work rhythm that actually works for me. (On which topic: the paperwork's all sorted, I think, and I am very cautiously and tentatively hoping to Hand In Before My 30th Birthday.)
I wrangled my accounts some more. (I had been very nervous about this.) Perhaps this weekend I will actually settle myself down with my paper statements and reconcile things properly (or at least start out doing a week at a time of same).
With A's help, we have ORGANISED the FREEZER. I have discovered that we have vastly more pitta than any one household needs; that we have multiple open bags of Freezer Croissant and Frozen Raspberry; that we have, in fact, eaten most of the haggis stockpile; and that I'm probably going to have to make some hard decisions about prioritising the ice cream maker versus the vegetable stock. On the upside, I now have a better sense of what all ice cream we even have in, which is an encouragement to eat some, and I... have discovered the tub of green tomatoes I picked before we went to Belfast, and then froze in the interests of turning them, eventually, into chutney.
I have been gently and politely engaging with People on The Internet to ask them to consider being a little more kind. I will shortly to bed, but I think this in specific and particular probably counts as my good deed for the day.

Not-really-a-linkspam: How Autistics and Neurotypicals Experience Emotions Differently. I have a whole bunch of quibbles & criticisms, but I'm interested in the framework, the concept of experiencing "justice" and "mercy" and "work" as emotions -- for example (emphasis as in the original):

I have a close friend [...] She will show me something she has been working on, and my immediate response will be to correct the language which might not be as accurate or as thoughtful as it could be. I do this before telling her how proud I am for the Work she’s doing, before I tell her it’s well-written, and before I affirm for her that she is a good person doing a good thing. She does the same for me.

The reason is because if someone complimented me on Work I was doing, then I would feel they were implying that I was Laboring in the interest of self-promotion or validation-seeking. These aren’t spoken values, but something we feel innately. This is how I Labor with other autistics. We correct each other. We offer what expertise and insight we can to sharpen the other’s Work, to add volume and clarity to the other’s Love song.

I don't think the things the author talks about as Weird Neurotypical Habits -- gifts, cards, talking about the weather, asking "how are you?" -- are in any sense universally solely Weird Neurotypical Habits even though they don't work for her. "We don’t really congratulate each other, because that would be an invalidation of the Purpose." -- um, excuse me, no. (There's probably something here about autism and trauma, as previously discussed: it's taken me a while to learn that it's useful for me to note and recognise and praise effort, as well as outcomes and product, but it taking me a while to notice that, it not coming naturally to me, doesn't mean it's pointless or invalidating.)

But it still feels like there is Something In There, even if I've not managed to articulate it yet, so apparently that's what I'll be chewing over this afternoon.

Content notes: consent-adjacent discussion (in a general context).

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A few years back, CN Lester gave a talk at the University of Oxford on trans histories,[0] containing the first reading from their excellent book Trans Like Me.[1][2]

During that talk, as you'll see if you watch it, they demonstrated the technique of assuming good faith almost ad absurdum -- well past the point at which any reasonable person might conclude that their interlocutor was hostile or indeed malicious, they maintain openness and curiosity and inquiry.

Since then I have taken a number of Very Deep Calming Breaths and done a bunch more learning about effective ways to engage in Debate should one wish, out of a sense of pragmatism, to Change Hearts And Minds, and this is one of the best tools I have.

I dither, still, over whether I'm comfortable describing something I'm consciously weaponising as "good faith"; over whether it still counts as "engaging in good faith" if I'm really very sure that the other party is in fact prejudiced, or bigoted, or wrong; if in fact the "show of good faith" is not about being open to having my mind changed, but about it being the most effective way to change theirs. Over and over I'm coming down on the side of "yes, more or less", because if nothing else I'm keeping hold of the idea that people might, that people can, change; that people are not condemned to be for ever their worst selves. I dither, but this is where I land.

And sometimes, just occasionally, the result is incremental change. At the moment -- in a general climate of the most 2018 thing I've heard in at least a week or so -- incremental change is what I'm hanging onto. So: here we are.

[0] Content notes for the introductory speech containing misgendering (emphatically corrected by the audience), trans history including 1930s Berlin, and cis audience members asking... questions.

[1] Interestingly reviewed by DRMaciver and subsequently referenced in a discussion of queer life as combat epistemology; relatedly, I've set up

drmaciver_feed.

[2] I recently saw an analogy for gendered experience of self and proprioceptive sense of body that was new to me but which feels very compelling: how do you know if you're left- or right-handed? What happens when you try to use the "wrong" hand?

My immediate reaction to Captain Awkward #1141 was "-- SWEETHEART do I EVER have some advice for you --"

... and I'd already composed half a reply in my head, and then got to the bottom and found comments were, entirely understandably, turned off.

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A model of social interaction I am chewing over: the trade-off between the background assumption that "well, you're a right-thinking person and we agree on a lot so clearly you'll want what I want" and explicitly-negotiated compromise.

Humans are good at pattern-matching, and we're social animals, and we're prone to forming in-groups based on shared characteristics, and it is actually useful to be able to shorthand shared desire (from "pizza for dinner" to "political whatever", because I am very aware that social situations where "I'd rather not have pizza for dinner" cause major friction and insult are not Unheard Of).

It occurs to me, then, that a lot of the ways in which social interactions have blown up in my face might be usefully modelled as a mismatch of expectations as to how the balance gets struck.

From my perspective, I have a long-term relationship with someone wherein for some time it is the case that I am happy to compromise toward prioritising their needs, because I think that position of compromise costs me-and-therefore-us less than it would cost them; I tend toward the background assumption that when that shifts, when that compromise would cost me, when I end up needing something, they'll be similarly willing to accommodate me.

From their perspective, it seems probable that I've spent a long time being right-thinking and in-group and having wants that align with theirs, and when that's abruptly and inexplicably no longer the case I get shifted to out-group, or to unpredictable threat -- and that's not helped by my utter bafflement and own threat-response at how badly they're reacting to me wanting something that's in conflict with their desires.

Negotiation versus alignment, versus mirroring.

There's a framing in which this is "allistics are sometimes weirdly bad at recognising that not everyone they consider a good person wants what they want all the time in all circumstances"; in which recognising that fallacy and actively and explicitly negotiating instead is a skillset I've learned through negotiating with myself, my own present-versus-future wants, the way BPD affects my timescales of desire and means that it is painfully obviously in my best interests (and the best interests of those around me) for me to examine what I think I want, and why, and make sure I'm comfortable I'm making ethical choices in seeking comfort.

There's another framing -- and please admire the fact that I pay a trained professional £40/hour to access these insights, and that's very much sliding-scale rates -- in which, just maybe, how much space I make for people to want things that aren't what I want... is related to my incredible resistance to the idea, my reluctance to believe, that actually, sometimes, other people's desires do align with mine, even if I express mine first, and that doesn't mean that other-desire is coerced or insincere.

We woke up in time to get to the Centre Pompidou! We got there about ten minutes after it opened, in fact, and once again swanned past every single possible queue and did not buy tickets. I am not going to get used to this unless I spend a lot more time in France; I am still, at the moment, apologetically wandering up to security at the front of the queue and saying "um, excuse me, where is it that I should be waiting...?" and getting cut off to be waved in halfway through that. It is disconcerting; I am Disconcert.

But! Centre Pompidou! We did a whistle-stop tour of the Musée, with the Collections Contemporaines and the Collections Modernes. I was especially enamoured of the curatorial decision that Respirare l'ombre was accessed via a stark white room containing trees by the same artist: Nel legno, Albero di 7 metri, and one other -- trees right-way-up and upside-down, excavated to their branches and sometimes their twigs, in the forest of their shadows. Sol-Mur is the kind of thing I'd reblog in a heartbeat on tumblr, labelled "hashtag aesthetic". And, while I didn't particularly care for the explanatory caption accompanying Precious Liquids, I did like the installation.

There was also a room full of wire-frame Friends whose name I did not take down because I was a little distracted, and balconies full of excellent swirly metal sculpture, and various other bits and pieces I would like to make the more detailed acquaintance of at some point in the future.

We cleared out of the Musée at 2pm, and were on a bus to the Gare de l'Est a whisker after half past; half-way up the hill between Gare du Nord and Gare de l'Est a pain spike started. I curled up in a sofa in the business premier lounge (because, again, being a wheelchair user just... gets you that, for the £29 flat-rate Eurostar tickets for you and a companion) and contrived to have A fetch and carry me drinks and snacks; and eventually onto the train we got; and eventually, eventually, home. Where I have been curled up in a small pile on the sofa basically ever since, watching the birds.

I think this is the first time I have Gone On A Holiday that I substantially conceptualised and orchestrated? It feels very grown up, in a very young sort of fashion, and I think I'm going to keep enjoying that.

A thing I learned yesterday and forgot to mention: charity shops are called solidarity shops.

This morning we were Mostly Asleep (which is, er, not surprising, at least on my part); once we had wrangled ourselves into clothes and through the boulangerie I got A to plot us a route to the Musée d'Orsay, where I dragged him round the Impressionists and had a lot of feelings about Monet; we had lunch in the cafe behind the clock, accompanied by a baffling dessert -- floating island with pink praline in custard flavoured with poppy -- before Investigating the way to the van Gogh. I am NOT SURPRISED I didn't find it last time, okay. (We also paused by all the scale models of Great Exhibition and opera house buildings, while attempting to navigate the lifts.)

Subsequently we wandered down the river a little to Notre Dame, where A was baffled by the sheer architectural scale and especially the little red doors; along the way I was particularly charmed by a set of three adjacent doors getting progressively bigger -- one small narrow single-storey, one slightly taller double door, and immediately adjacent that a bloody enormous two-storey-high set of double doors with a balcony and a two-storey window right above them. We also v much appreciated the various blocks that had just... had another entire house dumped on their roof, because why not.

And then ever-so-slowly back to the hotel, via the exterior of the Centre Pompidou and the Centre LGBT and dinner & some Pokemon & an adventure in public transport i.e. a bus that believed in two wheelchair spaces.

Somewhat clarified thoughts on Impressionism: part of what makes it work so well for me in person and fall so flat in reproduction is the fundamental three-dimensionality of the oil paint. Given that three-dimensionality, and given Monet's depiction of light, and given my short-sightedness, and given the light in the exhibition space, I end up feeling a very strong sense of realness, of miscellaneous complex sensory input: sun-warmth and movement-of-plants-in-wind and smell-of-hay-dust and all that sort of thing. In conversation with A I articulated that at least some of what's going on is that the nature of Impressionism is representing a probability envelope, if you will, of places the scene might be, in contrast with the static frame of photorealism: Monet's paintings look like how I perceive trees-in-motion without my glasses. Combined with the way the three-dimensional painting of the surface catches the light and my own motion, I perceive motion in the static-yet-not canvases, too. Which turns into "wind ruffling plants or grass" and "hay-dust haze" and "moving ripples in water", which means I want to sit and stare at all of the overlapping pictures for a very long time.

To my amusement, this works much better for me with the intimate landscapes than the buildings or the mountains; on a scale or in context where I wouldn't expect the subject to move (even if I might expect changes in light or cloud!) I don't get sucked in in the same way.

So yes. There you go. Probability-envelope articulation, along with why-reproductions-leave-me-cold.

(I was also very pleased by coincidence of the lit buildings and the brightest stars and their reflections in van Gogh's Starry Night Over The Rhône, which I hadn't previously noticed.)

Tomorrow, if we wake up in time: a flying visit to the interior of the Centre Pompidou, and then hooooooooome.

[Content note: domestic violence, parental illness, death.]

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So I seriously need to work this out some more, but given that I'm still struggling to make words happen, here's a sketch:

I grew up as a small queer Catholic, who had to be closeted about both the queerness and the Catholicism, and was made very ill indeed by fighting my way clear of love the sinner, hate the sin.

And my sticking point with rehabilitative justice is routinely "okay, but what about the people who know exactly what they're doing and are doing it for fun and are categorically uninterested in stopping?" Of whom I have known... several. And I think at least part of my problem there is my pseudo-allergic response to anything that looks even superficially like love the sinner, hate the sin, where if you're just kind and loving and gentle with people for long enough they will Realise The Error Of Their Ways and that They Were Wrong All Along, because of how toxic and gaslighting that can be.

Which brings me back around again to the thing I've been attempting to write a post about and failing since shortly after my "I am twitchy as fuck about the rhetoric I'm seeing around antifa, here's why" (thank you for your engagement and input on that, various, it was enormously helpful and I haven't stopped thinking about it), in the general vicinity of talking at cross purposes, and I haven't managed to actually pin it down yet but I'm still intending to. But this I can sketch, around ideas-that-turn-toxic and abusers-will-abuse-anything and baby-and-bathwater and examining-my-motivations, so. Here's a sketch.

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[Content notes: living with trauma, basically]

A thread that keeps coming up in speculative fiction I'm reading at the moment (which is probably more indicative of what I'm seeking out than any publishing trends?) is the necessity for artificial intelligences to have emotions, in order to facilitate making arbitrary choices (the Imperial Radch; the Wayfarers; ...). Logic alone isn't adequate for a complex responsive intelligence: they'd stall out agonising over minutiae.

I've also been having a fair few (they say, wryly) conversations around emotional reactions and responses to contexts and events. I've known for a long time that going "okay, but that's not what's going on, here's a coherent model for my actions and behaviour and motivations that demonstrates that the thing you're scared of isn't actually happening" doesn't actually seem to have as much effect on most people's decision-making and behaviour as I'd (naively) expect. And then yesterday my interlocutor said: doesn't impact how I feel about the thing ;-) just what I logically conclude

... and -- oh. oh. Between the BPD or c-PTSD or whatever and the depression, I've in fact had to spend a lot of time working on... precisely that, right? I have to spend a lot of time and energy directing myself away from reacting based on compelling emotional "truths" and toward responding based on logical frameworks. I don't have to act as though people I'm close to want me to vanish absolutely from their lives unless they directly tell me that in fact they have changed their mind and they do*. For me, having a logical framework that contradicts my emotional understanding of the world doesn't stop me having feelings. It just -- informs what I do with them? I can free up a lot of processing power because I stop "having to" worry about how accurate they are, how much I should be taking them into account, whether I should be acting based on them. The solution to the feelings then becomes self-validation ("wow yep feeling like this is pretty rubbish, have some hot chocolate and do some stretches"), rather than their being an additional constraint I have to try to solve for, that's usually mutually exclusive with what other people are actually telling me they want.

"This information changes what I logically conclude about the situation" seems to be pretty powerful for me in a way that, as far as I can tell, it perhaps isn't for many folk? And I'm just... amused by having fitted together a model for why "no, that's not what's happening" doesn't do what I expect, that is superficially such a contradiction to the fiction.

I think it isn't, of course: this is how emotion interacts with making big decisions, not trivial ones. I'm simultaneously (still) exploring the potential of having unjustified or arbitrary preferences, particularly in the context of modern art. Just: goodness, but the inherently contradictory nature of existing. Think, two things on their own and both at once.

* Yes, we're aware that puts them in potentially awkward positions, but we've negotiated this very carefully in specific instances where I get the strongest compulsions to Just Vanish.

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who only by moving can balance

only by balancing move

{up on the watershed/standing at a fork in the road}

a moment of understanding

social skills

dear limbic system: eBay is still not a tiger

placing pebbles

some things that happy

small braveries

the big lies

"Thank you for saying"

Weaponised good faith

One day you finally knew

Desire and negotiation

Paris part iii

Paris part ii

Poem | Simon Armitage

Love the sinner, hate the sin

[mental health] I wish to note for the record...

On hating one's body & love as praxis

An observation on the nature of decision-making

Medical notes

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May 2025

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