phase distortion synthesis
At some point in the last few weeks, I managed to drift largely out of phase with the world around me.
It's not that I'm especially socially isolated, although I am pretty socially isolated. It's a small world that I inhabit, but I'm neither alone nor in exile here.
It's not that I've lost my grip on reality, consensus or otherwise, although I do maintain a pretty light grip on it. Material circumstance and material consequence keep me grounded for now. I often struggle to recognize my own conceptual frameworks and experiences in the expressed realities of others, but I continue to value the work of navigating and appreciating the interfaces between these frameworks and realities.
Whatever it is, it's probably not a terribly surprising development in the context of a sustained assault on verifiable and contextualized information at a societal level coupled with a campaign to expunge me and many like me from public life. I'm less interested in the context right now than the texture of the experience itself, however.
I'm out of phase in time. I'm awake when others are asleep, asleep when others are awake. I eat at odd, ad-hoc times, in amounts that don't necessarily correspond to any integer multiple of A Meal. I work on holidays, I work on holy days, and I sleepwalk my way through workdays. When I can manage a conversation with most people, it is smeared across several disjointed weeks with the aid of asynchronous communication.
I'm out of phase in valence. My moral and emotional reflexes feel severely miscalibrated, especially when it comes to evaluating my own suffering. I don't flinch away from hot pans. My prey instinct is dull. Bad news relieves me of waiting for some particular shoe to drop. Pain reminds me of my capacity for endurance. It's not a desire for self-harm or some sublimated self-loathing; I do genuinely want good things for myself, and I still strive to make them happen as I can. My utility function just has peaks where one expects valleys.
Whatever this is, I'm not particularly distressed by it, but I recognize the precarity of such an experience. I don't expect, or even really want, to re-synchronize myself, but I do want to retain the capacity to drift back into approximate phase with others.
To that end, I do have a bluesky now. I won't post it here; I don't really want to establish too many identifiable links from my old online identity. If you happen to encounter a familiar echo there, it'll probably be decently obvious that it's me.