(no subject)

[flamingsword]

9. What was this year’s most memorable experience?

The three most memorable experiences were Bat dying, C ghosting/friend-dumping me, and Ghost not talking to me for three days. Despite those being the memorable experiences, it’s still been a year full of connection and quiet joys. It was not terrible even if a lot of things ended that I was attached to.

I don’t think that “memorable” equates to “most important”, especially not for people who have trauma. Our brains are catastrophizing bastards that preferentially remember the bad stuff that might come back to threaten us in the future. That doesn’t make it correct in its priorities.

Comments

[cosmolinguist]

Thanks for saying this last paragraph. I'm always sad that I don't remember good things better. But it's just because my brain is broken, it's not because good things don't happen.

I forget which neuroscientist said this

[flamingsword]

Our brains are not “broken”, necessarily, it’s just that their purpose for existence is not the same thing as our purpose as people. As much as we try to make them do so, human brains are not built to understand the world, but to survive it. It doesn’t matter that we’re not optimized for things beyond survival, most of the time, since surviving is step one in achieving all of our ideals and we can eventually train our brains to do all kinds of things they weren’t designed for (like complex math).

But sometimes who you are as a person runs smack into the limits of your hardware. And then you find out that trauma makes your brain pick whichever Fight-Flight-Freeze-Fawn response it thinks will get you through the current threat alive … sometimes when there is no threat. 🤷 We’re not broken, we just deal imperfectly with a world that is orders of magnitude more complex and chaotic than we can comprehend. I think we can cut ourselves some slack for that?

Re: I forget which neuroscientist said this

[cosmolinguist]

This is really true, thanks for being so wise in response to a flippant comment I made. <3

Re: I forget which neuroscientist said this

[flamingsword]

It’s cool. I just know that telling yourself that you’re broken is a good way to let shame get its foot in the door to decide your actions for you. I don’t want that for anyone.

In your defense, I should not have used pejoratively language when talking about my brain in the post. I do know better than that, so some of these comments are written to my address also. 😅

Re: I forget which neuroscientist said this

[minoanmiss]

beams at you