Lavender Tower Archives

That's where I've been putting structured explanations of my own thought processes and ideas. It's much older, and as a result it's hard to move the posts in full from Insta to Tumblr or vice versa.

I'll be airing my less organized and less important thoughts through here. I'm also trying to reach more people through tumblr, because Insta apparently doesn't like sharing my posts if I use certain keywords (so I'll be merely hinting at the main ideas here).

If you do check out @lavender_tower_archives on Instagram, please do start from the beginning. It'll explain more.

Please please please message me. I'd love to talk to you. It doesn't even have to be something I've posted about. I've stopped pretending I'm not desperate for human contact.

Thanks for finding me, thanks for listening, thanks for staying.

I've made additional blogs for specialized things!

Poetry: Celestial Tower

Stories: Lost Tower

Game Design: Mt. Pyre

I'm currently in the middle of it, and im doin my best to overexplain it to myself in an attempt to distract myself from it. It's the same sensation as when i'm drunk as fuck, trying to calibrate myself while knowing full well that my calibrations are nonsensical simply because my metrics are screwed up. How do I audit myself? I can't. How do I try anyways? I just ramble to myself until something either comes to me or the whole thing stops.

I dunno, man. I don't even feel like I can call someone to talk about this cuz that involves planning, even a miniscule amount of which has become impossible because my head shits itself the moment I have to put any two thoughts together. I'm dizzy, my head hurts, I'm hungry... And to solve any one of these requires a more-than-one-step process. Even just the simple plan of "go upstairs and play video games" (im in my apartment's lobby rn) is too complicated. What game do I play? What if I want to play another game? What if I want to go back downstairs and keep drawing\writing?

I'm even reusing all the phrases I normally try to use only once in these posts because rereading what I just wrote is too much of a deviation from "complete the task." The "task" is to distract myself. The "task" is to write a post. The "task" is do literally anything at all that takes my entire brain's worth of bandwidth. I'm writing so much faster than I usually do because I just... Refuse to proofread.

I need someone or something to instruct me. Literally anything. And I can't force myself to reach out because not only is that a multi-step process, but my social anxiety is convincing me that this is not life threatening so therefore no one needs to be bothered by this. And you guessed it, convincing myself otherwise takes effort I do not have to spend and could not afford to spend even if I did have it. Being self aware only makes me look stupider because I very clearly have the knowledge of the situation, the tools to fix it, and the time to put those two together, but I have somehow run low on this magical resource I call Bandwidth.

The light went off in the room I'm in. I've been perfectly still for.... I dunno how long. I don't know how long I've been say here writing and panicking and distracting and stumbling through my own brain. Ideally, I would take care of this by streaming. I would hop on, play some pokemon, yap, complain about my situation to a crowd of zero people, and that'd be that. But not only is that a process, I don't want to risk anyone I know hopping on and listening. I sound asinine. I sound helpless. I know what would fix this:attention. Preferably physical or otherwise. I'll take what I can get.

They barely touch me anymore. I'm the one doing all the hugging, scratching and squeezing. Every time I ask them to do something physically affectionate, they say theyre too tired. Im fucken dying here.

Of the very few times they do barely do something for me, theyre always under the impression that that'll sate me for any amount of time. No the fuck it wont. Five minutes of lackluster head scratching is not going to make me feel like I've had enough. It feels nice, yes, when they put effort into it, but they just dont. I always want more. I need more.

I just dont feel wanted. Being touched is how I feel wanted and I just fucken dont. Im not. Im not touched or wanted.

I'm laying next to them in bed right now and I can hold them all I want to. I just dont want to wake them up. Of the five hours a day they spend not sleeping, four of them are spent waking up, and I don't want to eat into the miniscule time we have together.

They dont seem to understand that I feel like shit because I'm getting nothing. Im gonna try to explain it later today before they drop me back off at my home. I hope I'll have the guts to actually tell them how severe this problem is.

I'm relapsing again, yippee. Day after day. I'm running out of inconspicuous and explainable places to become wounded, if I crowd the same spots over and over someone's gonna notice.

That someone has been outta town this weekend, unfortunately enough, which left me with more than a week where I wouldn't see them, and subsequently, more than a week to heal myself. I don't see any scars, but the more recent afflictions aren't healing very well. Serves me right for doin it all over my ankles and nowhere else.

It's an ailment. It's terrible. Migraines rob me of half a day each time they show up. Whether theyre accidentally self-induced or just randomly encountered, they fuck me up, impede my judgement further than it already is, and just come with unbearable pain and clinginess. They're legitimately overwhelming.

I can recognize them as such. They need to be fixed, and I can fix them by taking medication and going to sleep. This is the only way to actually get rid of them. Playing games and jerkin off (no not at the same time) only lessens their impact, and that time is better spent just sleeping.

It's this rare acknowledgement that I need to sleep that is refreshing. I never go to sleep unless I feel guilty enough about fucking up the next day. Every time I get a migraine, I actually have a reasonable night's sleep. I wake up refreshed. I wake up before noon.

Even more useful than that, I get a guilt-free explanation of why nothing happened. Usually, my responsibilities are left untouched while I do my usual mental crisis control, day after day. When I get a migraine, I have an automatic excuse for why nothing happened. I couldn't work. It was out of my control. I intended to do things, but something got in the way. I literally was unable to even try to make progress.

I am playing skyblock. Starting from the nether. I've done this once before, but stopped after I got a gold farm running. When I started then, I made sure to have nylium, all fungus types, water, lava, one blue ice, nether wart, and soul sand. In the overworld (for once I built a nether portal back), I had water and trees (i think, I never made it and don't wanna go back to check).

THIS TIME, I forgot. I simply forgot. I am now without red and brown mushrooms, lava, ice, and nether wart. It is a massive difference. While I still have eventual access to all (i think), the fact that I can't make a cobble gen before I make a wandwring trader farm is soul crushing. No cobble equals no repeaters, pistons, or comparators, even though I have blackstone and redstone out the ass. This equals no automation.

I made a witch farm for the sole purpose of getting autocrafters. Not possible. Now I need to farm oodles of blocks just for a wandering trader farm, and spend hours looking for zombie villagers to convert and trade with. It feels so wrong to cheat in what I know I should have, and what I know I would have given myself if i didn't rush making the world. This is why I second guess myself so much. I know that every time I can't come back to my decisions, I have the potential to absolutely fuck them up. I'm always wary of the fact that I am simply mistaken in my judgement and I just don't know how so yet.

The only reason I rushed the world was because I wanted to stream it. I've been streaming. A couple friends have come by and chatted but that's only been a couple times. Not even my partner drops by. It's not like I expected anyone to, this isn't fuel for self-deprication or anything; I just thought that I'd have seen at least one rando that isn't a scam bot in the past couple months. I only started streaming to practice social interaction. The constant state of "someone could be watching" is actually rather reassuring. Twitch also often lies about how many people watch at any given time, so I know any time I see "1 viewer (me)" i know there very well could be three people lurking. It's happened before and it'll happen again.

I want to continue writing. Now that I have a damned subplot on my mind, completing or even building towards the main plot is completely foreign.

I got 4.5\10 points.

Five of those points were lost solely because I used a script. I instantly went into a fucking downward spiral. Yeah, I'm sick, I'm coughing and sniffling and fucking hating life, but that was the kick that sent my flying. I immediately thought about ways to drop out and finish another time, not finish my degree at all, end my life, etc.

I'm still in the middle of it. I'm depressed. I'm screwed. I want out and I can't get out. I can't get anywhere. No pasttimes are working to sufficiently distract me. No creative hobbies can have any amount of effort put into them because i just dont have effort to give.

I havent even fucking posted in months because my creativity is stumped. I dont even know what else to say here. I want to describe what else is fucking my brain over but honestly the dayquil is making me too sleepy to give a shit. I want to continue writing the damned story I just started but I cant make it past page 5.

Fuck me, man. I havent had physical affection in ages. I'm just rotting inside and it's starting to show on the outside. I won't be seeing my partner for at least a week more so I guess I can rip up my skin more. Still gotta be careful.

I need someone to scratch my head. I need someone to tell me what to do. I need literally any external stimuli because my room is making me crazy. I tried streaming again and got too focused on building in minecraft and if I have any effort at all to give its gotta go toward my class cuz i cant afford to fail it. Or can i. I dunno. I dont care enough to find out whats gonna happen if i flunk this shit.

I dont want to write it or even acknowledge it. That'll make it real-er. Hopefully I'll be able to look at what I wrote and say "that doesnt sound right" or "I'm just being stupid again." I gotta write it down anyways.

Im catching a crush again. I'm sick of this. I just want to have normal friends in a normal way with a normal relationship. I don't want to have to jump through all these mental hoops to just... Chill with someone who's cool. I don't want to imagine myself in their arms or fucking them or having my hands in their hair. I want to think about how to edit the card game we've been playing. I want to think of how I can catch them on their way to class for just a high-five. I don't want to think about their relationship with their girlfriend like I'm "looking for a way in." My brain will not leave me the fuck alone.

I don't intend to fuck this up, and by that I mean I don't intend to do anything. I'm just gonna sit here and enjoy our friendship.

They're lovely. They're a nice person. They remind me a lot of my partner, and wow surprise, they're fucking hot. We both like MTG, we're both CS majors, and we're both autistic. We just talk for ages.

I recognize this pattern and all I can do is complain. I can't make myself like them less. I can't erase my own attraction to them. I don't want to isolate myself from them because it is v e r y difficult to find friends n shit. I'm screwed enough as it is.

In my asinine and incomplete attempts to read between the lines of other people's sentences, I've found a lot of patterns that make me behave in expected ways. If someone gives me two options and then moves on, I'm less likely to present a third. If I haven't done work on a project, and someone asks me about it, I'm eager to take suggestions over staying true to my preferences. So many patterns appear. They're all forgotten quickly, but my socially anxious brain quickly recognizes some hidden meaning that doesn't actually exist. My lack of faith in my own analyses is out of the scope of this post. The way my brain processes things is very different between "with people" and "not with people," enabling this heavy distrust of my own intuition from one side looking at the other.

With this catalogue of rules that don't really exist, I have to lug this shit around everywhere. I have to consult this useless rulebook whenever I think someone wants something out of me. I care what they think, so I try to understand what they're telling me.

Conversely, when I don't care about what someone thinks, this shitty rulebook rears its ugly head again, except now I see it in their hands, not mine. I assume they care what I think, and if they don't, no loss on my end.

Now comes the revelation that too many neurodivergent people have come to: I can be very manipulative. I understand the power people hold over me, every second of every day, unaware that I care so deeply about something so unimportant (and parasocial, no less). I also understand that this power is not theirs alone.

My point is that I know the rules to this stupid fucking game on a level that normal people don't even think about. People often don't examine their own speech patterns, body language, or other miniature (and usually benign) affectations. As someone who has overanalyzed everyone else's affectations, especially his own, I now know how to dance around these "rules" whenever I feel like it. I rarely ever do.

There are, however, people that I will gladly manipulate, given the right motive. I want something out of someone who has lost my respect, so I will purposefully lay cognitive bear traps for them to break their ankles in, and gladly pry their bloodied shins out of the twisted metal to paint myself as some sort of fucking savior. No, I don't feel good about it, but what makes me even less happy is how happy it makes me to fuck some person over as so many have fucked me.

To illustrate this point, I recently had a conversation with a classmate/teammate who has been slacking. I know he's done fucking nothing on either project we've been doing all quarter (I'm in two teams with him), so instead of leading with my work and how he can build off it, I ask how much he understands the paper we're reading. With his admission of "not having read the whole paper yet" (it's been eight weeks for fifteen pages), I tell him I want to take responsibility for two sections of the paper and give him the middle bit. I hate the middle bit and cannot find a way to present it cleanly, but I can just offload that shit so no one knows how badly I would have done it. The conversation went back and forth with me offering many more trap/rescue questions and him responding exactly as I intended and expected.

The worst part about all this is that none of this actually matters. I can paint myself as a "bad person," a "manipulative asshole," "forcing people to do what I want with just words," "covering my tracks so no one knows how much I just manipulated a dude," but yeah, none of that's real. I see this often enough online and in person about people worrying they're manipulating and abusing people. I have never seen a case where the self-aware person has actually done anything egregious. In every single (admittedly anecdotal, so take this "data" lightly) case, the person "at fault" is just... not providing the help they so desperately need from others. If someone's slacking, it's not manipulative to tell them what you need/want them to do. If someone forgot a thingy, it's not manipulative to remind them, whether it's once, twice, or ten times. People (again, anecdotally) tend to believe that their "victims" are just going to sit there and take abuse like the other person has been taught to do their whole lives.

Manipulation requires fear. Don't assume your friends are afraid of you. Don't assume classmates, acquaintances, strangers, etc. are afraid just because you did something you watched an asshole do to you. This whole self-aware-accidental-manipulator mindset falls apart the moment you realize the other person doesn't think like you.

If I insult you calmly in a language you don't understand, can I really say you understood? If I flip you off from behind a computer screen while typing normal messages, can I really say you got the message? I'm gonna steal a quote that I don't know the origins of: "Abuse survivors are fluent in a language no one else can understand." No one can hear your accidental undertones. Even if I'm wrong, and you find one of very few people who can hear the words you're not saying, this can be cleared up by calling out what you don't want them to hear. "I don't want you to think I expect ____." "Please tell me if you feel pressured to ____." Even I can feel the malice between these words myself, and I'm the fucking person who said them with the sole intent of not sounding like I'm saying something I'm not. There is no way to guarantee no one will hear words you're not saying. All you can do, and all I can do, is let them tell us when/if something's wrong.

I know I kept saying "you," but this is mostly just stuff I tell myself. It's just a lot easier to act like I'm talking to the reader. I kind of am. I don't know. I just have to remind myself every so often that not many people see the world in the same fucked-up obsessive/desperate way I do.

I hadn't been able to finish anything of note (aside from like one shitty video) for the entire summer. I didn't look at a calendar or anything, so I only recently realized I started a new ADHD med (non-stimulant) soon after summer began.

I started it in an attempt to make my brain quieter. After telling my psychiatrist that my main choke point was "getting distracted by everything," she recommended this new med. I was constantly assaulted by "random" urges to do "random" shit. I had the stress of understanding all the tasks I had to do and all the projects I haven't finished, and though they were never all present at the same time, there were still quite a few bombarding me every second of every day. I was frequently interrupted. Every interruption was another instance of analysis paralysis.

So I took the medication. I found myself interrupted the same amount, but the important difference was that I was no longer wrenched away from whatever I was doing. My focus remained. I was *essentially* less interruptible. The impulses that harassed me were much, much quieter and therefore much, much easier to ignore (especially involuntarily)

It was, and currently is, nice to not have my attention wrenched away every five seconds. Unfortunately, I failed to recognize a threat I already faced: I get sucked into certain tasks and don't stop for hours. It's usually video games. It's never anything with a real deadline and always something I find pleasure in. Now that I no longer have the chance to lose focus over small things, everything is a "small thing," and I simply do not stop. It's not like I actively choose not to piss or not to work on my homework or not get up to meet someone, those urges simply are not loud enough for me to hear. My brain automatically dismisses these barely audible complaints my brain constantly throws at me. Imagine hiring a secretary who handles all your phone calls, except they're also in the same room as you. I can hear that a call is happening, I can hear them answering it, and I may overhear what the call is about, but my assumption is that I don't have to care because my assumption is that the calls have been handled and will be relayed to me once I'm not busy. Of course, there is no conscious thought involved in this dismissal, I can't stress enough that I am not in control of the process of "brain says thing -> brain hears thing -> brain considers thing "handled" -> brain discards thing.

So no, I'm not as affected. I'm a little less stressed. It's sorta nice. Random reminders aren't as audible, but you know what else comes randomly and loudly into my mind? Inspiration. I haven't had any substantial inspiration. Of the few times I have found something new to create, I couldn't see my end goal. I thought that was okay. "I'll get there when I get there," I reassured myself. I had no vision for the end products, no guiding principles, no global optimum to fuel my local optimizations.

I didn't notice this problem for the entire fucking summer. I had several projects to work on, but absolutely zero motivation to continue them. If I even did go back, I would only do so out of guilt. I felt pressured (as always) to finish a project and have something to show for my efforts. There was barely any passion for those projects in the first place.

I dunno why I didn't see that I was aimless for a reason. My best guess is that my self-depricating nature assumed it was just a personal failing because "I'm a failure" (or whatever lies it was feeding me), and I didn't dispute it because any thought of "hey maybe my brain lies to me" was met with the same dismissive apathy that kept me from pissing, eating, going outside, talking to anyone, or working on projects.

It's not actually too bad. There are just things I haven't fixed in a while because they take too much work because I'm too tired or whatever. The only reason I'm tired is because I'm in my room.

I keep seeing things I don't like that yank at my attention until I learn to ignore them. The displeasure doesn't go away, but the recognition does. I haven't put away my laundry in months. I haven't vacuumed all summer. It took all my fucking sanity to wash my own sheets.

Over the past year, I accepted that nobody was coming over. No one will see me or my room, and no one will need to, either. I spent the two prior years keeping myself and my room mostly pristine since I had the prospect of neighbors knocking on my door and friends coming over after their classes. Neither of those happened in any meaningful way. This is the main reason my hygeine has plummetted in the last year.

It won't take more than a day to clean. Unfortunately, I have shit my brain won't put down, telling me garbage like "hey you should work on that thing. Go finish that thing." Despite me knowing nothing will get done. It'd go even quicker with someone else, but I don't want to involve my partner in my (probably) smelly-ass room.

I don't like being here. It's fine to have as a home, I just don't like being home. However, I need to be comfortable most of the time, and comfort comes from not being observed (and easy access to what I want). I really fucking wish I could go to the library or a cafe and be okay but nope. I can't think with all the people who could potentially think a thought about me, and if that happens, I want to be able to influence that thought in a good way.

Of course, none of that's real. No one's watching me. No stranger's going to have me on their mind for more than the split second I surface from a crowd and dive back in. This isn't out of self-deprication, thankfully, I can just remember my attitude towards the random people I see most days: I can't remember a single fucking person, and I'm constantly scanning everywhere I look. How do I expect someone with less on their mind to devote more space to me?

NUH UH

No, not really. Your well-wishes are appreciated, though.

I haven't finished any projects despite starting many and working on most. I just can't get my brain to like them anymore. I get relief from finishing things, at least from trying to finish them, and that just hasn't been available for months. I keep coming back to shitty ways to pass my time. At least I'm able to come back to this account.

My need to kill myself is just a want. My mind has classified it with the rest of my solitary pleasure-seeking activities, from gaming to jorkin on my it to scrolling instagram to making MTG decks.

It is a constant underlying "thing" that's just on my mind, always ready to pop into my brain when I'm feeling shitty (which, coincidentally, is often). While my more depressed moods do make me ravenous for my own death, they only increase the craving, they don't create it. It is constant and frequent, just as much as being hungry.

It hits when I'm happy, too. Whether I'm talking to friends or playing card games or playing video games, the urge of "kill yourself" pops up just as often as "I'm tired," and demands more attention on average.

I don't care enough to rid myself of this urge. If I felt capable of rewiring my most integral needs, I'd definitely change hunger or horniness first. Those urges (and how I deal with them) cause me muuuch more grief than suicidal ideation ever has. Even my fantasies are more achievable: it's much less realistic to imagine "having a threesome" or "getting a fwb" than "ten oxycodone is strong enough" or "ten stories is high enough."

I've accepted that this is just my brain malfunctioning. It is just something wrong with me. There is no root cause besides this. I'm just like this. Just as I am autistic, I am suicidal; not much can be done about either except hide it. It will not be going away.

TW sui

I haven't given up. Far from it. I just hit rock bottom and bounced around enough to nauseate me, forcing me to consider the options I have in a more realistic manner. I've always taken "riskiness" into account in my previous plans, I've just never assembled the materials with a clear mind before.

I don't have a way to reliably kill myself. That's the problem. I always knew I couldn't guarantee a death no matter how committed I was: at some point, my body would shut itself down even without chemical assistance. Even if I left the process to something else (e.g. a fall or a vehicular accident), that would be even less of a guarantee. Human bodies are fragile, but they can recover from some nasty shit.

That risk of recovery\survival is what actually made me reconsider my "options." To survive any attempt on my life would almost certainly sentence me to a much worse life with even less options. Overdose? Organ failure is survivable. Blood loss? No one will tell me the minimum amount required, plus infections are nasty. Asphyxiation? A crushed windpipe is survivable, even if I found something to support my weight.

So my options were eliminated. Even a bullet to the temple or the forehead might miss the mark. I don't even know where the "best" place to aim is. I know almost nothing about firearms, and I don't have access to any.

It feels frightening, knowing I may have to deal with the consequences of my actions. I really am a caricature of a suicidal person. There's no nuance, no "yes, and"s, no elaborations worth explaining... The only thing I can add is that the notion of an "off button" is what has kept me going throughout the past three or four years. I don't have that right now, which makes me crave one even more.

TW ed sui sh

I have settled into some local minimum, just as I usually do during the summer. I disassociate day after day because there are very few outside influences acting on my life. I wake up, eat, take meds, play video games, eat, then sleep again. Each step of that process is painful for different reasons. I haven't "solved" them since I am still wary of solving my own problems.

Of the two problems with that paragraph, the first is that there are many more steps than that; these are just the constants that happen every damn day. Eating is still a pain in my ass. My meds have been worsening the consequences of my hunger. The games I play are fun, yes, but the more important aspect is that they distract me (from whatever the fuck else I'm having s problem with). Sleep is getting more difficult despite taking trazedone every night. These are the same issues I've "dealt with" over the years.

There are other things I do. Every weekend, I go to my partner's place. I love them. I love them so fucking much. The situation hasn't changed, only shifted: they are feeling slightly more healthy (still migrainey 100% of the time, but less painful overall) and slightly more capable (they have a job now), but still can't help me with my deficiencies (physical touch and mental overload). I can't help but not give a fuck. This isn't self-martyrdom, my thoughts aren't "as long as they're happy I can suffer in silence," they've turned from "they're a priority over myself" to "they're a priority regardless of my condition." It doesn't sound like much, but it's noticeable. I can't help but love them. It's not a conscious thing.

I have been programming recently. I started a new fucking project. It's fun as hell but I reeeaaaally wish my brain would think something else is tasty for once. I want to finish my previous game. I want to finish at least one of my incomplete stories. I want to talk to someone. But no, my brain has chosen its target.

The second issue with the aforementioned paragraph is the blatantly unhealthy stance I took regarding my problems. While I do still fear going into my mind\future and taking a look, the fear is absolutely dwarfed by the guarantee of suffering I've learned to expect. I have been fucked over by my own brain so many times that I no longer think "oh no what if I feel terrible after." I know I will feel terrible. Looking inwards makes me want to kill myself. I want to kill myself 24\7 anyways, but it's not as noticeable. I need to self-harm, and I have, I just can't get enough since my partner will definitely see the aftermath. All I can get away with is surface level incisions.

I thought I understood my partner's self-harm addiction before, but now I realize I only understood in theory. The process feels like fuckin without an orgasm. I can recognize this only because the thought of putting down the razor feels the exact same as "pulling out." Its exciting, trying to go a little longer, but I know my future self will have his life absolutely fucked up if I don't stop right fucking now. (Sorry for the metaphor. It's unfortunately perfectly accurate.)

So yeah, I've gotta keep myself away from myself for my own sake. Hence why I haven't looked at myself. Hence why I haven't posted in too damn long. Every day is just the same. There is nothing major to make me go... Do a thing. I stay in my room and game and build MTG decks and not much else. It's miserable, I'm miserable, and I may be happy most of the day, but that's only because I'm taking a loan out of my future. I've made barely any progress on my resume. I've applied to only two jobs (because I don't have a resume). My legs and ass are atrophying, and it hurts to sit on anything not cushioned.

I forgot why exactly I post here. Thankfully, I remembered. My previous thoughts were that no one cares about my updates, no one is gonna read them, the people I knew on this account have moved on (can't blame em, I wasn't very engaging to talk to). I remembered that that's always going to be the case. I write this shit because it helps straighten myself out. I need to stop thinking of certain things so I put them here instead. I need to start doing that again.

This is not the case for video games. It is the exact opposite. I actively fear expanses of space, whether I feel threatened as a player or not.

I could be playing Noita (a game where the entire world is capable of killing you no matter your strength) and feel an unseen yet terrifying urge to not step out of the cave. I have every guarantee that not only do no enemies spawn "here," but this area hasn't even loaded in yet, so it's still "brand new." I will still hesitate to retread the paths I've taken hundreds of times before.

I could be playing Minecraft, in creative mode, literally unkillable (outside of deliberate manual methods), and still panic when I breach the roof of the nether to reveal a massive monochrome vista of just... Red. I don't want to come out. It doesn't matter how important it is to build something up there, the fact that I can see so much nothingness forces me to ignore\calm\berate my frightened brain.

It took a while to realize this. While it's not a very useful or large revelation, I still feel the need to make note of it because of how long it's plagued me and subsequently how long i've denied it. However little reason I have to fear the large, empty space, I have even less reason to deny that fear. It's never been revealed to anyone. It's never been an actual issue. I don't understand why I had a chip on my shoulder and a stick up my ass regarding something I've never even had to cover up.

The same thing happened recently with the topic of my fear of mold. It is a genuine, irrational, panic-inducing and paralyzing fear of mold. Even the chance it could be present makes me thoroughly check every surface of my food before I start eating. No, it poses no actual threat (yes mold can dangerous but that's never considered). No, I would definitely see it if it was actually a problem. No, I can totally eat mold and not even notice. None of these ripostes make a difference.

This fear, too, took a while to admit. It has also accompanied me for at least a decade now. Not that it's a secret or anything, but only one other person knows about it, and thats because it has indeed impacted my life to a level that I can't just work around it (nothing serious, I left my apartment for two weeks without clearing my fridge, one batch of leftover pasta made me not want to even open it for days before I had to sheepishly ask my partner to come remove it for me. They're the sweetest). Admitting it felt... Exposing. I can knock it around in my head all I want, ignoring it, explaining it away, convincing myself it doesn't exist... Telling someone else makes it final in my mind. I can't deny it to myself without simultaneously admitting I lied. I don't like lying.

The one thread these two fears shared is their visceral nature. I am always caught off guard when the feared scenario appears before me. I fear a fair few things, but that's only because I've reasoned with myself about them, worked out countermeasures, dissected them, and put them back together. I know I compulsively try to understand my mind's strange patterns, that's not news. I have reason to believe that my motivation for not "admitting" these two fears (and probably more in the future) is that they're operating on a much lower level than my more rational fears, like getting expelled or yet another friend losing contact.

I've neglected any mention of magnitude, mostly because I can't measure that. These fears are using backdoors I didn't even know existed, and more worryingly, backdoors I still can't find. I want to do any amount of research on them. I am incapable. I'm definitely not used to this kind of overwhelming urge from my own mind. My experience with "fear" is that of a collection of outcomes with a similar theme, needing my attention, and getting that attention in a very mentally loud manner. It's akin to many people shouting at me and only a couple words are shared among the yells, paralyzing me and preventing any actual progress from being made (on the feared issue or the rest of my life). The fear of such abstract things like "invasive yet docile fungus" and "empty space in a simulation" are more like tilting my mind towards one outcome: "escape." Every thought slides in unison towards that conclusion, which is made ever so easy to progress towards: I just retreat physically. It's as if every other course of action has a lower priority.

I've lamented previously about my utter lack of control over my mind, citing grievances like "Music doesn't stop playing" or "I obsess over people's opinions of me even if I don't actually give a shit about them" or "my focus is based off random chance." These still hold their relevance in the face of my fears; the important difference between the two is that I don't initially notice the fear. Recognizing my aversion to mold in the moment feels like quickly coming down from a high. There's the usual thought of "what was I thinking?" Followed by an unease regarding the fact that my decision-making process was heavily modified\weighted and I didn't even notice.

I am used to having my mental control restricted, both frequently and intensely. I am used to yanking my attention away from unpleasant or repetitive thoughts, usually in vain. It's the difference between having six small dogs on leashes and having one fucking bear at the end of a rope. I may still have the leash, but that bear will drag me wherever it pleases.

I worry about what other fears I have. I don't know. If I denied the existence of those prior fears for so long, preventing myself from remembering them until I was neck-deep in the paralyzing situation, the I have no reliable way to guarantee I'm not hiding something from myself.

Plus, hiding this shit from others? What am I, a fucking nine year old? It's not like there's even a semblance of toxic masculinity in my life. I've spilled my guts to people and I will again (this account, too fwiw), why did it just never occur to me to complain or admit this shit? It's not like this is embarassing compared to the other topics I've breached.