Old personality may have been fairly inhibited from acting (I say through gritted teeth, handing that “Act!” anon a win) but in lieu would engage in very extensive planning, understanding theory of how action would be done, etc., so I now I can pretty much step up and walk away with it

So remember how since Covid got into my brain and wiped out my anxiety processing I’m unable to feel guilt, shame, loss, regret, worry or terror?

I just realized this means that because I’d never been before now I’m NEVER going to know the loss of being dumped

As the personality change stuff continues to shake out it’s settling into “I’m putting far less pressure on myself and it’s much easier to kick back and relax, also I am at all times aware that the finite amount of my life remaining before I die and cease to exist forevermore is inexorably running down”. It’s a weird dynamic.

(re:)

Uh, well it definitely did cause brain damage, I’m not sure how much cell death vs. temporary interference there was because while some things – memory issues, tingling in extremities, fine muscle control – cleared/came back, others – anxiety, sexual orientation – didn’t, and I suspect some of the stuff that came back the original brain cells were destroyed and other ones eventually figured how to fill in in the same way the original ones had in infancy.

As for the rest, well there was just total depersonalization. Like if I was standing in a room with Bob and Charlie, I did not feel present in the scene, like “this is a room containing Bob, Charlie, and Kontextmaschine”, I felt like “this is a room containing Bob and Charlie, and I am the god’s-eye camera perspective”. Even while Charlie could ask me a question and I could hear it, evaluate it, compose an answer and say it, and it wasn’t like I was like “gah, who said that?”, but yet I did not have the sense there was a person who had committed that speech act.

Likewise I could eat food, and realize I was out of food and go to the supermarket and buy what I was used to or looked interesting, and I had the sensory experience of its taste, but I could not tell you if it was any good, because that would be in someone’s opinion, and there was no person having those experiences.

This fact pattern would also support “I entered a depersonalized state no personality could get through, and by the time it cleared my (original) personality had changed”, there’s not really any way to distinguish them and it’s kind of arbitrary.

So when I say the anxiety zeroing means I can no longer feel guilt, shame, loss, regret, worry, or terror people have asked me if I miss the ability to feel them, and the answer is no, because I don’t feel loss.

kontextmaschine:

Staying up til 8 is just so much more trivial when you only sleep 6 hours a night

So far what I’m attributing to downstream effects of the anxiety zeroing, where I went from having an anxiety disorder to not processing anxiety at all:

• I can’t feel guilt, shame, loss, regret, worry, or terror, and trauma rolls right off me
• I don’t feel in any worse mood as I get tired, and only sleep 6 hours a night
• It’s much easier falling asleep, I can do it despite much more light, noise, awareness of consequential activity to follow waking, or of an alarm due to wake me at some specific point
• I can go any length of time without communication with others without our relationship being affected by feeling abandoned
• I have no snacking impulse – previously I would eat between meals much more often in what wasn’t experienced as sensation-seeking grazing but reaction to actual hunger I no longer feel

Just want to once again point out that “you become smooth and charismatic and get girls easy and become thin and fit with no effort and also you turn bi” was quite literally what I wished for when I was 13

Well part is that yeah people are famously more bisexual on stimulant/anxiolytic cocaine, part is my experience of suddenly being bisexual right when the “anxiety” part of my brain went dead and that honesty manifesting as a bit of a looseness – like I grew up in the 90s knowing to harrumph “being bisexual isn’t a matter of low standards, fucking anything that walks and wot”, but honestly that was how it manifested for me, I was also open to a much wider range of body and personality in women.

(I also knew to be better than the stereotype of bisexual infidelity, fucking everyone they meet, only to see myself repeatedly blindly, unintentionally stumbling into sex [with women–I genuinely have no idea how sexual connection with men works, I wasn’t into them in dumb horny puberty to figure it out by trial and error], seducing people by accident because I had zero experience in seducing people by intention)

One takeaway from the personality change and particularly the autistic/allistic thing, if you think apologies are easy to make it’s only because you just use words to make goodfeels and don’t actually care about ideas or invest yourself in them, at which point why on earth should anyone act like your feelings matter, anyways?

Also hilarious personality change memories: how my entire concept of “self” was tectonically shifting but that included how I relate to not-selves so I found it hard to talk about with others, but I was severely disinhibited and forgot “coming out to your parents” was supposed to be a big deal so when I suddenly noticed I was bisexual I casually told both of them in passing

Oh god and if we’re marveling at the personality change, how wild was it that I realized I’d been living my whole life with an anxiety disorder in the context of suddenly becoming incapable of feeling anxiety at all?

kontextmaschine:

Thinking about how one of the weirder things of the last arc is that all my old plotlines regarding skills I developed in childhood became suddenly relevant to my journey again, remembering that I took flying lessons for several years

Like, when I was in tenth grade I started getting into reading about the history of psychedelics, not even “far out, man” stuff but about moves to use them to seriously grapple with consciousness – the Good Friday Experiment, early psychiatric use of LSD and “psychonauts”, Timothy Leary’s “circuit” model of consciousness all the way up to Shulgin’s circle, reading Erowid/The Lycaeum trip reports every day before I had ever smoked pot or drank alcohol.

Above all “metaprogramming”, the idea of using “entheogens” to reach a state where you could tinker with your self.

In the late ‘90s, long before anyone’d heard of Covid, one of my hyperfixations was “how you can use altered, depersonalized mental states to re-edit your personality”, and then I did some shrooms and acid in college, enough to get used to operating in such a state, and then I just set that one aside for decades

I suppose one thing about the personality change and the weight loss and all the post-Covid stuff is as miracles go it’s 0% divine, 100% Science in nature. Like, it’s virological protein synthesis under evolutionary pressure as applied to biology, influencing how consciousness arises through neurological electrochemistry and the endocrine system producing hormones and shit.

sighinastorm:

bananatwinky:

inside out (2015)

i regret drawing this

I regret you drawing this.

This is exactly how the old personality handled socialization, but with the new personality it’s like I click on someone and select “small talk” from the contextual menu, it’s nuts.

Which means so far my record for dealing with Long Covid symptoms so far is

1. Brain infection – caught a big chunk of damage with only and all of the parts of my brain I didn’t like, used the depersonalization to explore the concept of selfhood from outside and more precisely reshape the self in line with my life experience as it returned
2. Aerobic energy generation – rendered me barely conscious to the point of hardly breathing, I immediately reasoned it out and converted it to miraculous weight loss that is finally giving me a body to match my idealized self
3. Blood pressure drops – okay I passed out twice at the bar that actually trusted to serve me despite how the brain stuff made me unsteady and slurry, that kinda sucked, but it’d been a bit high before so okay?
4. this or maybe
5. I think was the testosterone, which was subtle enough I didn’t even notice at first, but on top of making me more sexually charismatic means my wounds heal faster and I gain more muscle from exercise – those are the effects steroids hack. Which is nice, because the #1 brain stuff switched me from being flatfooted to walking with raised arches, which apparently uses a completely different chain of muscles throughout the body I have to train up from scratch
6. Iron deficiency – the fatigue had gotten worse and even more creatine didn’t help, my limbs felt weighed down, and then 3 days in I was in the supermarket and was like “wait, you know what this reminds me of reading about? anemia” and got some iron pills and yeah, that was it
7. Used muscles fatigue more – this one’s receded some, I think it might have interfered with the breakdown of lactic acid, but as the muscles continue to build (with the help of testosterone, #5) even intense smashing just doesn’t push me to the limits and generate as much?

So basically as far as I’m concerned, I am the human that won this plague

viking-badger:

kontextmaschine:

sighinastorm:

kontextmaschine:

I love that I can jerk off about guys now. That’s just so neat!

Could you not before?

No, I was straight my whole life, I actually tried “bihacking” myself as a teen but while I succeeded in dispelling any aversion to m/m sexuality I ultimately had to accept I was just not into it. But in 2020 I caught Covid before vaccines existed, it spread to my brain and caused enough damage there that my existing personality was no longer viable, and after a period of depersonalization I generated a new one that is different in some major respects, including being bisexual.

Well, I experienced it as that narrative, but rather than “the old personality became unviable, so I generated a new one”, it’s possible that selfhood-focused brain structures became so affected it was not possible to maintain any personality and by the time that wore off permanent damage had altered mine

I’ve found there’s some crossover with the anxiety zeroing and sleep deprivation. If I stay up for 36 hours I can get back the catastrophizing and pessimistic evaluation of things I used to always have, but on the other hand if I’ve just been up 18 or wake up after only a 4 hour sleep I might still yawn or even drift off but there’s no negative physical or psychological angle to it, no sense of weariness or dread.

New hypothesis:

The old, autistic, vibedeaf personality (before Covid got in my brain and reshuffled things, sorry for the repetition regulars but i want reblogs to come with context) developed all the mental SONAR stuff so that without being able to percieve people’s projections of their inner state I could still determine it, much like deaf people who can’t perceive sound learn to read lips, which was key to social stuff.

And this is why I’ve historically been drawn to girls with BPD, because when you have to engage with other people by theory of mind, personality disorders are enrichment, like a pumpkin full of meat in a tiger cage.

So something about coming to read/write vibes and not just content is I kind of assumed content was all there was, and if I hadn’t engaged with someone’s the circumstances just hadn’t been right. But now I’m realizing some people really are just vibes, and enough people are at least partially both that maybe their content doesn’t need to bear the full weight of personhood and what of it I saw before was a much larger share of the total and doesn’t imply further depths elsewhere.

And I still at least have the content-centric worldview I developed in youth, and so the upshot of all this is I feel much more contempt for humanity than the old personality ever did. Which is maybe why just as I become much more socially fluid I have damn near totally abandoned human contact.

Again, it’s ironic that I’m now more charming and socially self-validating and people react to me so much more positively and approvingly since the personality change when from my perspective I no longer assume value in people or feel bound by any prerational morality just as I become so much better at using them

So I never particularly thought of myself as socially incompetent; maybe socially weird, but in a way I largely attributed to undersocialization, growing up more directly after the Baby Boom time that all the adults had recalibrated their expectations around but not subsequently updated to grok we were no longer in a small town paper route world overrun with other kids to occupy ourselves with (and, you know, being alienated with freakish intelligence)

I realize since the personality change though that I just had no social instincts though, as Taylor Swift put it, I’ve never been a natural/all I [did was] try, try, try, and I had to actively cultivate social logic and pattern-matching.

And I did quite well, in fact. Got to the point where I had good enough models of “human”, and narrowing types thereof, that after not even too much exposure to you I could generate a reasonable model of your mind in particular and hypotheses on its internal state, and some idea of which stimuli you would react to differently if they were/were not true, and fluidly drop these sonar pings into conversation and observe the reactions and refine the model… if I focus on one particular friendly subject enough (and it helps a lot if I’m manic) I can essentially not only read their thoughts but by determining where in the thought process they are at any given point introduce perfectly timed interrupts and influences to direct their train of thought.

…and I kind of figured that’s what there was, and maybe a lot of people were just pretty content-free and superficial.

But how I realize this, why I’m suspecting in retrospect that the old personality was autistic is there apparently is just this whole other level of instinct to it I suddenly get, maybe “vibes” is right, I have no idea what bandwidth this information is being transmitted on, there’s nothing like the stimulus->response->interpretation->new hypothesis loop for me to be deriving it from, it really might be some evolutionary relic of social species before language.

And the thing is it’s not the same information. Like, I can’t read thoughts this way, I read motivations. I can just somehow tell what someone else wants – to get something, to be recognized in some particular way, to be in accordance with some structure, to maximize for some particular emotion or self-conception. And then work things so whatever I want comes across as a fulfillment of that.

For one thing this turns out to be a lot more useful in getting laid than any stuff with ideas.

For another, I guess the distinction here maps to a plot/character distinction in literature.

But more to point this information not being redundant means that I can get good reads on people’s thoughts and motivations, which combination seems a lot more useful in social situations than thoughts alone. I find myself confidently making plans on the understanding that their success at some point will need to involve recruiting a complete stranger and not being disappointed. It’s wild.