It’s been clear to me for a while that what I jokingly brush off as “the discourse” on tumblr is actually not good for me and I really need to avoid it.  I’ve been doing this through a long blacklist, and used to do it through my rule about not arguing, which I ditched after a while because it wasn’t actually helping.

The problem is that if I’m exposed to certain topics, certain styles of argument or speech, or certain sorts of disagreement, I predictably start thinking obsessively about them, often for 30+ minutes, sometimes for the better part of a day.  It’s like a very minor “basilisk,” or a “lose a turn” card in a board game.  It’s not terribly unpleasant, although it is unpleasant, but it’s also just a waste of time.  I see it as the price I pay for the good parts of socializing on tumblr, but it would be nice not to have to pay it at all.

It seems like the natural next step is to come up with some list of topics that could be tagged as “#nostalgebraist don’t look” or the like.  It’s hard to figure out exactly what those should be, but I’ll think about it.

Go away unpleasant thought loops

(My unpleasant thought loops tend to be about things that disturb and/or anger me but don’t have the same effect on everyone I know.  I don’t know what to do about this, since it just comes down to “people react to things in different ways” and I can’t change that, nor would I really want to if I could.

This is probably rooted in a feeling going back to childhood that I ought not to have negative reactions unless I can prove unequivocally that they’re “valid,” b/c usually my negative reactions as a child were “wrong” in some way b/c I was a very oblivious child and was always missing the big picture.  This is probably no longer a useful way to feel, but if so I’m not sure how to remove it from my mind.  I’ve talked to my therapist about this but no clear solutions have presented themselves)

Thanks to everyone who sent me sympathetic or advisory messages in response to my post last night.

A number of people mentioned that “failing to notice ‘obvious’ mistakes for long periods of time” is not that unusual, and in particular is utterly typical of the grad school experience.  This is a fair point and I think I was probably over-reacting in the heat of the moment.

OTOH I do still think I have unusual cognitive habits that contribute to me making mistakes like this – I don’t mean “mistakes of this magnitude” but “mistakes with these particular qualities,” which I have often made before.  If I had to point to a particular thing here, I guess it would be an aversion to “standard methods” – meaning that I will develop my own way of doing something or thinking about something, and then will continue to use it and stubbornly resist to adopt commonly used tools for the same thing, even if they’re far more convenient and general.

Some examples: when I took a linear algebra class in college, I was weirdly resistant to learning certain formulas – I didn’t actually learn how to multiply matrices until well after it was covered in class, and I only learned how to compute determinants with the Laplace expansion after the class was over.  I would try to find tricks to solve problems without using these formulas, which sometimes worked – I got a good grade in the class! – but was quite difficult, and pointlessly so.

I also developed the “opinion” that matrix notation should not be used for linear equations unless one was going to do linear algebra to the matrix, and in my undergrad thesis I insistently wrote out large coupled PDE systems in components until my adviser told me to stop.

When I was a kid I learned BASIC and kept programming in it, working around its limitations, when my coding friends were using real languages.  Finally, later on in high school, I forced myself to learn C, but the C I wrote was strange and bad – I would avoid using libraries as much as possible, e.g. writing my own code to read in data from standard file types, and I would basically never write functions besides main().  At this time I wrote a raytracer and basic physics engine (for spheres and planes only) which used many dot products, but I never defined a dot product function, instead writing out the formula every single time it appeared.  A friend who looked at the code said it “looked like assembly.”  Going forward, I resisted learning any other language for years, and used C for many things it was overkill for.

For the longest time I edited my code in the default Mac text editor without line numbering (!) or syntax highlighting.  I was aware of LaTeX macros but used LaTeX for 6 or 7 years without learning to use them (god only knows how many times I typed “\begin{equation}”).

For about a year after getting my own apartment, I didn’t realize how the buzzer was supposed to work and simply went to the front door to let someone in whenever my room was buzzed.  I never thought about the fact that no one else with an apartment did this.  When I moved in I ordered a couch before ordering a bed, but I didn’t really need the couch so I turned it sideways and used it to sleep on (it was like a futon but less comfortable).  I then promptly forgot that this was unusual and didn’t buy a bed until three years later.

In college I wore dorky t-shirts (several of them bright purple) and green-with-orange-bits tactical pants everywhere except to job interviews, and only in grad school began to think it might be nice to have outfits that stood out less.

Etc.

I have still done “well” in many ways despite this tendency, and in itself this is arguably kind of impressive – I have sometimes had to develop pretty clever and complex tricks to do things without the standard method.  However, I do feel like this is an unusual trait that distinguishes me from other people with the same level of superficial performance.

One person said I might have ADHD and asked about whether stimulants helped me.  The second of my two IQ tests was actually part of an ADHD evaluation last year, which found that I don’t have ADHD – my IQ subtest scores were still weird, but in addition to the IQ test there was an attention task and I did fine on it.  I have tried stimulants and I find they work wonders for helping me concentrate, but this doesn’t really help with the issues described above – I will just concentrate very hard on my own unusual approach.  (This is not quite accurate – when I have more mental energy and focus I also find it easier to look up and learn standard methods.)

(Ironically, my problems with concentration are largely due to obsessive worrying about whether the sub-task I’m working on is pointless due to some fatal flaw in the broader task it belongs to – i.e. trying to avoid the exact sort of mistake I’m talking about here.  It makes sense to be concerned about this, since I make this type of mistake a lot, but my worrying isn’t actually effective at averting these mistakes since it is usually vague and undirected.)

One silver lining to anxiety is that it’s often hilarious just how implausible the things I worry about are

Because my brain is like “we are in a state indicating danger, but there are no currently known dangers, so something not believed to be dangerous must actually be dangerous”

“but we can’t think of any sensible reasons why that might be true”

“let’s randomly conjecture that some seemingly good part of our life is actually bad due to some ludicrous M. Night Shyamalan plot twist”

(Example: at one point when I was skyping with Esther before I had actually met her IRL, my brain somehow generated the worry that she might be a computer simulation with no tangible physical form)

aprilwitching:

aprilwitching:

aprilwitching:

wow those were some horrible dreams

i think im awake finally? glad to be

i dreamed that somehow i was a pedophile? like, the police came to arrest me, and they had all this proof (which seemed devastatingly convincing in the dream) that i was DEFINITELY an “unconscious pedophile” and would DEFINITELY molest or otherwise sexually creep on children sooner or later if they didn’t take me in.

then the dream changed to “i killed a deer by accident and everyone hates me for it” and then to “one of my friends is burying me alive” and then to “i got really drunk and/or dissociated and now im ‘waking up’ next to a person from school who i REALLY don’t want to have slept with”

something like that

based on some comments i’ve been getting, i have to wonder: is “somehow, i find out that i am really a pedophile (or child molester, or rapist)” a common type of nightmare/anxiety dream? 

it was pretty awful, i have to say

maybe it’s noteworthy that my nightmares tend to involve situations where i’ve been forced to hurt others terribly, situations where i discover i’ve accidentally or unknowingly/unconsciously hurt others terribly, and situations where i realize that somehow i am doomed to become this horrible, destructive rapist/murderer/monster in the future

i don’t have many bad nightmares where i am in peril from some powerful malign force, or where someone’s hurting me. actually i fairly often have pretty emotionally neutral dreams where people i care about are killing me/cutting me apart/etc. (this is never painful in the dream.)

probably the main theme of nightmares where i’m actually the victim of something is “entrapment” (being buried, restrained, walled into a room, unable to escape a location or situation) rather than being hurt or pursued or w/e

i mean this probs says some stuff about me, psychologically, yk

I haven’t had the pedophile/etc. ones specifically, but many of my anxiety dreams fit this general description.

Often, for me, the dream will utilize its ability to make up arbitrary past events to just stipulate that I’ve done something terrible and/or stupid in the past, and I spend a lot of the dream trying to figure out what I could have been thinking – like, I don’t want to seem like I’m trying to excuse myself by telling people “I have no idea why I did that, it feels like it wasn’t even me,” and yet that’s simply true

(In my case it ties pretty obviously into my waking anxieties about whether any given decision I make will seem flagrantly bad in retrospect)

(via aprilwitching-deactivated201808)

I’ve been really nervous/anxious and generally in a kind of bad mood ever since Esther left, and this might have some other cause but I’m pretty sure this is just me returning to my baseline, and realizing how much my baseline sucks compared to how I am when Esther is around

Things can get better – there are signposts guiding me

Arrrrrgh

Am thinking obsessively about bad stuff I haven’t thought much about in a while

It will go away soon, hopefully by tomorrow, but right now it is annoying

In any case, I’ll be seeing Esther the day after tomorrow!  And that will undoubtedly make my brain happy

supersmashthestatebros:

One thing about life is that you will always have enemies. There will always be people out there who don’t like you or what you’re doing. In a lot of cases, this means you’re doing something right. It can be hard to move on in the face of intense unmitigated negativity, but the best way to handle it is to just keep on doing what you’re doing and also always have a small chair handy that can easily be hidden under a larger chair just in case you go to sit down and someone tries to move your chair out from under you.

(via wrapscallion)

Man I was having a real nice evening and then I clicked through to someone’s blog and ended up seeing another Undertale Prime post and now I’m experiencing a tasteful and varied artisanal selection of simultaneous negative emotions

Look, brain – I know you like to have a few instant bad mood buttons at any given time, but did you have to choose one this goofy

As you can probably tell my brain has not been great lately

The nice thing is that it waited around to do this until I was done with a project, after a few weeks of uninterrupted productivity

So, like, now it’s wasting my time with cascading worries about the absolute silliest bullshit, but I actually have the time to waste