Last Quarter: Not walls, but protocols

Hello. It's Friday. Since my past couple of posts were for paid readers only, I haven't written to all of you in a bit — and since then, the advancing season has certainly brought new things. I've found a new favorite tarot deck, I've received some mostly good news in my fertility quest, and the local ecosystem has definitely decided it's spring. Bluebirds and red-winged blackbirds are back, the latter in startling numbers; more trees have their buds, like the hawthorn and the maple; our rose bush has popped out some new leaves already.

It almost doesn't bear mentioning that I feel less than delighted at these seasonal developments happening a little earlier than what the light levels and star movements would normally imply. Of course, with temperatures just around freezing by night and ranging up to 50ºF/10ºC, we're now growing closer to my ideal comfort zone; and I also know that with El Niño still in effect for probably a few more months, we were never going to have a "normal" winter cycle even without accounting for the eco crisis. Nonetheless, I worry about whether my bioregion is equipped to handle what could happen if spring kept coming early year after year. The returning birds seem happy to take advantage, but do they know anything is wrong? The more I learn about birds, the more I suspect the answer is yes.

Be that as it may, my thoughts during this Last Quarter week aren't so much about the eco crisis itself, and more about the social crisis that accompanies it — and not only a retread of what I see as the fundamental causes of the strained social situation we live under, but also a more thorough consideration of what I've increasingly been convinced is the way out from collective trauma and abusive feedback loops. I don't know if that way is the way that the modern settler-colonizer majority will ultimately turn; if not, then I'll have very little hope for the time to come. But right now, that hope is still burning, and though I try to use this newsletter mostly as a reflective space rather than as a means to exhort or persuade, here is one of those topics where I feel obligated to cry that if you, friend or stranger, are not sure where to find such hope, then please read this.

What follows is not an instruction manual, but there are concrete suggestions. There is no toxic positivity (a good phrase for a bad thing), but there is also no nihilism, only a grieving passion. There is no comprehensive vision of a better society, but besides dropping more than a few hints, there is at least a vision for how to interact with other human beings in a genuinely just, equitable, honorable, and above all connective manner. For these days if there's any one sentiment I tend to hear from people over and over about "the state of society," it is:

I don't know who or how to trust anymore. I feel like no one else trusts me either. I am so lonely.

Very simple feelings, but this simplicity contains the cosmic.

What is even happening?

We have separated from each other in stages. Capitalism, Euro-colonialism, and the Protestant Reformation all arose in the same general timespan, and spoke of the same story with different voices: you must make your own way, you must use all substance available to you, and if you are weak this means you are destined for failure. The Enlightenment came soon after, and the intrinsic good of science was poisoned from its outset by the urge to strip all animacy from that which was not a cold, rational, mechanistic eye; though this would eventually provoke war between the voices who would give that eye to "god" and the voices who would give that eye to "man," the effect was the same regardless: the completed objectification of the earth, of still-colonizable ethnicities, of anyone who might be categorized as female by the hegemony.

Industrialization tightened the screws further. The elect, elite barons of mass extraction and mass production were set apart from the bodies who worked for them — set so far apart that they might as well be god in heaven — and humans yoked to the wage-hour owned less and less of their own labor, and as Marx commented as they were alienated from their labor they were alienated from themselves. Each subsequent "advance" of modern living has supposedly linked all corners of the world together, but only by driving knives into the hearts of local communities, ripping out their beating heart to divide and sell a continent away. The internet could have offered an alternative network for people to authentically connect and turn globalization against the businesses that have thrived on it; but capital got its hands on the internet too fast, too soon, and we struggle now to hold any ground here that is not enclosed just as the old commons were. Just as neoliberal forces banded together to stifle what possibilities felt like they were dawning in 1968, my generation's chance at revolution through communication has arguably been snuffed by algorithmic news feeds and the fever-hunt for Engagement.

Make yourself stand out. Why is no one talking about YOUR problems? You have to talk about them or no one else will.

Discourse about human rights and socioeconomic justice, or as many people I know tend to call it, simply The Discourse — this became nigh impossible online at least 10 years ago as hostile, bad faith interactions were already becoming incentivized as a default mode by design features and oversights on corporate social media. Terrifyingly but inevitably, as so many of us now spend so much time online, this problem has spilled out into how we interact offline as well. It isn't that "Millennials" and "Gen Z" just invented things to be upset about. Most of the things were and are real things worth being upset about. But Protestant austerity logic, already a reigning power in the United States where so much internet culture originates, metastasized through engagement addiction, dopamine dependency, and took existing cracks in the offline political landscape and split them more into gaping fissures. Now reactionary figures in governments worldwide are trying to legislate away trans and gender-nonconforming people more or less on account of online debates that arguably got started in pop culture fandoms.

We have at least four fuzzy camps for The Discourse. I'm going to give them different names than how other voices sometimes talk about them. There are the people who feel unsafe due to materially experiencing systemic persecution; let's call them the Survivors. There are the people who may have more power but feel some necessity to help others with less; this may be through empathy or for ego, but let's call them the Protectors. There are the people who feel unsafe due to having their power challenged, even if they don't really stand to lose anything; since they often love the police so much, let's call them the Bootlickers. And there are the people who sympathize with or belong to the Survivors and the Protectors (and sometimes even the third group) but who are burnt out on the ouroboric qualities of The Discourse and wish to actively heal instead of live in perpetual pain; let's call this group the Quitters.

The Quitters are where I mostly position myself, even though I'm also a Survivor in some aspects of my life and Protector in others. I have gone through or witnessed the same interpersonal blow-ups so many times that virtually nothing surprises me anymore where The Discourse is concerned, and I'm ready to move on. I don't think of the left and right as equally bad, or that going too far to the left brings you around to the right, but the parts of the left that constitute the Survivors and the Protectors are by this point usually so caught up in processing trauma without resolving it that I find their spaces deeply harmful to my own mental health. That isn't to say I don't see flaws in my camp as well; sometimes desperation for solidarity does mean choosing the wrong bedfellows.[1] But the not-so-secret truth between all these camps, including my own, is that we are all traumatized, we are all colonized. We are all fragmented, inflamed, and engaged in a kind of mass autoimmune response.

And we all recognize the ongoing cycle on some level. We know we are trapped. Many of us simply don't break free because our eyeballs (and sometimes ears) are so regularly being fed incentives for cortisol release, not for oxytocin. The polarity of opinions keeps intensifying, and few people know how to do anything that isn't just to live in fear. The Survivors and Protectors have grown more and more sensitive to the real risks of danger from the Bootlickers, but with this some Survivors begin to equate the Protectors with the Bootlickers when there are misaligned perspectives or demographics; many of the Protectors begin to resent the Survivors for not appreciating their help. The Bootlickers meanwhile become cataclysmically insane about both these groups. The Quitters are more exhausted than ever, and even as more people from all three other camps join us, some of us are at risk of sliding into the Bootlickers as at least the Bootlickers have that appealing tendency of crafting narratives with meaning, instead of the Quitters' hopeless nothingness.

I am only describing phenomena, not suggesting what anyone ought to be doing as an ethical human in modern society.

But what ought we?

Exclusion and its discontents

The first and easiest step is to acknowledge that some people in our lives are transparently predatory, and to exclude them from access to all but the most basic human rights (and frankly, if one person were to individually deny access to those rights with their unaccountable, predatory abuser, I would not really blame them). No fascists, no cops, no serial killers, no dedicated rapists, no megalomaniacs, no professional exploiters like capitalists or scam artists[2]. These people would require so much time and energy investment to turn away from their damaging behavior that although in a better world these people sometimes wouldn't have avenues to exist, those that still might would likely merit total ostracism — not through a carceral system, but through exile — because by comparison it would just be too risky for most humans to bother engaging. Under the circumstances of our not-better world, of course, I have even less ability to rehabilitate someone like Ted Bundy.

The problem with simply developing defensive responses to predatory people, however, is that most people are not Ted Bundy. Not even most abusers are. The number of humans who would truly qualify as sociopaths (the label itself being increasingly deprecated) are very few, even if they're disproportionately represented in positions of power because neoliberal capitalism rewards them. Abusers also do not all match Bundy demographically; during university I was emotionally, financially, and sexually abused (arguably raped) by a queer woman who was a year younger than me and who was herself a familial abuse survivor. Abusers may likewise be white, straight, cisgender men who have their own share of empathy-warranting emotional challenges motivating their behavior, even if motivation does not equal excuse. And in that vein, there are many people who express or demonstrate beliefs that perpetuate abusive, unjust power dynamics — that is, people who are bigoted — but whose individual tendencies to mistreat other people can vary in intensity from "violently dangerous" to "extremely irritating." There are also people who express or demonstrate radically anti-bigoted beliefs on the one hand but on the other hand are still quite capable of hurting people around them.

These nuances are why well-meaning people who attempt to craft "safe spaces" often wind up flummoxed by situations that don't match what they were expecting. They think they did everything right, set up clear rules about what wasn't permissible, kept out the most obviously dangerous people, and some kind of violation still occurred. Now what?

It grows even more difficult to sort out when we honestly examine words like abuse and bigotry in the first place. These words absolutely describe real phenomena, and contrary to what hegemonic power structures would like us to think, those phenomena absolutely exist in a shocking number of contexts. Whether you belong to the Survivors, the Protectors, or the Quitters — and whether your exact politics are of the revolutionary left, the center's progressive wing, or something a little more unusual but decidedly anti-right, anti-reactionary, anti-fascist — then we can enthusiastically agree that abuse and bigotry happen on systemic scales, and that these structural violations ought to be minimized through most or all available methods. And yet: what are the conceptual limits around abuse and bigotry?

What delineates the moment when someone goes from insisting rightly on their own needs and desires to overriding someone else's needs and desires? How much does it matter if the someone-else consents to it? What constitutes their consent?

What delineates the moment when someone goes from simply not knowing about a flavor of systemic injustice to directly perpetuating it? How often does someone discernibly have more socioeconomic privileges than you and disagree with you about something, but their disagreement is founded on fair values? How often does someone occupy the same demographics as you and disagree with you politically? How can you tell which one of you deserves to be the arbiter of righteousness, and which one of you is merely dealing with internalized oppression?

It's from questions like these that some of the most virulent infighting really arises in leftist or left-positioning social environments. Usually everyone in a "safe(r) space" can agree on who the most overt threats are, so instead they tear each other apart over who is a covert threat. The outcomes of these implosions are almost universally a microcosmic version of what's happening on a grander scale across modern civilization: the Survivor grows more mistrustful, the Protector grows more anxious, the Quitter grows more cynical, and the Bootlicker both gains recruits and congratulates themselves for recognizing what they perceive as the left's inherent silliness.

Texts written in response to this, such as Sarah Schulman's Conflict Is Not Abuse or Mark Fisher's Exiting the Vampire Castle,[3] have attempted to analyze these implosions' implications for what some people might refer to as "the left's (in)ability to get anything done"; ironically, there is now a cottage industry of online personalities in the Quitter camp who feel so scarred by cycles of mistrust that their only recourse seems to be constantly publishing pieces that rail against that which they see as ruining the left, e.g. Freddie deBoer. (Oh, Freddie...) In turn, these people are accused of secretly being Bootlickers, so then they spend inordinate time having to defend themselves against that as well, even as the Bootlickers might love for them to join. The ouroboros has a whole second head.

Even without moral judgment, I think it should be obvious from watching all these phenomena that things can't go on this way. On a personal level, I see the psychological damage it's worked in most people around me. Without naming names, I know:

• Friends of marginalized backgrounds[4] who feel as if they can barely interact with most of their/our community spaces anymore
• Friends who are so addicted to doomscrolling that it's almost impossible to have cogent conversations with them anymore, because all they have to say are links to terrible news, or their out-loud opinions about it
• Friends who have tried so hard to be effective Protectors but feel so completely devalued as such that even if they may never cross over to the Bootlickers, I worry more seriously about their risk of self-harm
• Friends who overwhelmingly yearn to create meaningful, safer community but feel so traumatized and/or cynical due to others' conduct that they have no energy left to actually try anything

In my own case, I've never been "cancelled," and I think the word has described too many different concepts at once to actually be useful, but I certainly feel like there are people I run into both online and offline who would subject me to traumatic emotional abuse — similar in execution to what I experienced from my abuser[5] — if I ever failed to speak/write and conduct myself in ways that met their excruciatingly precise standards for purity. I deeply know the pain and insecurity they may well be feeling, because I've known the same things, often from similar sources, and I too have no wish to associate with people who hate defining characteristics of my body, mind, or heart; but for a long time now, I've been in a phase of my trauma healing where it's outright detrimental for me to walk on eggshells too much around someone. Many of the ways my abuser hurt me specifically involved her twisting progressive notions to force me to be a person who met her standards for "safety," even as the parts of myself she stripped away were completely harmless by any measure.

I therefore basically avoid these kinds of people when I run across them, but it's not a lovely way to live. It means I have to assume as much bad faith from them as they assume from me. It means I'm defaulting to exclusion among people who would otherwise leap to exclude me first.

This is in addition to all the exclusion I have to do with people who actually hate the demographics I belong to, or who are already inclined to exploit me, because they are Bootlickers or because they're the ones with the actual boots to lick.[6]

I, and people in my position, are beyond tired. Worn down to the bone, perhaps even the marrow. Excluding people to protect ourselves is not helpful when the smallest transgression is interpreted as a cardinal sin. What would happen if more of us chose to trust, to assume good faith, to give and accept apologies freely, to examine and work through sources of discomfort with each other? "Intent isn't magic," goes the now-rote slogan, and it's true, but only to a point: the person who didn't intend to hurt me is still categorically safer than the person who did intend it.

Good faith, good relation

I have been thinking about these problems for years and years in both an immediate personal context and the wider historical one that I began with. But much more recently, just in the past twelve months or so, I've had a clearer and more holistic framework for understanding what really has concerned me.

It is not only that life feels better when humans interact on a more good-faith basis, assuming the best of each other and giving the best as default. Lately, I've grasped that a core tenet of animist thinking — as my ancestors once possessed, and as indigenous peoples[7] still possess today — is viewing the world relationally, that is through the relations between different things. To be an animist also means to value when two (or more) things are in good relation, interacting with each other in the way that's harmonious, balanced, honoring their unique roles and also the bond that joins them; to say those things are in bad relation would mean something had become disjointed, imbalanced, disrespectful, usually with one side of the relation benefiting more than the other side, or perhaps with the relation being severed.

At least, that's my own way of thinking about it, but I hope I've correctly echoed the scholars from whom I've been distilling some animist analysis for my own rites. As semi-usual I have to credit Tyson Yunkaporta and Rune Rasmussen; in this case I can also name Robin Wall Kimmerer, Lyla June Johnston, Manchán Magan, and a host of other indigenous and non-indigenous voices I've encountered in these peoples' periphery. Everything I'm about to say here next is not my original thinking so much as my mind coming home to what seems, anthropologically, to be our species' original thinking.

The deepest harm of so much alienation, fragmentation, and mistrust on a social scale is the breaking of relations on a cosmic scale. The deterioration of good faith interactions between people is the deterioriation of good relation between us, and it's mirrored exactly in our bad relation with the planet we live on.

To recover, the only way is to make relations again, and to make them well. Certainly the more relating, the better. It's difficult to suggest that when I know full well how those of us with autism[8], trauma backgrounds, and so-called introversion all have distinct reasons to retreat socially, instead of going to the effort of connection. But we must. From an animist perspective, it isn't bad to retreat from one another sometimes, taking some time and space to ourselves — but to retreat at all times is another matter, and in fact very dangerous. As social, communal beings, we have to let ourselves need other people, and we have to let them need us.

But if more relations are better, then it must also be said that the quality of the relations is just as important. Some other time I will write out thoughts about quality relations with the more-than-human world — but just working within the human scope for now, I think one of the first and greatest steps toward ending our atomized loneliness is to intentionally improve what we do to relate human-to-human. We should be cultivating more than mere parasocial passings-by; we should be talking with each other about more than news or common interests, and rather about deep, strange, wonderful things; we should be demonstrating affection even when we aren't in romantic love, whatever that is; we should be building community as groups instead of ludicrously trying to do it as individuals.

Imagine having more than a dozen people you felt so close with that you could be vulnerable around them — probably not the same degree of intimacy between you and each of them, but a baseline in all cases where you don't have to hide any part of your personality, you feel certain you're seeing all of theirs, you can confide in them about dark matters, and you feel completely available for them to come to you. I think I'm growing close to that amount of trust with that number of people, but it's taken hard, hard work. Most of these people are friends I do regularly see in person even if online communications are our most frequent way to stay in touch. And I would hazard a guess that some majority of humans right now do not really feel they have this — feeling instead that their relationships are overly conditional or transactional — and unfortunately when many of them do it's a false sense of security wheedled into them by a high-control religion (that is, a cult).

If we could all work so hard to regularly create and preserve such trust between ourselves and our loved ones — to make them our unambiguously loved ones — then when conflicts arose, we would all have much more skin in the game for resolving them. When the actual energy of your relationship is its own focal point, and you do not simply live separate lives that happen to intersect when it suits both of you, suddenly your self becomes permeable with the other person, but you can accept it. Their pain is your pain, their joy your joy, and vice versa.

It's harder to hurt one another to the core, because you're both simultaneously more resilient and more sensitive. And this solid foundation reinforces itself: it's harder for malignant mistrust to take hold if the existing trust is already so honored.

This is just the beginning of good relation as a grounding point for making and remaking communities, however. For trust still can be broken even in that context. How can an ethos of good faith, good relation be protected against exploitation?

Protocol is for more than kink

It would be a critical error to assume that just because we can be more welcome and connective than we once were, then we must forgive everyone their transgressions. Sometimes we will meet people who hurt us so intensely, early on in our relation-making, that it would be much wiser to retreat and reassess instead of helplessly struggling to deal with the fallout. Sometimes we will know people who have already done us so much harm that life is too short to mend our relation with them, and we should feel free to walk away from them even if our overall community does not. I am glad to have learned that a person does not have to be predatory to still be incompatible with me.

To make these choices about someone, we must be able to cultivate a strong sense of whether they've transgressed in the first place. It's not enough to simply have all of our own unique, individual boundaries and hope that everyone around us will magically know where each of those lines are drawn. Certainly it's a start, but a community needs governance through flexible, adaptive rules — not walls to limit interaction itself, but protocols to help those interactions be the best they can.

Whether we're speaking of indigenous tribal societies whose semi-anarchistic systems have endured into the present (as I've focused on learning more about through Yunkaporta's work) or speaking of decentralized tribal and urban societies of the distant, unrecorded past (as I've discovered through work by the likes of David Graeber), one common thread can usually be noticed or inferred among them all: whether they have singular chieftains, councils of elders, or a more horizontal decision-making process, these peoples must uphold a great many laws. Even when the laws go unwritten, the laws are as complex as any colonial legal code. The law is life, not in order to produce harsh punishments but rather because laws provide a reference point for where someone has violated boundaries, and what is to be done to mend the relations that person damaged.

We need laws for our communities, even — in fact especially — the most anarchist ones, and we need them for our personal lives. We must each understand our own rules of engagement with someone else, and we must obey them. And whether our communities are just a few people or a few hundred[9], we might have the option of asking someone else whether they have personal variants on certain rules, but a certain code of conduct is the default, and in all likelihood if the someone-else is a dedicated member of the same community we would already be well aware of any variants to use with them.

If another person couldn't respect even the default code that they should know, there would be no reason to interact, because this would be the signal they wouldn't build good relations.

Should this seem too archaic, consider the alternative where we lack most consensual protocols and have either carceral, nonconsensual laws imposed on us or a complete free-for-all, while we are all connected and interdependent globally. This has resulted in billions of humans operating from different cultural, linguistic, geographic, and psychological contexts, all of us chaotically trying to behave in whatever ways make sense to us, without more than a few people we interact with ever perfectly sharing that same sense. We need to develop much, much smaller, decentralized groups that can set their own protocols...

and permit movement from one group to another whose protocols suit you better...

and have productive interaction between groups whose protocols are different if they aren't creating adverse effects for everyone — which means making protocols for interfacing between different groups through official and unofficial representatives.

We need not, cannot, and must not live as solitary islands, when instead each of us should be a nexus in a network, with protocols being the means by which each nexus creates new connections, or refuses them.

Some questions, answered

I have written this first part of my call rather abstractly. I did promise something concrete, so here are examples of what I mean for when to choose exclusion vs. inclusion, and how to organize a social life toward that which is equitable and rewarding.

1. Besides the truly, dangerously, unaccountably predatory people mentioned earlier, do not engage more than necessary with people who are profoundly incompatible with you — while accepting they have a place in your community that other people can handle for you.
2. Educate yourself periodically on what injustices have taken place in the world and in your community, but do not follow the daily (let alone hourly) blow-by-blow if something doesn't have direct implications for you and the people you directly care for. Spend the equivalent time drafting and experimenting with the community you wish to belong to, or do something kind for yourself or your loved ones — or simply make something beautiful, because beauty gives us all a special kind of resilience.
3. Find the people around you with whom you can engage in rewarding, not perfunctory or uncomfortable, activities. Find these people hyper-locally. Don't try to manage something on a national or international scale. These people should also be as happy to interact with each other as with you.
4. When navigating a problem with these companions of yours, acknowledge your shared humanity and the likelihood that you all have your own traumas, scars, and fears — that with this acknowledgment, you have made a pledge to be patient with one another — and that any solutions you devise ought to account for and work to heal those old wounds instead of reinforcing them.
5. Recognize that if someone is having trouble trusting you, the worst thing you could possibly do is give them more reasons for mistrust. Take their trust as seriously as you want them to take yours. Otherwise, be prepared for them to dismiss you in the same way they perceived you dismissing them.
6. If someone believes in or desires something that contradicts your self-image or your own values, consider that they may still care about you even if they don't understand you. If this person tends to show respect to you in most contexts, then perhaps you or someone else you both trust could work to patiently educate them rather than push them away. If you expect them to understand you without any explanation even though it would require a great shift in their own perspective, then don't be surprised if they fail to figure things out on their own. Do not assume they'll find worthy resources elsewhere.
7. In a disagreement, sort out semantic differences as soon as possible. As many besides me have long observed, it's often the case that you and the other person are speaking about the same exact thing from different angles, nothing more.
8. Even when you are tired or busy, put in the effort to uphold your side of a relationship so that it isn't always the other person doing so. Bad relation will emerge if you only engage with the other person when it's convenient for you.
9. Conversely, do not let yourself be the only person upholding their side of the relationship, or bad relation will emerge as they take advantage of you and as you exhaust your own strength. (This does not mean dropping someone just because their own strength seems to be flagging. Keep a candle burning for them for a while.)
10. Maintain the substance of your relation with someone, not the mere idea of it. If there is no substance beneath the idea then the relation is a shame. Let it go, or rework it to have substance again.

If it isn't altogether clear how I reached these ten suggestions, I still don't wish to spell it out too didactically, so simply reread what I've written overall, and consider it. This ambiguity also brings me to what will serve as my conclusion.

A non-conclusion

I can tell I've only said a small part of what I could say here, so I will continue on this theme in the future. There is more I could elaborate about from each section of this post, and there are also further steps I can envision from where I've left things. But as for what I have said so far, the hour is late for me and it also feels as if I've prepared a taste of a dish that must now simmer a while longer before it's ready to be tried again. I can't write one definitive essay about the mass social crisis or its solutions.

I do know, however, that I am more certain than ever about what is happening and what is to be done. If you have been at a loss, if you have been despairing: I hope my words are a salve. We do not need to give up. The protocols can still be made, and we can each still find where we belong.

[1] I was disappointed recently, for example, to discover that Peter Grey, the author of a few works that have impacted me like "Rewilding Witchcraft," seems to have mounted some asinine defenses of allying ourselves with the worst possible people. When someone who's an anti-capitalist gets much more hung up on being "anti-woke," I can only shake my head at the skewed priorities.

[2] At least the scam artists who take advantage of working people. Those who take advantage of capitalists are fairly entertaining even if I can't say I'd go to that effort.

[3] I haven't yet read the former, but I've read the latter and may have even referenced it in Salt for the Eclipse before. Although I agree with many aspects of Fisher's thesis, my necessary disclaimer is that it's a shame he chose to defend Russell Brand — not that Fisher knew anything at the time, but what the public these days knows of Brand's private life is upsetting for certain.

[4] Not exclusively but especially queer, asexual, and/or trans friends.

[5] And sometimes also content. Never forget that terfs were originally feminists who considered themselves very much on the far left; and we can't "no true Scotsman" our way out of that one.

[6] Unlike some people I know, I don't mistrust all white, straight, cis men — but I do immediately mistrust them if they make twice my salary, own a business, or wouldn't blink twice at starting one that they controlled by themselves. Ditto for people in other demographics who are still in the same class, but of course that particular class is widely dominated by that type of man.

[7] And even some not fully indigenous groups, e.g. the ongoing prevalence of Shinto in Japan.

[8] I intensely distinguish my autistic experience from anything about introversion because although just about every autistic comrade I've ever met has difficulties with human interaction, it's only sometimes due to disliking the company of other people and preferring solitude; very often, the issue is that the desire to interface is hampered by neurotypical expectations of what that should look like, and so it feels safer to interact with other autistic or autistic-adjacent people, or not at all. In my case I'm so extraverted that I'll even brave the risk of social awkwardness in various contexts — as long as the logistical effort to reach or arrange the social space doesn't fry my executive function in the process.

[9] Any larger and we are definitely pushing up against the restrictions of Dunbar's number, which I believe I've touched on before.

Thank you for reading a post on the longer side, because it was important once more. I doubt it will go viral, but of course I know that talking about these things puts me at some small risk of that event — and its consequences from all directions. So be it, though.

Next week, things will be less potentially controversial but certainly kinkier, focusing on sensory overload ordeals. After that, it's going to be an Occult-tier post for the spring equinox.