Music soothes the savage beast

I am a classically trained musician and I really do love music, but I don't think it is the same way that most people love music. I read music blogs sometimes to find new music and most of the time it's just people describing how the music feels to them, as if that is the main purpose of music. Music can feel like certain things to me too. Of course it is more like sensing the adrenaline kicking in as part of a fight or flight response to drums and bass, or feeling dopamine flood my brain to self-soothe for sad music. But mostly when I listen to music, I listen to the structure, the same way you might read an essay for the form, ignoring the substance. I never think that a song is "good" just because it makes me feel something. Music is manipulative by nature, it can provoke certain emotions, but so is a telenovela. People don't judge the quality of television or film based on how much it makes them laugh or cry, do they? Don't they resent the blatant attempts at manipulation? Why is music any different?

I was reading this music blog, and was surprised at the author's reaction to this video:

He says:

i’ve never posted just a video before. and i already featured this track on the blog a long time ago. but i saw this today and it kind of blew my mind. it’s all one take (the first take, actually), and nothing out of the ordinary happens until about 1:36 in, at which point something extraordinary happens. (do yourself a favor tho and don’t skip ahead.) at that point, the fourth wall breaks, the shiny veneer crumbles, and you get a glimpse of an actual artist caught up in a true moment of connection with her craft. kind of incredible, actually. and it hit me in such a way that i’ve decided be naive enough to believe that it is what it purports to be — a genuine moment of unstaged, unaffected emotion. it was certainly compelling enough to be real, so i’m allowing myself to embrace it as such. -d

Really guy? "Connection with her craft"? "Genuine moment of unstaged, unaffected emotion?" I cant help but think that people like this want to be manipulated. They're the same ones that believe (against all evidence to the contrary) in romantic love. If I see this attitude in someone I want to target, I will manipulate them until they truly weep. Do you think they mind me doing that? Or is that their masochistic goal?

I guess I don't understand people.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

The older I get, the more my obsession with efficiency and decisionmaking provokes me to behave in quirky ways, giving me every appearance of suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder (emphasis on compulsion).

Every month or two I make a small trek to a warehouse store. At the store I buy the same approximately 20 items in various quantities (small amounts of hummus, large amounts of palm hearts). I eat these items in a particular order, prioritizing the fresh fruits and vegetables in order of their spoilage, shifting then to baked goods that have a slightly longer shelf life, and finally to canned and frozen foods until I am able to make another trip to start the cycle over again.

My approach to shopping at the warehouse store is a ritualistic self-indulgence of the extremes of my desire to control. Because I am never sure what fresh fruits and vegetables will be available, I start there (what I am able to acquire in fresh fruits may alter slightly my choices in the frozen foods section, and finally in the dry and canned goods section). Even though I have a list and even though I buy nearly identical items at each trip, I still spend approximately 2-3 minutes with each item, even more for produce. I look at the quality, looking for flaws, looking at spoilage dates, comparing the item I selected with other identical items to determine slight variations. I do this carefully and methodically, trying to remain focused as my body suffers through the artificial chill of the produce section’s walk-in refrigerator. I then do the same for each other type of food, frozen foods, dry and canned goods, as well as any paper goods. I walk fastidiously through each aisle, paranoid that I will neglect some forgotten need and have to go without for another month or two.

As I stand in line to pay for my purchases, I sometimes smile at the odd picture the bizarre array of foods makes, each one of them a carefully chosen trade-off between convenience and nutrition, taste and perishability, versatility and diversity. Are people more likely to believe that I am throwing a theme party (assorted beverages and ethnic foods) or that I have Asperger’s (16 jars of palm hearts)?

But after years of this self-indulgence I can’t go to a normal grocer’s anymore; at least I can’t go and feel satisfied about the experience. My datamining mind chokes on the sheer amount of data involved for choosing each item: the unknowns (taste, quality, perishability, nutrition, price, etc.) multiplied by the number of options. People say “a whole aisle of bread,” like it is a good thing, but to me it is horror.

The last time I went to a grocery store was a whim—I needed to kill time waiting for an appointment so I thought I would buy rye bread because I love it and my warehouse store does not stock it. When I walked into the bread aisle, I was aghast. There were 8 different types of rye bread. I looked at each one, comparing the descriptions of taste, comparing the color and feel, comparing the nutritional information and the ingredients list. After 20 minutes and about to become paralyzed with indecision, I picked one loaf of each—all 8 different types of rye bread. (I am still eating rye bread from that trip, the loaves suffering serious freezer burn.)

And that is why I like to shop at the warehouse store. There are not 100 different types of bread, there are 5. There are not 20 different types of yogurt, there are three. There are only two types of bacon, regular and turkey, and only one type of egg whites in tetrapak. Going to the warehouse store is a satisfying experience in which I am quite certain that I can make the best possible choices given my options. Given my love/hate relationship with food and my particular dietary needs, I avoid going to a large grocery store for the same reasons I avoid going to a used car lot .

UPDATE: Interestingly, James Fallon said that he was at one point diagnosed with both an anxiety disorder and OCD. 

Quote: Education

“Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.”

― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

Better than before

I thought this article was interesting (interesting enough to re-tweet the quote "We are frightened by people with mental illness." a few days ago) for its discussion of stigma and heritability of mental illness. But what has stuck most with me was the section where author Jenni Fagan talks about trying to get better by just paying attention to herself, her reactions to things, and making fine adjustments that seemed to put less stress on her brain or give her outlets:

[O]ur bodies want us to heal. My injured brain was telling me I had to change how I thought.

So I did. I bought a record player. I made a vow to brush my teeth each morning and not check emails until after I had breakfast. I decided to go out to dinner during episodes of severe derealization. I said I would not wait for my illness. I took train journeys where I thought I would not be able to stand at the end of them because my exhaustion was so severe it seemed I would have to just go to sleep on the floor. I told people.

Am I well? I am better than I was before.

A lot of people have asked me what I find most helpful in dealing with my mental issues. I tell them what has worked for me: gardening, playing music, writing the blog, therapy that is focused on helping me be more in touch with my own self (especially the origins and progressions of my thought processes), alone time, exercise, fish oil, a diet high in protein and fiber, excessive amounts of sleep (induced by sleep medications), not being around strangers for more than a couple of hours a day, being around family, writing, masturbating, being religious, listening to music when performing mental tasks to help me think more linearly, calling people by their titles to remind myself of both who they are and who I am to them and to treat them appropriately, finding relatively harmless mind games to indulge in instead of doing them with people I love, etc. How'd I figure these things out? I don't know, I just tried them and they helped (or tried stopping them and they hurt). 

Maybe I'm just self-medicating with some of these, and maybe in a way that simply masks problems instead of helping them to get better. Maybe some of these things are a crutch that I really don't need. But I don't think the only criteria for whether or not something is a crutch or perhaps an excuse to engage in bad behavior is just whether other people seem to find it distasteful. Some people might disagree with the way that I am religious, say that it is an opiate of the masses and ultimately contributes to my delusional thinking and megalomania. Others (probably not the same people) might take issue with the masturbation or the antisocial or selfish tendencies. And I'm sure a sizeable portion of people reading this will think that playing mind games with people is bad and I should stop doing that right away. But will those same people believe that I can keep exercising and playing music? Probably so, because somehow those are more popular/common amongst people aspiring to live "better". 

Here's the thing: I currently don't think that playing music and exercising are necessarily better or more noble or even more wholesome than masturbating and mind games. Or at least, I haven't yet learned to distinguish between those. Maybe I will eventually. Maybe I will come to see that some of those really are crutches/placebos and should never be indulged in by nobody ever. I am not ruling out the possibility. But I probably won't believe it just because you say it. Because maybe I will eventually learn that music and exercise are actually bad for my mind but mind games are good. Or maybe I should start taking long train journeys. I'm pretty willing to try whatever might help. And maybe I am doing wrong things. Maybe some of you care enough about me to tell me how/why. Or maybe some of you don't care at all about me and hope I get worse and then die.

Relatedly: medicinal marijuana? Legal farce contributing to social and moral decay? Or godsend to suffering souls?

A computer analogy

From a reader:

For most of my life I've been operating under the assumption that I was fairly normal psychologically even if my social life and general socialness was atypical based on what I could observe around myself.  This would turn out ultimately to be an elaborate trick on my part against myself, but solely for the sake of my own survival.  I'm not sure when exactly it started, but it must have been fairly early on in my life as I have no recollection of building my web of self-deceit, only sporadic instances that could have contributed to it and general notions of my childhood. This includes my overly curious nature, always asking questions that "didn't matter" or "didn't concern me" as a child, but I would always press until I got answers or until I could be pointed to other information that could satiate my curious mind.  "Why" was my favorite or at least most used word growing up, much to the dismay of many people around me.  I also would watch people intensely for clues into their behavior, to figure out "why" for myself instead of asking questions.  Reflecting on this I realize now that it was because I understood very little compared to others when it came to anything outside of factual knowledge I'd picked up from classes or books.  I always wanted to know more about how and why people thought like they did.

Using analogies is one of the key ways I figured out how others work, and I find them equally useful in explaining myself to others, whether it is some fictitious account to make myself more acceptable or actual truth.  And in relation to the human mind my favorite is using the analogy of a computer.  Using this theme and imagining everyone else wireless computers of some kind, constantly sending and receiving signals, it is easy for me to understand mental difference.  Some of them are genetic predispositions(hardware) and others are socialized into them(software).  When something goes "wrong" with one thing or another it results in a mental disorder.  I could spend the rest of the day explaining all the nuances of this analogy, but I'm sure you can suss them out for yourself.  Sociopaths fit into this model as computers that lack the hardware and/or software to make sense of certain codes transmitted in the signals they are constantly bombarded with, one might even go so far as to say they're running a different operating system than most(as I think Linux computer users will tell you, it's hard making their machines talk nicely with a Windows computer).  Criminal sociopaths would be the ones that, frustrated with their position, start bombarding others with malicious viruses and strands of code meant to disrupt the processing of other computers.  Successful or at least non-criminal sociopaths on the other hand would usually attempt to make sense of the mysterious codes by seeing what other computers were doing with the same codes and then writing their own programs as to mimic the same responses so as to appear normal and try to function with other computers in the system, but eventually there are issues as spitting out mimicked codes only works so much.

Bringing this back around to my story.  It was my overly curious nature mixed with a very nurturing, protective, and understanding mother that allowed me to build my little program that kept the real me hidden, even from myself once I had it up and running.  I'm not sure how I did it or if was entirely me, but continuing from the computer analogy, I didn't stop at building a simple list of commands to mimic the responses of others.  I built an emulator program.  As such, instead of simply responding with a mimicked code, I could actually take in, process, and spit back out code in the same fashion other empaths did.  It wasn't and still isn't perfect, and requires constant maintenance and energy to keep it up to speed.  The main difference being I can actually "feel" the emotions I pretend to have, even if those responses are merely my own trickery.  To try and bring this back into the realm of reality and not just analogy, the best I can figure out is I that created a mental programming that not only tried to figure out the correct mental and social responses to others it actually caused physiological changes similar to those experienced by empaths, thus allowing me to "feel".

The only reason I'm still not bound up in the web of my own creation is after several years of living away from my parents(my mother in particular), and I'm sure several other contributing factors I'm not whole conscious of, this construct began to degrade as I no long had reason to maintain it as thoroughly.  My sociopathic nature began to seep through at an alarming rate(it had always popped up now and then, but was excused by everyone, myself included as the result of stress at school or work) and I thought at first something was seriously wrong with me.  As time when on the sociopathic traits showed more and more, until eventually I had to sit down and figure it out NOW.  When I did I realized that most of what I felt made little to no logical sense to me, and I began poking at this mental construct until it all but completely fell apart.  I put it back together because I realized it made my life a ton easier after only a day or so of not using it.  I still had no name for what I was on the inside, that is until I came across your book.  How nicely everything you said lined up with what I saw in myself allowed me to finally ignore the clinical representation of sociopaths and explore the notion of it from the perspective of someone who really knew.  That as brought a level of ease and acceptance to me that I'd lacked until now, probably due in large part to my empathic emulator's influence.  And now that I'm looking at myself and the world in a new light everything is making a lot more sense.  But it also makes me wonder if there are more out there like me who have this capacity to emulate even down to the internal responses of empaths.  I've not found any evidence of them, but then again, if they never have reason to doubt their own trickery then they would remain stuck in their own web oblivious to who they really are.

I found it particularly interesting that he focused so much on analogies to figure out the world around him. I feel the exact same way. I focus on the structure and relationships between things, so thinking in analogies is a natural fit for me. I think that's what made studying law such a good fit for me, because particularly in common law systems, everything is analogized to previous cases or previous legal reasoning. It's a very instrumental way of thinking, thinking of everything and everyone in terms of what they do and how they function in different situations. But it makes me wonder, is this something common to any/most sociopaths? Certain personality types? Other personality or mental health disorders?

I also liked the part about how it was a "very nurturing, protective, and understanding mother that allowed me to build my little program that kept the real me hidden". I actually just met someone who has sociopathic tendencies/proclivities, and he speaks much the same way about his mother -- about how she trained him to be sensitive to certain things. He always says things like, "if you follow a thought, it can take you all sorts of places," like he makes a distinction between "having" a thought, and "following" it (and of course finally "acting" on the thought).