Part 1:

I occasionally get questions or praise or insults for remaining so levelheaded while the internet crumbles around me. Normally I just make some cool remark back, and let that be the end of it. Most people don’t press further, because a cool response just reinforces the “he’s just chill like that” view, and I prefer it that way. Most people don’t really go on to question the full extent of the context under which I’m being “just chill like that.”

Chill through death and revenge threats (my personal favorite being the proposed kickstarter campaign to mace me), calm at the doxxing of my parents, bored at ninety articles trying desperately to find new ways to call me a shithead so they can praise my poor abuser. Reasonable in the face of an ex obsessed with painting every attempt I make to mitigate her harassment as the acts of satan incarnate, quietly amused as progressive feminists make 4chan worthy comments about my genitals, and sangfroid as half of the internet starts a social movement while the other half calls for my head on a pike.

I imagine at this point you might be projecting some emotions to the paragraph above. Don’t bother. Your inadvertent analysis is probably incorrect. I ran it by some control groups, and their replies orbited around: “annoyed," "fed up,” and “struggling.” And these are words that never appear anywhere. The only emotional words in that paragraph were “calm”, “bored”, “amused” and "chill.“

I imagine what happened is that the control group saw words and phrases like "death”, “revenge”, “threat”, “doxx”, “praise my poor abuser”, “comments about my genitals”, and “head on a pike” and tried to find a feeling that doesn’t contradict my behavior and sentiments in light of how they themselves would feel in that position. But the correct answer is in fact “amused.” Because it is, in fact, an amusing paragraph. It’s a paragraph that instills its theme: it’s difficult to know how to feel. But we’ll get to that later. First, know that this is an exceedingly difficult post to write, for reasons that will also become clear later. And second, know that you should seriously not attempt to follow this advice too often if you’re younger than like, 16. Anyway, the advice:

How can you personally get to the point where even if you are reviled and publicly slandered and harassed and mocked and threatened by and in front of thousands of people, you are bored at worst and amused at best?

It takes some practice, and I’ve had enough over the past sixteen years or so that at this point I’m playing in expert mode, but if you find that you need it, and you’re willing to risk the consequences (and there can be some) you might find the trick helpful in difficult situations. 

So, imagine you’ve done something to piss someone off, and they’re yelling at you and saying all sorts of horrible things about you and – heck, maybe you even deserve some of them. What are you liable to feel? How are you liable to react? 

Now imagine a similar situation. Except you’re just a bystander. You see someone yelling and saying horrible things at someone else for something they did. And imagine that these are all things that you have also incidentally done (whether they are good or bad is irrelevant), but you’re not the one getting yelled at. How do you feel in that situation?

Control groups responded that in the first situation they would feel either defensive or attacked or angry, and in the second they would feel empathy, some for the person being yelled at, some for the person doing the yelling, depending perhaps on context.

Now imagine that in the second situation, you have a direct line into the head of the person getting yelled at, and you want to diffuse the situation, or maybe help fix whatever’s wrong. And imagine that this person is 100% willing to follow your advice. Now realize that this hypothetical situation results in the person getting yelled at reacting calmly and reasonably, and you personally not feeling attacked for things you incidentally have also done. Some stuff happened, and you are basically just fixing things. 

What if every difficult situation were like that? What if no one ever got angry at you or hurt you or annoyed with you? What if they only ever got angry at or annoyed with or hurt someone who is basically identical to you in appearance and history, and all you ever did was give that identical version advice?

Well, your identical copy would probably come across as reasonable and calm and empathetic. This seems like a win for everyone involved. No one gets hurt, things get fixed in healthy ways, or at least a best attempt is always made, and you all go on from there. So, maybe you can use it sometimes if you need it. What do you have to lose? 

Or, rather, what do you have to lose? 

Well, maybe everything. It’s kind of tricky. If you use it sparingly enough that there’s no risk of it becoming a problem, you’re not going to get very good at doing it, and so its effectiveness will be limited. If you use it constantly because (let’s say) you’ve grown up in a situation where you’ve basically had to use it constantly just to get by, then what you start to lose is your self. If you go through life handling most formative situations as an empathetic observer, then your identity becomes in large part that of an empathetic observer. And then things get weird.

For one, you’re acutely aware that your clone isn’t an actual entity with feelings, so you’re willing to let it be a punching bag. And externally this looks to other people as if you'rewilling to let yourself be a punching bag. But, you don’t really care. You’re removed from the situation, and you can toss your clone around in whatever way is needed to prevent things from getting worse for everyone who has a stake in the matter. Your clone doesn’t have a stake emotionally, so you don’t need to worry about it.

But then people will ask your clone how it feels. And how are you to tell it to respond then? You don’t know how the clone feels, because it’s just a clone, and you don’t know how you feel because nothing happened to you. So you’re basically just left going through significant portions of your life not really knowing how to feel.

Do this for years, and things can go one of two ways. You could choose to lose yourself completely because you’re satisfied with that and content to live your life as a detached observer, or you can realize it’s been years since you’ve been in an environment where you needed to rely so heavily on your clone, and you can now start trying to engage with people on a real and personal level.

One problem: It turns out that years spent impervious and unknown, makes the thought of vulnerability and know-ability pretty freaking scary, actually.   

We’re going to talk about the second route, but as an aside – if you take the first route, what you end up with is essentially schizoid personality disorder. There’s a lot of debate about whether or not it should actually be classified as a personality disorder, and a lot of difficulty studying it because almost by definition schizoids don’t want to be studied, (and there’s a lot of contradictory behaviors that get lumped and categorized in fancy tables that sort of ignore that there’s actually a lot of reasons why someone might resort to depersonalisation as a coping mechanism) Quick excerpt of things that are going to be common to most schizoids for those interested in what it ends up looking like though:

Schizoid Personality Disorder is characterized by a long-standing pattern of detachment from social relationships. A person with schizoid personality disorder often has difficulty expressing emotions and does so typically in a very restricted range, especially when communicating with others.

A person with this disorder may appear to lack a desire for intimacy, and will avoid close relationships with others. They may often prefer to spend time with themselves rather than socialize or be in a group of people. In laypeople terms, a person with schizoid personality disorder might be thought of as the typical “loner.”

Individuals with Schizoid Personality Disorder may have particular difficulty expressing anger, even in response to direct provocation, which contributes to the impression that they lack emotion. Their lives sometimes seem directionless, and they may appear to “drift” in their goals. Such individuals often react passively to adverse circumstances and have difficulty responding appropriately to important life events.

Okay, so you decide you don’t want to be live your life detached from all human experience. But again, you’re still pretty scared of letting people emotionally control you, how do you proceed? 

Personally, I went for slowly, and cautiously, and a little bit at a time. This was like three years ago.

At the time, I’d been dating this girl for about two and a half years, and she was really in love with me, and I basically found myself incapable of letting her past some imaginary threshold of intimacy. She was allowed further than anyone else, but that wasn’t saying very much. 

I recognized this as a massively unfair situation to put someone who cared about me in. So after a few months of stalling, I broke up with her, in the hopes that she could find someone who would love her back (she did, I think they’re happy now), and I set out to start fresh, interacting on increasingly personal levels with new people who seemed trustworthy and nice, but who I didn’t have a strong enough social bonds with that I couldn’t disappear if things got scary.

And this was working fairly well. I relied on my clone less and less, and I started speaking on my own behalf, even in vulnerable situations. I found that I could be calm and levelheaded, and I found that even if I gave people the tools to hurt me, most of them were kind enough not to. I could be more affectionate and intimate, and it was nice for me, and not the clone.I could get into sleep deprived caffeine fueled debates with my decade long best friend until he got mad at me. And it felt bad, but it was liberating to be the one feeling it. 

These years were strange at first. Because using the clone was almost instinct by then, and I’d have to catch myself doing it, and evaluate whether I needed to. And a lot of times when I wasn’t using the clone, I still didn’t really know how to feel about a lot of things, because it was basically the first time I was putting myself in the position to feel them, but I got better. I started relating to people as people, and not some mesh of toxic behaviors to untangle into a reasonable resolution. And in any case, the clone was still there if ever I needed it. Things were going well.

Then I met Zoe.

And for whatever reason I couldn’t understand at the time, the clone would keep jumping out for me to interact through seemingly at random. For reasons I also wasn’t sure of, Zoe picked up on the fact that I felt distant and difficult to comprehend emotionally. And this was especially tricky because, again, for reasons I didn’t understand at the time, this would make the clone jump in again. And if I tried to stop it, it would just jump in again like a few minutes later.

I should clarify at this point that the clone metaphor is actually just a metaphor and what it’s actually like is more akin to feeling as if someone isn’t speaking to you so much as you are just analyzing someone’s responses as they speak to your body, but we’ll keep the clone metaphor because it’s easier to use. 

In any case, the important thing is I didn’t really understand why I was regressing then of all times. After having come pretty far, and even having had another relationship before Zoe in which I had been doing better and better. But it was basically happening with increasing frequency, and so I sort of let Zoe know that emotional availability had historically not been a strong point for me – without going so far as to kill our relationship by saying (or even really accepting) “and I don’t know why, but you’re making it worse.”

In retrospect it’s fucking obvious why the clone was jumping in. It had sixteen years of training telling it to jump in when it picked up on exactly these sorts of situations. The ones that sixteen years of exposure to had left me thinking weren’t abnormal, but could only be reasonably dealt with by proxy. Or, less ominously, specifically the sorts of behaviors where someone is actively trying to manipulate your emotional state in their favor. So it would jump in when Zoe would get angry or frustrated about things that didn’t really warrant anger or frustration. It would jump in when Zoe would tell me I was too distant, because that is basically an explicit demand that I change my emotional state to appease someone else. And it would jump right back in again a few sentences after I pushed it back because as soon as I had pushed it back some other behavior would demand it jump right back in.

And this is the weird thing. I didn't know what emotional abuse was because I hadn’t really treated it as such. But clearly I knew exactly what emotional abuse was because it was comprised of exactly the behaviors I was avoiding. But I’d only ever treated them as situations best handled by proxy. And I’d lived a life where I had to handle a lot of situations by proxy. So, listen. Serious props to Phil for making his emotional abuse video series based on thezoepost, because that seriously helps me on a personal level with understanding why the whole depersonalization thing spontaneously happens. Like it’s basically a one to one correspondence between behaviors outlined so far and situations where the clone would jump in. So yes, if I come across as distant or robotic in response to parts of the logs where things escalate, now you know the reason.

[This is taxing as fuck to write because I am basically giving the entire internet the ammo it needs if it actually wants to hurt me, so I’m taking a break, next post is tomorrow]