Scribbles and Bits

Rogan: Whew! Got through Arisia. It went well! Made good money, used the quiet times to pencil and ink some stuff, and surprise: we got some important insight into how our (particularly MY) neurology works, courtesy of LJ Cohen!

We've paneled with Cohen a few times on neurodiversity panels, and she's been open about having aphantasia. Because I've been getting commenters lately on my headspace building/discovery and defense posts that boil down to "I have aphantasia, what am I supposed to do?" I went to pick her brain.

Where I learned that's what my headspace blindness is.

( Aphantastic! )

Title: Headspace Discovery and Defense
Series: Essay
Word Count: 4000
Summary: Dealing with a living, volatile, or aggressive headspace.  Probably the start of what will be series.
Notes: This essay was the winner of this month's writing poll, and as always was funded by the Patreon crew!  This is kind of a weird essay on a weird subject, and it will likely come off as metaphysical and abstract, but we'll see if this is something that's useful to folks not us!

There are a good few guides for building your own headspace out there. (We link a few at healthymultiplicity.com, and ATW has a section devoted to it in their DID self-help book, got parts?, which you can find at www.gotparts.org.) However, all treat headspace as an inert object, a resource to be molded and mined at will: “It’s imaginary! It has to do what you say!”

But even in our early days, we knew folks for whom these guides failed. Their headspaces were violent, volatile, or just plain unpredictable. Our own headspace, though well-meaning and mostly benign, would lash out periodically or do strange things such as pour rubber duckies onto our heads, and conventional guides had no real explanation or guidance asides from, “will harder! It’s your mind, and you can make it obey!”

But what if there was more to it? What if will wasn’t the end-all be-all of headspace management? What if the problem was not our will, but our attitude?

If this is a problem you have faced, then this essay is for you.
( Read more... )