Resenting Ridiculous Rules
A good friend of mine thought she had to adhere to draconian behavioral laws. She feared the judgment of some Kafkaesque court. She hated those laws, and secretly admired all who broke them.
The Early Years
She has always had her secrets, even at the age of 3 or so. No one must know, and she knew how to behave in such a way as to minimize the risk that anyone might suspect anything. Unless some people could hear her thoughts. She was rather wary of that. She didn’t know that her secrets, albeit unusual, were perfectly legal, with small enthusiastic communities around them.
Somehow she also felt very guilty, which was probably not due to these secrets. She had dreams of having accidentally killed someone. She tried to hide the body, but it kept showing up in unexpected places and at inopportune moments. Sometimes she dreamed that she had accidentally burned down a building. These nightmares still haunted her long after she had woken up.
She often wondered why she felt so guilty. Something terrible she did in a past life? Did she have an alter ego who committed heinous crimes by night? Had she done something terrible and repressed the memory of it? Whatever it was, so far no one else seemed to have found out either. She wanted to keep it that way.
I still had some problems with theory of mind in kindergarten. I must’ve been age 3–5 when my mom complained to a kindergartner that the children always bite down on the toothbrushes, which renders them unusable in no time. I was brushing my teeth at the time and wanted to counteract the effect by biting down on the sides of the bristles. My mom pointed at me, “Yeah, just like that!”
It was a mystery to me. How might biting down on the sides of the bristles cause them to fray? Over the years, I came up with various physics models in futile attempts to explain the phenomenon: ….
It was only much later, maybe 10 years later, in high school that I realized that my mom simply hadn’t seen the orientation of the tooth brush in my mouth.
She had a friend in kindergarten and even visited his place. He and his siblings watched a children’s show together while the parents chatted in another room. She would’ve liked to watch the children’s show with them, but she was afraid that the parents might find that childish and so grudgingly came up with a pretext to avoid it.
She also told me about an activity in kindergarten that struck her as vaguely reminiscent of a secret she was keeping. She was the only child who refused to participate in the activity (even though she would’ve enjoyed it greatly), because she thought that by participating in it, she might reveal the secret. It didn’t occur to her that she stood out more through her avoidance.
Elementary School
In preschool she noticed with some consternation that she was somehow able to communicate with adults with no problem and had been able to do so for years, but that communication with children her age was near impossible.
But she also already showed a peculiar relationship to rules, marked by religious abidance paired with resentment. Something that might’ve started even earlier in her life but became more apparent the more she had to consciously remember to follow rules.
It was generally easier to keep to the adults because I could communicate with them. They could even cut in straight lines with scissors where I could only manage ugly jagged lines. I admired that a lot in them.
But one thing that I understood about scissors is that they must never lie on the floor. The teachers had a strict rule to that effect.
One day another pupil dropped a pair of scissors to the floor and left them there. I thought that was unbelievably hot! I hadn’t even started with all my crazy rules, and yet these scissors have etched themselves into my memory.
Until the age of about 8, she was still able to express anger, at least at fictional characters. She subsequently lost access to that emotion almost completely.
Around the same age, she had a falling-out with a friend and noticed with some confusion even just a few years later that she couldn’t remember what had happened or why she didn’t want to spend time with said friend anymore.
It was wild. I was used to having some kind of narrative in my mind for every decision that I made. It always laid out what had happened, my interpretations and reasoning, and how my decision followed from them. The end of this friendship was a significant change in my life, and yet I couldn’t remember any of these factors. My guess is that I started narrativizing my life only after age 8.
Something happened around age 8 among many of the students. The boys started to become more violent, especially against girls but also against particular other boys. During class she felt a bit safer, but the recesses were terrifying. For a while, she tried to make do with mediocre hiding spots in the shrubberies or behind the school buildings, but eventually, around 4th grade, she found a restroom stall that she could lock from the outside to keep it clean and that had a big window to sit in like a cat and be safe. She tried to get there as quickly as possible, and waited a few minutes after the recess was over before returning to class so as to minimize the number of kids she’s run into in the hallways.
But she also started to deploy some social defenses: She tried to keep out of any status games and, as further safeguard, proactively signaled her inferiority whenever possible just in case someone saw her as part of some status game after all. The idea was that she might be tolerated so long as she didn’t appear to be trying to interfere in anyone else’s power plays. Part of that was also that she never dared to wear any belts to school for fear that someone might interpret them as an expression of social status.
She also made sure to react to any bullying only in ways that revealed nothing about how successful the bully had been. If they actually managed to hurt her, she wouldn’t react at all, but sometimes when they were particularly far off target, she might feign a reaction as a red herring.
She can’t quite remember whether that that was fully conscious misdirection or whether attacks that hit home were the ones that made her feel wrong and evil and she had to not acknowledge them to protect her unstable self-esteem. At one point she got bullied for the pants she wore to p.e. class, and even though she was subsequently deeply embarrassed of the pants, she couldn’t change them anymore for a long time, because then it would’ve felt as if her original choice of pants had been wrong. She later also relied heavily on aphorisms like “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” and hence thought that she was not allowed to care about how she looks, including gym pants and any other elements of her appearance.
Once back in the relative safety of the classroom, she usually drifted off into more wholesome fantasy utopias.
At one point during the later years of elementary school, the class read “Julie from the Wolves,” a story about an Inuk girl who keeps splitting on people and whole cities. But to my friend, the most relatable character was a wolf who was more tolerated than accepted in his pack… until he wasn’t anymore, starved, tried to steal some food, and was killed by the leader of the pack quite early in the book. That was devastating for my friend who assumed that she might be killed like that too, sooner or later.
She had a friend for a bit in 4th grade, a pupil who had newly joined the school, but he changed schools again soon after to escape the violence.
It should be noted that this was in Germany, so we’re talking fist fights, not gun fights.
Home felt safer, and she frequently feigned sickness to avoid all the bullies in school. But every other month or so her mom had outbursts of rage when she screamed and stormed around and smashed things for hours, and then gave my friend and her dad the silent treatment for a few more days. Sometimes my friend unambiguously blamed herself, e.g., when she had accidentally spilled something and her mom raged in response to that. But she was exceedingly careful never to spill anything or to clean it up and hide all the evidence so quickly that her mom didn’t notice. Sort of like a neurotic version of “The Wolf” from Pulp Fiction.
So oftentimes she didn’t know what caused it and just sort of probabilistically blamed herself among other possible causes. That seemed plausible to her because there was always a chance that she had put something in the wrong place without even realizing it or that the correct place had silently changed. The rage could always be due to any of these violations of unknown rules.
Her mom didn’t usually speak coherently during these episodes, but on at least one occasion she made a threat that would stick with my friend to this day: That her mom would one day give her away to another family who she described as totally dog-eat-dog, where my friend would have to adjust to the family’s law of nature or starve.
But her parents’ friends also had an influence:
My mom taught me how to correctly format formal letters, and I used that new skill to ironically write personal letters to my parents and their friends in this formal style.
One day I told one such friend that I’m good at writing formal letters and whether she’d like to receive one.
She responded, “Something stinks here,” and pretend-sniffed all around her. A minute of guessing later, I understood that she was referring to the aphorism “self-praise stinks” and had elected to humiliate me for it in front of my parents and their friends to punish me for saying that I’m good at writing those letters.
But in better news: On Good Friday, the 13th of April 2001, at the tender age of 12 and still in 6th grade, she published her first website!
I was so proud of my website! It had all the information anyone could possibly need – cheats for the Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow Gameboy games, collections of jokes, my music, etc. etc.!
It did need visitors though. I tracked the viewer stats and advertised it online with links in my signatures in online forums and with banner exchanges. But I also went outside and talked to hundreds of people and gave them my advertisement leaflets.
I also emailed newspapers and asked them whether they’d like to cover the website. Some of them said it wasn’t special enough for someone at age 12 to have a website or didn’t reply at all, but I didn’t case: Eventually a newspaper got back to me and interviewed me! That lead to a significant spike in visitors!
I just went out there and did whatever the fork I wanted if it seemed like it would drive more visitors to my website.
This was about to change…
Most of High School
(In case someone’s confused, there’s no middle school in Germany.)
The first half of 7th grade still kind of sucked, but then all the more aggressive pupils left the school because they couldn’t keep up academically. So after half a year, suddenly, she felt no threat anymore from her classmates. Other pupils in other classes were still quite scary, but she could usually spot them from afar and avoid them.
But then something happened, probably around age 13, probably still in 7th grade. Maybe it was puberty, maybe something less sinister. She became intensely self-conscious. And mostly lesbian.
On the first days of the new school year, I thought about putting up my newspaper interview in the classroom. … There was a kind of contraption along the wall for hanging drawings and posters, and the article would’ve fit right in. I never got around to it.
Only a little later I looked back at that in utter horror and shame because it suddenly struck me as so “narcissistic.” Somehow that was one of the worst things I could do. Even just touching on the memory of that idea made me recoil.
That was an experience that repeated itself many times over.
She looked back in utter horror and shame also at her leafletting, because someone had told her that walking up to lots of people to advertise something is a sign of confidence, and “confidence” translated in her mind to “arrogant, self-absorbed, and probably soon expelled from the pack and starving to death.”
At one point she briefly tried out wearing baseball caps, especially ones with a smooth front without that little horn. Making a change to her appearance like that also retroactively struck her as confident and hence reprehensible. She was deeply ashamed of it and vowed never to change something about her appearance or behavior again except for purely pragmatic and perfectly rational reasons.
If I suddenly start wearing a hat and it’s not obvious to everyone why, I’m risking that some people might think I’m doing it for “superficial” reasons, and if were to do it anyway, I’d violate not only the “Don’t judge a book by its cover” rule but I’d also imply that I don’t care about these people’s judgment of me, which is something that a confident person would do, but I mustn’t be confident of course, so I must never change.
But there was one way out:
Pragmatic reasons were okay, e.g., to wear something warm in winter and something light in summer. … I could assume that everyone else knew why I was making the change because the change in temperature was common knowledge. Hence there was no potential judgment from others that I was at risk of being seeming uncaring about.
That opened up another way out: If I managed to construct a well-reasoned argument from first principles that I can hope will be as convincing to others as “I’m wearing the coat because it’s cold,” I could make changes! I read some philosophy and philosophy of science to aid me in the preparation of these arguments – but sadly no economics or psychology.
But that cut both ways: I was already doing things, such as moving my arms back and forth while walking. That is one example that I remember where I couldn’t think of a convincing chain of reasoning for why I was doing it, so I tried to suppress it. After all I might be quizzed on it at any moment!
Oh, and I was of course also careful not to think that other people actually paid so much attention to me, because that would’ve also been a forbidden self-centered thought. Rather I assumed that some others might notice and either take action against me themselves or report me to some higher authorities.
There was also the notion that maybe these higher authorities could read my thoughts from afar, but I was slightly less worried about that than I was about getting busted the regular way, but still worried enough that I refused to think consciously about anything that might reveal that I’m actually confident or that I’m faking my lack of confidence.
She mentioned later that it felt weird to write in the first person “I refused” because these thoughts and any meta-reasoning about their necessity were totally disowned. She managed to fool herself almost perfectly into believing that she didn’t have those disowned thoughts. She told me about a few isolated instances when thoughts became conscious that weren’t supposed to, but > 99.9% of the time the strategy worked.
Essentially, she method-acted a Dobby-like character – perfectly diffident, inferior, unlovable, loathsome, and subservient to society – because she feared that some abstract Kafka-esque court might be tallying up her thought mistakes (and certainly all other mistakes), until at some point, they’d banish her from society and leave her to starve to death under some bridge, like the wolfie.
And the court would not only make the case that she overstepped her social status in various instances, mentally or physically, but that would also be evidence of her deception, because a proper “house elf” would not have made these mistakes.
The problems she remembers include:
Eating might cause bit of food to stick to the lips or cheeks, and not noticing it might be misinterpreted as not caring about it, which might come off as self-confident, and hence “expose” her.
Brushing one’s teeth can cause the foam of the toothpaste to spill onto the lips, which seemed hazardous for the same reasons.
Nakedness, however brief, e.g., while changing for a swimming lesson, could also be interpreted as self-confident.
Allowing photos of her to be taken, for all the same reasons.
There was a book that advised that the reader should experiment with putting an item of trash into the wrong trash can, and see if they can do it. She was terrified that if someone found out that the book advised this and that she continued to read it anyway, that they’d think that she is reprehensible by association. She immediately stopped reading.
She was more daring at lockpicking events. E.g., she was asked to select some music and play it in the background at an event. She was terrified of playing the wrong music, but she did it anyway, selecting bands so obscure that hopefully no one else knew either whether they were the correct or the wrong ones.
She was not inherently anxious about these things but just afraid of the social reprisal for her deception and the seeming badness it tried to hide.
Accordingly, she admired and envied people who brush their teeth with others around, eat in public, take selfies, play music, etc.
Humiliation & Catastrophes
I often wonder how it all fit together: Did I feel evil deep inside and tired to overcompensate for it by adhering to draconian rules and punishing myself with guilt in an effort to feel virtuous? After all, I tried to abnegate even perfectly normal things if they’re in any way associated with some kind of social stigma.
Or was I scared of humiliation, but in an ego-dystonic way, and wanted to feel virtuous about my avoidance instead, and so made up these rules and all the self-deception to dress it up in an ego-syntonic costume?
I’m still disproportionately afraid of catastrophes – accidents, conflicts, losses, illness – so maybe humiliation, and by extension ostracization, is just another catastrophe?
Maybe the Dobby-like character was a neat solution to both at once: Reduce risks of all sorts (including ostracization) through avoidance, feel virtuous about it, and thereby compensate for and cover up the toxic shame.
The fear of the ruling of this court (a metaphor she came up with much later) remained an implicit fear for decades, so she could never question the exact mechanisms by which this parallel justice system was supposed to be operating.
She will make mistakes and be punished for them.
If she appears confident when she makes the mistake, she will be punished more severely.
Therefore, she is very afraid of coming across as confident/self-assured.
If she signals uncertainty instead, she anticipates making a mistake, so she will be punished less.
If she volunteers, it doesn’t signal uncertainty, so she always has to be invited or persuaded.
But she is also not allowed to behave differently in different situations, because that could come across as contradictory/unpredictable/fickle, and she could be punished for the dishonesty by herself or others.
Sometimes, however, she is actually not very uncertain or would like to do things that could fail, so she has to trick people into persuading her.
Sometimes she is so lacking in uncertainty that she sees hardly any danger of making a mistake, so she has to completely fake the uncertainty in order not to be punished for her contradictoriness/unpredictability/fickleness.
But this is also dishonest, contradicts her values, and will also be punished, so she has to hide it from herself and others.
The constant fear also sucks, and she would like to have a safe person who allows her to make mistakes, or who even supports her psychologically, like a therapist.
The headmaster of her high school himself once gave a substitute lesson in the 13th grade and said that it is allowed and even important that students are willing to make mistakes. That was the first time she heard this kind of permission to make mistakes. Unfortunately, they never had lessons with him.
Conveniently, precisely because of her uncertainty, she can hope that someone will want to help her eventually.
But if she is not absolutely uncertain for once, the person might notice and not help her, so she cannot allow herself any mistakes even when faking perfect uncertainty.
And of course, she can never admit that she wants this kind of help, because otherwise one could deduce that she actually thinks she deserves better self-esteem, which contradicts her mask, because one must feel some self-worth to think one deserves better self-esteem, which would expose her as a liar.
Thoughts
It seemed so odd to me that I felt so evil and shameful and broken and tried to hide it from myself and others by being rule-abiding, and yet one of the worst things that could happen to me was to get confirmation of the shamefulness that I already felt. I think I was hoping that I can prove to myself eventually that the shame is wrong if I attain and maintain moral and intellectual perfection.
Through very careful non-verbal thinking, she was able to hide various thoughts from herself. She experienced this again recently for a few seconds. She simultaneously perceived two parts of her brain that couldn't communicate properly with each other. One part analyzed the situation sensibly and the other part desperately tried to spin several contradictory narratives. It was around ages 24–25 that she realized that she was doing this.
Of course, this wasn't all well organized in her head, but rather like wandering in a forest where she had to make a separate decision at each junction where she wanted to go, but didn't have a map like the one above.
I’m now aware of a lot of thoughts that feel like atomic thought bursts. No sentences, though some scraps of language are sometimes attached to them. They are usually very simple tuples of cause and effect or affective reactions. But with a bit of practice rather complex thoughts can occur in a single or very few bursts like that! I think that is how I can now reconstruct what my common thinking patterns were at the time. Some complex thoughts feel unusually natural, simple, atomic.
Naturally, this mask was not functional on its own. She actually had preferences, goals, and intense interests and felt quite capable some of the time. She did not want to entirely abandon those things.
Some of them were conveniently niche, so there was no established hierarchy of what good or bad performance looked like. It was hard to do anything mistake-shaped.
Some of them could be done in secret, like coding, with all the mistakes that the compiler constantly tells you about, which no one will ever find out about. She also tried to learn the guitar by building a silent replica, or the piano by using a musical keyboard with headphones, or singing by singing along with extremely loud music.
But sometimes she had to come up with tricks how she could get others to invite or persuade her to do the thing she wanted to do.
She made sure to plan these stratagems without ever thinking about them explicitly. In particular she avoided any verbal thoughts. Once the stratagem itself and its pretext were in place, she could lock in the new narrative, including the pretext, by repeatedly mentally verbalizing it.
The echos of the unverbalized thoughts were easy to forget. She rarely felt the need to communicate these narratives. For the most part they were just for herself and in case someone (or the “court”) questioned her.
[This double-think] was a constant thing for me, and completely internal. Today it still sometimes happens, but unless I’m sleep deprived, I just sort of observe it with amusement and move on.
I remembered a scene from high school where a super nice teacher invited me to join her extracurricular theater course. The course had already started a month or so earlier and was announced somewhere where I saw it. That day, I saw my secret crush waiting at the meeting point, all alone. So I figured that the teacher was inviting me because there were too few people in the course.
At the time, I couldn’t just join things, because I thought that I might make a mistake (The horror! The horror!), and then people would hate/punish me for both the mistake and some extra for having been overconfident, because clearly a single mistake proves that I’m unfit for theater, and I ought to have somehow known or assumed that.
So I got a unique opportunity to try theater because if someone asks me to join, I’m off the hook for part of the responsibility for any mistake I might make. In other cases I had to trick people into persuading me to do things I wanted to do, and here I was getting it for free! Plus my secret crush was part of the course.
Problem though: I felt like I was rotten to the core and was just faking being a smart, conscientious, diffident nerd, and that’s why people let me live. If I’m too bad at theater and acting, it’ll be shameful and mistake-like; but if I’m too good at it, people may realize that I might have been fooling them all along with my fake smartness and it’ll be over for me. And acting well but just badly enough that people can tell I’m acting, like good actors playing amateur actor characters… I didn’t think I could do that from the start.
These were all thoughts that I had gone through hundreds of times, so they played out in a second in my head in some nonverbal part that I, most of the time, pretended didn’t exist. (I’m not so much remembering this instance than reconstructing it, which is possible because these very well-oiled mental pathways still feel very natural to me, despite how weird and specific they are.)
But how do I narrativize that to myself? After all I was also fooling myself into thinking that I’m a smart, conscientious, diffident nerd, not whatever might lurk underneath (nothing bad at all, it turns out). I don’t remember, but I probably went for something like pretending to be shy, my usual avoidance trick: “Oh, theater is so intimidating! I’m sorry. But thank you so much for thinking of me!”
I usually tried to come up with narratives that didn’t hurt anyone else, but tricking people into persuading me to do things I want to do so I can internally shift the blame for my mistakes on them… is something I’m proud I’m not doing anymore.
A particularly difficult situation was receiving compliments.
She thinks non-verbally “A compliment! How sweet!”
But she also has her fears – humiliation, banishment from family or society, and variations. More with some people than with others.
And she cannot accept the compliment because she is trying to maintain a false self according to which she feels no self-worth.
At the same time, she doesn't want to offend the person, because she generally doesn't want to, and because she actually needs compliments.
Therefore, she can pretend, via the false self, that the person might be trying to trick her and is secretly recording their conversation or has witnesses, in order to prove that she accepted the compliment, to expose her in front of others, laugh at her, or even report it to a higher authority.
Presumably, she was really afraid of the embarrassment if the compliment was a trap, but in the narrativization, she dramatized the whole thing a bit and made it more probabilistic and detailed than she actually felt it.
She probably reacted quite automatically and non-mentalizingly out of fear at that moment, and the narrativization afterwards was triggered by feelings of guilt and shame and probably proceeded somewhat more slowly, as indicated by the probabilistic thinking.
The narrative has the advantage that she won't tell the person she's afraid it might be a trap, because that would hurt them if the compliment was genuine, and it could become dangerous for her if the compliment was a trick.
The advantage is that this gives her a pretext never to test the narrative, and thus never find out that it's not true.
Love
From 8th to 13th grade or so she had a crush on someone. It started with the words “I think you’re cute” from the crush, a pivotal memory. It was a compliment, so she had no way to respond to it and was completely out of her depth. She felt terribly guilty for that. It was one of her greatest regrets for over a decade. She punished herself for it constantly.
She probably spent hundreds or thousands of hours over the years thinking about countless aspects of the situation.
Did she have what it takes to have a relationship?
She read a lot about relationships, how they work, how to get good at them, toxic behaviors to avoid. It didn’t help; she had no confidence that she wouldn’t eventually make some kind of mistake, especially without a lot of prior practice.
She wasn’t sure whether she’d be able to live up to all expectations in a relationship. The most common forms of sex seemed uninteresting to her. Without practice, she would not be good at them, and maybe her lack of interest would shine through too. There were probably countless expectations she didn’t know about.
Marriage seemed terrifying to her! So many unwritten rules; so many written rules that are written in legal language that is hard to understand. So many hidden legal traps, probably.
Some partners want to have kids. What if her crush wanted to have kids? Would she be able to raise kids? She researched parenting but found it overwhelming. She lost hope that she’d reliably be able to live up to the expectations of a relationship.
What if her love is not perfectly stable? On some days she had difficulty visualizing the crush’s face in detail. She worried that this and other problems might imply that her love wasn’t true love and might lessen at some point, be it after many years.
What if it turns out that they have some kind of incompatibility? It seemed like an abominable failure to her to not have known this in advance before talking to her crush.
She sometimes found other people attractive too. What if that continued into the relationship? She hoped it wouldn’t, but expected to feel like an abject failure if it did. She couldn’t risk that. She already felt guilty for it.
She had secrets, but in a relationship you were supposed to be perfectly honest with each other. She was terrified how others might react to her secrets. Revealing them might be the last thing she ever does, she feared.
Of course she also couldn’t ask her crush about any of this, because the mere fact of the question, or any relationship-related interaction, or any kind of interaction that could plausibly misinterpreted as being relationship-related, would betray that she assigned a non-zero probability to someone being able to love her, exposing her hidden self-confidence.
She didn’t know the rules of courtship. Was it her obligation to initiate contact so that it was reprehensible for her to stall? Was she forbidden to initiate contact so the reverse would be reprehensible? Was it generally forbidden to talk about these things? She was terrified that her crush might be going through all the same torturous self-doubts at the same time, and by stalling, she’s essentially torturing them.
At the same time she feared that there might be some kind of predestination such that she’d forfeit her whole life if she fails to get together with the person she’s destined for. But what if either she or her crush are destined for someone else? No matter what she does, there is a risk that she’d ruin one or both of their destinies, and it would all be her fault. Was contemplating risking the ruin of another’s destiny commensurate to manslaughter in badness?
She solved this by coming up with a code, writing a love letter in that code, folding it into a tiny ball, and hiding it in a place where it’s almost impossible to find. She hoped that whoever judges her will see that she had made it at least hypothetically possible for the universe to arrange her destiny if it is her destiny.
If she’s destined for her crush, wouldn’t she have some kind of magical connection to them, some kind of telepathy, some kind of foreknowledge of the crush’s interests, preferences, aptitudes, hobbies? She knew nothing of the sort. Wouldn’t she magically remember all facts about her that are knowable – phone number, address, etc.? She learned them by heart, and it was easy, but maybe it should’ve been even easier.
If she’s destined for her crush, wouldn’t she feel some kind of otherworldly conviction that they’re the right one? It felt just like a crush, without any special conviction.
She would certainly die for her crush if the opportunity presented itself. But she was also suicidal, so it didn’t really count. Would she really still die for her crush if she weren’t suicidal? If not, was it reprehensible of her to even think she might be in love?
She felt so incomplete. Like a part of her was missing. Maybe a third or a quarter. (Like in the image.) Could a partner complete her? If not, would it mean that she had been destined for someone else, and her partner probably too, and they’d live out the rest of their lives together failing their destiny and it would be her fault?
She wished for nothing more than finally some kind of resolution, be it a rejection, it didn’t matter!
Eventually, after five years of this, her crush got together with someone else, and she breathed a sigh of relief! All the hopeless ruminations could finally stop!
Mistakes
The whole school system is set up to punish mistakes, so I got punished for mistakes plenty of times, and so tried to basically never say or do anything in school voluntarily unless I was highly sure that I wasn't making a mistake and had triple-checked in uncorrelated ways, so I could at least claim that I was forced and hence made a mistake and not out of overconfidence. No wonder I've long loved displays of overconfidence!
Mistakes were terrible because she thought that it was devastating to be caught doing something ostensibly reprehensible, that overconfidence was seen as reprehensible, and that any mistake (not a preponderance of mistakes over correct decisions, weighed by risks and payoffs) was viewed as overconfidence.
One shameful memory that I have is of an English lesson where I said something along the lines of “in the years to go” instead of “in the years to come.” It was not a mere slip of the tongue. I actually assigned for a moment a sufficiently high probability to its being the correct idiom. Then it seemed odd to me, and eventually I looked it up, with great trepidation, and to my horror, it was indeed a mistake. It’s not so much the brute fact that I made a mistake that felt so deeply shameful, but rather that I had felt “overconfident” while I spoke. I could’ve noticed my uncertainty and said, “next year or the year after,” but I went for the idiom whose correctness was not sufficiently supported in my mind.
I imagined that many people might learn about it and would be shocked that I had been pretending to not be confident all along and would see the abyss inside me and consider me an abomination unworthy of societal protections.
For years, I punished myself for this mistake and others by revisiting their memory frequently and feeling the shame again in all its intensity. Maybe if only I punished myself enough, I would be forgiven. But no one ever told me that I was forgiven. So I had to continue punishing myself.
She thinks that eventually her fear of the various catastrophes was a lot less present than the fear of her own self-punishment.
But she also started to wonder why she was still alive. She had been self-punishing for scores and scores of mistakes for years, and somehow it had helped, seemingly, to keep her alive, against all odds.
I had made so many mistakes… It didn’t make sense to me that I had somehow gotten away with all of them. Did my self-punishment suffice? I didn’t think so. My guess was that society thought that I was smart, that I might use my smarts to contribute back, and so I was granted some extra leeway. But what if I wasn’t actually smart? What if I had just tricked everyone into thinking I’m smart?
Studying for exams became difficult because if she really were smart, she wouldn’t have to study for them, or so she thought, so she felt like a fraud for studying anyway.
Watching movies was also a stressful experience because she might miss something or not understand something, seemingly proving that she’s dump and a fraud.
Any kind of real-time interaction with other people was terrifying, because in asynchronous interactions at least she could try to maintain the impression of being smart by investing inordinately more time than anyone would expect.
She usually learned things by heart that others did spontaneously so she could minimize the risk of making mistakes.
The Last Two Years of High School
She had had a friend throughout high school, but it was a rather perfunctory friendship where they collaborated on library-related projects and her friend helped her with homework, often with remembering what it even was.
Toward the end of high school, someone joined the school who she felt a real friendship-like connection with. And he was vastly more chill than her.
It was the first time in my life when I felt like there was a person whose behaviors I could copy. Everyone had always been so different from me that I assumed that I’m not allowed to do any of the things they do. Suddenly that was different.
For example, I always thought that because I wasn’t good at p.e., I mustn’t try to do anything in p.e., or else it might seem like I overestimated my abilities. I had tried hard, for years, to be as avoidant as possible in p.e. (and in general) to prevent making the impression as if I thought that I had a chance at it.
He wasn’t great at p.e. either, but he tried and failed anyway, and nothing catastrophic happened. He wasn’t punished for it. He wasn’t ostracized or banished. P.e. ended and he lived to see another day/class. It was stunning!
On some occasions, when I felt particularly confident that I wouldn’t make a mistake, I cautiously tried the same, and I wasn’t punished either. I couldn’t believe it.
Simultaneously, she was able to specialize more on subjects she was least afraid of and her crush finally found a partner too, so many of her core stressors dropped away.
She also made driver’s licenses for two types of vehicles. Of course only because her parents coerced her to do it. In this case she honestly thought she couldn’t do it. But it turned out that she needed a below-average number of lessons, and passed the first exam (regular car) on the first try.
In my exam for my second driver’s license I made a mistake. I had all sorts of excuses – extremely high temperature in the car, stress, blackout, etc. But the fact remained that I had made a mistake and failed the exam. There was no way I could keep this a secret. I thought this was the end.
Do I try to keep it a secret for as long as possible? Do I run away? Do I kill myself? Nothing felt real anymore. I was in a haze. I wished for nothing more than to be able to turn back the clock and try again, but there was no hope. It was over.
I did none of the above. I came clean to my parents right away. I was ready to accept whatever the consequences might be or die then and there.
But then they comforted me and told me I can try again? I couldn’t believe it… This didn’t seem real. Nothing seemed real. What was happening.
She passed on the second try. But failing that exam and surviving was something she couldn’t comprehend. The cognitive dissonance would reverberate for years or decades. It didn’t change anything right away.
She continued to drive a car for a few more years, but her fears came back with a wholly new kind of immediacy.
Previously, I had always been afraid that I’d make some unknowable mistake and be banished for it and die. Now I was driving this enormous, terrifying machine that could easily damage something or even injure or kill a person – very knowable mistakes.
I felt like if I damaged something, it’d be over. They’d never let me get away with that. It would be the end of me. And it would be worse than death: It would be humiliating. A friend once told me, “C’mon, what’s the worst that can happen? That we die? I’m not afraid of that!” Neither was I, but humiliation felt so much worse than death, and more likely.
Getting in an accident and killing someone? I wouldn’t even care about the punishment and banishment anymore. I wouldn’t have wanted to live another minute with that on my conscience.
I tried my best to be as cautious as possible, but it was not enough. Half a year or a year into my driving, again in enormous heat in summer, I rolled out of a highway rest stop and overlooked someone on my left. The person honked and I stopped and nothing happened. But there was no way I could weasel my way out of acknowledging that I had not noticed the car until it honked. I had made a mistake. I was a lethal hazard, and if I had any conscience or goodness left whatsoever, I needed to stop driving a car. Or so I thought. I didn’t stop.
Confusingly, I even tried to reach the top speed of the car (just over 220 km/h) on a section of the highway that had no speed limit. It was terrifying, and I never did it again.
A few months later, I tried to park, but I touched the car in front of me. There was no visible scratch. But I had made another mistake. It felt unconscionable to continue driving after all these clear signs that I was unfit. And yet I didn’t stop.
Finally, there was a red traffic light at night that I only noticed when it was too late and I had crossed. There were no other cars or pedestrians in sight, but it wasn’t like I had seen the red light, observed that there is no one around, and decided not to stop. (I wouldn’t have done that.) I just hadn’t seen it in time. It was a clear mistake. I was totally unfit to drive. I stopped driving.
There was one more medical emergency where her parents asked her to drive a car so they could get home from the hospital, and she did it fighting the overwhelming fear of becoming responsible for the untimely death of someone’s beloved spouse or mom or child.
After that she never drove a car again.
University
University was something else. Finally virtually all courses were non-terrifying and often even fun for her. She found she could even connect with her peers and soon had a whole friend group when she opened an IRC channel and invited a bunch of fellow students to it. Students of computer science were different. They were relatable at high rates. They felt safe.
She watched TV shows with multiple main characters and character development to study human behavior. The social interactions in Buffy the Vampire Slayer were hard to comprehend at first, but with a bit of charting and mapping, it all became much clearer to her.
She became cofounder of a charity and joined another one in a principal role.
She read about sacrifices of abducted children in Uganda, deaths from treatable diseases in rural Uganda, homeless children in Burundi, factory farming in more developed countries, and much more. The suffering in the world was overwhelming, and she wished so dearly that she could die, or better yet never be born, but that wouldn’t change any of the suffering, so there was no way out. Existence in general was hopeless.
One day, she helped a friend move houses, and a second-degree friend asked her why she’s doing charity work because really nothing makes any difference. They had a longer discussion, but eventually she fell back on Pascal’s wager: Maybe she can make a difference, maybe not, but only if she doesn’t try, there certainly is no hope.
She started working part time too. The work was easy enough to get into (software engineering) but the social rules of the workplace were challenging to figure out. Eventually she found a routine that worked and stuck to it.
She moved out from her parents.
Within two years, they funded the building of a medical clinic in a rural area that previously had no medical services. The clinic treated patients every day and they even made house calls with off-road vehicles because often there were no streets.
She had been right. She could make a difference. Her life was not in vain. Her suffering had not been for nothing. Every time she had not killed herself she had made the right call.
It was also in her mid-20s that she discovered that other people are not like her – or not like her in even more ways than she had thought. Most people move through life in a series of inscrutable motions that sometimes look almost choreographed in their surprising confluence and sometimes painfully obviously self-defeating and unprovoked. But at least, she assumed, everyone tried to do the right thing and just disagreed on what it was due to disagreements over epistemics and normative ethics. Some people value fairness, some suffering reduction, some happiness, some preference satisfaction, some net-positive life years, etc.; some people think that certain risks are log-normally distributed while others assume something closer to a Pareto distribution; and there are differences in temperament too. But basically everyone tried to maximize in the world whatever terminal value they cared about, strategized, and picked to the best of their ability the best actions toward that end.
She found out that that does not seem to be the case. Some people claimed to not care about death and suffering as a function of the distance, and not because of some kind of ordering rule that helps them grapple with Infinite Ethics but somehow for no explicable reason at all. She felt like she had joined a company that was building a bridge and asked why they laid out all the cables on the shore, and everyone is like, “Hmm, not sure, but the snakes are long and the waves are long, and what is a bridge anyway?” The world she thought she had started to understand turned out to be dadaist improv.
I felt like anyone might just kill me on a whim because everything I had believed about other people seemed false, and I found that didn’t know at all how they worked – some of my friends notwithstanding.
Jonathan Haidt and Joshua Greene helped me understand people better. I always try to understand even if it means becoming deeply disappointed in almost all of humanity. Then again, even if just 1% of humanity is respectable at the level I expected, that’s still a heckuva lot of people.
Recovery
As so often, I sat in a lecture and the professor asked a question. I was by far not brave enough to say something during a lecture like that with a hundred students listening, and potentially suspecting that I’m self-confident. But I liked to come up with the answers anyway just to know that I could figure them out.
Another student gave the answer, and I thought, “Darn, why didn’t I think of that even though I had thought of it!”
That struck me as an odd thought to have. Can I really have thought of something and not have thought of something simultaneously?
It dawned on me that I had two processes going on in my mind, one verbal, one mostly nonverbal. I had thought the answer nonverbally but had not yet mentally verbalized it. I was intrigued!
All the while she had been exchanging emails with a friend. Soon she realized, on some level, that this friend had a crush on her:
She remembered how torturous it had been for her to have a crush on someone, and thought it’s the same for others.
She only had friendshippy feelings for this friend. They had some glaring incompatibilities.
She could absolutely not think consciously or verbally about any of this or it would be admitting to herself that she thought she was lovable.
A tremendous responsibility pulled her in one direction; a tremendous fear pulled her in the other.
It was like a matter-antimatter reaction. I lay in bed one evening, having become more and more conscious of my two minds over the course of the previous months, and I finally admitted to myself that I actually thought that someone could love me.
Nothing happened. No punishment for my arrogance. No SWAT team storming my apartment.
I wrote an email that explained why I didn’t think we were compatible. I felt clumsy. I had never used used my brain in a way that acknowledged that I thought I was lovable. I had never written or said or thought sentences like that. It was terrifying. But I could never subject someone to that which I had been through.
It was well received. She was much more confident and hadn’t been crushing hard on me anymore anyway.
A great relief. Especially the SWAT team that didn’t come.
They stayed in touch, and being more aware of her two minds, she started to talk about feelings with the friend, and even about her secrets. All went well. She had no language for most feelings, having never admitted to them or overheard others discuss them, but she felt them clearly enough, so it was just a matter of learning the vocabulary.
Just in time too, because her first relationship was about to happen.
I was madly in love, but I was older, so I was concerned. I didn’t know what the explicit rules are around age gaps, but I had found a formula in the xkcd #314 and of course concluded that it was an unbreakable law.
My friend told me to ignore the age gap, and so my first relationship could start!
We both agreed that we wanted it to be a poly relationship. That was a tremendous relief for me because one of my greatest fears had always been that I would not be able to live up to some expectation or other in a relationship. Poly solved that. She could just have other partners to compensate.
What followed were two of the best years of my life. I think I unlocked the next tier only in 2024!
She wanted to commit for life and never look back. Her partner often warned her not to expect the relationship to last forever because we cannot predict what the future will bring. But she didn’t allow herself to even think thoughts like that her partner might break up with her. Even the thought felt like a betrayal to her. She always stopped it before it could fully form.
They moved in together, they traveled together, they even did a bit of charity fundraising together.
When she broke up with me, she did it very kindly. I would’ve liked to have more of a say in the matter, some kind of discussion of problems and solutions, but there were time constraints, and she found the least bad way to break it to me. She didn’t blame me for anything; she could hardly even think of a reason for it. I don’t know how she could’ve done it better given the constraints.
Nonetheless my friend’s future lay in shambles. She went into a deep depression that was dominated by anxious thoughts and the impression of not being able to trust anything or anyone anymore. Intrusive thoughts for months. In some weeks she could hardly work. It felt like she had no future anymore, and she herself was not a full person either, or so it seemed. Fragments of a person scattered everywhere.
But the math was clear: Her own suffering was only that, the suffering of one person. She had the power to alleviate equal and greater suffering of many more. Her life could be net positive regardless of her own suffering.
Even personally there was still plenty of hope: She calculated that she could remain depressed for up to another 14 years and still break even given her life expectancy and conservative assumptions about the remaining decades.
She resolved to not kill herself.
She also heard from a colleague that he had found an illegal source that sells SSRIs, and from another colleague that there are legal sources too. She got sertraline from her GP. Soon all emotions were on mute.
Somehow she had completed her MSc in the midst of all of this. She resolved to quit her other jobs and start a new life in another country.
Epilogue
Breakups only hurt for so long, and a year later she was over it.
Moving to another country turned out to have been a great idea financially, romantically, and psychologically.
One of her new partners chiseled away at her fears of therapy, and therapy turned out to be awesome! Her therapist had worked at a prison, which washes away all fears of shame. ADHD meds and HRT worked wonders too!
Her latest hobby is compassion as an extreme sport: Training her compassion to the max to prove to herself that she has the capacity to be self-compassionate no matter what and will never self-punish again. She’s starting to trust herself on that.