Things relating to my experience of mind.
View All TagsI've always struggled with maintaining a daily routine, both in remembering to and in finding a reason to bother. Over the past couple of years, I've come to realize that I've needed some kind of ritual to bring meaning to not just the routine but the passage of time. Both of which are things that I haven't had much luck with.
I am not unique. The idea of a transfem developer that plays Minecraft coming to their identity relatively late in life is such a common stereotype on the trans forums that I'm on that it's hilarious how much I've boxed myself into it. Add that to the number of ace people that seem to be autistic on similar forums and some days I feel like a walking stereotype. But even if that was my entire story, that those descriptors were all I had to share with people, I believe there'd still be a unique value to my voice and an impact I can have among the thousands of others with the same experiences.
Time doesn't fly, it falls with everything else, accumulating with the mess we live through. If time were to fly, it would be a fleeting thing, something that we notice on the sidelines or admire on the rare occasions that it stands still. Instead it crashes into us like a waterfall, and builds up below us like sand, weighing us down as we age. Tearing the things we build to pieces and wearing down our bodies with each grain we are hit with.
I've had to consider the concept I discussed in September a lot over the last month as I get ready for my next Neurology appointment, and while discussing it with someone I remembered a word that I never get to use in regular conversation, gestalt. As defined on the Merriam-Webster website a gestalt is,
something that is made of many parts and yet is somehow more than or different from the combination of its parts
broadly : the general quality or character of something
I'm going to ask you to follow me down a seemingly absurd train of thought that I had today while listening to a podcast about a particular preacher who feels that hurricanes don't have rights to anywhere inhabited by humans. While I don't think that she's considered how that actually works, I was just tired enough at the time to ask myself why it doesn't work that way. Why don't we give rights to the forces of nature that we fight against and that we're trying to protect at the same time?
I was reading The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in June this year, and found that I related to the idea of bifurcating yourself and neglecting one half, only to be forced to face it later in life. I don't doubt in the slightest that people far smarter than me have gone over this part of the book in much greater detail, but I wanted to write about it myself anyway. A section of Dr. Jekyll's account in particular hits very close to home for me.
It feels really weird to talk about this because some of the things I mention are tropes in TV shows, Books, or Movies that I relate to, and I'd imagine that's because I can't really know how other people order their thoughts unless we talk about it. The issue being that the topic of how we think isn't very common, but it is something I seek out in the media I consume. Some more of the discomfort comes from the fact that if I try to find others talking about it online, the search results are overtaken by discussions of the media it was mentioned in instead of people who also feel the same way, or even just find that way of thinking interesting.
Suffice to say, I'll be using words and structures similar to some media you might have consumed, but I'm trying to convey something entirley unrelated to the media. The media from which I have taken these words only gave me the ability to comunicate these ideas in words.
Up to this point I've only been asked this question once, but a combination of the assumptions I can see being made and what it actually means to me makes me want to write something up in regards to my chosen last name, Trinket.
It’s been a while since I’ve made a blog post, but today Mojang released a video that really hit me and I wanted to get the words out while I had them. I would strongly recommend watching that video, it’s extremely short but it does a great job of capturing a person’s experience with Minecraft and their disability.
When I was growing up I was ravenous for knowledge, and random pieces of information that I came across would be next obsession. Every week I was on a whole new topic, a completely different field of study. While I still retain a large portion of that hunger, to the extent that “Information Sponge” has come to be my de facto self-description, there has been a rather large change in a significant portion of my world view.