It’s new years day and it’s time to write out some resolutions, or goals, or aims or what have you. Some polaris to orient towards in the coming 365 days. Also a time to reflect, as I sit here next to mountains of snow in the quiet of afternoon.
My last year was pretty great. I feel like I came into myself, more and more fully. It was a year of growth, growth in ways I’m not really used to, more like outwards and peripheral growth than straightforward and narrow growth. But I think that was good for me, anyways. I feel more like me.
I started dating someone really special, someone who has helped show me how to be free, intakes beauty like me, who fucking loves me! Wow! What it is to be loved. It is like nothing else, really. It is the most beautiful thing, a thing to cherish and to hold. I love him, too. In short, I found someone of the same soul signature as me, and it’s as ecstatic and melancholy and fast and slow and sad and alive and bursting and bubbling and joyous and hilarious and playful and intense as me.
But I also found me. I started this year in Oakland, moving in with my boyfriend into a new house that was a little life-sucking. A McMansion-y thing. But our room was big – so big! And it let in all the light and rain and was filled with books and art and instruments and uncountably many nights next to the fire, on the floor, laughing, longing, crying.
Oh, I’m a crier. I think not many people know this about me because I am typically very extroverted and happy around people. And that’s all true. I am a very happy, adventurous person. But I cry a lot. I’m super emotional. I’m kind of intense. It’s good, overall, I like it. I feel alive. But sometimes it’s a lot to handle, and sometimes it’s bad. I cry about being alone, I cry because I feel the weight of years pressing on me, so little I’ve accomplished so fucking worthless. I cry because of my traumas and because I get so little sleep and because I have no friends.
Which of course isn’t true at all. I do have worth, I have accomplished things, I do have friends. But there’s a mode I get into where none of that feels real, in fact where nothing feels real. The trees, slowly swaying in the nighttime wind seem just a bit… dystopian. Scary. Love feels far away. I feel alone. And I think probably I’m a bit cyclothymic (like pretty low-key bipolar), and I think also I experienced some pretty extreme and complex trauma. And I’m still trying to figure it all out.
The good news is that I have figured it out, a lot more now than I ever have. I’ve figured out that the feelings I get are all associated with this word: worthlessness. That somehow there was something really special and beautiful that was taken from me, and that part of my mind still implicitly assumes that the way I’m going to get it back is through these specific people who really hurt me. And I’m always measuring my self, my worth, up to them. Part of me thinks we’re still best friends, and is seeking their approval. Approval which, of course, I’m likely to never get.
But there’s been a shift, in noticing that. And in something my boyfriend said to me a few weeks ago which really stuck. He said that if I spent a long time feeling and thinking about it, I would come to the conclusion that my update should be more about how these people suck, rather than some update about how unworthy I am. And I was like, oh, wow, you’re right.
Of course I knew that, I’d known that for a long time, known that they were shitty, known that I was probably better off without them, known that my life with them would be dramatically worse in so many ways than my life is now – but somehow hearing someone else say that, and all the background processing I had been doing, it just clicked a bit, spoke to the part of me that felt so hurt, that didn’t understand why anything that bad could have happened.
I can feel the tendrils of self-worth growing up in me, the little bits and pieces of reclaiming myself as a whole.
And so I feel like I’m making progress there, progress which has been a long time coming. I’m getting better handles on what these worthlessness bouts are like, what they’re about, why they happen. I’m figuring out more of my triggers and I’m feeling a bit more worthy and a bit more me.
A lot of other things happened in the year. I went to oceans and cabins and deserts and plains. I went to the east coast and went to a funeral for my boyfriend's mother. It’s just terrible, death. I feel that a lot, but I felt it so strongly then. I cry thinking about her sometimes, a person I’ve only met very briefly, and yet through the stories and the words of others and who my boyfriend is as a person, I feel like I know her. And I feel like something real and special was lost and I feel the weight of that. And the weight it bears on my boyfriend, who I love very much and hate that he lost someone so close to him.
I saw a great friend who I hadn’t seen for years and it was a ton of fun. I went on long train rides and felt very sad and also very alive. I stayed at cabins, weeks of pure delight. With someone I feel intellectually paired with (my boyfriend, again!). I’ve never had that and it’s something I’ve always, deeply craved. Someone with the same sorts of curiosities as me, who is looking and boggling at the world in the same sort of way, who is fascinated with the same questions as me. Who I can talk with and trust that he’ll understand my frame such that we can boggle at things as a collective. It’s, wow, it’s so cool. I am so grateful.
I also left my grad program, which was gnawing at me to become someone who I wasn’t. It was the culmination of my quest to achieve worth and recognition through societal means, to make my dad happy, to have something to say at parties, to fit into the fabric of worth that is presupposed and external to me.
But it wasn’t me. I love the subject of cognitive science, I love minds, I love thinking about all of it. I still spend most of my time doing that. But the way I had to do it in grad school was forced, it was in all kinds of directions I didn’t really think made sense, but I wasn’t allowed to push back against them. “Wasn’t allowed.” I mean it in the sense of like, it would have been hard, and coming from a place where I was still exploring and figuring it all out, pushing hard in some direction wouldn’t have made sense. And pushing to explore would have been equally difficult and weird.
So, I left. The best decision I’ve ever made. I am so much happier now. It was hard and I kept having feelings like “oh god what am I doing with my life.” I had to relinquish some control. I kept saying to myself “if I had a job or something lined up this would be so much easier, but what am I going to do – just leave and read for a year or whatever?? What the hell is my life going to become? I won’t ever accomplish anything!”
And you know what, I left and it’s been a few months and mostly I have been reading and thinking and writing but it’s fucking great. It’s amazing! It’s the best thing ever. I feel so lucky to have enough money to be able to do something like this. And I don’t feel scared, scared that I won’t be able to get a job, that I won’t accomplish anything. I already have, and I trust that I will. I’m a smart, curious, driven person. I have faith in me, and more than that, I have faith in the world.
Because leaving grad school did require some leap of faith. I wasn’t leaving for a job, I was leaving for the great abyss of the unknown. I had no idea what my future looked like, what it could be. And that was part of it, I think. Sometimes you just have to make the decision that feels right, and lean into what might come, relinquish some control, let the universe guide you. And if that sounds like some woo shit, well it is, a little, but I think it’s nonetheless true.
When you let yourself up into the void, when you give up the constraints that have so far held you in certain places, and let in other energies, other opportunities – they come. When you are receptive, and are guided by your internal gradients, not the ones set out for you, I don’t know man, it just seems like it works out way better. And I don’t know why, really, but right now I don’t really care. I just know that there’s something to it. Relinquishing control, finding your taste, and going out into the world – this is my new years resolution, my polaris. The thing I want to keep aiming for. Because it’s beautiful and I think it works.
Narrow energy is good too, getting things done is great. But you should never let your energy be captured by the fabric around you. Social gradients are set up all around you, so easy to click into, but there will always be a tension there because they’re not you. Your gradients pull you in different directions and being at a crossroads between the two hinders you. You move less, do less, I think. Finding your own gradients, the ones that you feel that innate excitement to pursue, the places you find yourself wanting to go to, the directions that make you feel alive to follow – those are you. And if you lean into them, the world opens up as you go.
Indeed. I was really excited about this one dude, Michael Levin. I’m still really excited about him. I think he’s onto something really big in the study of things living, I think he’s one of the coolest scientists around. And I felt that excitement within me, and I reached out to him to see if he wanted to collaborate, thinking surely he wouldn’t, thinking that he was obviously too busy and too high status to talk to a lowly PhD dropout like myself. But I reached out anyways because I was so drawn to it, and lo and behold he did want to! And we email each other regularly, having philosophical discussions, exactly the sort I was itching for in grad school. It’s just… it’s so amazing. I never would have thought I could just reach out into the world and… get what I wanted! But I could, and I don’t know why exactly, but from the inside it sure feels like it was because I was finding myself, and following my own polaris, not some borrowed one from all of my social and familial anxieties.
So, it was a pretty good year. I feel more me, more genuinely me. I feel less anxious and less depressed (although I still have a long way to go, to be sure). I feel like I made some real strides in processing trauma I’ve been carrying around for a long time. I feel really in love. I’m more playful, I’m more artistic. I’m leaning more into these things that are really me, that I’ve been neglecting the last few years. I’m writing! Which is huge – this is something that’s been so bottlenecked on with societal anxiety, something that I’ve always been tense around – how I’m going to sound, how people will perceive me, if everyone will think I’m -gasp- dumb! But I’ve been writing more, a lot more recently, and it’s been just so great.
And for this next year, honestly I kind of want to mostly keep doin what I’m already doin. I want to work with Michael Levin, I want to see his work come to fruition. I want to figure out how I relate to AI x risk more clearly. I want to figure out things like abstraction, agency, entropy, intelligence. I want to come into myself more, I want to see where there’s tension and see if there are any moves where I can feel into fluid energy instead. I want to move into a group house. I want to be more vivacious and meet more people and build up communities of interesting and genuine people. I want to feel and tap into love so full and free. I want to give love and happiness to the people I’m around, share in them with laughter and joy. I want to see and make beautiful things. But I think all of that is going to come from this place of rediscovering me, who I am, what makes me feel alive, and following those directions more and more.
Happy new years everyone. I hope year 2021 was great and that 2022 holds even more in store :)
ps. some memories/pictures:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb28b0e5e-c2c5-4da8-8169-c581ad3c2dd9_1024x768.jpeg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbff44ab5-92aa-444e-ab20-e49fb3ce2dae_1024x768.jpeg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F122e3183-1fac-4f07-9d06-01c70fe176f9_1024x768.jpeg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff6763b40-4fb1-4333-b458-d0647b8c10ec_1086x724.jpeg)
Okay that is all :)