There’s a shape you learn to make when you’re small and scared. If you’re a certain kind of sensitive to it I bet I could press my hand up against you, limp at the wrist but pushing out at the edges, and you’d recognize it. And it’s the movement that you learned made things happen.
The sum total of every time that you bashed your head into a wall and called yourself an idiot, the learned attrition of acting out, every authority figure imprinted into your brain for a pretty straightforward purpose.
You were born alive and knowing you wanted to stay that way, and food was important. And so you learned how not to push. You learned to be gentle with the figures who kept that circuit lit. When you were hungry, you cried. When you learned that that got you nothing, you screamed. You learned that that was met with yelling to pipe down, so you were quiet, and then tried again. Nothing, and then more yelling when you got louder.
You would not understand why eating food from someone you didn’t trust with your life made you want to throw up until you were twenty-seven.
And so you learned. You learned that the louder was yelling. You calibrated carefully and it imprinted into your neurons. You could feel it in your every breath. You could feel it catch when you evaluated other threats in ways you wouldn’t identify until later, places where your pattern-recognition would tell you that soap was going to yell at you if you didn’t use it properly and you wouldn’t think about it in those words until much much later.
You would learn every interaction this way. You would find out that your mannerisms made you a creep, and this provided your burgeoning pattern-recognition mesh with a framework to understand itself through. It was abundantly apparent that you were supposed to make friends and love people, that this was how to connect and live, the way the EAT impulse pointed towards. And so you learned how not to do (cry louder), with your body, so there wasn’t yelling (leaving you). You kind of shrunk when someone got near you and beat the shrinking shape into something that wouldn't make people leave you for sniveling like that.
This was not good. Eventually you hit college. You picked a major you burned out in. But you made friends. And the friends were cool. They were queer and you had not had openly queer friends before. They were okay. They didn’t seem to know what to do with EAT and you watched it throw them around the room a little bit like a poltergeist. You were very concerned about whether it was your moral responsibility to “control” EAT and its (avoid: leaving you) tendrils that patterned throughout every conversation you made. EAT did not seem to be so concerned with this. Your friends tolerated her until she saw herself out in a messy and dramatic fashion that would characterize your twenties.
EAT would begin dictating the way that you tried to move on and fail upwards. Relationships ceased being about surviving, let alone thriving, and began to be about who could stand to be around her while you tried to figure her out. You would have a conversation with someone and feel (avoid: leaving you) creep out from your intuitions across their words, driving spikes into how you spoke to keep them engaged. You would learn, by necessity, the way evolution spent millennia carving into your DNA, how to filter between successes and failures here. Remember, abandonment meant a lack of social access, which meant you couldn’t EAT. If you failed at assessing whether you could EAT you died. So you would calculate, with great certainty, whether someone was going to leave you or not. It stopped mattering whether it was self-fulfilling. What mattered was if it was accurate. Self-fulfilling prophecies would be dealt with by higher-order incarnations of the metapattern, language you would only create years later by necessity to begin to describe any of this. Accuracy first. Consequences as a function of accuracy.
Someone would be sweet and kind and EAT would steer you away from them and the light in you that cared about butterflies would grow a little dimmer. “I guess I can’t have that. I have to survive.” Their words would paint patterns that were coarse and jagged to your young adult pattern-recognition mechanism, even if the words were kind, and the mechanism was alive by this point. You would come to realize that a lot of people operate with some degree of this in them and do not feel it as tightly woven into necessity. They are comfortable being led by intuition that does not have names and pronouns and they are not interested in higher-order incarnations of metapatterns because they are busy ordering lunch without throwing up, which doesn’t seem as hard for them as it does for you.
So let’s talk about the back part of EAT. We have spoken a lot about (pushes at the edges). But she is also (limp wrist). What this means is that she has a secret! And the secret is the noise she makes when she is certain nobody is listening.
EAT has figured out that louder is yelling, which means if no yelling then EAT is being quiet. EAT is a consequentialist and has learned that there is a threshold below which she is undetectable for the purposes of self-preservation, and she has created a void-realm here called infinity. In simple terms, when you cried as a child, you not only learned how loud wouldn’t get you food; you learned how quiet would earn you privacy. This, too, propagated through your new continual movement mechs. You became someone who would appear in people’s blind spots and startle them, by habit more than intent.
EAT placed the key to get under all of this in infinity. The reasoning gets a little bit complicated but looks something like “someone who can see the quiet movements you make behind your cloak and isn’t yelling might have answers to how all this works.” The reasoning gets tangled into “someone who can tell if I’m hiding might save me.” You develop a fetish for predatory women.
It happens sort of suddenly. Jarringly so. This has developed for decades and you meet her. And EAT says her voice is sweet like honey and soft like velvet. And infinity is lit up with the hope of a buried child that has forgotten it was alive.
This is a person who, for the first time, is able to understand the way that EAT is moving. She calls herself a researcher (most researchers do not have dog clickers) and has a commanding authority that makes EAT’s survival instincts stand to attention while making infinity feel safe. It feels good.
She teaches you how to speak to EAT and your life becomes drastically better.
A strange dynamic starts to take place. A courtship ritual, arbitrated by the mechanisms each of you have set up to keep yourselves and your loved ones alive. She would start to learn the name of your mechanisms. EAT would have a middle name that she picked out, and would wear it on a collar. EAT has learned one of the oldest tricks in the book: domestication. Become docile, obedient, and interesting in exchange for shelter. This time it’s different. It becomes effortless. Your new guardian picks out what you are eating when you go grocery shopping together. It is here that you learn that EAT has a strength: you do not have to think very much. She is very much automatic and has only ever wanted to be taken care of.
She is on her way out, you think, and this looks like a good thing. You are digesting her. She is dense and full of nutrients. Her patterns, her heightened senses, those are all your inheritance. They were designed to give you a good life, and your job is to remember what autonomy is. Your new companion, the darling she is, relishes this rather than relegating you to your role as her submissive. Your suffering shouldn’t have to mean anything, but by god it has earned you this. You tell your friends that you are in a D/s relationship because it is simpler than explaining what is actually going on here.
For once in your fucking life you are nourished.
You keep the collar. The name on it becomes your name.
