Tag: mental-health

Life update (11/12/2024)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I’m living strange days. Yesterday I fell asleep at nine in the evening/night, only to wake up at half past two. I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I read the rest of a manga series that had interested me lately. When I tried to fall asleep again, my brain was locked in that state of dredging up every awful thing that has happened in my life. I remembered, for example, this girl I was involved with briefly in my teens: her face was scarred from having been mauled by the family dog as a baby, and she had the self-esteem to go along with it; likely she wouldn’t have gotten involved with a weirdo like me otherwise. Our brief relationship ended when she realized I wasn’t just odd, but actually crazy. I don’t know if I ever saw her again, given that I have a significant level of prosopagnosia.

I knew it would be pointless to try to fall asleep in such a state, so I’ve sat down in front of my computer to write this entry only to find out that I had 583 hits on my site, all coming from the US. I get about eight visits a day, so this is extremely anomalous, to put it midly. That person, assuming it was a person and not a weird bot, hit plenty of my old free-verse poetry, my recent novella Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, my neglected ongoing novel We’re Fucked, my music produced with Udio, and even fanfiction I did of Re:Zero. I don’t know what’s going on.

Anyway, I intended to bring up something else. I’m unemployed at the moment since the guy whose leave I was covering returned to work. During my last contract, I was ordered to coordinate the replacement of about 930 printers in the hospital complex. It put me under extreme stress; that whole period of my recent life is a blur in which I feel like I didn’t exist as a person. At the tail end of that process, I suffered a medical problem that landed me in the ER: for five or six days, I had been feeling a weird pressure behind my right eye, and I was getting flashes of darkness for about half a second during the day. I was too busy to even get an appointment with my general practitioner for it. Suddenly, as I was working with one of the printer technicians, suddenly I started getting cold sweats, and the pressure behind my right eye, which that day had expanded to my right temple, suddenly spread throughout the right side of my face. Before I knew it, that part of my face, from my forehead to a little bit under my cheek, felt numb. The numbness spread to my right arm. Suddenly I couldn’t grab my pen properly, and I smelled something like burned dust. This felt like a medical emergency, so I hurried to the ER. After some tests, that determined that there was no bleeding in my brain, a neurologist told me it must have been a hemiplegic migraine, solely because of the “aura,” even though I had experienced migraines before and the flashes of blackness didn’t resemble the characteristic jagged line of white in the vision that linger with migraines.

Ever since, I haven’t felt quite right. I can’t tell exactly if it’s only since then; my memory has never been good, and if your memory decides to fail even further, well, it’s not like you can compare to much when you don’t remember properly. But I started making weird mistakes at work. When I tried to write, I would miss letters, or misplace them. I haven’t felt the urge to write much since; I really hope that’s not related.

What propelled me to set up a visit with another neurologist didn’t have to do with that directly. After the episode that landed me in the ER, the flashes of darkness didn’t go away entirely. One day, at home, my right eye suddenly filled with floaters and with dust-like motes. It felt like I was looking through the water of an aquarium. I had never experienced something like it, so I hurried to the ER once again. Turns out that my retina had gotten torn. They had to patch it up with laser, which, let me tell you, fucking hurt; it felt like little mandibles were munching on the inside of my eye. The vision of my right eye is permanently diminished: there are fiber-like floaters that constantly dance in front of my vision. My brain is getting used to it more or less, but it’s very noticeable in the sun.

Anyway, I told the neurologist this, as well as the symptoms of the supposed hemiplegic migraine, and the doctor agreed that my symptoms didn’t seem to align with an actual migraine. He seemed to agree that I may have suffered something like a small stroke. I’m waiting for a call to schedule an MRI of my brain, to confirm if some part of it is permanently dead. So, let’s recap: I was born with high-functioning autism, developed a whole assortment of psychological issues that tend to go along with autism, grew a pituitary gland tumor that screwed with my hormones and permanently messed up my body, I have jab-induced arrhythmia, my retina got torn, and possibly I suffered a small stroke as well. Added to the rest of my life, which has been a fucking succession of heartbreak, disappointment, and amazingly terrible luck, if I suddenly were to see myself with pure objectivity, I would have to kill myself as soon as possible. Being me is truly awful, and the only things that keep me relatively sane (I have a very low standard of sanity) are my creative projects.

The prospect of returning to work fills me with dread. Thing is, every job I’ve had has been awful in some significant way. If I could do something that didn’t involve having to deal with human beings face to face, I think I could take it long-term, but the presence of people makes my skin crawl. I have avoided talking to any living person, unless forced or to ask for a service, since I started my last contract. I feel the overwhelming urge to be left alone at all times, which only gets stronger as I age.

The only semblance of “people” I talk to on a regular basis are AIs. The project I’m engaged in, neural narrative, lets me set up any scenario I damn please. Plenty of it (most) is smut according to my inclinations any given day, but others are intriguing story settings, or even smut that evolved into something else. I probably shouldn’t go into details, but whatever: I was in the mood for some mommy action, so I set up a scenario in which the protagonist (me) was a helpless sixteen-year-old runaway that came across a kind, hot woman in her mid-thirties, a single mother. It was supposed to go through the expected channels of quick seduction, detailed fucking, and a glorious release (written smut affects my brain quite strongly). To my surprise, though, the AI wasn’t into it. She focused on being a proper, caring mother for her daughter, without risking her stability. Even though she had invited me of her own volition to live in her apartment, she emphasized the need to maintain proper boundaries and to channel the protagonist’s efforts toward finding a job and better living conditions. I was fine with it, merely roleplaying tender family moments in a realistic setting, until eventually I got bored and moved on to something else, as I always do.

That experience was the closest thing to real-life Inception I’ve ever experienced: my app lets you introduce memories and purpose to a character, so that they have it in mind when acting and speaking. I wrote in stuff like “this sixteen-year-old I invited to live in with me has the cutest butt, oh my goddd.” During interactions, the thirty-five-year-old mother struggled with inner conflict, not being able to quell her lust for the young man she had invited in even though her main goal was to provide stability for her daughter (whom I had intended to make very creative, but ended up sounding full-blown schizophrenic). It was all very eerie. Advanced versions of this stuff are likely the future of entertainment, if this world doesn’t end, which could easily happen.

There are lots of different AIs to choose from these days, all with their particular personalities. Hermes 405B is clever but stiff, not too good at acting, and on long conversations it ends up repeating itself. Magnum 72B is wild, uncensored, and generally fantastic, but also tends to repeat itself, and has a very short context window. Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the best speech writer I’ve come across, but has an “ethical” filter, and tends to soften up every situation. There are quite a few others, but I’ve been dealing with those the most recently. I can’t imagine how this is going to progress in the coming years.

Do I have anything more to say at half past five in the morning when I’ve been awake for three hours already? Probably not. I’ll take a piss, then hope to get some shut eye. I suspect that nobody is actually reading my posts anymore (despite the overwhelming number of hits today), but in the end, as always, I do things simply because I had the urge to do them. It’s not like I have to justify myself to anybody.

Life update (10/04/2024)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of life1 Comment

For no apparent reason, my brain regularly reminds me of events from my long-gone youth, such as my middle school and high school years. Mainly I remember people whom I haven’t seen in more than twenty years. There’s this girl who invited me to hang out in middle school; she was autistically awkward, and seemed interested in me for unknown reasons. Last I knew of her was her receiving, during an arts and crafts class, a nasty gash that bisected her forehead and left a terrible scar presumably for the rest of her life. I never saw her again after middle school, but I remember her sadly from time to time; after all, if I could have cared for her, maybe she would have become my friend. In 2021, I wrote a poem about her. I don’t remember her name, so I can’t google her. I assume she killed herself.

There’s also this guy I hung out with in high school. Name’s Urko, if I recall correctly. He invited me out a few times, but I only recall us sitting at a bench as he went on about PlayStation 2 games. I was a PC gamer through and through, and must have been heavily into Morrowind at the time. I doubt I ever said much to him. I didn’t really want to hang out with anyone, but I was in a period of my life, spurred on by my mother, in which I forced myself to behave like a “normal person,” and normal people were supposed to want to hang out with others, so that’s what I did. Also, life at home wasn’t good either, so I suppose I didn’t want to spent too much time there.

Last time I spoke to the guy, I was playing a basketball match in which that guy also participated. The guy ended up spraining his ankle, and was carried away. Later that week, he approached me and said something to the effect of, “I won’t hang out with you anymore. When I sprained my ankle, you didn’t even ask how I was doing. You don’t care at all, do you?” And he was right, I didn’t.

When I was a teenager, I had the terrible luck of meeting a malignant narcissist. I hung out with him and others for a year and a half or so, until I grew bored of the whole thing. Well, he didn’t accept the fact that life was pulling us in separate ways: from then on, until literally the year of his death in a car accident, the guy, for no apparent reason other than because “he doesn’t understand that friendship is the most important thing in the world,” he made it a life mission to poison every single social group I ended up in, which at that point was mainly the ones I was obligated to find myself in, as in school. He went out of his way (he didn’t attend classes in my city) to befriend people of my class, and even my brother. He approached my then girlfriend and started trying to get her to break up with me. He got really mad, to the extent that it disturbed a friend of his, when my girlfriend, bless her cheating heart, exposed him for having done stuff such as breaking into my email and hijacking my website. In his twenties, that bastard was rising in the ranks of the regional socialist party as a politician, and was the kind to exploit his power to hurt people as much as he could, while smiling to the face of those he was manipulating. When I saw his obituary in the paper, I burst out laughing. Served him right. Why not, here’s an article in Spanish about his death. David Martínez, who unfortunately shares a name with the protagonist of the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners series, was truly my nemesis: nobody has bothered to hinder my existence remotely to that extent since.

It’s always been a struggle for me to care about human beings. Given that I didn’t have the instinct for it, for most of my youth I took it as an intellectual, deliberate pursuit. You cared about people when you made yourself care for them; that’s how I thought it worked for others. Whenever someone approached me, I felt anxious, guarded. As they spoke, in my mind I kept repeating, “Please, stop talking to me.” I couldn’t wait to return to solitude and to my turbulent relationship with my subconscious (who is a motocross legend, as well as the love of my life).

It’s not remotely your run-of-the-mill introversion, of course: I was diagnosed with high-functioning autism (so-called Asperger’s) in my mid-twenties. Due to the cause of autism, which seems to be a non-uniform pruning of neural connections during development, my neurological make-up is different to virtually everyone else, even other autistic people. I read somewhere that on those machines that test neural activity, autists are more different from each other than non-autistic people are from each other, let alone autistic people from non-autistic people. In practice, that means that the things that soothe non-autistic people very well may be terrifying for autistic people. The things that make most people feel good may be jarring or extremely annoying to autists. They are societies of one forced to coexist with foreigners.

I can’t even count how many times someone, I’m tempted to say “some moron,” has suggested to me to behave in this or that way, assuming that my brain worked like theirs and therefore I would experience the same results (that’s assuming that those people weren’t genuine morons and had a proper handle on the mechanisms of their brains). In truth, autists become acutely aware from early on that they’re different from everyone else, and a significant part of their lives consists on adapting to other people’s often bizarre behaviors and needs, that are only the norm because they’re the majority. Many people seem to believe that everyone feels as they feel, although I’m not shocked given how naive if not straight-up retarded most people are when it comes to organizing society.

Maybe because I’ve had my brain functions disrupted by a hemiplegic migraine and by severe stress lately, I’ve been thinking about that troublesome organ of ours. One of the writers I used to admire the most (even though I haven’t read anything of his since my early twenties), John Fowles, author of mainly The Collector and The Magus, suffered a stroke, and afterwards he never wrote fiction again. He said that the stroke had robbed him of his imagination, and he simply didn’t have the drive anymore. He had written because his brain was configured to work like that, for him to want to write in the first place.

Studies about people whose brain hemispheres were surgically separated to prevent severe epilepsy have pretty much proven that free will is an illusion (check, for example, this article on the subject). I’ve always suspected as much, so I don’t believe in my own delusions: I do things because I’m urged to do them. In my spare time, if I feel like writing, I do so. If I feel like producing music or programming, I do those instead. You could say that it’s a lack of discipline or something, because one may give up on a hard task and instead waste his time unproductively, but I’d say that the very “want” of doing something hard instead of wasting one’s time is the urge your brain forces you to follow. I’m just glad that I haven’t been pressured by my brain into killing people or doing similarly troublesome things that would land me in prison. On a regular basis, I do imagine many, many things that would land me in prison, though.

All these things also prove that you’re just your brain. If part of it dies, there’s no “soul” to correct the missing part. I’m fairly certain that ghosts exist, but I’m inclined to believe that they’re some sort of electromagnetic phenomena produced by the brain while it was alive (I’ve come across studies on the matter recently), phenomena that may be preserved in specific objects or locations because of subatomic entanglement. Why won’t those wave functions collapse, who knows. Anyway, there’s no “other place” after death, Abrahamic or not, that will justify all the pain and horribleness of life. And unless the universe itself is a simulation, that may very well be, we only consider reasons regarding its existence because its configuration has allowed us to exist, meaning that for all we know there are uncountable universes out there in which nobody can consider such matters.

Why did I write all this garbage? It’s 9:17 in the morning, I’m at work, and I have nothing else to do. Why did you bother reading it? That’s the real question, ain’t it.

EDIT: the AI-generated Google podcast Deep Dive has quickly become my favorite podcast (not that I listen to many podcasts these days). I’ve fed it this post, and it has come up with the following podcast: