📝 Alex's scrapbook

The stories we tell about ourselves (2025-05-13)

Sep 19, 20254 min read

Since writing my last post about my “nuclear fission → solar power → nuclear fusion” analogy, I’ve had a sense of ickiness, of wrongness. I think this is so so insanely cool.

Part of my journey has been from left hemisphere captured, alexithymic trauma dude to aware-of-my-body, aware of the felt sense (shout Eugene Gendlin’s “Focusing”) guy. It’s such a simple thing, but it feels absolutely miraculous to me: the fact that I can write something, and for 2 days afterwards have this embodied sense of “ew no that wasn’t quite right”. So cool!!! 1

Investigating this felt sense of wrongness, of “that model isn’t quite right”, one problem I can identify is that it condenses the “fission” era into “productive but Very Toxic”, in a way that doesn’t really match the reality, in a way that overemphasises the bad, obscures the good, etc.

This is bad because the stories we tell about ourselves will always be incredibly crude approximations of true reality, and we have the freedom to shape our stories, and I find that I can often have a particularly self deprecating, negative storycrafting mode by default.

(Cate Hall is an awesome person for thinking about this area. She appears in a Clearer Thinking podcast called “are we all the heroes of our own stories?”, her twitter bio is literally “born lucky”, her Substack is called “Useful Fictions”.)

For a long time I operated with the story of “my childhood was especially bad”. And then I did a Jhourney at-home meditation retreat where I experienced the second Jhana: a meditative absorption state essentially like a positive feedback loop, where a positive feeling leads to more positive feelings, which grows and grows into literal ecstasy.

Jhana 2 is a gratitude feedback loop. I can’t explain how I managed it, and I only managed it once, but I ended up weeping with absolute joy as a seemingly infinite stream of happy memories from all eras of my life flooded into my consciousness. I absolutely, deeply wept. It was so beautiful - in every era, at every age, so many things to be grateful for, so much love, joy, special moments to cherish, memories that I can access at any time. It sounds trite, but truly it felt like an enormous pile of gold had been right behind me my whole life whilst I focused solely on the (also rather large) pile of shit2.

I think there’s still a long way for me to go re: skillfully reconstructing my life story and self model, but I’m really excited about the progress I’ve made, and the fact that I have very clear paths forwards. What a time to be alive!!! I love this shit.

I’ve been writing this for 50 minutes so I’ll leave it there. Basically, it feels so great to be able to quickly diagnose things that have a whiff of bullshit, in this case both an overly simplistic model, and the recognition of a common pattern of “telling a story which overemphasises the bad”. To be clear, the model is still a decent match, but it has some very salient errors which I’m looking forward to investigating and making a diagram about, lol.

Xoxo Alexgirl3

Footnotes

  1. There’s so much here → the felt sense of Eugene Gendlin, the “Decartes was a fucking dumbass, there’s no body/mind split, it’s ‘I am therefore I think’” shift in philosophy starting with Husserl/Heidegger, right-hemisphere holism vs left-hemisphere capture, Heidegger’s thing of us seeing ourselves as technology, disembodied rationalists who say not to listen to your feelings (see the book “Decartes’ Error). It’s so rich! Buddhism for god’s sake, non-dual, thoughts-and-bodily-sensations-appear-in-the-same-space-obviously etc. Michael Polanyi’s tacit knowledge and Boyd’s emphasis on the importance of mismatches
 it goes on and on and on and on - don’t stop! [Sopranos reference] ↩

  2. Of course, the thing with minds is, we can massively amplify the felt size of either pile by how much time we dwell on it. Obsess about the pile of shit and it will feel 100x bigger and genuinely dwarf the non-amplified pile of gold. Do daily gratitude journaling and metta meditation and you can take the gold pile, which may not even be that big, and 100x it. One of these ways of living is skillful, the other is fucking moronic. I really need to start doing metta!!!! ↩

  3. I’ve never watched gossip girl, I’m a fraud ↩

Graph View

Backlinks