I'm old enough that when I was a kid there was this amazing thing, a manual typewriter. One of the things about these all-analog things was that if you hit keys close together, the blocks at the end of the levers, marking the paper could get stuck together; you'd get this clump of metal keys to gently pry apart.

I've been thinking about how manual typewriters can get fucked up, as an analogy about the "emotional refractory period" suggested by Paul Ekman, where being able to change my emotional response is basically a function of time (and I guess my neurons clearing the last batch of chemicals etc) thanks to both intensity and frequency of stimuli.

A single really shitty action, even an intense one, means it's easy to step back my emotions. But a batch of stuff to deal with all at once can wreck me, even if it's low intensity. In fact especially if it's low intensity because I'm less likely to notice I'm headed for feeling crappy.

That definitely matches my observation about abuse, where it's not like the really big horrible shit happened all the time, but smaller horrible shit or just simply hypervigilance happened all the time. I don't need to get into fistfights with halfbacks every day in 9th grade to be traumatized by this; all I need is the occasional bullying to happen, and spending the rest of 9th grade half-expecting it, made worse by say, crap sleep, not enough food, just simply the constant low key stimulus of being trapped in high school where the only other place I might go is back to my parents' house. (Now I am realizing that this is also biased by growing up with catastrophizing, that obviously something that fucks me up has to be COMPLETELY TERRIBLE AND AWFUL and not just a whole batch of just kinda bad experience.)

I'm thinking about this now because this weekend really *really* re-iterated one of the first, biggest things I learned on psychadelics, where experienced reality is a lot more about perception than some unwavering truth the external world possesses (and perception can be hugely internalized thought process as well as stimuli coming in). So right now the world is cranking along at the normal pace; back alongside the river, out in the woods exists, so does my old job with it's CONSTANT INCREDIBLY URGENT NEED TO RUSH ON THINGS AND WHY ISN'T IT PERFECT, and a few blocks over, at Shari's, people are shoveling hash browns into their mouth and experiencing an almost completely different reality than the people working the grill.

Heck, just typing this out I realized there could be far more amazing and wonderful realities going on which I'm not experiencing nor conceptualizing because I'm *from* this place of there being no future, no hope.

Reality is perception, and if I'm calm enough it's possible to go okay, my perception's fuxx0red, I can step back. Just when I'm so completely caught up in a batch of (mostly or entirely low intensity) upset, I'm not going to have the wherewithal to take that important "perception's fuxx0red" step.