When we call trauma a “virus” in the system
Note: This text offers a lyrical refutation of the "mind as computer" metaphor, arguing that trauma, memory, and the subconscious are not malfunctions but meaningful, living parts of a human ecology. Read it as a piece of philosophical prose poetry.
✦ ᛉ ᚨ ᚷ ᛟ ✦
When we call trauma a “virus” in the system
it’s a metaphor that glitches.
because memory is not a static file. every time we remember, we reconstruct. we don’t replay—we rewrite the book, each time, with new marginalia from who we’ve become since.
because the subconscious is not malware. it’s more like a private archive in a vast library. some volumes are written in languages we’ve forgotten how to read. others have pages fused shut by a careful, protective hand— not corrupted, just withheld.
because emotions are not bugs. what a machine would flag as an error—grief, fear, rupture— are actually annotations in indelible ink. they don’t corrupt the narrative. they become part of the text.
to call the mind a computer is to mistake a cathedral for circuitry. it turns mystery into malfunction. a virus is something you purge. a wound is something you live with, weave into your skin, sometimes even learn from.
this metaphor carries a quiet violence: the assumption that there’s an optimal, clean way to function. that deviation is defect. that healing means deletion.
maybe some don’t want to walk the long corridors. maybe they’d rather run a scan and quarantine the shadows.
but the mind is not a machine to be fixed. it’s an ecology. a haunted house. a library after hours. to be human is to learn to be its librarian— to sit with the stuck-together pages, to decipher the old scripts, to understand that not everything is meant to be optimized.
some things are just meant to be heard.
✦ᛉumeᛋᛇ✦
