I realize how insignificant I am

CW: eating disorders, abuse, sexual assault, illness, racism, sexism, and ableism

I just googled "Why do I hate being on a computer". Google's AI overview gives a list: anxiety, injury, technophobia, and misplaced blame.

Misplaced blame: People may get angry at computers when they don't work right because they don't understand that the computer is not responsible for the processes it runs.

It's 12:30 AM and I finally sat at my computer workstation for the first time in 4 days. I need to do something for a project. But I don't feel like I can and that feeling doesn't make any sense. I'm more than capable. Aren't I? I have this history of amazing complex work, going above and beyond. And as a generalist I feel like I'm improving all the time. Yet improvement doesn't seem to fix anything, not in a tangible way.

A lot of things lack sense now. And the only way I can seem to pull things together is to steal sense from one area for another. Because covid denial is constantly stealing from me. The only clear part is that it's not working. I'm not working. I'm a worn down gear that the machine is choking on. And oh how I want capitalism to choke on me. Am I letting myself be eaten? Am I the thing to be binged and purged? Or is that cycle intrinsic to me and my energy?

My EMDR therapist recommended I not label these issues "avoidance" and to do everything I could to regulate myself before working. For 2 years, she witnessed me relive and process the worst things that have happened to me. Then one session, instead of being at home, she was at the therapy clinic maskless. It turned out she was an anti-vaxxer and covid conspiracy theorist. I forced her to talk to me about it the whole session while I sobbed. She just wanted to slink away, to give up on being my therapist the way she said other clients had given up on her. Once they found out about her beliefs. I recorded half of our conversation. Not sure how I even had the presence of mind to make that decision. I didn't want to expose, I just didn't want to forget.

"Weren't you the one who taught me the value of a pause?", and she admitted she had.

I asked her how she could be so well read and believe covid was made in a lab or fake. And she said she has read different information than I have. And I know the research supports this, that the more intelligent and educated a person is the more they are able to integrate disinformation. Ultimate rationalizers. Some of my fear of myself is buried in here.

A bunch of my sessions were processing things that have happened to me in my STEM career. Memories of my PhD advisor, who discriminated against me.

Where did my trauma with tech start? Was it being an unsupervised child on the internet in the 90s? That incident on Everquest in middle school, where some kill stealer called me the N word (my character was Black) and said his brother was going to come rape me. My blog being discovered in high school, where I was shit talking my then-boyfriend's little sister for being a brat to me. Something I could have never gotten away with, just like I didn't get away with writing about it. Being the only person in my advanced programming class to actually solve the Towers of Hanoi recursive algorithm and told by my high school teacher that I should become a female software engineer. Like I'd be set for life, some DEI hire, right? I showed him by not finishing the project and got a D in the class. I had already done the fun part, how much could a grade matter after that? Was it the girl several grades older than me in the same math class saying "You're going to die bitch" when I turned in my geometry quiz early? Maybe it was the teacher screaming at me in the hallway, who'd pour water on my head when I would fall asleep in class. Because we'd be just taking turns reading out of some book that I could have read several times faster. He liked to ask questions to prove we knew nothing and I liked to answer those questions. He made fun of me for reading condensed books, my mom would get them for a quarter each. Maybe it was earlier than all of that. Maybe it was my dad introducing me as his little math genius to strangers. Maybe it was peeing my pants during that standardized test and then getting the highest score in the district, which my teacher felt the need to announce to my class. A story I want to tell as standup someday, refining my pain into humor before others can do it for me.

Maybe it's all the nerve pain computers have caused me. Maybe it's the exploitation it's always tied to. Maybe it's my advisor retaliating for me mastering out of my PhD by forcing me to give up my laptop I bought with traineeship funds and saying she would go after my entire traineeship if I didn't. At least my department forced her to sign for me to get my Masters. Maybe it's all the times in STEM that a man screamed or laughed at me. Weaving their power into my earliest traumatic memories, bringing it out of me. Fawn, flight, fight, freeze.

Maybe it's all the harm tech commits. The unhealthy leaders, too many to list or describe. The conflict minerals. The factory suicides. Maybe it's the years of pandemic isolation, with only tech and devices as an outlet for connection. That connection bundled with distraction. Where should that blame be placed?

I should have those same associations with my phone and I don't seem to. Or maybe I do. Impossible to say. I keep looking for answers and I can't seem to find any sturdy ones. Nothing I can rest upon, for just a moment.

I dream about a world where tech never existed. I consciously feel like there's no way I would want that. But I am craving something that is different than here and I don't know how it would feel.

I've become obsessed with the history and roots of words. Maybe because my social context is unmoored by societal abandonment. Maybe it's just autistic hyperlexia. Technology as a literal definition means words or discourse about the way things are gained. That would have included art or a craft, but we lost it somewhere along the way. We've lost so much, it stuns me. An ache in my chest for a world I never knew and still long to return to.

It's now past 1 AM and I'm still not doing what I'm meant to be doing. But here we are and maybe I will get there.

The words I was researching the other day came from context and connect and collect. Trying to define my unique gifts as if I could be guided by them. The more words I looked up the more etymology seemed to be rooted in words about body positions, movements, and patterns from our earliest forms of generative work. For context and text to come from weaving. I was doing questions from a Tiktok creator about defining your villain to help your creative process. As if my issue is a lack of opposition and not too much of it. I will take all the hints I can get.

My villain was this overconfident, under-competent probably-a-man. Someone who doesn't care about details or other people's reality, because they don't have to. They don't seek to understand and so I can't seem to understand them. They are very busy and busyness means they're important, so who cares if others have to pick up the pieces around them? Who cares if they are late or don't show up at all, after asking you to meet a deadline? Who cares if they take shortcuts and speak in vague generics? It must be a you-problem.

In visualization meditations, I've become them. I've felt the energy of manipulation and covert aggression and false certainty. The dogma of a world narrowly defined. The politician, wishy-washy telling-you-what-you-want-to-hear. The greed of an endless void, nothing ever enough so you certainly won't be. The occasional thin fabrication of being aware and caring and progressive, but a blackbox underneath it anyways. Knowing there's an undefined expectation hanging over my head and maybe they put it there, but somehow I'm a willing participant and it shames me still.

And then I became a snake and ate them. The archetypes and actual leaders I've encountered. I didn't stay long enough to find out if the snake got indigestion or if it was an ouroboros eating its own tail.

I was trained to center men. They can still cause me to spiral and destabilize. They are left untouched while I carry everything that's happened. Often when I get close to a cishet man and sometimes women with a certain pattern of behavior, I have this hangover after where I feel like a fool for ever trying. For internalizing another's communication issues or lack of awareness of their own limitations or respect of boundaries as my inability to explain or tolerate or be reliable. It's a psychic and physical cost I can't afford to pay. And no amount of money would ever make it worth it. Ambiguity becomes analysis and still I find no answers.

Maybe it has nothing to do with computers. Maybe it's money or my strained relationship with my own will and motivation. Maybe it's pathological demand avoidance or persistent drive for autonomy or counter-will or reaction formation or burnout. Maybe I can't take responsibility for myself and the decisions I make. And when the phone drifts from my hand, no more notifications to constantly check..

I realize how insignificant I am. And that is the root of the trait tree that bothers me.

Disability comes with this gift, a cripping of time. I can't be constantly busy or be rushing into the next thing. I have to be here, in this bodymind with all of it's needs and quirks. I have to rest and reflect. And I want my time to remain available for the people who may need or want it. I am never too busy for people I love. I'm always here. I will not cancel or abandon you.

I turn my thoughts around, I do the work. I'm not irritated with others, I'm irritated with myself. For not trusting my instincts and taking a leap on my own. For not knowing what I want. Is this resistance a clue to stop or continue? Will I find that answer in words derived from a body's position and movement and the iterative relational maintenance work of femininity? I am weaving and I am woven, stitch by stitch and row by row. An organized mess.

The computer isn't responsible, it's a layer between all of us and a messy nonspecific context. It's a space with no place. The alternative to misplaced blame and externalizing is internalizing. Oh, this doesn't work and it must be my fault somehow. Grandiosity about being the worst of the worst. What's that study about people's perception of their own math skills not matching their actual skills? A study upheld with the subtext of gender, yet it is never named or defined or controlled for.

If I wrote well researched articles, I would find that research about a tech middleman or AI in harm and how people reacted to that authority and meddling. It requires a sifting and searching to go find and in that time, I'll stop writing. And I don't believe I can stop, because I am stealing this time for me.

Then I remember what I've read about how a positive mindset is better than negative, but the best is a questioning mindset. Hi, I live here. And I'm confined to my home of questions.

Here's what I guess I know. I don't want to be at a computer or code or have anything to do with tech. But I also think that's what I want more than anything. To build a product, to make some dent in developing software as a process. To contribute a new tech business model that isn't extractive. I lack discipline, but I want to be Galileo on house arrest finishing my seminal work. I have commitment though, down to my core. And I know for what: Buddhism, disability justice, infectious disease mitigations, anti-genocide. Curiosity, compassion, creativity, courage, calm.

I know I am committed to life, so why is it so hard to be committed to mine?

How much does any of that matter if the result is the same? That I am not doing it. I am letting everyone down. Especially me and the fantasy of who I could be. If I weren't so insignificant.

I can't carry this pressure anymore. And I don't know how to set it down. I remember Amy Gannon, holding a pumpkin at a women's entrepreneurship retreat. Saying we have to set it down for a while to work on a business - all of our care and concern for others. I dress up in the trait of unreliable because I'm tired of other's energy being built on top of me. If I reject me, maybe I can reject all of it. Maybe I can reject the generosity and care I invested in people who abandoned me.

I remember how my speech about being an abuse survivor was so powerful in front of a room full of people and so icky in a 1 on 1. I wish they would have prepared me for that, instead it was like peeling off layers of my skin with each new stranger who sat down. "Hi, I'm Cakelin and I survived abuse, here's what I want to build..". A women's business retreat causing one of my most memorable trauma setbacks.

How I wished it wasn't all so.. gendered. My retreat from men into a world of women, feeling almost as bizarre and foreign to me.

Men can stand at a front of the room and pretend to solve some problem they are unaffected by. And that will never be me. I'll be affected and everyone will see me as pure risk, forced to answer downsides instead of being seen as potential. This weight I had to carry with no tangible support given to me. I am only full of potential when it is amorphous and convenient to others, while I orbit the tangible permanent potential of men.

Amy died in a helicopter crash with her daughter at the end of 2019. My partner at the time, another founder, had scheduled something else at the same time as her memorial. He was waffling back and forth about staying. I didn't care what he did, I was exactly where I wanted and needed to be. And then he left. A woman founder he was working with was with him and I remember him saying "She's not that great for you to talk to, you won't get anything out of her". So many clues I misplaced, in my desperation to be understood and accepted as a founder in a world I didn't belong in or to.

Why would you ever think you could do it all? That's only possible if you continue to take from everyone else. Along the way, robbing yourself of your own presence and ability to enjoy the process.

One day you'll be a story someone else can tell or listen to. And it won't matter if it's real, all that will matter is how others feel.

Disability will force you to stop, develop boundaries around your precious energy. You won't be able to tolerate the busyness, manufactured urgency, miscommunications, and lack of boundaries from others, because that unreliability belongs to your bodymind. In some clever painful twist, it resists. It is beautiful and unyielding, like the severe weather events becoming more frequent and intense as climate crisis continues.

I wonder what matriarchal software would look and feel like. I wonder what kind of context would center interbeing and engaged action. I wonder how to connect buy local with local first software. I wonder if design could ever help bridge my unmet needs as a disabled person, without the attached crip tax.

In order to get closer to what we think we want, do some of us always have to absorb harm? Do we have to be something we're not?

What if we turned to ourselves and each other and said "you can stop"?