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To recover, you literally need to manually learn skills that most people learn as a toddler

You need to learn what makes your body uncomfortable, and what to do to fix it

If you are high-masking, that usually means that you have learned to ignore every distress signal your body sends unless it is a distress signal that a neurotypical person would recognize. People have likely been unintentionally gaslighting you about your lived experience your entire life

If you feel bad or panicked for no reason, stop and try to pay attention to your body. Are you tense? You are likely feeling physical pain somewhere. If you've been gaslit about your pain your entire life, you might not be able to identify it.

Go through a sensory checklist.

SIGHT: Try closing and covering your eyes. If this gives you relief, the lights are probably too bright. You may also need differently-colored lights

SOUND: Cover your ears. Does this give you relief? If so, you may need earplugs or noise canceling headphones. You may also benefit from a neutral or pleasant background noise, like soft music or brown noise.

TOUCH: Are your clothes uncomfortable? Your chair? Your body? Do you feel greasy, like you need a shower? Do you need softer, sensory-friendly clothing?

TASTE: Do you need to brush your teeth or tongue? Would chewing on something help?

SMELL: Is there a strong or unpleasant smell in the room? Do you need to clean or empty a trash can? Would an air purifier help? Would a pleasant smell like a candle help?

INTEROCEPTION: Are you hungry? Thirsty? Tired? How is your posture? Are any of your muscles tight or sore? Scan your body slowly from head to feet, tensing and loosening each group of muscles. Going for a walk or doing a series of quick stretches may help a lot.

Learning how to do this stuff is not intuitive, if you've had an entire lifetime of gaslighting telling you that everything hurting you isn't a big deal and you're being dramatic over nothing.

This takes time, it takes work, it's not intuitive, and it's hard. Most people forget how hard it is, because they learned this as toddlers.

“Experiments in attachment. My friend has just had his PC wired for broadband. I meet him in the cafe; he looks terrible - his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot… He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has now stopped even listening to them, and spends his time sleeplessly monitoring a progress bar… He says it’s like all my birthdays have come at once, by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is going to die.”

And it always would continue to expand…right?

Hah. Even back then the idea was a bit of a smokescreen, the dumping of endless streams of anime torrents and ‘zine pdf’s not done by a digital weltgeist but instead by a disparate groups of like 20 guys in Lvov or Hong Kong, who time and boredom could easily destroy. But of course far more sinister in the past twenty years has been the brick-by-brick dismantling of the digital commons to erect paywalled fiefdoms of exclusive DRM’d content. In the face of the dual forces of greed and entropy, your saved links have rotted, your go-to torrent sites flit from registry to registry if they don’t die entirely, your favourite alt-rock AMV from middle school that first got you into Inuyasha got DCM-striked in 2014 and you didn’t even *notice* until 2018. The Akashic Record turned out to not be a monument, but a front in a war - one that hasn’t been lost yet, sure, but *could be lost* at any time, and you won’t receive any more warning than you already have. And once you know this, not by reading words but the only way one can - from the first time you look for something you thought was always there only to find it locked away forever - you can’t regain the innocence lost. Now you download out of fear.

The man above is man fully embodying an ethos of a time and place. Not simply because he is obtaining free songs; in the end, if you want the song, you can buy the song, or use spotify, you can find a way to listen! But precisely because he does not care, in the moment, to listen, he has achieved enlightenment; to take with reckless abandon from a moment in history, a moment of spatial infinity and infinitesimal temporality, is worth the sleep deprivation. Maybe you should too, if you still can, while the moment lasts.