Fibrillation

I've been around descriptions of cardiac failure for a long time; I have family members and have had a few friends in various medical and emergency-response careers, so hearing about heart attacks was not unusual for certain segments of my life.

What really made the concept real to me, though, was a book about chaos theory that described "fibrillation" in terms of a mathematical situation. The electrical signals of nerves and neurons that typically regulate proper muscle contractions - a heartbeat - become uncoordinated, uncooperative, and can even lead to permanent failure.

A heart-muscle in fibrillation does not move the way a heart usually should. Fibrillation can affect muscle fibers anywhere in the body. When a fiber is in this state, its movement is not as pronounced, not as recognizable - often requiring specialized, highly sensitive equipment to even observe that motion exists. And yet a fibrillating heart, just like a single fiber of muscle acting this way, contains phenomenal amounts of energy - it simply goes nowhere productive.

The mental image of this has stuck with me for many years, and I've actually started to see analogous concepts in other areas of life besides just muscles. Of course, the words used to describe those things are typically different, but that's the nature of analogy.

Cognitive Fibrillation

I work in a very mentally-intensive field that involves the need to make many kinds of complex and often very difficult decisions based on criteria that are far more intricate and detailed than any one person can hope to hold in their heads at once. Part of my job is helping other software engineers overcome analysis paralysis - an affliction that is likely familiar to anyone who has faced a tricky choice.

Given all these options, how do you know what the "right" choice is? What is best? Or what do we do first? There are tools and mental habits that can help make these decisions simpler, but they are not universal, nor are they guaranteed to lead to a particularly desirable outcome. In other words, they are necessary but not sufficient for making decisions.

Knowing the "right" choice always requires first stepping back and understanding the criteria and the situation. The exact same set of actions can be helpful in one case and harmful in another. If we're startled by something unexpected, sometimes taking a deep breath to steady our nerves is exactly what our bodies need - but if we happen to be underwater, that's not a good response!

Often there simply is no one right answer to a choice, and so we instead get fixated on the "best" options. Again, though, we need a lot of contextual awareness to understand this. What makes one thing "better" than another? What costs are we willing to incur? What effort are we willing to expend?

When this involves time pressure or a limited set of resources, we enter a mode of triage - what needs attention right now, and what can we get into a reasonably stable state, and get back to later?

A person caught in analysis paralysis is not literally motionless. On the contrary, they may expend tremendous amounts of energy, and generate massive amounts of anxiety, without actually making a choice - because the selection process is so overwhelmingly complex and difficult.

The mind, in this state, is using energy but the movement is uncoordinated, unproductive, and unhealthy. Much like with the process for recovering from an in-progress heart attack, the brain needs a jolt - some strong, powerful signal that says "this is where to go next" - and, almost always, both a fibrillating mind and a fibrillating heart can respond to that signal and return to coordinated, productive, healthy operation.

Social Fibrillation

Groups of people do the same thing. Groups of people, regardless of  - families, friends, teams, business organizations, countries, even the entire planet - exhibit patterns. Much like a fractal shape, the patterns are strikingly similar at different scales and levels of detail. They differ and evolve and shift, especially as the numbers grow and shrink, but they all have similarities.

The patterns of fractal nature within a single person's body, mind, and life also manifest in the collective.

On occasion, social groups - of all sizes - find themselves facing a situation that is difficult, complex, problematic, maybe even overwhelming.

Somehow, humans as a species tend to solve these situations. Otherwise, I wouldn't be here to write this, and you wouldn't be here to read it. And yet in the moment, those challenges are almost always daunting and may feel utterly hopeless.

The sad truth is that sometimes we don't solve them. Sometimes friend groups dissolve, business ventures fail, and life has to readjust. But this, in itself, is a smaller pattern within the larger context of human existence.

When amazing changes happen, they are almost never easy. They cost time, energy, commitment, and a willingness to endure change - which often brings sensations of discomfort, for all of us. This happens both in the context of a specific person, and all the way up to the entirety of our planet.

A great many words are invested in exploring the experiences of "leaders" in this kind of context - the people who seem to provide that "signal" or "jolt" that grabs our collective hearts and gets us moving again. These people are important, to be sure, but there are so many others who do not get much attention and yet deserve a far greater percentage of the credit and appreciation.

A defibrillator doesn't work alone. It simply allows the existing body to return to its natural way of functioning. The electrical action is very short, and often does not need to be used repeatedly; the body is able to recover and resume regular heartbeats. The hero of the story may be the "A.E.D." device as the tale is usually told, but the real quiet, unsung hero is the miraculous set of nerves and electro-chemical coordination mechanisms that allow the heart to go back to operating safely.

Of course, there is usually lasting damage from both fibrillation and the recovery from it; again, this is the way of analogies. Unlike heart muscles, minds and social groups can recover from these situations and go on to be far healthier than they began.

In a social context, anyone can provide that nudge. For a healthy heart, the signals that regulate pulse are very subtle and quiet compared to the jolt of a defibrillator. That extreme measure is only needed in dire circumstances.

In a heart, it isn't just one nerve, neuron, or muscle-fiber's job to maintain the pulse. It's all cooperative. Fibrillation occurs when something gets in the way of cooperation.

In a brain, for someone thinking and acting and choosing their way through life, cooperative effort is vital. "Cognitive dissonance" is well-known to produce actual physical symptoms when left unaddressed for too long. A mind in fibrillation will cause immense discomfort and damage - not out of some kind of malice or spite, but as a desperate plea to return to peaceful, harmonious operation.

And the fractal scales upwards even still.

In a group of people, moving in the same direction is immensely powerful. It's why we (rightfully) fear a panic-driven stampede. It's why we find hope and strength in marching together. It's why having people provide signals that keep us all cooperating and working in alignment is so essential to functional and healthy societies.

The story isn't - and shouldn't be - focused on the brief, temporary actions of extreme measures used to try and restore that cooperative alignment. The story has always been about the rest of the tapestry of existence. Knowing the rest of the context is what gives us the ability to know when to take a deep breath and when to remember that we're still underwater.

In a healthy heart, mind, or social group, the tiny corrections and gentle encouragement of cooperating members can sustain success and guarantee thriving for amazing amounts of time and through incredible challenges and struggles. Being disconnected from the collective, or being given a sufficiently disruptive jolt, can spell disaster - not just for a small part, but for the larger group, and even for the larger context beyond that: a heart attack can end a life; a poor decision can affect many people; and a species unable to find ways to work together can bring an entire planet into a precarious state.

We should be concerned about these risks; and we should also remember the hope: that with enough of an insistent supply of direction and effort, returning to healthy life is also possible.

Thinking

I think a lot.

I wonder if my recent blossoming fascination with human connection is really truly the deep, significant, profound glimpse of the true path out of the less-lovely aspects of the human "condition." I wonder if maybe it's just me projecting my fundamental angst and pain, or if all these people I talk to about the horror of loneliness are really, truly leaving our conversations with more hope and interest in nurturing the connections of their own.

I say lots of things.

Sometimes there are responses and there seems to be a moment where people think I've said something helpful, or useful, or insightful. On occasion people will even thank me for things I've said - whether large or small.

For a while that seems nice, and I leave those conversations with a little more hope and interest in human connection for myself.

I fear lots of things.

I worry that the way I write, the stories I tell, the perspectives I try to share, are all just a little too hard to manage. I seem to make a difference, sometimes, and I'm happy about that and proud of my ability to do it.

But I worry that it doesn't leave any room for the reality of what goes on in my head - the stuff that isn't sculpted into words or conversations. I worry that the act of translating my actual thoughts into words - the very act that enables human connection in the first place - particularly in a time when I cannot safely be around anyone in physical space - is so painfully expensive that I'm racking up some kind of emotional debt by trying to communicate at all.

I'm sure this makes very little sense, especially to anyone who has ever spoken to me in realtime - and even moreso for those who have talked to me without keyboards being involved.

I speak quickly, often with considerable precision and clarity. Words flow to me at a speed that must seem "easy" to most people.

What I have almost never admitted, to anyone, until now, is that it is not easy.

To explain this, I need to take a short detour.

I love music, and particularly the "live" performance of music. Instruments are endlessly fascinating to me, and watching a truly skilled musician work magic on their instruments is... well, the best word I have is that it feels, to me, like a gift from the universe, every time.

It takes tens of thousands of hours of practice - hard work, failure, patience, exhaustion, learning, trying, faltering, succeeding, repeating - to be that good at anything. Music happens to be one of those activities that can "look easy" when done by someone that has invested that kind of time.

I wouldn't call myself a particularly good musician, but I've invested enough time of my own to know when someone is doing something remarkably difficult and making it "look easy." There are certain things in music that are shockingly hard to do that don't "sound" (or look to the eye) particularly tricky. There are also certain things that sound amazingly impressive that are - with a tiny bit of training and theory - recognizable as fairly easy.

To me, words are not easy, and communicating in language is expensive. It costs time, emotional energy, and a level of focus and attention that is - despite all appearances - massively taxing to me.

It only looks easy because I have spent so much time practicing.

Incidentally, I only started practicing because of one of the most influential pieces of advice I ever received. I have long since forgotten the subject, but I remember a moment as a young teenager, struggling with frustration and confusion because the ideas I knew were right seemed to make no sense to the people I was trying to talk to.

My dad took me aside and calmly explained that being right - or even having a useful idea - wasn't the problem. My thought process wasn't to blame; the source of contention was my inability to relay what I understood. As he said, "even if you were the smartest person in the history of the world, it'll never do anything but hurt you and frustrate you if you can't find ways to communicate with everyone else."

Parental advice often doesn't quite work on teenagers, and considering that I had what can only be charitably summed up as a difficult, traumatic, and somewhat bizarre childhood, it's a minor miracle that I even listened to him. (It's a somewhat substantially larger miracle that we still speak to each other frequently, but that's another post for another time.)

But from that moment, I took it on myself to learn to communicate.

So now, two decades later, I like to think that I've at least gotten some kind of skill accumulated in that department.

I want to try something, now, that I've never quite had the courage to attempt before, nor have I really fully understood how deeply I need to make this attempt.

In most of my writing - which tends to be for professional, academic, or some flavor of semi-formal purpose - I try to find structure, and make things flow in a progression that suits the reader. For personal things, what I write much more closely resembles my actual thought process. There is meandering, there are cycles, there are revisitings of things, themes that unfold and emerge, ideas that vanish in the fringes of a half-cohesive paragraph and unexpected clarity that seems to come unbidden from the midst of it all at the end.

I don't rewrite or edit these posts, generally. I don't go back and change words or sentences or directions. This is almost entirely stream of consciousness - and the effort required to write it is far more than just the effort to press keys on a keyboard for an hour. I knew exactly what I needed to say when I sat down to write this; I knew exactly how to get the point across; and I knew exactly what shape the whole thing would take in the end. The process of turning that knowledge into words is what is so immensely difficult.

How do I explain that I can see this entire set of ideas as a sort of swirling mass in my mind? How do I find words for the fractal kaleidoscope of detail and understanding that exists in my skull? Could I even find images to try and explain it?

I don't understand things in words. When I understand something, I literally visually see the idea in my head. It is not a static picture or a simple combination of shapes and symbols. The more I understand something, the more detail becomes visible - shapes, designs, movement, patterns, shifting, evolving.

I do not feel things in emotions. I feel in something that I can only describe as music, and emotions come by attempting to translate that music into something that I can explain and communicate to someone else.

When I try to learn something, the first step is to get all the pesky words and feelings to quiet down - a struggle immensely complicated by the way my brain tends to work. In some venues, this is what would be termed "ADHD" and "autism" - except I take deep, bitter exception to the idea that the way my brain works is some kind of disorder, or pathology, or disease. I am not to be cured, not to be treated, not to be fixed. My difference does not merit the fear, the pity, the stigma, the disgust, the impatience, the bewilderment that so many people like me are forced to live under.

I carry many things that have required me to learn how to be invisible: growing up in a "third culture" configuration, being trans, being a lesbian, being neurodiverse. If I have learned any particular survival skill in my time, it has been to disappear.

The time for that is over, now. I need to be seen, and that requires facing up to my entire reality - and refusing, for all the awkwardness it will inevitably cause, to hide who I am.

I need to say that I often despair of actually convincing anyone how disconnected, alienated, and isolated I feel - even when talking to various groups of very similar people. I need to say that the act of connecting is, to me, both a vital need and a massively expensive undertaking. I cannot live without connection, but connecting takes something from me that is virtually impossible to quantify.

I do not understand social interactions. This may seem absurd to anyone who has spent time interacting with me, but it is true. I simply fake them. I do the words and the gestures and the patterns because they seem to help other people still want to talk to me again. But I cannot see why those things are useful - they do not fit into the mural of comprehension in my mind.

I see - by which I mean I truly understand - when a connection is working. I see when people respond to those connection attempts, not by the words they say, the expressions their faces make, or other cues of that nature, but by the way their own movements in life are altered.

I see when someone really, truly resonates with me, because as I look at their actions, their choices, their overall existence, the shift in their direction becomes a clear sort of vector in my mind.

How do I tell people that I know that moment of alignment, of connection, as a sort of visceral music? I can explain it with mathematical analogies, with metaphors, with all the prose I could wring from my exhausted brain, but will anyone ever actually hear that harmony as well?

Or will it all just be lopsided attempts at cramming an inner universe of immeasurable beauty and intricacy into the pallid, ineffectual shards of linguistic frustration?

Have I learned to communicate what is actually going on in me, or have I simply gotten good at faking it for the practical stuff so I can at least get by with daily life?

Will I ever really be able to convince anyone that I don't withdraw because I want to be alone, but because trying to interact linguistically often becomes too tiring to be a good idea? Will anyone ever understand that I suddenly leave conversations not because I have lost interest or energy, but because the ideas are moving too fast in my mind, and I need to let them thrive without trying to torture them into mere thoughts?

How many time will I say, to someone or even no one in particular, that I just want to feel like someone else will put literally any shred of effort into understanding me? Is there a magic number of attempts, after which it might actually happen?

Or do I need to be more clear about just how much effort this costs me - something I (apparently) do so effortlessly? If I make it "look easy", will anyone understand why I feel so alone every time I try to talk?

Will this make a difference?

Or will I click Publish, start preparing for bed, and wake up tomorrow into the exact same world all over again, with a smattering of mild reactions, and no change?

I only know two things for certain, right now.

The first is that I can, intellectually, conceive of a world where this does have an effect. But I cannot see it. I can see a world where this does not do what I hope it will do, in which case, I will try again another day.

The second is that the music is too much, now, and I need to go hear it for a while.

463 Days

Today marks four hundred sixty-three days since I wrote this - which became the first entry on this site.

The past few months have been laced with an odd mixture of monotonous stress and unexpected, bewildering calm. Sitting around alone, effectively quarantined, for weeks upon weeks was not a choice I would have made for myself - and yet, as odd as it may sound, I'm glad to be doing it. In a way, I'm at peace with continuing to do this for as long as I need to. It's not a resigned, powerless sense of "guess I have no choice" - I've actually become interested in making the best of it, for as long as I can.

Which is not to say it's been fun, or easy, or even consistently enjoyable.

I am a rather complex person and one of my personal realities I've been unable to hide from lately is my neurodiversity. There are many words for this set of characteristics and traits, but they carry a lot of stigma, misconceptions, and even overt prejudice in the world these days. I prefer to describe what I experience, first and foremost, and not shy away from the complexities and messiness of it all. An exploration of that particular set of oddities, however, probably belongs in a different entry.

Really, though, the subject reminds me of a much larger pattern of my life - and, in particular, my past 463 days of living it.

There is something tempting, I think, to the idea of simplification. Certainly the pressures of daily life tend to lead us to want things to be a little less messy, a little bit clearer, a little easier. We're busy, the world is a chaotic place, and stability and certainty are at a premium these days.

I feel like I have something of an unfair advantage in that regard. I don't like simplicity. I don't like stagnation or excessive predictability.

There's a word, I've often observed, to accurately describe what happens when things stop changing. The correct adjective, in English, to describe a state where complete and utter stability and simplicity has been achieved, is "dead."

Life requires movement. Movement requires that things change, even if the changes are subtle. Change implies loss: something old goes away.

Change also implies something new arriving.

For change to occur, something old has to stop, and something new has to happen. Change is movement; the very language of physics, and of much of mathematics, reflects a human understanding of the fundamental connection between movement and change.

Attempting to separate these things will always, in a sense, be an exercise in shutting out reality. It isn't as simple or blithe as "take the good with the bad" or anything as pat and impractical as all that.

I think of it like a palette of paints. Take a dozen colors, totally different hues, some vibrant, some muted, some contrasting, some barely distinguishable from each other. Consider a decent sized paint can of each color.

Throw them all in a bucket and stir it up vigorously.

What you get will inevitably be a bland, probably vaguely unappealing blur. Erasing the distinctions doesn't just make it simpler; it makes the dozen colors into a nigh-on useless muck.

The first trick is to stop trying to make everything simple.

Those exact same ingredients - the same selection of colors - can be turned into a beautiful display of artistry and expression, given patience and a willingness to respect the differences and the nuances, and a little bit of vision.

Given sufficient practice and imagination, a painter can take virtually any selection of twelve colors and produce something amazing with it.

I don't want to go through life wishing for a smaller selection of colors. I'd rather learn how to paint.