#uaipost

I made a new playlist today, called "desire, without obligation." It's named that because I needed something to be listening to while I wrote a draft of my grad school application statement of purpose, which I've been badly struggling with because I don't know how to communicate the idea of wanting to do a thing in a manner other than explaining why it would be good for other people were that thing to happen. And the problem is, I don't really want to go to grad school to help people. I want to go to grad school to have fun being a faerie academic nerd doing theory about how the internet is magic, and I want to make things that other, more practical, people will be able to use to help people. So focusing on the other people was railroading me towards a statement of purpose that was gonna put me in the wrong kind of program.

In my early 20s, I started going to therapy, because I wanted to have kids some day, & I felt like I owed it to them to deal with some of the trauma I picked up from my parents, so I can at least minimize the extent to which I'm passing on the same problems. It took me more than 2 years of sessions with the best therapist I'd ever had to get to the point where I was willing to say that, actually, I don't want kids, I've never wanted kids, every part of every aspect of setting up a life to have children is deeply unappealing to me—but it was okay for me to be in therapy anyway, because it's not wrong to go to therapy for your own well-being.

In our last in-depth conversation, my as-of-recently-ex friend told me that he felt like he could finally start figuring out what he wanted from his life because he'd done all the things he was supposed to do. Got a degree, got a job, got married, had two children, bought a house, paid off the mortgage. After all that, that's when he was allowed to ask, "What do I want?"

I don't want to think about helping other people. I've spent the past decade wrangling and soldering and sanding my personality to care about other people, and at this point I do it by reflex. I don't have to think about it, and I'm better at it when I don't—metacognition takes up the same brain space that would otherwise be going to cognition, so to whatever extent I'm monitoring my behaviors to make sure I'm happy with them, those behaviors are being made less competently, with fewer cognitive resources.

The thing I haven't figured out is how to hack and sculpt and wire myself to take care of me. Which is philosophically inconsistent: I'm a person, right? I go out of my way to help people. More or less by reflex. I ought to be willing to go out of my way, to put in effort, to make changes, sacrifice, lose out on things I wanted, to make things better for me.

But there are two kinds of people: the one experiencing this consciousness, and all the other consciousnesses that this one doesn't directly experience. the habits I've developed for how to act with regard to other consciousnesses are not the habits to care for this consciousness. I never witness myself struggling in a way that I know I'm currently secure in; I can never lend myself the strength I have in areas where I'm seeing weakness. Whatever it is I'm failing at, it's always the thing that I'm currently doing an awful job of handling.

"Friendship and Responsiveness"