hex_m_hell

My therapist asked me to write about the ways in which my early childhood trauma affected the direction of my life. So, naturally, I spent the following several days reading about cybernetics, coming up with projects, writing on my work-related blog, and generally avoiding the subject.

I'm intensely drawn to the idea of spending several hours writing about threat modeling, which overwhelmed my mind last night. I lay awake thinking about formal languages based on constrained English, threat inheritance, and using data flow graphs to identify risk. During that time I did not think about how frustrated I can get when my kids start fighting, or how overwhelming their feelings must be for them right now.

I designed and wrote a testing framework, now used by thousands of people. Tests are developed by multiple teams. Test definitions are relatively easy to write, and (unlike many other things) actually lend themselves well to being written by LLMs. This is true, despite the fact that LLMs didn't exist when I designed and wrote the first prototype.

I spend days, weeks, in deep thought. I thought about code. I thought about organizational structures. I've spent so much time reading and learning, trying to understand. I focused to the exclusion of everything else: first my pregnant partner, then my kids.

The first six weeks after the birth of each of my children was the most human I have been for a long time. The first week is nothing but survival. You must be present because a tiny life is relying on your constant attention. But even as the weeks rolled on, as I was off of work and able to focus on my family, the trial crept back in and pulled my attention away. Then the disability and leave team, having messed something or other up, threatened me.

It's so much easier to follow those threads: logic, fear, distraction. It's easier to fill my head with something than to leave it empty and quiet enough for the feelings to come in.

I never noticed before. It just felt exciting to hack for hours straight, order a sandwich to eat while reading some specification or other, focusing on each detail until my roommates broke my concentration with a glass of whiskey and chants of “bar night.”

Focus, then numb, for decades now. When did it even start? From the moment I got my eyes on the Internet, I was always thinking. Perhaps some of that was a reaction to the boredom of rural living, spending most of the day alone in my house while my mom was at work. I wasn't much older back then than my oldest is now. How much different it must be for her, unending activity vs my unending isolation.

The more I've unwound it, the more I've been able to allow myself to feel, the worse I feel I've gotten at my job. Then one day I couldn't do it anymore. I noticed it before I actually snapped. This time I noticed my feelings.

Years earlier I had put my fist through a window. That's what it had taken for me to realize there was a problem.

Before the shooting, I had spent a few years in therapy. After those few years I experienced something I hadn't ever experienced: I stopped thinking for a few moments. My internal dialog, which had never really stopped as long as I could remember, was silent. My therapist was Buddhist. We had focused on mindfulness. I had been gone to a meditation course at Toorcamp a little earlier and had been working on my awareness. After a bit more work, I was able to be present for a bit.

I hadn't noticed how much I had been suppressing my emotions by thinking. But the more I would take a moment here and there to just be present, the more I noticed them. I realized I needed to stop working as a consultant for a bit. I went to work somewhere else. On the walk to work every day I would stop for a moment and breathe.

Then Trump happened. It was a reminder of something I had left behind. My experience in the rural part of the American West Coast were dark. I was different, and the places I lived were not very tolerant of difference. And I was bored. There was a crushing boredom, a hopelessness, a feeling of being trapped. Looking back now, I realize it's not so much rural living as a reality constrained by my lack of access to a car. The Internet changed some of these things. Some people opened their minds a bit. (Other people became more radically entrenched in their intolerance.)

But at that time, in that place, I had felt trapped and hopeless. It had almost killed me, but I had escaped. Now the horrible thing I recognized, the wild incompetence, the anti-intellectualism, the fanatical religious authoritarianism, the blatant corruption, they were all there. They were all embodied in one man.

Folks living in cities felt the time warp. This thing didn't belong to the modern era. It was old and weird, clawing us all back in time. But for me that time also had a place. I had felt the time warp in reverse when I escaped. But the monster had followed me.

That focus, filling my mind with so much information that nothing else could get in, was adaptive under capitalism. It got me job after job. I was a top performer wherever I worked, because I never stopped trying to get better. My personal life would vanish as I poured myself into learning, growing, improving. I read books and took classes. No one could believe I had dropped out of high school. All of my peers had secondary degrees. I could pass for something that I wasn't, and part of that was driven by fear: fear that I would be found out, fear that I would, somehow, have to go back.

But back came for everyone, so I organized.

I had learned this skill, the skill of learning, the skill of focusing at the exclusion of everything. I had learned it to adapt to capitalism, to adapt to my trauma, to keep myself safe. I applied the skill. I applied it to my organizing, I applied it at work. I was always working on something. I worked on organizing plans. I wrote code. I worked on software architectures. I wrote papers, so many papers, to get these ideas funded. I pushed myself without feeling. I pushed until I broke. (or, I guess, until I broke a window.)

Time off, therapy, things started to get better. We realized we could leave. I paid attention to my feelings. We moved to the Netherlands.

I thought that things could be better, and they were. The longer I've been here, the more I've been able to be with my feelings. When I stopped working, I realized I needed to focus on my emotions if I wanted any hope of getting back to work. So I've been writing.

The more I do this, the more I let myself engage with feelings, the more I've started to notice this thing that I do. Sometimes it even comes in when I'm in therapy or talking about my feelings. I shift to the theory, the context, depersonalize it and think about my experience as part of the system.

But I didn't follow that thread last night. I let myself drift away from theory and notice what I had been doing.

This adaptation, which I learned to deal with childhood trauma, works well for capitalism but poorly for parenting. So here I am, trying to figure out how to balance the need to fill my head with information, theory and code, to get back to work against the needs of my kids for me to be emotionally available. And the transition is harsh.

I want to talk about capitalism. I want to talk about how it tunes people in maladaptive ways. I want to talk about how it is a system of death, a system that gradually makes social reproduction more difficult until it kills the society it infects. I want to talk about all this, so I don't have to think about how bad it feels to actually be in the thing. By thinking about this as a system, I can rally a comfortable anger against something horrible. By thinking about this as a system, I can remove myself from the experience of it. By thinking about this system, I can not feel it.

It is far easier to talk about this monstrous system, to clinically analyze it, than to admit that I feel scared, and sad, and helpless. The monstrosity of this faceless system, operating on the emotionless logic of profit, mirrors the incomprehensibility of the world of my own childhood.

And there's the answer. How has my childhood trauma shaped my life? How hasn't it? Every part of who I am is intermeshed with my strategies for adapting to this trauma. So then, what am I left with if I treat the trauma? How do I survive if survival in the capitalist system has been predicated on an adaptation to trauma that eliminates the feelings I need to help my kids grow?

How do I let go of something I need? How do I provide for my family without the tool that makes me successful?