#dosomethingcrazy

How do you find your way through a metaphor?  

In an appropriately science-fictiony version, I have often thought of life as being the Voyager spacecraft.  Long years in the frozen black broken by frantic moments of activity in dangerous environments.  

In what might be an appropriate fantasy-ish version, I have also thought of life as the Black Maze.  Imagine the Backrooms only all walls and floors are absolute light absorbing black.  You cannot see the walls, you cannot see the floor, and you cannot see when the floor falls out beneath you.  You can only feel your way along and for all you know gravity itself is wrong.  You could be walking on a wall or the ceiling and wouldn’t know it until you fell.  

The interstellar probe is my metaphor for loneliness, the Black Maze for depression.  I realize now I was trying to conceptualize being autistic, to run the unconscious knowledge through the Metaphorizer circuits to put it in symbols.  It didn’t help in either condition, but it gave it a thoughtform.  So it was a Thing that could be thought about and manipulated and re-contextualized.  

I may not be able to name these things as their true selves thanks to the alexithymia but I can make them into symbols.  At least then they have a form enough to squish.  

Not the first time I’ve done it.  Remind me to explain someday about my idea that cyborgs are the Green Men of the technosphere.  

The Voyagers are on an eternal journey, and now that they have left our solar system they likely won’t encounter another solid object ever again in their existence.  It is entirely possible -- probable, even -- that they will still be travelling in a straight line when Sol reaches the red giant phase and destroys Earth.  They will outlive the planet that created them.  

The Black Maze... well.  A mind can be divided into smaller and smaller rooms, and the mind trapped inside them unable to find a way out.  There are times I’ve become more and more frantic, trying to find keyholes that were never there.

I call it “hamsterwheeling” -- running at top speed and getting nowhere.  At some point, you’ve got to stop and say to yourself “what’s keeping me here?  Why do I think I can’t stop?”

So many times it’s because someone else said so.  And because we’re afraid to take that first step. And we’re afraid of what others will think of us.   And we’re afraid of the unknown.  

The unknown is my home.  And Voyager navigates by the stars.  

How do you find your way through a metaphor?  

In an appropriately science-fictiony version, I have often thought of life as being the Voyager spacecraft.  Long years in the frozen black broken by frantic moments of activity in dangerous environments.  

In what might be an appropriate fantasy-ish version, I have also thought of life as the Black Maze.  Imagine the Backrooms only all walls and floors are absolute light absorbing black.  You cannot see the walls, you cannot see the floor, and you cannot see when the floor falls out beneath you.  You can only feel your way along and for all you know gravity itself is wrong.  You could be walking on a wall or the ceiling and wouldn’t know it until you fell.  

The interstellar probe is my metaphor for loneliness, the Black Maze for depression.  I realize now I was trying to conceptualize being autistic, to run the unconscious knowledge through the Metaphorizer circuits to put it in symbols.  It didn’t help in either condition, but it gave it a thoughtform.  So it was a Thing that could be thought about and manipulated and re-contextualized.  

I may not be able to name these things as their true selves thanks to the alexithymia but I can make them into symbols.  At least then they have a form enough to squish.  

Not the first time I’ve done it.  Remind me to explain someday about my idea that cyborgs are the Green Men of the technosphere.  

The Voyagers are on an eternal journey, and now that they have left our solar system they likely won’t encounter another solid object ever again in their existence.  It is entirely possible -- probable, even -- that they will still be travelling in a straight line when Sol reaches the red giant phase and destroys Earth.  They will outlive the planet that created them.  

The Black Maze... well.  A mind can be divided into smaller and smaller rooms, and the mind trapped inside them unable to find a way out.  There are times I’ve become more and more frantic, trying to find keyholes that were never there.

I call it “hamsterwheeling” -- running at top speed and getting nowhere.  At some point, you’ve got to stop and say to yourself “what’s keeping me here?  Why do I think I can’t stop?”

So many times it’s because someone else said so.  And because we’re afraid to take that first step. And we’re afraid of what others will think of us.   And we’re afraid of the unknown.  

The unknown is my home.  And Voyager navigates by the stars.