PERSONAL
Combination of CNS depressants lead to respiratory arrest:
- 29 x 10mg (290mg) morphine sulphate
- approx 2g ketamine
- 12 x 40mg (480mg) propranalol
- approx 40g GHB
- (? x 1mg) Xanax
- alcohol
Beta-blocker + morphine + GHB (especially because I already have sinus bradycardia). Xanax and alcohol mainly there to potentiate these drugs. Ketamine and anti-emetic for pain relief/comfort.
To look into:
- how SSRIs affect pregnenolone
- LIH383 (opioid dysregulation)
- GABA agonists - tolerance?
- is lifelong anti-depressant opioid use sustainable with drug holidays?
- hedonic treadmill, dopamine
Physicist's Love Poem
You are the only isolated equilibrium point for my stable dynamics.
Whatever my intial conditions -
In any possible universe -
My state vector would always converge to you.
The Sickbed Tyrant
When I was on a rehabilitative weight gain plan at the Royal Free hospital, I had to be supervised during meals. This was to make sure I didn't secretly dispose of food under the table etc, as a lot of anorexics are wont to do. So usually somebody would sit with me and watch me fairly closely. When I was at home, my mum would do it. This set up sounds like it would frustrate my goal, which was to eat as little as possible, but I actually didn't mind because typically I had already negotiated down the amount of food I had to eat/compensated by secretly diluting the Ensure with water, or whatever.
Instead, a weird secondary issue would arise. I found myself getting desperately upset when the supervisor wasn't watching me. It's obviously pretty boring and uncomfortable watching someone eat, not least someone who eats excruciatingly slowly, so their eyes would wonder/sometimes the TV would be on etc. I compulsively tested the supervisor's vigilance. I industriously and imaginatively strove to find ways of misleading them. I silently slid food up my sleeve or down the sides of a sofa, simmering with anger with every single bit I got away. If it went on for long enough my vision would literally tunnel and I would shake and hyperventilate from the irresolvable internal contradiction.
I still don't know exactly why this happened. Maybe the thought was something like: "why aren't you paying attention to me?", "why are you letting me get away with this?". Maybe I actually *wanted* to eat my allotted pathetic apple slices, but was only able to under the arbitrary condition that I was being forced to. That way I didn't have to take responsibility for eating (because I 'had no choice'). But as soon as that illusion was broken even fleetingly, I was forced to bitterly act out the role of the anorexic I had assigned myself. It hurt most of all when it was my mother who was not paying attention to me.
I think I was a bit of a 'sickbed tyrant'. I felt like I could not get anyone to pay attention to me unless I make myself physically unwell. When I recognised this tendency in myself I tried other things. I tried asking indirectly and then directly. I tried to find connection in all the 'healthy ways'. But it still all just feels like crap. I cannot get enough attention, or the right form of attention, or something... I have unfulfillable and contradictory desires.
I cannot do anything by myself. What do I imagine the masochistic word games will culminate in? I think I want somebody to come with me all the way. Admit that my quality of life is so poor and that I mean so little to anybody, that I should die. I want somebody to put their money where their mouth is, to put the ultimate stake on it. Maybe even to physically guide my hand. I cannot do anything under my own steam.
Other People
- I do not really feel that I am real until another person is there to infuse me with meaning.
- I feel that the 'truth' of my existence is located not in the physical world but in the mental world of the people perceiving me. I feel that I exist in no geographical location so truly as I exist as a mental object of contemplation.
- By which I mean, other people have a much greater say in defining reality than I do.
- I completely incorporate other people's emotions towards me as 'facts about myself'.
- Whoever I'm interacting with at any given moment has absolute power over me. 'Whatever you say I am, I am'.
- So, when someone expresses visible displeasure, boredom, contempt, anger, disgust or disappointment towards me, I literally feel that they are annihilating me.
- And yet I must go to other people to seek identity, form and meaning. I am obsessed with finding out what other people's mental models of me are like, because this is how I feel I can access truths about myself.
- When I do get to find out what others think of me, I am more often than not horrified by the model they have fashioned. I do not recover from these incidents, they just accumulate.
- I do not have a concept of being 'mistreated'. I assume that all treatment that comes to me is justified.
- I crave for someone to verbally affirm that it's good that I exist.
- Clearly I crave this strongly enough that I suffer through thousands of interactions from which I come away annihilated, for the chance of obtaining a positive one just once.
- My few positive social experiences are never unqualified.
- I absolutely admire and am terrified in the presence of people I consider to be 'full human beings'.
- There are no boundaries between my self and my environment. I feel like a particle that exists in a superposition of many states when alone, and which only gains a fixed identity when someone else pins it down in observation. I'm not sure there could be said to be any continuity in my personality traits whatsoever. I am situationally agreeable, disagreeable, conscientious, lazy, extroverted and introverted etc... essentially like a shapeless mass from which other people can call forth whatever they want.
- I often feel that I do not have permission to exist and that every inch of earth I've walked upon has become a site of trespass.
I understand 'social conventions' as theoretical objects but don't know how to manipulate them... I am very well aware of 'what one must do' and 'what one musn't do' in interpersonal relationships, so why does it always go down so disastrously? It's almost like I over-adhere to rules, maybe like the social equivalent of trying to cut a cake with a chainsaw.
Narcisstic Platonism
If I have faith in anything non-empirical, it is in the existence of 'ought-to-be's. Things ought to be a certain way. They ought to adhere to an ideal version of whatever category of thing they are. The ideal version is similar to a platonic form, except derived entirely from my own private combination of fiction, childhood perceptions, imagination. So, a narcisstic platonism. [tbc]
Questions with critical intent:
- Why is there something rather than nothing?
- Is the internet "real life"?
- Does reality actually contain "ought-to-be"s?
- Can Feynman's 'transactional handshake' occur between two particles exchanging a photon if that photon can never complete the exchange because of the expansion of spacetime?
- Does the supposed distinction between 'guilt' and 'shame' exist in actuality? Isn't guilt the internalisation of social disapproval?
- What is a wave function?
- Why did humans evolve concealed ovulation?
- Is it the case that:
1) other people generally dislike me and this is because I am ugly or that
2) I have pervasive treatment-resistant mental illness(s) which cause(s) me to believe 1) ?
There is far more evidence to suggest that 1) is true, but I am aware that that is exactly something I would think if 2) was actually the case. And, indeed many sub-possibilities:
3) I am not ugly but people generally don't like me for another reason
4) I am ugly but that is not why people dislike me, or only a very small factor
I have more experience with guilt and shame than just about anyone alive, and I believe now that they both cash out not as self-persecution but as fear of being found out.
Love
- I long for someone in the past to have come and loved me and taught me how to be a person. I don’t know who you would have been but if you had existed, I would have been okay. You would have simply 'made sense', in contrast to all the absurdity which came prior to you and continues to surround you. You would have existed as an exception to the rest of the world.
"Love involves serious ontological reconfigurations. Or at least there’s a thing that happens, when you grow to know a person, when that person is smart, creative, and kind, when they can surprise you, see the same things you can see, and behave with either such compassion or regularity that you can relax your shields around them, where they become qualitatively more real to you. Almost as real as yourself. Loving someone remakes yourself. But most importantly, even if that ghost fades to a silent unnoticed echo, the impression left by the experience reshapes your ethical reality. You are not alone. Tangibly. Provably. There are other minds... And this implies an absolute ethical obligation."
There is no spark of life in me. Something about me is 'not there'. I don’t feel like very much. I don’t feel like there is very much of me. I don’t feel like I have very much to offer. I don’t mean that I feel useless or insufficient, I just feel like there is little of me to be to anyone, I do not have very much me to be, there is little interior to externalise. I am not very much, I do not contain very many things & qualities. I feel like less than I was at some prior point, not lowered or denigrated, just subtracted.
It feels like there isn’t a rehabilitative way forward anymore. It feels like forward is just a construct to debate about the meaning of. There is nothing so definitive as forward. I feel like I am on a cartesian plane, which has only the indifference of whatever coordinates are plotted. Existing just feels like something that hurts in each moment & I can no longer attribute it to stagnation & consequent atrophy because even that implies the existence of a definitive way forward away from such things, which feels impossible. There is nothing to do.
Every moment of my life has been most significant for what it does not contain. The world in general does not contain any proof of my existence. There's no physical location I've longed to inhabit so much as I've longed to inhabit another person's awareness. I want to be held as a worthy object of contemplation. Every fantasy I've ever had has basically involved my taking a journey somewhere... I'm travelling to see someone who is looking forward to my arrival. When I get there, they smile, they're pleased to see me. I'm of positive value to them. And that's all that happens in the dream.
I don't inspire affective reactions in others. I lack whatever it is which binds humans to other humans. The way that people interact with me implies that I am not 'real' literally on the perceptual level... I have never been in a social situation in which anyone would have noticed my spontaneously vanishing. I do not affect people. Probably a high percentage of all the speech I've ever uttered in public has gone literally unheard. Suggest some mechanism by which the usual neural reward for picking up and interpreting human speech is inhibited by having to look at my face at the same time. So, interacting with me is overall an unrewarding activity.
I am never at ease with anybody! There is always friction. I am capable of sitting in confidence with someone I like very much and with whom I have many interests in common, whose brain I'd love to pick and just - jamming up. Not able to find anything to talk about or only being able to make trivial comments. Socially, it never feels easy with anyone. Every interaction feels like a test I am failing horribly. Or worse, I have attempted to break through, to disinter some essential core part of my life, and have just been horrified by the cheap and farcical thing which acctually came out!
I think that there is some visceral animal thing about me which repulses. Some terrible coincidence of physical features, grey reptilian eyes, teeth, the way that I move, the way that I talk - repulses. It's the level at which real communication occurs, far below the verbal. I terrorise people's ancient hormonal triggers: [stranger], [pathogens], [developmental instability], [sterility].
Sherwood Anderson's Out of Nowhere into Nothing:
In the orchard Rosalind sat with her back against the tree in the same spot where her fancy had created the dancing life of her childhood & where as a young woman graduate of the Willow Springs High School she had come to try to break through the wall that separated her from life.
*
Where was the wonder of life? It was not within herself, not in the ground. It must be in the sky overhead. Presently it would be night & the stars would come out. Perhaps the wonder did not really exist in life. It had something to do with God. She wanted to ascend upwards, to go at once up into God's house, to be there among the light strong men & women who had died & left dullness & heaviness behind them on the earth. Thinking of them took some of her weariness away & sometimes she went out of the orchard in the late afternoon walking almost lightly. Something like grace seemed to have come into her tall strong body.
*
What would her mother have to say to her? What did mothers say to daughters? The male element in life -- what did it want? Her own desires & impulses were not clearly realized within herself... Men confused Rosalind, they had always confused her. On that very evening her father for the first time in years had really looked at her. He had stopped before her as she sat on the porch & there had been something in his eyes. A fire had burned in his old eyes as it had sometimes burned in the eyes of Walter. Was the fire intended to consume her quite? Was it the fate of women to be consumed by men & of men to be consumed by women?
*
How life had coursed through her body! How alive she had suddenly become! It was at that moment she had decided definitely, finally, that she wanted to come closer to the man, that she wanted with him the ultimate physical closeness... It was in expressing physically her love of the man she would find the white wonder of life, the wonder of which, as a clumsy & crude girl, she had dreamed as she lay on the grass in the orchard. Through the body of the singer she would approach, touch the white wonder of life. "I shall willingly sacrifice everything else on the chance that may happen," she thought.
*
She had been thinking, all through the years she had been thinking. There was a dreadful lie in life, the whole fact of life was a lie.
Some animal thing in her will react and be forced to reassess what it means to exist. And then she will be free to undo the shackles and take a more exploratory approach to life. Though what will mediate it is unclear, she feels that there is some exchange to be made. For the price of one ritual act of bravery she will earn her living place in the world.
For the price of one ritual act of bravery she will earn her living place in the world.
MEPHISTOPHELES: I am the spirit of perpetual negation;
And rightly so, for all things that exist
Deserve to perish, and would not be missed—
Much better it would be if nothing were
Brought into being.
Femininity is
1) desirable to me and
2) unobtainable to me whilst at the same time being
3) clearly a standard one holds their face to like a belt sander
The word that springs to mind when I look at my own face is: 'dinasourish', an association I can't quite account for... maybe something to do with the way the teeth are, the heavyset jaw and the kind of reptilian greyness of the eyes. I am a horrendously ugly person, inside and out.
Rank Theory of Depression:
I subscribe to Anthony Stevens and John Price's Rank Theory of Depression. "SRT proposes that low mood and submissive behaviour are involuntary yielding responses to defeating competitive situations (i.e., in the competition for resources, such as for food or mates, with dominant others), and these responses are as a means of inhibiting an aggressive ‘comeback’, communicating a ‘no threat’ status and facilitating acceptance of the situation. This is reflected in the submissiveness, withdrawal and self-criticism that are indicative of depression states (Gilbert, 2001)." [Source]
This affects me because:
1. Physical attractiveness is the primary female status indicator
2. I am physically unattractive
3. Therefore, I have low social status
I feel that in many cases the life of a low-status, reproductively unfit person is so inadequate as to be not worth living. Long-term social subordination is immensely psychologically distressing for social primates like humans.
OCD(?):
- I'm very prone to feeling 'contaminated', especially by food, water, plastics, air pollution, perfumes etc. In particular, real or imagined carcinogens. Foods are deemed accptable on an often arbitrary basis.
- I feel anxious about aging and go to great lengths to manage this anxiety. This is because youthfulness is an important aspect of female attractiveness, and as I am otherwise physically unattractive, it is an especially load-bearing characteristic for me. UV radiation is widely believed to contribute to visible skin aging, so I avoid sunlight in order to preserve my only positive characteristic. However, I am aware that the extreme lengths I go to in order to avoid even incidental sunlight exposure/marginal gains in attractiveness are irrational.
- I often don't have a very strong sense of the boundary between myself and my environment.
- I do not perform any repetitive or ritualistic behaviours.
- I do not experience 'intrusive thoughts', as I understand the term.
Overall, I'm not sure if I meet the DSM criteria for OCD.
I guess what really impresses me in a novel is the ability to show the randomness of life, how moods just change like weather, how people mainly do things for no clear reason etc. yet how certain symbolic objects continue to reassert themselves throughout nonetheless.
People are always telling plain girls that they're clever as a consolation. This has been absolutely fatal!
"Liquid Modernity"
'Zygmunt Bauman, who introduced the idea of liquid modernity, wrote that its characteristics are about the individual, namely increasing feelings of uncertainty and the privatization of ambivalence. It is a kind of chaotic continuation of modernity, where a person can shift from one social position to another in a fluid manner. Nomadism becomes a general trait of the "liquid modern" person as they flow through their own life like a tourist, changing places, jobs, spouses, values, and sometimes more—such as political or sexual orientation—excluding themselves from traditional networks of support, while also freeing themselves from the restrictions or requirements those networks impose.'
‘He stresses the new burden of responsibility that fluid modernism placed on the individual when traditional patterns would be replaced by self-chosen ones. The result is a normative mindset with emphasis on shifting rather than on staying which can lead a person astray towards a prison of their own existential creation.’ [The Hermetic Comfort Zone of The Post-Modern Self]
The entirely negative characterisation given here is not quite fair... some people clearly thrive in such environments. I just happen not to be one of them. I'm not equal to the responsibility of defining myself, and my life would have gone better had I had less freedom.
I wish to have an effect on others.
Remember standing on a riverside in the City with my family some years ago, watching the moonlight on the crests of the little waves on the Thames. I thought: "that is beautiful". The thought was not attended by any emotion - I tried to summon some. I stared intently at the moonlit water - ridiculously so - my eyes literally narrowing in focus, but the scene began to feel more and more like a photograph or a painting - distinctly 'not real'. I was not able to achieve direct visceral apprehension of that water. I can't even identify exactly what was missing, it was my entire sense of natively inhabiting the same world as it...
I am unable to respond to the world in an affective way... I am pressing on a dead nerve basically. The incident on the Thames stands out to me because it was probably the first time I consciously articulated the feeling as I experienced it, but when I come to think of it, hasn't it always been that way? In Chamonix too, the mountains are sometimes so immense, monstrous even, that my brain just dismisses out of hand that they could be real? Null emotion, the sense of fundamental unreality of anything beautiful.
So, it seems I became desensitised to visual beauty some time ago. I'm afraid I'm losing music now too. Music has been my greatest sensory and aesthetic pleasure for years now. If I don't have that, I don't know what I have.
Sometimes I think I have a fundamentally mercenary soul. But then... it's not quite that either. I consider my life a failure because the world and the people in it have constantly violated my elaborate internal value system. My ends are the achievement of certain aesthetic states, but I have been totally unable to corral the world into conforming to them! I can't make anyone understand why things have to be just so or why it's so devastating when others don't play their parts correctly, because these aesthetic states are above all private. "..listen to me...couldn't you let it happen beautifully?"
"If it pleases you to leave me, just go -
Stopping you would stifle your enchanting ghost"
Cherubini's Requiem, Tavener's Funeral Canticle, Arvo Part's Tabula Rasa, Fair of Face, Stephen Reich's 'Music for 18 Musicians', 'Who is Hagar?'
"The next wife I think was Egyptian... I didn't really know very much about her..."
"Been through several dark nights of the soul. Hagar is a woman in a difficult position. I understood Hagar because of my own mother..."
Something about the way that she nods her head in acceptance and breaks into laughter as the angel descends means I have never been able to watch this scene without crying.
Mum went to a farmer's market in Suffolk and brought me back some beeswax food wraps and some wildflower seeds! The seeds come in little balls of clay (to protect them from birds) and mixed through with chilli pepper (to deter slugs). In the evening I went out and planted approx. half the seed balls (50) in my little patch at the back of the garden. I tried to sow them where the grass grows tallest, as those must be the most advantageous spots for sunlight. Should get purple loosestrife, forget-me-not, yarrow, corn marigold, musk mallow, red campion, cornflower, and corn chamomile. I'm especially looking forward to seeing the forget-me-nots and musk mallow. The ground was muddy and waterlogged and we are forecast cold and wet conditions over the next week or so.
The Greengage Summer, Rumer Godden (1958)
"I did not struggle anymore: Joss was beautiful and I was not; she, not I, was marked; Eliot looked at her and did not even notice me and yet I was not jealous. I was sad, but it was a contained, secret sadness and I was not jealous."
PENIS SERIOUS, PENIS MYSTERIOUS,
QUELLING ARMENIUS? CALL THAT PENIS TIBERIUS
PENIS DELIRIOUS, PENIS MISCHEVIOUS,
YOUR PENIS IS WANTED FOR CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
Philip Larkin:
"I think someone might do a little research on some of the inherent qualities of sex — its cruelty, its bullyingness, for instance. It seems to me that bending someone else to your will is the very stuff of sex, by force or neglect if you are male, by spitefulness or nagging or scenes if you are female. And what’s more, both sides would sooner have it that way than not at all. I wouldn’t."
Hazel Shade, by her father, John Shade (Canto 2 of Pale Fire, Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov, 1962)
At first we'd smile and say
"All little girls are plump" or "Jim McVey
(The family oculist) will cure that slight
Squint in no time." And later: "She'll be quite
Pretty, you know"; and trying to assuage
The swelling torment: "That's the awkward age."
"She should take riding lessons," you would say
(Your eyes and mine not meeting). "She should play
Tennis, or badminton. Less starch, more fruit
She may not be a beauty, but she's cute."
It was no use, no use...
"But this is prejudice. You should rejoice
That she is innocent. Why overstress
The physical? She wants to look a mess.
Virgins have written some resplendent books.
Lovemaking is not everything. Good looks,
Are not that indispensable!" And still...
No lips would share the lipstick of her smoke;
The telephone that rang before a ball
Every two minutes in Sorosa Hall
For her would never ring; and, with a great
Screeching of tires on gravel, to the gate
Out of lacquered night, a white-scarfed beau
Would never come for her; she'd never go,
A dream of gauze and jasmine, to that dance.
I think she always nursed a small mad hope...
People have thought she tried to cross the lake
At Lochan Neck where zesty skaters crossed
From Exe to Wye on days of special frost.
Others supposed she might have lost her way
By turning left from Bridgeroad; and some say
She took her poor young life. I know. You know...
In the wet starlight and on the wet ground.
The lake lay in the mist, its ice half drowned.
A blurry shape stepped off the reedy bank
Into a crackling, gulping swamp, and sank.
As summer approaches, an unstoppable force (wanting my bedroom to be dark) meets an immovable object (wanting to have the window open).
Vision and Choice in Morality: Stories and Fables. R. W. Hepburn
" 'What does my life add up to?', 'what is its meaning?', 'is it coherent, integrated, or formless, chaotic?'. There are the bare autobiographical my life, but there is also a 'fable' - a slowly developing, often elusive, cluster of personal symbols, compounded of childhood memories, foci of aspiration, discoveries in literature, with reference to which his whole life is orientated... [my life] has revolved round a single axis and has a number of constant dominant themes, which give it inward unity."
"A life is a life, how could it be more? Nevertheless, 'by the end of it something more has indeed transpired'. "
"What can be said about the alarming violations of that unity? For there are desolate tracts in the autobiography where the 'story' stubbornly refuses to be transmuted into 'fable'... I have no symbol which can cope with, which can give me commmand over these events; no image, motif, theme, is available through which I can regain perceptual order. 'Despair' might be described as the recognition of complete failure to integrate life's events.
I wonder about canine phenomonolgy a lot. Otis was lying half-asleep in the centre of my bed, and I was sort of nudging him off, gently then more aggressively, when I suddenly remembered how elderly he is! 11 years old! And he's had cancer. I often forget that. He's coming towards the end of his life and needs to rest.
19 years old now. My teens, but especially the last three years, have been essentially a process of assessing each of my beliefs individually and now assembling them into one coherent worldview... I still struggle with this. My life lacks unity, it's themes are not synthesised. I guess evolutionary psychology is the map which best fit the territory. Not 'mood disorders' or 'autism' or any of the other DSM spooks, behaviourism, internal family systems, folk philosophies, Freud or Christianity...
Physical attractiveness is the primary female status indicator > I'm physically unattractive > I have low social status. Awareness of social subordination triggers social withdrawal and low mood (potentially mediated by testosterone among other things).
1. This is going to hurt every day until I die
2. It does not have to maximally hurt constantly
3. But it is going to hurt every day until I die, too
I can't really understand the idea of being sexually aroused by violence, even conceptually. But I do see the way in which it could be deeply psychologically satisfying. If I could eg. get a man to hit me, it wouldn't be sexually gratifying, but it would act as proof that the world was 'really as bad as I had always suspected'. I've played it out in my head and the physical pain is always accompanied by this feeling of absolute triumph - Ha! Forced the world to show its hand, and it's just animalistic brutality, I was right. Nobody can pretend any longer!
Mary Gaitskill on masochism:
"It seems like self-contempt, but it's really an inverted contempt for everything... masochism is like 'I'm going to make myself into a debased object because that is what I think of you. This is what I think of your love. I don't want your love. Your love is shit. Your love is nothing'. " Source
Although I'm a bit grumpy with her because she claims to have been unattractive as a young woman, which she wasn't, and I feel this is stolen valour.
One of my many physiological abnormalities is that I can make myself cry multiple times within a single 24 hour period by merely reading anecdotes from the lives of other women.
"...We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly. For many couples, children are a third thing..."
- from The Third Thing by Donald Hall
Gorecki - Symphony No. 3
Mozart - Ave Verum Corpus, KV 618
Rachmaninoff - All-Night Vigil, Op. 37 "Vespers": Nunc dimittis
Au Revoir, Adios, Toodaloo, Pip.
... But sometimes when clouds are violet-grey
and five o'clock stalks me, huddled
in its lonely cloak, I remember
the one from decades back
in her prairie cotton dress at Charing Cross
when any other man would have.
I made her heart burst. Looked away and up
at the times, the destinations, just checking
my own, that I'd make the last. I still see life
as a bewjewelled fabulous board of possibility.
Clackety-clack, my head tilted back,
but in shadow. All of me. Always.
Helen Farish, published in the Times Literary Supplement, 2019
Recognition
I think that the problem of being an unattractive woman is much more profound than 'just' romantic failure. Something there too about lack of access to social recognition...
"Most theories of recognition assume that in order to develop a practical identity, persons fundamentally depend on the feedback of other subjects (and of society as a whole). Misrecognition thereby hinders or destroys persons’ successful relationship to their selves... thus, recognition constitutes a “vital human need” (Taylor 1992, 26)."
So total is the identification of womanhood with desirability, the concept of an undesirable woman is culturally incoherent and possibly not even imaginable. Social recognition comes mediated by mass culture, but what if you are entirely absent from mass culture? What if, instead, every aspect of culture, particularly work, romance, politics (incl. feminism) and news and entertainment media, dwell on hyper-visible, attractive young women and the way in which they suffer from being too desirable? (The problems that socially recognised women have are, amongst others: unwanted romantic advances to assault, the problem of filtering from a surplus of suitors etc. These problems are real - and it's good that they see daylight.)
On the other hand, romantically and sexually invisible, friendless, and missing from all forms of cultural representation, an undesirable woman struggles to form a sense of herself as a social person at all, and cannot find her place in the world. She has none of these cultural reference points, not even a handhold to claw at, she cannot even really conceive of herself.
England is like a macroscopic version of myself.
The most perfect passage in all of its literature:
"Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell."
From Act I, Scene ii of The Tempest
Early daffodils, lungwort or 'blue cowslip' (despite not in fact being related to true cowslip).
Gerald Manley Hopkins
"No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief...
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep."
"Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can..."
Last November I went to see a concert at St John's Smith Square with Alex. The programme: a contemporary piece by Daniel Kidane, Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 and Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 8. Baroque churches, gleaming brass instruments, polite uniform applause, lemonade - I was struck by how miraculous civilisation was.
But the worm in my heart: I am not beautiful so am forever shut out of the place where real life happens. Despite being physically present, I stood totally removed from that harmonized scene. Passed lots of pretty violinists - my crumpled face in the bathroom mirror next to their unconscious beauty nearly made me burst into tears. My attempt to mimic natural female beauty by painting over my thin lips and glueing on eyelashes was a picture of grotesqueness.
"Without beauty a girl has missed her chance to be loved."
It still winds me to think about this - that this was my one and only 'shot' at life, that time has rushed irretrievably past me, that there will not and cannot be any resolution to this problem, that at some indeterminant point in the future my consciousness will just cease to exist and that will literally just be it for me, I will never arrive at any point of catharsis, I will just die with this deprivation.
The absolute incorrigibility of reality.
Ultimately the innocent party who suffer the most unjustly from all of this are [my parents].
Neuroscience of beauty
Human Beauty and the Brain
Beautiful Faces Have Variable Reward Value: fMRI and Behavioral Evidence
Reward, motivation, and emotion systems associated with early-stage intense romantic love
"The brain uses at least three modules, or cognitive domains, in deciding the value of attractiveness. The occipital and temporal regions of the cortex, the superior temporal sulcus, and the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), including the nucleus accumbens, for making judgments of beauty and producing the neurological rewards (dopamine and other neurotransmitters) for finding it. When men were shown faces of beautiful women while their brains were scanned by fMRI, the attractive faces specifically activated the nucleusaccumbens in the caudate region of the brain, when compared to viewing average faces."
"Functional magnetic resonance imaging at 3 T shows that passive viewing of beautiful female faces activates reward circuitry." The results suggest that romantic love uses subcortical reward and motivation systems to focus on a specific individual, that limbic cortical regions process individual emotion factors, and that there is localization heterogeneity for reward functions in the human brain."
Neoteny: the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. A neotenous face is one which combines a high ratio of neurocranial to lower-facial features with a small nose and ears and full lips. In other words, features are clustered towards the bottom of the skull and the skull itself is round and shortened.
My face is marked by dolichocephalia (ie. is lengthened), asymmetry and maxillary and mandibular recession. I have no neotenous features. In this sense, it is not possible for others to feel affection or care towards me, or can only happen anomalously.
Circa 2019-2020 I listened to the song Glass Eyes, from Radiohead's 2016 album A Moon Shaped Pool, several times a day for many weeks.
"The path trails off
And heads down the mountain
I don't know where it leads
And I don't really care"
I am catastrophically ugly!
Grumpy thoughts...
I don't really understand why people associate utility maximization with capitalism - as if it's not a feature of all large scale human organisation, or as if a socialist regime wouldn't also seek to, say, obtain the highest yield per square mile of land. There's also this silly tendency on the left to attribute the smallest of their problems to 'late-stage capitalism' or 'neoliberalism'.
Eg. "It started to rain today and I forgot my umbrella...[indistinct]... O the trials of life under capitalism."
Depersonalised production is the price we pay for efficiency and plenty - it's not necessarily been the disastrous trade-off that many people say it has.
I've clearly suffered from some form of clinical depression for almost 6 years now. And it has taken me this long to establish and really accept the causal link with physical unattractiveness. It's not sufficient to be a woman, you have to be a beautiful woman. Womanhood is ratified by men being sexually attracted to you.
I'm very curious about what it would be like to be desired, particularly by someone I desired reciprocally. There is surely nothing like it to provide the intense physical evidence of impacting another person. Trying and failing to make myself sexual desirable, the readiness and visibility of my sexual repulsiveness - in that gap has disappeared all my self-esteem, social currency, enoughness, value, worth, and belonging to the world.
ASD diagnosis
On my ASD diagnosis: I'm very skeptical of it all. ASDs occur about 4 x more frequently in males at the population level - this is because most mutations occur on the Y-chromosome. I think in the future my diagnosis will be recognised as part of a (well-meaning but wrong) medicine-led push to 'redress this ASD gender imbalance'. If I was male, my symptoms would definitely be described as subclinical. However, I find it convenient at the moment to use 'autism' as a shorthand for my lifelong pattern of failed social interactions, as it's at least somewhat socially legible.
Privately, I am working on a theory that 'autism in women' more likely refers to the subjective experience of being physically unattractive. Physical attractiveness is the primary female status indicator, so what I've experienced is more likely serotonin stress from long-term social subordination. It's a shame that I have not been able to find any sense of community in this label though. I had hoped that I would encounter less subtle intrasexual competition in these circles, but frankly being amongst autistic women feels no different from being amongst neurotypical women. Interests & modes of expression tend to be circumscribed by the limits of traditional femininity, lots of self-infantilisation, speech patterns which seem effusive and emotive for autistic people ie. 'i love my plushies!!!!'. This is an observation, not a critique; I just don't get it. I have blunt affect, stereotyped speech, have empathy deficits, make odd facial expressions, make inappropriate comments, suffer badly from anger and meltdowns, and other grubby and unpalatable symptoms. I am really remarkably unlikeable, maybe even vaguely predatory in some sense. Either they are sanitising their content, or I'm truly a freak among freaks. I identify more with the male-typical presentation of autism, yet I've found autistic men to be implicitly or explicitly misogynistic. I'm not sure where to go from here.
Applying makeup is really my greatest comedic bit! As if a bit of lipstick could mask an orthognathically appalling arrangement of facial bones and flesh! Me putting makeup on is like inanely clawing for handholds against the surface of a cliff that I am clearly already splattered at the bottom of.
Ugliness
"The lower end of the attractiveness continuum (ugliness) is a source of stigma. Indeed, in his classic work on stigma, Goffman (1963, p. 4) highlighted “abominations of the body” that lead to negative labeling. In particular, unattractiveness is a discrediting stigma, in that it is generally visible to others and can set off expectations and evaluations as soon as someone enters into a social interaction (as opposed to a discreditable stigma that may be less obvious; Goffman, 1963). Without effective coping strategies, such as prioritizing in-group comparisons or making external attributions, repeated negative experiences related to stigmatization may harm self-concept (Crocker & Wolfe, 2001; Major & O’Brien, 2005).
Based on the stigma perspective, we expect that physically unattractive people may be viewed negatively by others, be less often selected for investment and rewards, be treated in such a way that their performance suffers, and, as a result of their poor performance, be frozen out of additional investment and rewards." [Source]
In retrospect my life probably flickered out in around September 2020. The despair that my body is even in youth repulsive, and intractably so, that I had never and would never form a reciprocal positive relationship with another human being, that all of my bids to become acceptable had failed... I never really came back from it. There aren't palliatives strong enough. Interestingly, what can still bring me to tears now is not the suffering, itself, but the total indifference with which it was met by others.
All of my social interactions are really just silent pleas for others - even a single person - to affirm that they find my presence on Earth to be acceptable. Imagine: if there was a man who could take care of himself, but sometimes wanted to take care of me too out, of love and excess capacity.
I understand now that my life experience has been radically different from that of most other women. When I slowly came to realise that most women spent their teenage years fielding constant sexual advances, in a state of predation, basically, I could hardly believe it! I spent my teens desperately trying to get men, or anyone really, to look at me, notice me, like me, hold my gaze (I was not successful). In some ways I'm grateful for this, because I fundamentally move around the world differently now - totally unafraid. I am not psychologically a prey animal.
But sometimes, when I'm walking around at night by myself, which I do often, I think about how my ugliness makes me exempt from the risk of sexual assault, and I feel like a 'less complete' person for it.
I can't really distinguish between 'not wanting to be female' and 'not wanting to be myself'.
Cosmetic surgery necessary (but not sufficient) for me to be competitive in the sexual marketplace:
Orthognathic surgery (to address: orbital canting, occlusal canting, recessed mandible, recessed maxilla, poor infraorbital suppor, L ptosis, bilateral negative canthal tilt):
Rapid Maxillary Expansion (RME): £3,000
Total Mandibular Subapical Osteotomy and Le Fort I Osteotomy: £8,000
Face:
Rhinoplasty: £6,000
Lip lift: £3,500
Juvederm lip filler: £500
Lipofilling: £4,000
Ptosis correction: £2,500
Canthoplasty: £5,000
Body:
590CC breast implants: £6,000
Pelvic widening: £10,000
All prices are estimates made at time of writing. £48,500.
Whilst I was climbing the gate to get into the orchard this evening, I paid attention to the articulation of my knee, and the pleasing interplay of bones, muscles and ligaments that permitted my leg to swing over the gate, flexion and extension, and the loaded springs in my calf muscles when I landed on the other side. It was dark, but I was able to scan the horizon. I have a highly developed capacity for pattern recognition, I can optimise my location for shelter and food access, I can run very fast (the fastest woman in the world runs at 92% of the speed of the fastest man). It's not true that my body's only purpose is reproduction. That would be an abyssal horror. There are other things.
I hope there are other things. Opening up the court minimises more specific failures. If the entire purpose of my being is to be sexually attractive, and I have failed at that, then I have failed in a total way.
Maybe there's a way of looking at reproduction as something other than at best, a game which I lose, and at worse, the dissolution of my self. What if being added to means not increase, but dilution?
Maybe it's actually a wonderful adventure that has only a tangential relationship to sex. After all conception is just a fraction of the multi-year process of gestating and nursing an infant. The reception of the sperm is overemphasised culturally. If my body can fulfill some specified function, maybe that will compensate for its form.
I hardly even look like a woman. I think I underwent some kind of psychological and skeletal masculinisation. Perhaps I'm infertile anyway for this same reason, then I'd never have to think about any of this ever again. But it's OK. For the time being, I know that I am myself, I know that I exist bodily in the world, I know that The FitnessGram™ Pacer Test is a multistage aerobic capacity test that progressively gets more difficult as it continues. The 20 meter pacer test will begin in 30 seconds. Line up at the start. The second time you fail to complete a lap before the sound, your test is over. On your mark, get ready, run.
Russia is the coolest country on Earth. Tolstoy, Chekhov, Shostakovich, Stalin, Sputnik-1, forsty ballerinas and grand chess masters, cold, splendid, aloof and tragic.
I think things might have gone very differently had I been made to feel valuable at some pivotal moment in my adolescence, even once.
Geoffrey Hill
King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sandstone: overlord of the M5: architect of the historic
rampart and ditch, the citadel at Tamworth, the summer hermitage in Holy Cross: guardian of
the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge: contractor to the desirable new estates: saltmaster:
moneychanger: commissioner for oaths: martyrologist: the friend of Charlemagne.
‘I liked that,’ said Offa, ‘sing it again.’
I don't think I have ever really experienced a positive reciprocated relationship. I believe that I still have the latent potential to experience love but I'm also aware that it is diminishing every day that passes. Suffering has made me a worse person. It has not purified me or vitalised me, it has made me unpleasant, bitter, ashamed and paranoid. It has forced me to adopt pain-avoidance as my terminal value. I want to die and start over.
Terrible blinding headache that radiated to all the bones in my face, temporal-mandibular joints and ears. Slept fitfully all of Thursday, sometimes becoming delirious. By the evening it was gone, fortunately. Although I still have a bad sore throat and this morning I lost my voice.
11th October 2021
Update on mushroom: Has released a brown translucent liquid, whilst the body has blackened and almost completely disintegrated. Not conducive with glistening inkcap.
7th October 2021
This morning I found a cluster of mushrooms in the park, growing amongst some yarrow. Yarrow has very pretty small white flowers. I'm not certain on the identification, but my tentative guess is glistening inkcap. Took a sample home with me, it came away very easily when I picked it. I'm going to photograph it at approximately hourly intervals, to see if we observe the degradation of the gills into a black spore-laden liquid, which is a feature of the glistening inkcap. If we see this autodigestion process, that should count as more evidence that the ID is correct.
21st September 2021
Notes on North London Site 1.
What appears to be uncultivated heath, fairly littered
Grasses including common Bent and some others I haven't been able to identify yet, potentially Foxtail
Lots of patches of dock, Great Hairy Willow Herb growing 1.2m high, stem coateed in fine hairs and small purple flowers supporting grubs
Abundant thistles, knapweed, dandelions
Smaller patches of white clover throughout
Some bramble, or though probably too late to see fruit
Saw an oak sapling which looked a bit worse for wear. Must have been planted deliberately
Heard crickets but could not see them
Saw what may have been a carline thistle, which had vicious inch-long spikes. I thought it looked monstrous
Most plants showed signs of ill health and flowers were rare
Other grasses were potentially: False Oat-Grass, Cock's-Foot or Crested Dog's Tail
Assume soil is quite calcerous but hope to test this in the future.