Truly scattered, but I'm trying to tie together some ideas that have been floating around, and maybe others here can relate, or have some insight?


-- I had one of those days recently where I couldn't muster the energy or focus to do much of anything & so just skipped around recommended youtube videos (What the Wait But Why guy calls the dark playground. ) I found one lecture about gaming addiction, which I watched despite not having been a 'gamer' in a long time. The lecturer was specifically focused on intelligent gamers and - similar to the thesis of The Drama of the Gifted Child - argued something like: having the idea of Being Intelligent baked deeply into one's identity can cause some people to avoid anything that undercuts their sense of mastery. Basically, avoid anything that you're not immediately good at, especially if the failures necessary for growth happen in the presence of others. Mistakes are not just mistakes, but are registered (consciously or otherwise) as attacks on one's very identity. If Identity is tied to being worthy of love and acceptance - as Miller, for one, suggests -then these mistakes are mistakenly triggering shame and exile-danger centers of the brain, or soul, and preventing growth.

(Miller would say this also applies to feeling certain emotions, or having certain memories, or anything that doesn't fit neatly into the Supremely Reasonable persona, the development of which was meant to gratify what one perceived (accurately or inaccurately) as what one's parents wanted. Failure & mistakes (or irrational emotions and dark memories) mean being divested of the identity one trades for love & inclusion.

-- At 31, most normal aspects of life are still a struggle for me. Becoming able to get a minimally sustaining work-from-home job (after an excruciating in-office decade) to get my own apartment, and to take care of my expenses; that is basically the sum of what I've achieved in terms of day-to-day life. It was hard-won, and I am grateful that I have gotten to this point, but, as a achievement, it places me far behind the curve. It is still difficult to go to the store and do normal social things; I do it, but It's like sternly piloting a ship while the entire crew is panicking. I find that I have to rely on pre-thought-out heuristics to navigate basic social things, and those fail a lot of the time, because they're substituting algorithms for just-doing-what-people-learn-naturally-to-do (or: substituting 'episteme' for 'metis'.)

---Related: over-intellectualization of everything: my stream of consciousness often feels like an interpretive machine, processing everything in a certain way, and spontaneously generating theories about what doesn't fit (When I was doing therapy, my therapists inevitably got frustrated with the feeling that they were talking less to a living, feeling person than to the theorist of a person; 'So many constructs!' my final therapist finally burst out one day, frustrated, after stoically listening for months). This post, of course, is another example of that.


-- What is the voice of one's inner monologue? Is it oneself, thinking? Is it a mesh of voices heard as a child, that have become internalized? It's familiar, and there is a comfort in that. Is it someone one is speaking to? How does it develop? Is having a childhood friend the vanishing mediator between living in the overheard words of others as a child, and developing one's own reflective and autonomous self? But then what is that voice, exactly? And are there multiple voices (I think there are)? Does the internalized interlocutor, and one's relationship with it, determine in part how one acts? If one acts in a different way, does that change one's internal monologue?

-- "Mindreading" is a psychological term used to describe a common psychological defense, especially in those with personality disorders. Essentially: if you're mindreading, you're not really open and engaged with others, learning how they're thinking by interacting, but reflexively, and without strong reason, imputing to them certain thoughts and feelings. There have been some studies that many people with personality disorders perceive neutral expressions and tones as hostile (sort of the subjective inverse of 'resting bitch face'). I don't know how much this characterizes me but I do know that whenever I meet people it seems to be modulate between 'hostile' and, if they like me, 'hostility deferred for now.'

I think where all these things are heading, or how they're linked:

-- What is the relationship between one's inner monologue and actual dialogue with others? Is there an economy of conversation that can be skewed toward a monopoly of an imagined, inner, interlocutor which one misperceives as oneself?
--How is the capacity to learn related to one's openess to people outside you? Does learning always imply a teacher? A judge?
--If your inner monologue is deceptive, how can you move beyond it, since it's so deeply wrapped up with yourself?