An Open Letter

I confronted that gross feeling of not being in love. This time I asked my therapist how I can stop feeling like the struggles I go through are unique, and how to realize and have that reassurance that everything will be fine, and I am just young and dumb. This question was used to close out several others before, and even before I could finish it I realized the same answer shows up again. Depression is playing a trick on my mind, and I cannot fall for it. Personification aside, if my brain gets a sharp drop in dopamine, then of course I will attribute anything I can to the cause of this.

Consider this: imagine I have a reinforcement learning agent in some super complicated environment. If I suddenly drop its reward for nothing, it will attribute that pain to whatever actions it’s doing. It could be doing the task correctly, but because of this drop, it will blame that action for this consequence. But in reality, it did nothing wrong (or right). I just dropped its reward. I need to remember that I am the same – when the dopamine levels just plunge in my brain I shouldn’t attribute it to the first thing I see. As rational as this is, it’s hard to remember this in the moment – because I am just the agent. I don’t see what’s going on outside or anything like that. I just have to have the foresight to understand this is just how the game goes.

I have a final tomorrow at noon so I prepared to sleep early for it. I guess I’ll call it here, goodnight me.

24,923 mph. That's how fast something needs to go to break free from earths gravitational pull. There's different cosmic velocities also – 3,000 mph for the moon, 7,900 mph for mars, and something more than 40 mph for a 2014 Prius C.

40 isn't much, but when whipping around the twisting back roads behind the university, it borders that boundary. There's some belief I have that if I can just go fast enough, I can outrun any fears or feelings that lay behind me. 40 mph wasn't enough to break it this time.

Sometimes I'll turn the lights off on the car so I drive almost blind. Something about going fast on a straight stretch with no guide on what's ahead feels like it should be intoxicating. But it isn't. I turn the lights back on after a few seconds. This time I started to brake to take my exit, and I saw the red glow in my rearview mirror. For a split second, I thought I was being flagged down by cops – but after the light doesn't change to blue that whole fear/fantasy goes back into some corner of my mind, until it's next performance. That brief scare is enough to remind me that I don't want the rest of that fantasy, and I slow back down to the legal limit.

30 over wasn't enough to escape it's pull this time, but I'm sure I just need to go a little bit faster. Then I'll be free.

I ended up sending a message to L on faith that she would understand and not double down on it – and she completely did. She apologized profusely and said she was just trying to banter and didn’t mean it. I’m very happy I did reach out to her, because in my mind I was afraid of doing that, on fear of a negative response. The reality was the opposite of that – she didn’t mean it in a negative way and all of the things I was paranoid about weren’t true.

I’m glad I checked my unconscious brain, but at the same time pre workout like that is far and few between lol.

L & L lol – I couldn’t let that one go unnoticed.

I met L today in person for the first time, we’ve known each other for 2-3 years now and we play games almost daily. It was a nice day, we hung out for like 6 hours or so. I guess you kinda do know someone after spending hundreds of hours with them, other than some strange quirks here and there. The second L comes in because I noticed they set their status as “that fucker is kinda short 💀”. For the record, I am 5’9.5” last I went to the doctor, so I’m 5’10” with shoes. This person’s 5’6” or so, so it’s not like they were my height. I am most likely not going to see L in person for a while anyway, so it has no consequence at all, but this comment did for some reason affect me way more than I thought it would.

My gut reaction is to defend myself – my posture is naturally pretty bad, but I also noticed I was never standing fully upright and was being incredibly passive with my body language, which I attribute to not wanting her to feel uncomfortable or scared at all. I was always leaning against something, or sitting down and never stood straight while facing directly at her. After all, she is a few years younger than me and is way more at risk meeting up with an internet friend if I was a murderer compared to the other way around.

I guess I kind of take offense to things like these because they feel emasculating. I’m not rigidly masculine in a traditional way, so it’s not emasculating in the same lens of toxic masculinity – but I guess I just feel weak and vulnerable. I grew up incredibly short, weak, and fragile. I ended up eventually growing around 10th grade, got physically stronger, and mentally tougher over time. Those are all things that were never guaranteed to me, and I had to work hard for some of them. I have a fear of going back to that state I used to be in. Or maybe the fear is being perceived in that state I was in. I didn’t think that anyone could be attracted to me, and I guess by some continuation of that love me like that. As time went on, I ended up becoming someone who was more self-sufficient, and stable. Now I have people consistently finding me attractive or wanting to pursue things, but I guess my mind has not caught up with the rest of me. I still see myself as the person I was for 90% of my life – weak, frail, and unloved.

I set my status to “Somehow every body of water leads me back to this ocean”. I guess I wanted to go back to my roots and sadpost, but I can’t really do that when I have a ton of students constantly reaching out to me over Discord given this strike. I set the status while in the shower in my childhood home – a place tied to a lot of horrible emotions for me. That image is synonymous with all of the pains I had growing up, and I felt like it was almost inevitable to end back up there. No matter how far I climb, or how deep inland I run, the rains drag me back into the ocean where I drown.

Professor on strike, I have been trying to help students as much as I can for their sake. I had my first meal at 8pm while starting to drive down to SD, which took another 4 hours. Too tired.

Today was the first time in a while that I had some semblance of a fire. I once heard someone talking about the problems with dreaming – and how it was just prematurely getting high off of an achievement. I felt like it was just stealing joy from that thing if it ever did happen. I don’t know if I stole joy or if there wasn’t much to begin with, but I at least felt this with my whole lifting goal I guess. I had watched so many videos of Matthias Steiner and just wanted to chase that high. I wanted something to overwhelm me, and fully encompass me for just a moment. I wanted to shake, just like he did on that stage. But when the time came, the lights were more of a soft glow. Faint enough that I didn’t notice they were on. I somehow find myself still getting high off of that dream, of some event that already had passed. I find myself thinking about just collapsing shaking in utter disbelief of my achievement in the face of adversity. I have to remind myself that it had already happened, and nothing like that happened. I miss the rage.

To me starting has always been the hardest part. I tried to pick it apart a little bit to think about why that’s the case, and I guess it’s mostly because of my perfectionism. Or probably better put, the disjunction from my creation, and what I want from it. I think this is just another form of a fear of failure if I look at it that way. I know that this fear has held me back in several different ways, and as much as I romanticize doing things anyway, without the guarantee of success I still struggle to do it. Oh well, I hope I still try.

with putting this shit off lmao. It’s 2:51 AM and I don’t even feel that tired, that’s probably a pretty good sign that I haven’t been good to my sleep schedule. Apparently the strike is happening, and I personally am not going on strike. I both financially need the support, but also feel more obligated to my students in this course. I TA for a mandatory required course, and it has been a very rocky quarter and so a lot of students are concerned they will not even pass. Because of that, I want to make sure that they will have adequate help and I want to do as much as I can to help them at least pass. This course is a beautiful one, and it pains me when students are fighting for their lives. It’s hard to appreciate a waterfall when you’re directly under it drowning.

it’s 2:24 AM, and I am pretty exhausted. I’m just going to attribute it to being exhausted from yesterday, and so I’m just going to postpone writing. Today I finished the linear cryptanalysis CTF, and so I’m done with all of my homework. Finals are almost over, and I’m honestly just exhausted. This was a good year.

// TODO: write this post when you are not about to fucking pass out after driving for so long