My brain is a fucking paradox. This is not new to anyone who reads these (not many). As much as I spent most of my life drowning in all the noise of hopelessness and self hatred and nihilism, I’ve also spent a lot of it making up pointless fantasies. Delusions of being something or being with someone. Hopes and dreams and all that idiotic shit. It was delusions that made me apply to grad school. It was delusions that made me still message her after she stopped talking to me a year and half ago. It was delusions that made me think if I just kept going and chipped away at it, I could have a thesis and robot I’m proud of. All my delusions just end up fucking me in the end. It got my dumbass shipped across the country to a strange land I knew nothing about. It left me heartbroken every time I went to check the messages and she still hadn’t replied. It got me a subpar robot that probably won’t even work.
But there’s also another element that’s tucked into it. Fear. I was afraid of going into the workforce because I didn’t think I could hack it so I continued with school, the only thing I’ve ever known. I was afraid that I’d never find another person who made me feel the way she made me feel and someone who I could talk to about anything. It was fear that drove me to spend nights and weekends trying to get this thing to work because if it doesn’t then that proves I’m not an engineer and without that I have nothing.
See what I mean? One big mass of contradictions and nonsense lodged in my skull. My brain.
1 comment
part and parcel of the whole humanity nonsense, most of the paradoxes you’re talking about. Somewhere earlier in life, it was easier for you to calm your fears, if you were looking for a diagnostic, or there were external circumstances insulating you from the things you now find frightening. That’s be my guess.
because the brain is a layer cake, with the most rational functions only occuring in the top layer. As long as all is peaceful in the lower layers, you can achieve amazing things in your frontal lobe.
but that damn amygdala, when it starts screwing around it really starts screwing around. It’s somewhere in the early mammal layers, tied in with scent and hearing quite a bit. It’s an absolutely useless professional path, but I’m familiar with the type of brain likely to have needed an early version of the amygdala.
As an engineer, even a struggling one, you should appreciate loyalty to a design concept, and how iterative design can put you in some difficult problems, well that’s most brains.
Modern humans having those design elements, it’s what makes us such easily excited, angry and frightened animals. That’s humans working to spec, us on this site tend to be going our own way.
it seems like you’re doing some good work trying to understand yourself though, not that you needed my encouragement on that front. Why your life is currently not working seems to be an apt goal to understand.
You may even discover you’re something more than you thought. That’s what I’m seeing here, potential for movement beyond prior limitations. Granted, I see that everywhere, that’s my commitment to a design concept.
I can’t say I envy those who can see something and assume that’s all it will be. What a dull awful outlook. Even potential to become more awful is potential, and potential is the only interesting thing going on with anyone.
So, where is your potential I wonder? To become what?