Is my gophermap really reflective of what I post here and how it
is meant to be read? It's hard to tell if the reader can
appreciate that this place is mostly a therapy tool for me.
I am treating myself as a character in a story. In some ways I
think it might even be that the person who writes here actually
IS a different character than my more normal me.
If you can speak more than one language fluently, you know what
I mean. You probably have different pitch, different tempo,
different amount of body-language when you speak the second
language.
I've been hearing both psychologists and neuroscientists talking
about how we are not actually one person. There are experiments,
like the one with lobotomized people having one hand express a
different desire than the other.
There definitely is a "person" inside me that gets addicted to
things and another "person" who really does not want to. Is it
either of them who writes this phlog? It could be a dialogue.
The addictive one has no sense of time. The way time manifests
itself is through repetition. That's the addiction.
The more responsible one is making all these plans, but they
will often fail, because the addictive personality comes online
and keeps doing it's thing.
There are ways to fool the addictive person into going along
with the plans of the responsible one. I live above a bar, and
have made a point of not going in there. The addictive person
does not want to do new things, so it will not walk into an
unknown bar. It would be the other person who went there first.
The addictive one is extremely lazy, in a particular way: It will
keep doing some hard thing over and over again, rather than think
of a new way. This is how it's possible to start using it to do
something positive. Like, at the moment I am actually addicted to
walking quite long distances, after walking all summer.
The responsible one is planning similar coups. They are quite hard
to pull off, though. You really need to keep pushing a while to
get a momentum. And it is better to do it with some ulterior
motive to present to the addictive one. Something that is
enjoyable in the moment.
But who is writing here? Often it is someone who is chewing on
a concept, but hasn't brought it up to a conscious level. The
writing is bringing the concept up, but more like a glimpse than
a definitive statement. Maybe the energy that is needed to push
it up is often so strong that the effort needed for the delivery
mangles the message, possibly making it seem more definite than
it actually is.
Sometime the writer is the responsible one, but more often than
not it's on a rather sour and jealous mood. The responsibility
is contrasted to the society's addictive ambient tone, making
the responsible one quite resentful.
The addictive one does not speak here. Maybe there is a regretful
one that is closest to the addictive one. The regretful has a
limited sense of time, it is the time between a past wrong and
the present state. A time as narrow as a hangover.
If there is an enlightenment,
it will be reached by the addictive one.
