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.