Oh in all the new personality stuff I’ve been talking up the kinda extra-psychiatric stuff like the anxiety zeroing and allism, but a lot of the improvement really is in the structure of personality, the stuff talk therapy can get at, the old one was totally wiped out and I had to construct this one under conditions of depersonalization.

But of the analytical, intellectual mind being intact and functional and able to guide the process usually conducted in infancy and childhood (though honestly I suspect the autism brought a degree of naive conscious construction to the old personality too) with the benefit of decades of experience and knowing what the personality needed to be suited for

Plus there’s further bonuses from how it comes together – like there’s a whole category of stuff that, having lived with an anxiety disorder for decades under the old personality, is now trivial to handle; there’s another huge category of things I no longer need to construct defenses against because without anxiety I do not feel them at all

Driving a bedload of topsoil back from the landscaping yard, passing through an up-and-coming neighborhood see a cute mixed girl in neo-2000s hipster style on the sidewalk, realize that after all the changes lately no she’s not out of my league anymore

Appreciate that this summer topsoil Strawberry Field-building program has alternating sections where I Do Things and ones where I Do Nothing, but the rest days are kind of a load-bearing part of the plan, it doesn’t work without them, so Doing Nothing satisfies the new personality’s constant drive to Do Something

My sense of Portland has changed so much since the personality change just ‘cause I go out in the daytime now.

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

also me: you realize “travelers who recognize you from your writing visit you when passing through town” is like, the real, historically well-precedented step of being a guru before “people come to town specifically to meet you”, right?

me: oh if we’re doing Jesus fantasies here who’s my John the Baptist?

also me: DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN SCOTTSTARCODEX CAME THROUGH TOWN AND AT THE CULT GATHERING THAT FORMED AROUND HIM HE PERSONALLY TOLD YOU HE THOUGHT YOU WERE ONE OF THE ONES WHO MAYBE COULD DO THAT TOO?

(time passes)

me: oh when I was telling him how to recognize me I should have mentioned the cane

also me: YEAH YOU’RE JUST SOME WIZENED-BEFORE-HIS-YEARS SPACE GENIUS WITH A CANE AND A HALF-OTHERWORLDLY MIND THAT PEOPLE FROM AFAR SEEK OUT, NO WAY IS THAT WEIRD

Like do you guys appreciate how hard it’s been to maintain an understanding that I’m not the main character of life when a global era-defining pandemic plague sweeps in to resolve all of my issues specifically in the most cartoonish possible way?

Oh, and, AND I discover that I can now basically win any Charisma roll against anyone and convince them to do anything if, weirdly not if I try hard enough but if I want it enough.

(I think this might be defeatable if you prepare for it coming, so readers you can’t disprove it yourself, gotta go double-blind and feed me some victims. Good luck with your IRB.)

It’s a very weird experience and I like to think I’m handling it maturely and well, considering.

You know, in that after the brain Covid I had to relearn my basic controls both as a person and as a body from scratch (and some of the gameplay mechanics that I still knew on an intact, intellectual level were different) that was kinda an honest-to-God born-again experience, huh?

One interesting question is with the autism gone and interpersonal vibe resonance boosted, would people’s deaths (or even just disapproval) affect me more if not for the anxiety zeroing?

Yeah even when I had anxiety combining with the depression side of manic depression I didn’t think of myself as particularly unfortunate in any particular area, social stuff wasn’t my thing but well within common norms

The first miracle, just the personality change stuff, well that’s weird like brains are weird and everyone’s gonna have something be the weirdest thing that happened in their life, and mine also takes weirdest thing to ever happen to anyone I know, so that’s kinda neat.

The second miracle, the creatine weight loss thing, insane how that’s perfectly on track to take all the fat I built in life and leave me attractively slim with like no effort, but I do feel some agency by way of figuring it out and it seems fitting that I get some kind of reward for putting everything together there (while still deliriously half-brained!) to fix it immediately

The third miracle, this muscle gain testosterone stuff, it’s like you already gilded the lily, what are you doing now, gilding the gilding? Fuck, man.

I honestly think a lot of what it is, just so much of the social stuff is generalized back to going up to people and pressing the action button, and with a lot of girls that seems to map to “seduce”.

So I guess my take-away from ::gestures:: all this is that after I graduated college I was not in fact a final-stage imago, I had to moult through several instars before, mediated by Covid, I pupated.

So one take-away from the personality change maybe making me unautistic is that the antonym of “ask culture” isn’t guess culture, they’re not (now I’m not) guessing, there really is some sort of interpersonal signal they’re (we’re) picking up.

But it’s not like an information-carrying signal, or at least one that gets delivered to the consciousness, it’s not like as if where before I’d be like “oh I want to make a romantic move but I don’t know the right moment” I pay attention to the signal and it tells me what the right moment is and so I can decide to do it then.

What it is is that being attuned to this signal, I will make that move at some point that happens to be the ideal moment, without ever having specifically considered and decided on that.

I dunno, maybe this is what instinct is? Whereas previously I had thought of it in terms of information (like “this is the moment”) arriving without any obvious source that would then serve as an input to the same conscious decisionmaking process?

One thing about the new personality having a radically higher Charisma stat is sometimes I will make plans where one step involves some sort of social skill check and crit it so hard I render the rest of the plan superfluous

I’ve gotta start making plans with tougher checks, I guess

Hm, no yeah I’m pretty sure the mania did fire prematurely and proportionately weaker AND it’s doing the “anxiety returns” variant so “proportionately weaker” means I don’t have an anxiety disorder now, but I am able to experience anxiety again (and thus shame, guilt, regret, etc.)

So in totality this is novel - I’m not always finding negative angles to things but I do dwell on particularly unpleasant ones, my outlook for the course of events isn’t really more negative – I don’t see any new threats – but not immune – I’m not as expectant there won’t be threats –and certainly less golden sunshine day positive.

Though I do see a potential for a good future broader than what I thought of as “the sun-dappled clearing”

Also less eye-rolling about people drawing negativity from contemporary trends or events – there’s some bad shit going on!

Huh, looking at Badger right now and realizing one way I affirmed the closeness of intimate others to myself was modeling how much I would miss them if they died but now that I can’t feel loss that doesn’t return anything.

lealhound:

going to be losing my mind about this forever. neurotypical people don’t know why other people do things EITHER!!!! they are operating on VIBES. diagnose u with NO VIBES DISEASE

Honestly yes, since Covid spread to my brain and gave me a new personality and I only then realized the old one had been autistic by contrast, I don’t fully know why I do things sometimes and just operate on vibes.

Like logical reasoning is still done with the same structures and procedures, but especially social stuff – I had always been like “is everyone else aware of information they’re picking up from some other frequency?”

And like, they are definitely – now I am – picking up that frequency but weirdly we’re not becoming aware of any information from it, it’s like it goes from input to informing our own behavior without ever surfacing into consciousness.

Allistic stuff is actually a lot like that - like, if I want to go up and have a conversation with someone I don’t have to consciously decide on a subject, and figure something to say about it, and a particular approach to open with, and precisely when to time it for, instead it’s just like an adventure game – I choose TALK with GIRL and that stuff just sorts itself out.

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

Like, I always used to plan too long-term, in Spiderweb games (Exile/Avernum) I’d always clear out the first goblin caves and keep going back to pick up every least valuable loot, like the rocks that weren’t even ranged equippable until after Nethergate, to haul back to town and sell and then buy all the skills the pay-trainer offered up to fill before I moved on

Which crosses very productively with the thing where I can game contemporary trends put to tell where they’ll eventually end up

Which is maybe part of how it works out that I am now more amazingly well-positioned than I could ever imagine.

Like, in 1999 I was like “anime, happy hardcore, JRPGs, and Daft Punk is the important stuff going on” and with the benefit of hindsight was I wrong?

Basically my experience right now is that my very first diagnosis of social cycles and history in like my late ‘90s teens was 100% correct and all my attempts to live in line with my understanding of them finally succeeded perfectly and I won like, life

Like that sounds so comical but instead of just dismissing it that spurs me to prod at its weakest point but it doesn’t yield

I mean some of my evaluating my current life and situation as off-the-charts-great might just be the anxiety I was calibrated to disappearing and maybe… the depression? I honestly have no clue what the bipolar’s up to these days – I’ve noticed that my mood of late weeks is no longer at nadir and really past midpoint, but last one felt like a fizzle, “maybe the real mania was the anticipation we experienced along the way” is bullshit – but the down phases of that were mostly experienced as feeding the anxiety

“Oh in the ‘10s the culture’s courtship practices totally collapse, but decent autistic queer ones actually develop, and then in the '20s you turn queer and out to have been autistic all along” actually a pretty good synecdoche of my cultural whiplash lately

kontextmaschine:

Oh, great, apparently that mulch pitching built my back, shoulders, and arms to the point my shirts are tight again.

I resent that I can’t even complain about this too hard because it’s like “oh, I hate that I’m getting too sexy”

I resent that I can’t really complain about a lot of this stuff really because it’s a totally out-of-nowhere nonconsensual change to my basic experience of life and the world, except it’s so great that both

• it would be churlish
• it is in fact exactly in line with what I specifically wanted

So right now I am basically in a constant state of

Just let my mind drift to The Turtles’ “Happy Together”, and surprised myself how comprehensively I remembered the song before I realized I was doing the thing where I tap into deep memory and hear songs in background noise

Like the bisexuality, the 3D vision, the non-flatfootedness, that’s all within the normal scope of human experience. “Anxiety goes to zero” is just an attribute change that other things key off of, the disinhibition is maybe one to the extent it wasn’t a temporary and common reaction to brain disruption, but this is a whole new crazy-ass special ability

kontextmaschine:

Oh, huh, without noticing it everything in the kitchen’s fine now except two “work stations” worth of counter space and the floor, I think by now I’ll need to go and give the other rooms another pass before I call the house put away though. And I half-did the garage in passing last week, but I need to finish there.

Inside the new personality is two wolves. One is constantly posting about being pleasantly surprised at all the work he did without ever intending to, one is constantly posting about all the work he’s very intentionally doing.

Seriously, this is great. Ask your doctor if Xanax is right for you or something.