Why, it’s Therapy Thursday, of course! Everybody knows that!
Everyone but me, that is. Somehow I managed to completely forget what it being Thursday meant and didn’t get reminded till the phone rang and it was Doctor Costin.
Annoyed grunt! Oh well, no harm done. I was in a good enough mood that it was easy to just let the whole thing roll off my back, laugh it off, and move on.
As to what exactly we talked about, the bad news is that I don’t know, exactly.
But the good news is that I don’t recall because I processed some large icebergs of emotion during the session and that’s not exactly easy to describe.
Plus, ya know. I was too busy processing emotion to take notes, mental or otherwise.
I think I may actually be starting to dig into my actual emotional substrate instead of just tunneling around randomly like an indecisive earthworm.
If so, I am going to keep digging. Hell, I will rent a backhoe if I have to. I am eager to unearth my unholy host and release them into the world to seek their fortune.
Or whatever. All that matters is that I am not hauling their shrieking and howling spectral butts around any more and can finally get some real sleep.
Funny how I can’t really remember what we talked about. I just remember this feeling of emotions being evoked in a larger way than ever before.
Those were some mighty big icebergs.
Which is great. I am long overdue for some emotional global warming and can’t wait for all this goddamned permafrost to melt and reveal the ancient relics hidden along ago.
And then smash them into dust with a sledgehammer.
Maybe I just need more time to process what all went down before I can write about it.
I know there was some of his usual “you should DO SOMETHING” bullshit.
Not that he’s wrong, exactly. I probably would be recovering much, much faster if I was more active. Even if it is just more active on the internet.
I’ve been talking little steps. Like I am pretty sure I “get” Discord now.
It’s not nearly as complex as it seemed at first. There’s servers and servers have channels. It’s not that different from later-stage IRC in that sense.
I even managed to find servers in which people occasionally actually talk. Imagine that.
Those of us who were there know THAT is just like later-stage IRC too. Endlessly looking for channels where people are actually talking.
Meanwhile there are thousands of channels with millions of users all waiting around for someone else to say something.
God, did/does that drive me crazy. Talk, god damn you! Talk! why are you here on a CHAT server if not to TALK!?!?!
Have we really become so passive that we treat even internet chat like it’s passive entertainment like radio or TV?
I know, I know. I am just a skooch overwrought about the whole thing.
But I need conversation, damn it!
More after the break.
Why is this?
The statement “My baby is cute” could be an entirely nonsexual statement about the adorability of one’s infant or an entirely sexual statement about how sexually appealing one’s significant others is.[1]
How is it those two things can overlap like that?
And that’s not the only example. The language of love and lust is the same as the language we use to talk about children and childrearing.
And this strikes me as particularly odd given how incredibly strong the taboo against putting children and sex together even conceptually has become.
Yet language like I’ve mentioned above flies almost completely under the radar and it’s just socially isolated weirdos like myself who even notice this bizarre discrepancy.
It’s normal. Therefore it’s fine.
I mean, lovers even talk baby talk to one another, for Christ’s sake!
I figure the uniting factor is tender emotions, and the lowering of defenses they require. With both a child and a lover, some very delicate and vulnerable feelings are involved, and it would make sense if our minds used the same circuit for both except for one small but vital difference.
The one that connects those emotions with sex, in case that’s not clear.
This is illustrated by the various ways we use the word “love”. We can love our children, love our lovers, and love nacho cheese.
Those are three different sense of the word “love” yet it makes intuitive sense to us that we use the same word for all three because we are talking about something for which we have powerful positive associations.
Given that the love for our kids and the love for our lovers run on the same circuit with one vital difference, it makes sense that for some people, that difference disappears.
This is especially true for individuals for whom a traumatic out of context sexual interaction with a sexually immature adult has left them with a permanent lifelong rejection of adult sexuality.
All that leaves them is their childish sexuality that has been activated way before that of other children and caused their sexuality to imprint on that scenario.
Thus the pedophile meme reproduces. An encounter with a pedophile turns the child into a future pedophile.
It’s crushingly tragic.
Wow have I wandered far afield.
My point, and I do have one, is that it’s weird how one of our strongest taboos, the child/sex barrier, is routinely violated by the very words we use to describe sexual and nonsexual attraction, and nobody even notices.
I think this conflict reveals something deep about the hazy nature of our deepest emotional triggers and how things that seem so far apart can be found to have a much closer connection than one might ever have suspected.
The zeitgeist can be a scary and surprising place to explore.
But there’s so many interesting things to find there.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.