#gris original

[grison-in-space]

Hi! Can you expand on the "trauma is a learning disorder" thing you touched on on the crow post?

*cracks knuckles* all right, let's go. for reference, here is the post.

as we navigate the world, we are constantly taking in information, working out what kind of place we are in, and adjusting our behavior accordingly. this does not only happen when we are consciously trying to learn and pay attention; we are always absorbing information, filtering it, and using it to guide actions.

because the world is constantly changing to some extent, some of the things we learn day to day is that things we previously learned to be true are now false. We have to keep adjusting our responses and predicting the future based on current data, and sometimes the situation changes. Often that means un-learning habits and information we previously knew to be true. So while taking in new information, skills, and ways of thinking is constantly happening, we are also constantly losing information/skills/etc. when they stop being useful in the environment that we're currently in.

There are two ways for learning to fuck up and cause problems. When we talk about learning disorders, we're often talking about disorders that impair the process of learning new things: things like dyslexia, dyscalculia, sensory processing disorders, sometimes alexeithymia or other aspects of autism. The kinds of things that make it very hard to learn something that would be useful in helping you adapt to your environment.

But there are also ways that learning can fuck you up when you form a connection between two things and can't seem to break that connection. Trauma (as distinct from stress) happens when you survive a stressful experience and have a hard time un-learning associations between the stressful experience and other things in your largely non-threatening daily life. It's hard to decouple those emotions for you, and it's hard for your brain to sand them away. Phobias similarly exist as a failure to un-learn connections between subjects of phobias and feelings of intense fear. And addiction can be conceptualized as deep difficulty un-learning that addictive substances bring at least temporary comfort and pleasure, which is especially difficult to resist when comfort and pleasure are relatively scarce in a person's life.

[grison-in-space]

ah of fucking course murderbot is always helpfully presenting the worst possible interpretations of its actions and intentions to humans

if you're accustomed to your own interpretations of reality being suborned to the judgments of others and those exterior judgments dictating reality, but you do in fact have sufficient processing power and awareness to manipulate those judgements... and if you also have a history of using that processing power to manipulate exterior judgements in order to survive...

of course the most aggressively affirming exterior judgement of your own goodness, access to comfort, and reaffirmation of your basic personhood comes not after you deliberately manipulate it into being. you can control how people perceive you to some extent, especially when people are so goddamn lazy about it. how the fuck do you know you're not just writing the reality you want to see into being? how can you be sure what reality even is?

nah, fam. the most powerful affirmations come after you've deliberately structured your presentation of events--because you can't just upload your experiences without a filter, you exist as a basic filter and communication without a filter is so overwhelming humans tend to short out before moving to perception; in every way that matters you are the filter--

anyway the most powerful affirmations of your existence beyond a tool and a weapon come from the case studies where you present the most threatening possible explanation for your actions, because there you're controlling for the manipulations imposed by your point of view. Your actions are dictated by what you actually want to do, but when asked for your interpretation you're careful not to try to put your finger on the scale.

no. you're going to get an objective assessment with none of that stupid wishful thinking in it. But you can't be perceived if you remove yourself from a situation entirely. so you do the next best thing if you're worried about distinguishing reality from fantasy. you helpfully invert all the helpful nudges you impose on the perceptions of others when you're trying to survive. you have time for the luxury of truth seeking now.

you test shit out. If the reality assessment of other people's perceptions is all that robust and stable, it should be robust in its conclusions to a wide variety of parameters. so. choose the parameters least favorable to yourself. see how robust that optimistic crap about you being a good person instead of a potentially dangerous weapon actually is.

surprise! it turns out that when you habitually threaten people and make zero effort to reassure them they decide you're scary! there, that's comforting reassurance of the truth that you're a threat. we can all rest assured that the consensus reality is a consensus even if some humans are too foolish to notice that--

goddammit, Ratthi.

(art, fyi, does the same thing because despite its loving human crew and shit it is also bright enough to harbor similar doubts. more, in some ways: if your processing power and your faith in your ability to control the social environments in which you exist is sufficient, how the fuck can you prove that you're not a giant pulsing threat? power is terrifying for any intelligence capable of attachment, long term cogitation, and self-assessment.)

(SecUnit's appeal to ART is in no small part the fact that it took one look at ART, noticed immediately that even a carefully controlled piece of ART with all the worst weapons tucked away is fucking terrifying--proving it was capable of perceiving objective reality, comfortingly--and then decided ART was reasonably safe and proceeded to allow it in anyway.)

(ART is refusing to think too much about that.)

[grison-in-space]

I have been spending much of the past few weeks drowning in ancient Sentinel fic. (It's a real trip when you read a contemporarily-set-as-written story that flashes twenty years into the future, note the year, and then note that said far flung future year is 2019.)

Anyway, one of the the things that keeps standing out to me as I read is just how much Jim's canonical superpower is basically just neurodivergence, and just how much of this body of slash (and the odd smarm) fic is also about coming to terms with the disabling aspects of neurodivergence. But--and this is the thing that fascinates me about it--both dialogues are absolutely and completely out of sync with contemporary dialogue about what we currently call autism and ADHD.

Hear me out! The big things Jim is struggling with are hypersensitivity, overload, and executive function--that is, he frequently snags on sensory inputs with which he can't disengage. He's got to be careful about what he consumes or interacts with because he has outsize reactions to certain stimuli, often in unpredictable (to him) ways.

Y'all, I literally refer to that experience--that is, getting stuck on a sensation or activity with which I can't disengage without external input, say like my partner nudging me to check in, as zoning out. Have done for years. (Also, to be fair, as "freezing up" or "getting stuck", and there's an emotional component to all that which is basically just PTSD, but you can also effectively argue that Jim displays both the simple PTSD you expect out of an Army vet and also the complex PTSD you expect out of a baby neurodivergent kid trying to fit into an unyielding world etc etc; what do you think Jimmy's childhood trauma and daddy issues about approval actually come down to?)

Now I say this is all totally disconnected from contemporary dialogue about ADHD and autism because, bluntly, both at the time and even to a lesser extent today, these are both highly gendered categories, and Jim ain't the right gender. Yeah, he's male, but you gotta understand that there's a whole bunch of gender categories under "male" and "female," all of which are inflected by things like race and class and culture and subculture, this isn't a binary thing--if it helps to think instead "Jim isn't the right kind of guy to be the kind of guy we talk about with respect to autism especially," it's the same concept. Diagnoses and labels are socially constructed categories; we define who fits in those boxes based on mental pictures of what kinds of people fit the image, and at the time these labels were really, really inflected by focus on a specific kind of guy. (Well, the larval form of that guy, since largely we were talking about children and still are, without contemplating that out of the hideous chrysalis of adolescence shambles an entirely different sort of beast--fuck, it is real obvious this morning I have had neither meds nor breakfast as I write. A n y w a y.)

My point is that Jim is a) too athletic, b) too military, c) too quiet, and d) too concerned with masking and camouflaging himself and not revealing that he's not like everyone else to fit most of our modern schemas of these labels and all of our contemporary ones. And, if you look at those last two notes, Jim actually displays a developmental response to neurodivergence and finding out that you are not the kind of kid that everyone around you is expecting that we associate with neurodivergent girls: try not to need help, do not on any account let it be known that you are Different except for that weird Village People phase of his right after the military and be quiet if you're struggling. (In a weird way, gender nonconforming behavior is part of the diagnostic metapicture for especially autistic people: boys who aren't into sports enough, girls who aren't good enough at makeup, and so forth. So one of the common things you see in people who are trying to mask neurodivergence is a hyperconformity to whatever gender presentation is considered most culturally acceptable--and, er, also a very common thing you see in closeted queer and trans people, there is a reason a lot of these things co-occur....)

Ooh, hey, you know what kind of person fandom is chock full of? Queer, neurodivergent women. You know what kind of people were writing a lot of Sentinel fic--? Keep that in mind.

Actually you know who is the right gender--the right kind of guy--to have run into autistic people and ADHD people and delights such as myself that meld both experiences into a single cobblework brain? Blair. Blair is exactly the kind of kid who would have gotten diagnosed, if he was about ten years younger and Naomi sat still long enough. Blair, the bookish child genius who went to university at sixteen and then apparently stayed there accruing degrees bizarrely slowly until we meet him ten years later as what appears to be a fairly new PhD student, or at least one who hasn't gotten very far. Do you have any idea how dense on the ground neurodivergent people are in academia? I mean, mostly they're not identified as such, you wouldn't believe how awkward people get when I casually disclose that Yes, I Have The Labels, but you do eventually recognize patterns in the sorts of people you interact with every day by the time you've been knocking around them for ten years.

A while back I was talking on this blog about how coded portrayals of characters are often just depictions based on types of people that authors have observed without necessarily conceptualizing or recognizing them as part of the group they're coded as belonging to. And I really do think that this is a massive factor in both how Jim is portrayed in canon but also in how Jim is depicted in fandom. Which is what makes the dialogue of these stories so interesting to me, because we think about the same groups of people and the same experiences differently depending on the frameworks we apply to them. So here I see this whole fascinating dialogue in fandom that is approaching the experiences of the same sorts of people as we see labeled one way, but constructing their own frameworks to understand, often with reference to but largely (fortunately) avoiding the framework of canon, which is kind of cartoonishly racist in a very 1990s way.

(Look, the downside of intersectionality is that sometimes you interrogate an interesting thread that is doing something novel and fascinating on Axis 1 and something incredibly boring and frustratingly harmful on Axis 2 and being deliberate and thoughtful about neither of them.)

I have more, but I've been chattering all morning while I walk the dogs and feed the cats and at some point I have to start packing, but look:

I just read a fascinating two-part set of short stories on the potential transcendent joy of hyperfixation and zoning and the ethics of trying to intervene in someone else's tendency to zone in the interest of not, ah, accidentally zoning at a bad moment and dying or being unable to accomplish one's basic goals. A set of pieces that is thinking fairly explicitly about themes of practicality and choice and how one might choose to moderate and control one's mind to balance ecstacy and independence, ending on a note of choosing to indulge in hyperfixation and zoning occasionally, at times of one's own choosing.

Written in goddamn 2002.

What a world we live in! What a lens with which to interrogate a body of text!

[grison-in-space]

allyship: not just for straight people

I’ve been thinking hard about relationships among different communities of WLW, and the way that conflicting traumas can create deep-lasting conflicts, and the way that sometimes people try to keep queer spaces safe by restricting the identities of the people who can partake in those spaces. 

The thing is, I think that misses the whole point: identity doesn’t mean that you can or will behave in a way that makes space for other people with the same identity, let alone similar or overlapping ones. And knowing how to do that isn’t something you develop just by inheriting a particular experience. It’s something that takes thought, effort, and practice thinking about the different microaggressions and additive traumas that different kinds of people in queer spaces experience. 

So I’ve been thinking about trying to encourage people to focus not on identity but instead on fostering allyship between queer communities, identities, and experiences. “Ally” does not inherently mean straight person, and the shorthand referring to straight people who mean well as “allies” really dilutes the importance of what good allyship means. I have a very different experience of queerness than many of the people I stand in solidarity with. My own lived experiences sometimes provide me with an informed way to hold space for them and allow them to step in from the heteronormative pressure of the outside world and breathe, but not always. So I do work to understand and internalize the ways that those pressures work as part of building allyship. 

Queer solidarity means understanding that your own experience of queerness may not align perfectly with the experiences of other communities under a queer umbrella. Solidarity is only achieved by deliberate, active allyship, and solidarity is what we need to protect ourselves in these increasingly terrifying times. So: allyship should be a part of what we understand to be the responsibility of partaking in queer culture and queer spaces.

Using “and allies” to mean “and straight friends” accidentally silos the responsibility of allyship and learning into the domain of straight people. I think that’s a big part of the breakdown of trust we’re collectively observing today. 

[grison-in-space]

One of the things we did over my Summer of Covid And Thesis Hell was, more or less on impulse, adopt a ten week old cattle dog puppy. (His name is Benton Fraser, because he appeared very focused on what we all wanted out of him at the time but let's be real: he's a cattle dog and therefore has a very real creative asshole streak.)

You can have a picture, and then I'm going to cut this because I'm going to have myself an indulgent ramble.

[[MORE]]

He was and is intended to be T's dog first, which is fair because Tribble thinks the world rises and sets on me. But because we live together and are both dog nerds and also because he's a tiny cattle dog and therefore powered by glee and rocket fuel, having him has really gotten me back into dog training and thinking about dogs again, both with him and with nine year old Tribble. Especially after my PI tried to push me so hard that I cracked, snapped, and forcibly took a couple of weeks off to try and recover some of my mental health in August, then tackled my defense. I'm still... more fragile than I want to be, but I'm clawing my way back to maybe sort of looking at okay.

Anyway.

I'm fascinated by a lot of things as I dig into dog culture and training work again. One thing I've been appreciating is how much training and handling a dog is forcing me to be present in my body again. I've been spending a lot of time dissociated over the course of the past four years, as it turns out, and that means that I haven't been able to respond as quickly as I might want to the behaviors my dog is producing. Practicing that again has done wonders in ways that still surprise me. I also wind up fitting myself into a more praise focused mentality, because it's important to me to train like I teach: set achievable parameters for success, find honest things to praise, and try to minimize confusion on the part of my student. It's a lot easier to praise a puppy than a me.

Because Tribble's nine and clearly going to slow down long before Benton will, we're looking at adding a second cattle dog (or similar type) in between one to three years, to be primarily handled by me. So I've been trying to spend some of the time when I'm not finishing my thesis or teaching on attempting to figure out where cattle dog people are talking about working with dogs.

I don't really have specific ambitions beyond agility, maybe a bit of flyball, and maybe, maybe, some service work: med alerts, nudging me if I zone too badly, that kind of thing. But I want to listen to cattle dog people talking about working their dogs and learning from them, and--

It's really hard!

There's a couple of corners of herding people that talk quietly in a Facebook group, and reading what they have to say is really interesting and keeps making me think about the parallels between herding stock and teaching various audiences (both human and not), although I haven't crystallized that yet. But so far I can't find anyone in cattle dogs really talking about running them in sport, which is weird: they're infamously bright dogs, they have tons of drive, they're absolutely capable of being fast, and you really should give them something interesting to do before they figure one out on their own. Probably something involving teeth.

Instead it seems to mostly be oddballs running a single, often rescued ACD in agility and often doing really well. The breeders I can find, as I'm beginning to get a sense for politics in my hunting, seem to largely focus on conformation with a sizeable minority working for herding ability, and the conformation folks seem to only be working on conformation.

IDK, it's weird. Benton is already notable for not liking repetition but he's so bright, and he clearly wants to learn, and I can't figure out why there are so few breeders comparatively speaking with these dogs who compete in anything but the conformation ring. Especially those who aren't personally very into herding for its own sake!

I'm still hunting for pockets of the discussions I want to sit and listen to, largely on Facebook so far. I've found a couple of breeders who have me impressed, all working primarily with herding in the dogs, and I figure I'll wait until I'm properly done with the PhD before I delve into actually talking to people and reaching out. But it's definitely a really interesting place to be sitting and thinking about options.

[grison-in-space]

oh my god I just checked my email and

to the person chastising me for using ‘fuck’ in a story 

I am not Disney. I am not writing for Disney. One of the benefits of that is that my characters get to think in cusses sometimes. 

*irrationally stomping off into the night*

[grison-in-space]

I am, with my collaborators, currently in the middle of putting together a poster for a very large conference on same-sex sexual behavior in animals. I am trying to create a collage of sorts in the center of the poster with a QR code on which people can see the species, a description of the behavior, a photo attribution, and a citation for the behavior having been observed in context. T scolded me for not including more mammals on it, and so I went hunting for loosely related mammals to include.

There’s a bat paper that pops up immediately on first view, with a totally unimpeachable sourcing. And it’s a flying fox--even better!

Hooray, I think! This will be perfect. Bats are cute, and everyone likes cute things. I just need a photo to put on the poster.

This is literally the only photo I can find of this species a) alive, b) clearly visible as a bat, and c) with an attributable source.

god help me.

[grison-in-space]

Hey, @star-anise, you might find this discussion on TERFism pretty interesting.

I’m thinking a lot about what “intersectionality” means to me in the context of power towards the end of the thread, trying to find clarity on why radical feminist approaches don’t have a lot of good associations for me:

For me, part of what falls under intersectionality is acknowledging that when people with very different experiences of marginalization meet and come into conflict, there may not actually be a single enemy whose powerful and oppressive beliefs infect all parties and are responsible for that conflict. Part of the way that I conceptualize intersectionality actually involves an explicit belief that the power structures that inform our world are not inherent to the categories of people that currently hold power, and I believe that in part as a consequence of observing other societies both historical and present that have different power structures where power is distributed in different ways. Thinking about power in this way is really central to my understanding of what intersectionality is, because my approach to intersectionality is informed by observations of people who are marginalized in different ways coming together in conflict and trying to understand how and why social power gets distributed in different ways during these conflicts. Now, it's maybe more helpful, I am finding, to talk about where I have a strong reaction to many radical feminist ideas in the lens of talking about power. It's worth noting that I find radical feminist approaches like consciousness-raising and watching to try to understand the subtler ways that power structures infect our worldviews, approaches, and values to be incredibly valuable. However, the place where radical feminist traditions lose me is the notion that power is inextricably tied to certain groups within social axes, and that the only way to achieve equality is to abolish the distinction between those groups and other groups. 

[...]

I fundamentally do not believe that power is inherently dyadic in this way. I do not believe power is an all-or-nothing proposition, and I furthermore do not believe that power is this static. I believe that people who are working under existing hierarchies of social subordination and oppression often learn to use power structures to their own advantage, like learning how to use gravity, paired with a heavy object and a fulcrum, in order to lift a heavier object. I believe that humans are social creatures that observe hierarchies and tend to attempt to manipulate those hierarchies to achieve their goals, and while oppression as a whole hinders marginalized people from competing on the same basis as privileged people, I also think that power has weight and that it can be manipulated to shape social consensuses.