Living the Aftermath 2021-2026 - A. and Short Conclusion

The Beginning of the Self-Restoration Attempts: Mapping Memories and Trying to Reassemble Continuity

I think it was already late 2021 when I realised just how disconnected I was from my feelings. By then I had started deconstructing and mapping all sorts of moral concepts: forgiveness versus enabling, what love does and how it moves, how fear arises, why truth is important, and so on.

For a long time, I kept circling the same questions, feeling foolish, as if my own thoughts were slipping through my fingers. This is what led me to start taking myself apart, piece by piece, convinced I must be confused about the very nature of a thought.

Everything inside felt jumbled, indistinct; my thinking was heavy and sluggish. After a while of trying to separate my feelings from thoughts, I realised that I couldn't find any feelings at all. That seemed impossible. Everyone has feelings. I turned to Google, assuming I must simply be unable to recognise them. I can't remember what I typed, but nearly everything I found pointed to alexithymia. I must be alexithymic, I thought. Having grown up in an emotionally illiterate, neglectful environment and lacking any vivid emotional memory of who I used to be, it seemed to fit. That discovery naturally led me to consider being on the spectrum.

Reading about the autism spectrum, a vague, uneasy feeling began to surface - something to do with a comment about autism. I couldn't remember any such moment, but the feeling was heavy. It kept tugging at me, as if the memory lived inside my body but I was unable to see it having any basis in reality. No image, no context, only the weight of it. Then one day, a sliver of memory appeared: A. angrily saying, "Are you autistic?"

At first it seemed almost unreal, like something my mind could have made up, yet the more I connected with the feeling around it, the more details began to surface. That moment cracked something open. It was the first glimpse into the heavier part of that night. For years I had been operating under the illusion that our interaction had been far lighter, even understandable. My emotional impressions had been vague but generally benign, centered around the feeling of being accused of prejudice. I empathised with him. It was only when this particular memory resurfaced that I realised how much I had truly forgotten.

It wasn't only memory that had gone missing, but a sense of continuity within my own being. It became an endless cycle of watching myself think and act, while access to the continuity of my awareness was itself disrupted. I was somehow aware, but not aware of being aware, and each moment was disconnected from the next.

For the longest time I operated on auto-pilot, as if I was performing myself. It is as though the memory of me was carried by my body alone. I was moving through familiar gestures, habits, ways of using language while the self behind them was numb. It was as if my body remembered what to do, but I wasn't fully there to inhabit it. The patterns of behavior my self had been operation from my entire life continued on their own, but I would sometimes catch myself confused, recognising the familiarity with my own self, but struck by the strangeness. I would sometimes overcompensate, and other times hold back, like my body was acting on self without the context of self. Even the words I would use, they belonged to myself but somehow weren't me. I lacked even the capacity to inhabit my own language.

Without external confirmation of those two nights, I couldn't anchor myself in reality. Every piece of my fragmented experience depended on knowing whether my memory was stable, and whether my perception of those nights bore any resemblance to our shared reality. With no understanding or clarity on my experience, I couldn't even begin to truly process, let alone heal from it all. I couldn't tell which parts of my shattered reality to trust, or which memories to integrate.

After we met, I had only sent A. a total of eight emails, spread across eight years; confused attempts to establish my reality that were met with silence or vague responses. I tried to respect what seemed like a boundary while working through my understanding on my own. I didn't know what else to do. He wasn't communicating, and I was operating on emotional impressions alone trying to make sense of an experience that defied conventional perceptions of reality.

For a long time I didn't even have the words for what I actually needed from him. There was a lot to process before I could reach that place. And I struggled processing with so many pieces missing, and no access to my feelings. It was as if I knew what feelings were required in any context, but I didn't understand the context.

I had never asked him to agree with my interpretation, only for communication. Even when I couldn't articulate it, I still knew that silence where clarity was needed wasn't right. Making use of symbols to communicate it probably didn't help me. It is only now looking back that I realise that beyond the cognitive and emotional overwhelm my experience came with, the second night served as trauma around my core identity and values which impeded authentic expression of self around the matter. It was as if I needed to hold onto the symbols, because I felt reduced to them, and that part of myself felt rejected. The symbols I was left with were the only emotional memory of myself and feeling rejected because of them impacted, and slowed down my ability to differentiate. 

He had told me early on how the physical implications would create unnecessary complications for him. It was his prerogative, and yet for me all of it was bigger than the romantic implications. I told him this, but somehow his reply ended up making me feel as if it was romance alone that I was looking for, and in our circumstances it didn't feel wise to challenge him. Sure, I was still hoping for it, but my needs went beyond that.

His accusation of bigotry, and the memory loss complicated things. I was unable to defend myself adequately, as otherwise, I would have turned to feminist frameworks to explain why his vagueness was not ok. I wanted to point out the double standard I saw, back then, but his silence was making me question whether or not I had done something wrong. With no reliable memory I couldn't defend myself even to my own self. I remember telling him in 2017 that the road to knowing would be long and painful without his input. I could already see what the absence of clarity would do to me, but I couldn't yet articulate the how and why, and I had yet to know how to articulate the existential charge held by my experience. All I felt I could do was to ask him to talk to me.

In trying to find ways to defend myself from his accusation, I ended up deconstructing the entirety of my relationship with prejudice, racism, and Islamophobia. His accusation struck at the core of my being. I felt that his failure to address them afterwards, especially given that I had constantly told him I hadn't done anything wrong, and that I believed we shared the same essential structure, was key to understanding my experience.

He knew what I believed. I told him plainly about my mindset that night, my dreams, that I thought we shared the same soul. He never addressed it. Not to agree, not to disagree, not even to say "you are seeing things that are not there". Only ambiguity. It was either that I was failing to see my prejudice, or he believed I was making things up and wasn't seeing the reality inversion, as it was possible for his vagueness to be deliberate and conscious avoidance.

The idea that maybe I held unconscious prejudice I wasn't aware of had me look deeply into the possibility. 

The irony is that the very fact that I could see past a label like Devil, that I refused to impose that weight based on dreams and symbols, should have been evidence enough of my character. Yet his vagueness left me suspended, unsure whether he believed my account, thought I was delusional, or was avoiding something he could not or did not want to face.

Doing this, however, helped me to gradually restore some of the memories of that second night. At first, the more neutral fragments came back through analysis alone, as I worked through his accusations logically. The heavier ones involved a different process. Each fragment began as a feeling I initially resisted. When I worked through this, and managed to stay with the feelings around certain gaps, more of the associated memory came into view. These were the hardest feelings to connect with, so the process was slow, and it took years for the fragments to stabilise and become less blurry. I had yet to say that my memory was one continuous flow, and I am unsure whether or not there are parts I have yet to recover to this day.

Relational Ethics: The Cost of Withheld Clarity

By 2023, small chunks of my memory had begun to return. The picture was still incomplete, fragmented, and blurry as a whole, but it was more than the emotional impressions I had been operating from. I had spent eight years trapped inside a past I could not make sense of, years marked by isolation, depression, and plenty of moments when life simply felt unbearable. It was as though I had been living in suspension, neither able to move forward nor close what had happened.

After so much restraint, the pressure finally became too much. I reached out to him on WhatsApp, asking for a real exchange - a back and forth. I needed to understand what was real and what wasn't, to understand why he never addressed anything and remained vague, yet polite and familiar in reply to an existentially charged narrative. I needed him to acknowledge our shared reality, and to fill in the gaps. I needed answers so I could process and heal. The situation had become too heavy to carry as I had been doing until then. Not long after I had sent him that message on whatsapp, I realised I had been blocked.

Without understanding the reality of our dynamic, my mind kept looping through endless possibilities, each one as unbearable as the next. I knew I was asking for something simple. I wasn't asking for agreement with my interpretation, only for the ability to anchor myself in shared reality. I was desperate to feel some ground underneath my feet, whichever way that ground might have looked like or felt.

When his silence persisted, I wrote again. A series of short emails this time. I couldn't write the longer explanatory ones I had written until then. My mind was too broken for that. I sent rapid fire emails trying to release some of what I had been holding inside. Writing was the only way I knew how to release the pressure and keep myself from imploding. Each short email was an attempt to get something out so that I could breathe. I think I imagined that will be it. Little did I know. Those rapid fire emails ended up turning into a short exchange that left me even more confused than I was before.

I hadn't reached out hoping for anything, or even knowing how to ask for what I needed. I was overwhelmed and barely holding myself together and all I was able to say was distress, memory loss, isolation and that I needed a back and forth. Those short emails weren't even an attempt at dialogue, they were just breaths I was trying to take through words. When his equally short replies came: "you should try and live your life" "please realise I do care for you," "my life took on a different path", "I am upset you have felt like this", "I didn't intend for this to happen, and in all sincerity, I want the best for you", "I spend all my time walking", "I have no answers" "I will always be here" - I couldn't tell what they meant, or what some of his words had to do with anything I needed. I wasn't looking for confirmation of anything mystical. I was just trying to anchor myself in something real, and I was left with more confusion.

His words lingered without context. They weren't saying much of anything, and yet some of the words seemed like agreement with my interpretation. I wasn't sure if they were distance disguised as care, or care disguised as distance. I had been unable to shake the self hypothesis. It only grew bigger with time as seeing his social media seemed to confirm that what I had initially intuited about him was accurate. Him entering a relationship with a woman the same type as I am, in the same age bracket, when it seemed his 'type' was no more fixed than mine, was also giving me pause. I was already disoriented, and every silence after those messages seemed to expand the fog and heaviness that had taken over my life.

I was trying to understand and make sense of how I was supposed to interpret his words and how they fit into my reality. My mind went back to the year before when right after I had sent him an email with the full account of the precognitive dreams his online presence shifted. He broke from his usual pattern of political tweet likes to: 'truth has one face', 'leave space between yourself and the trigger'; 'women knew everything from the start'; 'you can't be awakened when you've been pretending to be asleep all along'. To anyone else, these might have been random, but to me - someone still holding the possibility that maybe we shared the same soul they felt charged. The ambiguity kept me suspended.

I kept my composure for a while, then tried to explain my state. I had never done anything like it before, but I was desperate. I knew it was likely I was going to look pathetic in his eyes. I didn't really care. I was trying to survive by reaching out to the only person who could have made things easier for me. I thought that making my state clear to him would help him see just how much his ambiguity, and silence were affecting me, so I told him I was having suicidal urges at that point. I hadn't shared this with anyone. Back then, I was confident enough that his silence would only last for a little while longer and that I could keep myself from acting on them. The urges were there nonetheless and I desperately needed to anchor myself in reality and only he was able to help me with that. With no anchor in reality, my mind was going wild imagining all these possibilities and scenarios, and my self was crumbling under their weight.

I could barely think during that time. I was literally struggling to make connections between one thought and the next. I barely had any energy, and my anxiety skyrocketed. Without context, I had no stable access to my feelings. I was rapidly cycling through extremes as my mind was trying to make sense of it all. I was desperately trying to hold my life together. I didn't want people to notice what was happening, because if they asked me why, I thought that would be the beginning of my end.

I wasn't looking for validation of my interpretation. I did not deny my affection, as I was both still unable to put the Self hypothesis off, and I was hoping for possibilities that registered less heavy for my nervous system. I, however, made it clear again and again that he was free to do as he felt and pleased. I only needed answers. I needed to understand. Here I was in the most extreme of circumstances of my entire life, where his silence and ambiguity amounted to darkness and my own personal hell. Orienting myself in the reality I so deeply cared for, felt like an impossible task in this context.

Here I was, facing his silence in a circumstance where silence stood starkly against any of the feminist or human rights values he seemed to strongly identify with. It made no sense to me that someone publicly identifying with such values would treat a human being in such a vulnerable place with what seemed like avoidance of any and all responsibility. The double standard I was seeing angered me: man who had unfairly accused me of religious prejudice, to then verbally assault me to the point of near dissociative collapse, man who identified with human rights values was now turning a blind eye to a suffering he contributed to, one his ambiguity and silence over the years only deepened.

Looking back now I am not even sure how I managed to hold my life together. I was still going to work, still trying to function. I think that ironically what helped was that I couldn't remember my baseline, so I wasn't aware of how unwell I truly was.

After it all escalated I had my instagram hacked into at the end of June 2023, then again one week after I shared my state with him, in July 2023. It felt like too much of a coincidence, and this opened the floodgates. I ended up writing frantic emails trying to save myself from crumbling. I started going over every possible reality, trying to eliminate them one by one. I was hoping that if I nail the correct one, the silence will stop.

Then, in May 2024, strange things started happening in my digital space that destabilised me further having me spiral at times. I had started getting weird friends suggestions, and later on, my Facebook feed started being flooded with ads and content related to his culture, and distinctive interests. I couldn't have been the one fueling the algorithm. I was particularly careful from the first moments the content appeared, as I was looking for stable patterns in my external reality, and for that I had to be able to trust I could rule myself out of the equation. Besides, the fear of being accused of wrongdoing, and the fear that I could have been a bigot held me back all those years. It both held me back from engaging with any kind of content related to him, particularly his culture, anywhere online. Yet there it was, all of a sudden - content related to particular interests of his, and cultural background were dominating my fb feed - ads in Arabic, ads about Islam, and content related to South Asia, and Middle East. 

I couldn't help but link the drastic departure from my normal Fb feed, lasting for months, back to him somehow. I didn't know what to make of it, and started taking screenshots to make sure I wasn't seeing patterns where there weren't any. The pattern was there but that didn't make it any easier to anchor myself in reality. My mind was going wild in circular loops trying to understand my reality.

Sometimes, I thought he was maybe checking my Facebook. I couldn't see any other explanation, and couldn't imagine only fb misfiring to that degree. Then remembering his data analyst and his partner's social media marketing professional backgrounds had me question if it could have been mere coincidence. The excessiveness of the ads made no sense for the algorithm, and my engagement patterns. I couldn't confirm or infirm anything, but the combination of timing, content, excessiveness and professional capability became yet another question in trying to find answers for other questions.

It felt like every time I considered to stop writing to him, it was as if something in my digital environment would pull me back in. The two successful Instagram hacks, unusual sign-in attempts on my Hotmail, Facebook and another Instagram account, the algorithm of my Fb pushing content I wasn't engaging with, for months on end, consistently. I experienced more security incidents during this time, than all my life spent online combined. The pattern and timing were impossible for me to ignore, and kept fueling my engagement. I wasn't sure what to make of it and each incident would destabilise me further, leading me to spiral at times.

I was desperately looking for answers anywhere I could find them, and while he was more opaque, his partner's behaviour provided its own set of data points. She had blocked Instagram accounts that merely had my name attached to them, yet a month later, in a brief WhatsApp interaction pretended she did not know who I was. When I apologised for the disruption this caused in her life, she said, "What mess? there is no mess". This was directly contradicting his earlier statement: "My partner found your messages and it's been an absolute mess since." She also reduced my needs to romantic interest, by only telling me "He wasn't interested" completely discounting the trauma and distress that I raised in my initial message. 

Her public identity also underwent a series of shifts that correlated with the content of my communications. Shortly after he deleted his account on a social media platform, she began liking pages related to nutrition and obesity - a completely new behavior that hadn't been present on her twitter before. She knew of both my struggles with weight, and that I was watching. After that moment, and after sending him an email saying that what she did felt targeted and if I had unalived myself could be considered criminal - nutrition had become a visible part of her public identity, despite having labelled herself a nutritional therapist years before. 

Her insta bio also shifted to "health and beauty" after this moment, and she created a Facebook page pairing her name with those words, with beauty being a direction she had shown no prior orientation toward, and one that I felt mirrored my background in fashion. Similarly, a sudden public interest in psychology,  appeared only after the escalation. These were deviations to consistent patterns of behavior I had already observed. Neuroscience as an interest followed the same timeline, which to me felt like a tool one would reach for, in trying to discount shared consciousness. After I tagged her on a platform, she changed her display name to "I can't magick you anymore" - a phrase that only makes sense as a reference to "magical thinking", the dismissal most commonly levelled at claims like mine.

None of these were enlightening on their own but the pattern - the timing, the responsiveness, the degree of adjustment seemed to have some significance. 

His silence made the entire experience incomprehensible. What was I supposed to do with something as existential and traumatic as that, when the only other witness refused to speak? His silence didn't just hurt; it suspended my ability to make sense of my experience, my life, and it seemed equally as excessive as my attempts at clarity must have seemed to him. I couldn't wrap my mind around how someone like him would act in a way that to me seemed opposed to the very definition of ethical behavior.

My mind kept looping through endless possibilities trying to make sense of it. It was all I could do in absence of any stable feelings that could help me orient and navigate. I knew I was asking for something simple. I wasn't asking for agreement with my interpretation, only clarity. His truth over our dynamic and shared reality was all I needed, whichever that truth was. I wasn't looking to shame, to judge, just to be able to stop the mental and rapidly cycling emotional loops and orient myself in reality. I was desperate for that ground underneath my feet. I didn't even need him to pour his soul out - an explanation, his account of what happened, anything that would let me understand and finally resolve the experience. I became so desperate that I found myself writing things designed to provoke any response at all. Even anger would have been better than silence, because at least it would have been real.

My mind kept circling the same unanswerable question: how do you heal from something you can't even name? It was as if I knew something hit me. I could feel the bruises, but I couldn't say what exactly hit me. I couldn't know if the bruises lived in my mind alone, or whether I could trace them somewhere on, or inside my body.

What ended up keeping me alive was that I had no access to ways in which unaliving would be a certainty. I did my research after I wanted to drink plant fertiliser but decided it would be a gruesome way to go. I really wanted to live, but I couldn't bear it anymore. It was pressing down on me like a stone tied to my neck, and I wasn't afraid of death either. I didn't want to suffer and I wanted to spare myself of needless pain. I didn't trust myself to be firm enough with a sharp object, and it turns out most other options run the risk of merely causing loss of consciousness and physical damage. 

The weight of it all built up inside me with nowhere to go, no ear, no reply, no form. The pressure was constant, like something pressing inside my body with no way to escape. 

It all turned into deep anger, and the bigger his silence grew, the angrier I was getting because the injustice was becoming clear. 

That's when the need for release took over, and I started hitting myself in the chest. Another first, as I had never engaged in what would be socially labelled as self-harm. I, however, wasn't trying to harm myself, only to release the pressure. I was desperate to find relief, and the pain anchored me in my body. I would bruise, then move to the other side of my chest, following the tension as it surfaced. I would never recommend what I did to anyone, but it helped. It was my body's way of forcing release - a rough, instinctive somatic exercise born from mental and emotional overwhelm. Once the anger released its grip a little, the feelings underneath began to return.

The tears slowly came back. I don't remember shedding a single tear all those years, despite having lost a decade of my life to trauma. It was difficult to do so when countless possible realities had equal chances to be true at the same time. While others may be overwhelmed by sadness to see themselves cry, but the tears brought me joy. It meant I was alive. I was now experiencing the contrast from the previous dead woman walking to woman feeling something, even if something meant sadness. It took longer for feelings to return on a more daily basis. I had yet to have stable access to my feelings, but the flickers gave me hope.

I was now able to access the felt memory of how full of feeling and aliveness I used to be. I was now able to observe how my feelings had always informed my choices, and had been my navigation system throughout life. I had always been a far cry from the alexithymic woman on the autism spectrum. And yet during the times I had no feelings, and no felt memory of ever having had feelings I thought autism was a real possibility. I remember how during those times when affect couldn't stabilise itself, I would spend absurd amounts of time trying to choose a pair of socks. Every choice felt loaded, as if I could fracture or restore something depending on which way I turned. 

It had only been the cognitive memory of myself that was left. The paralysis, the confusion, the inability to make simple decisions - I cognitively knew the indecision was new, but with no felt memory of who I used to be, I didn't know if it had always been there, and I just lived life acting against it. 

I didn't recognise myself, but I also couldn't remember who I used to be, so I had nothing to compare it against. Because my feelings were gone and I had no memories of having ever been different, I didn't understand my behaviors so I thought he had to have been right when he called me autistic. The behaviors I was displaying seemed consistent with it. Him calling me autistic felt like an accusation that second night, but now it felt like an explanation. Maybe he'd been right. Maybe this was just how I am. Maybe I'd always been like this and just never noticed.

During those days, in the midst of his silence, I'd even started internalising the silence as the fixated obsessed woman, and my strong pattern recognition skills had become a sign of pathology. I was no more the intelligent woman with strong pattern recognition skills I used to be. My trauma had become a display of everything that was 'wrong' with me. The autism hypothesis gave me a framework for what was inexplicable to me. In absence of reliable memory, and acknowledgement of a shared reality that had shattered me, I could see more evidence for neurodivergence, than I could see for having been shattered.

By that point, the emails had become a way to generate patterns of data in darkness. In his silence, even the smallest response, or lack of one became information. I explored every possible reality I could think of in the content of my emails, and his silence would help me take them off the table. I compared what I wrote with what I could glimpse on his social media, searching for any overlap that could help me verify what was shared, what was projection, and what was real. It was the only external mirror I had left to test my perception against. This was my way to test a reality to which he was the only witness, and the only way I knew how to keep myself from disappearing under the weight of fragmentation.

As I became more desperate for release, the words in the emails I would send changed too. They were no longer careful attempts to explain what I merely thought I must have felt. They became raw. Anger, grief, confusion - coming out directly, not filtered through analysis and care. Each email felt like my pulse was slowly returning, and like my language was starting to remember the body it was coming from. Writing became my only way to reassemble my Self. In each and every email I sent I always tried to speak the truth as I perceived it, and the emails themselves became like a mirror for myself. A mirror where I could discern truth from distortion, see and remember patterns in my being. Using words to express what I believed I felt became a tool for calibration. I wrote to stabilise what had fractured, to find coherence where confusion used to reign, to place the weight in the only relational space between us I had access to, where it belonged. 

I had ended up trying therapy in the months before, once I grew more confident in the existence of my experience, but it usually took five sessions just to recount the story. The therapist-client dynamic was a hit-and-miss too depending on the counsellor. It wasn't that they didn't believe me, but it seemed like they didn't have the tools to truly grasp my experience and I was usually left feeling unheard and unseen. Only one of them recognised my spiritual experience for what it was. He even called it "an education in healing", something I hadn't quite thought of before, but our sessions began in an unconventional way which made trust difficult. I tolerated it for a while, because I liked our dynamic and I was desperate, but the trust issue only deepened over time. I then had no energy left to start all over again with someone new, only to risking feeling unseen.

The frantic emails were born out of survival when I had no other support system. Writing was how my consciousness searched for reality, and language was a tool to calibrate my consciousness when everything else had fallen apart. I kept testing reality against each possibility I could think of. It was through those emails that I began catching glimpses of myself again. Lines and paragraphs brought faint echoes of emotional connection to the self that was once alive inside my body, one small fragment of self linking to the next. Writing became both a mirror and a lifeline for my consciousness to find its way back to wholeness, one sentence, one truth-check, one remembered piece of self at a time.

I didn't even know if he was reading them. Sometimes I thought he was, other times I thought they disappeared into nothing. Some emails were attempts to explain, others to apologise for how I was, and others to provoke hoping to get a response that would confirm I wasn't imagining everything. It was a mess, but it was the only way I knew how to externalise what I couldn't hold inside, when I had no other reliable witness for a reality that had shattered my life.

I had no reality to work with. The last memory I had of myself lived in those two nights. It was that second night that held my Self's deepest source of fragmentation.

His silence was making me feel as if I imagined the reality we shared those two nights. The greatest source of trauma was not the archetypal encounter, but the failure to acknowledge and address the reality we shared, leaving me unable to make sense of an existentially charged experience that had started when I was a mere child, an experience that had left me all alone, an experience no one understood or was able to relate to, yet one that seemed to engulf, and drown in insignificance everything else.

Despite his accusation that I wasn't present that night, the reality is that I was deeply present - present with his frustration, present with my own overwhelming state, present with the impossibility of bridging our realities in that moment.

I am not healed, but sometimes healing feels accessible, unlike before. I can only say that I am significantly better than I used to be, although better does not imply I reached my baseline. I re-established access to my feelings, and my felt sense of self. I remember who I am, and I even started being more like myself, although calibrating and aligning with my consciousness is an ongoing process. There are still days where I find myself struggling, but it's no longer a constant. 

It was only a few months ago that I first felt the first pulse of my heart returning, and today there is a range. 

And if I did make it this far it was because I was willing to go through the rapid cycles of feelings, regardless of how painful, and through each and every feeling I was able to grab onto. I rode every wave that came at me in a turbulent ocean, until the waves took me closer to the shore. I've been through the storm for so long, that now I feel I don't know what to do with myself, and sometimes I find myself instinctively looking for a wave out of inertia alone, even if I now fear the waves and when one naturally comes up I find myself wanting to run from it because what if this one is different than the others and has me getting lost at sea? 

I regulate myself, and that self-awareness practice, and my willingness to be honest with myself saved my life. If there was anything my spiritual emergence taught me was that healing, coherence and light implies honesty about our inner experience, the willingness to move with the feelings as they arise, and trust that process to lead to freedom.

*

Trigger warning: Symbol speak :)))).

A.'s silence (obstruction of truth) - with A. being the vehicle for the Devil Archetype in the structure of my experience - functioned as Darkness (Hell), as it was implicitly unloving since it was based on distortion and injustice. Love is always Truthful, and Truth is always Logical. Love sits at the intersection of Self and Other, and lack of love towards Other is lack of Love towards Self, and vice versa. I do however believe society has a very skewed perception of what love is and isn't.

***

Short Conclusions about Process, Consciousness, Coherence, and Memory

All of the above is truly just a rough sketch of my experience.

From my perspective no part of my experience was random, yet it wasn't defined by predetermination either. It follows the logical path of an emotional-cognitive experiential pattern that had been quietly forming all my life - consciousness fulfilling its own pattern while accounting for agency/agency under constraint as variable, and not discounting the usefulness of accountability where appropriate.

Regarding A., even if a spiritual emergence and archetypal activation were involved that does not absolve the parties involved of responsibility. Agency was exercised in his decision to offload the emotional labour, leaving me to hold an ambiguous shared reality, the meaning and consequences alone. He withdrew from a relational reality he helped create, and refused responsibility for his participation in the relational field. 

I believe reality is a relational field by its nature. Abandoning responsibility for the relational space is therefore a form of reality denial. 

Within the dynamic between me, him and those surrounding him I reached out to, gender stereotypes were also likely involved where I was positioned as the irrational, obsessed, unstable woman, while my direct spiritual experience was stigmatised and reduced to magical thinking. Not only was this coming from people who are vocal about religious prejudice, but it occurred without any genuine  engagement with my account, without dialogue and without being recognised as a human whose presence was worthy of acknowledgement. 

The length of time this spanned registered as existential erasure at times. My suffering was a failure to uphold the principle of psychological integrity in the aftermath of our experience - a failure rooted in silence, ambiguity and the refusal for repair. While I assume the silence was framed as compassionate boundary, a healthy boundary must protect the dignity of everyone involved, not merely the comfort of the party who enforces it. The silent treatment could never be a healthy boundary, but only an instrument of control aimed at re-writing reality through omission and obstruction.

Regarding consciousness, based on my observations it seems to me that consciousness is a continuous recording medium that registers everything as relational patterning - less a linear archive and more like a living hologram. What it retains is not the external world in detail, but the total relational configuration of each moment: the felt geometry of perception, attention, and meaning. Every instant is recorded as a complete field of relationship, weighted by what awareness deems significant.

For example, as I write, awareness holds a vague image of my hands on the keyboard, the screen before me, a sense of the purpose of my action, and a diffuse sense of the room around me - even a passing awareness of the bathroom's layout if I think of taking a bathroom break. Should a loud bang occur outside, the field would instantly reconfigure: awareness would expand to include the direction of the sound, the imagined distance, my relation against the street, and perhaps even a flash of the building's colour. All of these perceptual and affective impressions are registered as one integrated pattern - a living record of how consciousness relates to itself through experience.

I spent a long time analysing the dynamic between cognition and affect, and based on my observations affect seems to be the first registration of coherence in the field of reality, in consciousness. This is supported by several mainstream and widely taught lines of work in psychology and neuroscience (Lisa Feldman Barrett, Antonio Damasio), where I see the nervous system as a differentiated expression of consciousness. Affect as primary can also be observed in child development when affect comes before language, as it can be observed throughout human evolution when early humans oriented entirely based on affect before conceptual thought and language evolved.

Once everything had settled a little for me, likely because many feelings that had always been there but inaccessible were now bubbling up, I also felt my nervous system particularly strained. I was under the impression that I was able to register any tiny shift in affect (coherent or incoherent) through the nervous system. It was as if I could feel coherence or incoherence in my spine, and orienting by it, choosing what didn't strain it further was life saving for me. This also involved allowing feelings to come organically to the surface.

Based on what I observed affect seems to hold the undifferentiated structure of the entire relational context in condensed form. Cognition then differentiates that registration into explicit structure. The more loyal this cognitive structure is to the full pattern carried in affect, including the relational data between inner and outer conditions, the more coherent and stable the structure, and ability for successful experiential and reality navigation.

In this sense, I think affective memory functions as undifferentiated structure, while cognitive memory is the synthesis we build on top of it. Integration is the ongoing process that keeps these two in correspondence, allowing cognition to be revised whenever affect signals that the story we tell doesn't match what was actually registered.

In practice, I was often able to retrieve detailed structures by connecting to the feelings and perceptions around a memory. It was never an instant recovery, but a back and forth between thinking about the event and allowing myself to immerse in its affective tone. Each moment of affect seemed to act like a coordinate in the field, marking a specific configuration of thought, emotion, and environment. To me, remembering was not retrieving information from storage, but re-aligning awareness with those affective coordinates, re-entering the configuration of consciousness as it once was. When my awareness returned to the feeling at the core of a recorded moment, it moved through a recursive process where the depth of re-alignment determined how much of the original field became perceptible. Shallow re-immersion evoked only traces – a tone, an image, a mood – whereas sustained engagement helped me to gradually reconstruct the full experiential geometry as it was first lived. I think that if the cognitive structure built on top of that affect is not faithful to what was registered, the affective imprint does not dissolve; it remains as unresolved tension, pressing toward a more coherent differentiation that finally matches the original registration.

For the dream I had at 17 for example. Initially I had an overview of it, and by immersing myself in the memories I did have, and the feelings they evoked, triggered more details to gradually open. The memory of recounting my dream to my colleague at school the next day started from the memory of the dream lingering and haunting me at the time. This was more stable in my memory due to the fact that it was unusual for my dreams to have that haunting quality. The moment of coming home from school and the need to do something about the dream was also more stable, but initially I remembered nothing between my dream and my return from school, except for a sensation I associated with the color yellow. I also had the vague sensation that maybe I recounted the dream to someone, yet nothing else but vagueness. I didn't understand at first. I wasn't too concerned with it, as I felt it had little relevance. Then I remembered that the colleague I was sharing my desk with would often wear a yellowish mustard color blouse. Then the thought of recounting her the dream hoping for some insight came as well. I also remembered the feeling of embarrassment around recounting the dream, and that my colleague was passionate about psychology. It was a constant string of re-connecting and allowing myself to experience the feelings and sensations associated with what had remained stable in my memory. The most stable parts in my memory initially were also the most emotionally intense ones, like the S.A. accusation, and the contrast between going back and forth between A. being the other half of my soul, or the Devil.

It seems to me that during experience, consciousness does not register only what is noticed, but also the emotional and cognitive topology beneath perception - the subtle currents of anticipation, resistance, or ease that shape each moment. The deeper the emotional participation, the denser the recording; the more fully I was engaged in feeling, the more complex the imprint. Later, this depth of emotional coherence determined the fidelity of detailed recall. What returned was not a fixed image of the past but a living reconstruction, animated by the same relational logic that first gave the moment form.

I do not regret the countless emails, or engaging in actions that society would likely judge me for. The level of coherence I re-established is a consequence of allowing myself to disrupt embarrassment that is externally imposed, and then internalised, and shame over societal conventions that are both dysfunctional and disproportionately placed onto women, especially women with complex experiences that fall outside of what is approved as 'normal'.

I believe it's patriarchy and its insistence on suppressing affect, and the plethora of downstream structures that emerge within the system, that lead to dysregulation. Patriarchy disproportionately punishes those whose psychological integrity was affected by the very system that infringes on it, and shame is the instrument of choice. Awareness of that shame being externally imposed, and it going against nature in this context helped. 

Also, I do not believe in any way that cognition is secondary, or inferior. I am a big fan of reason, and I have always been, but I also believe that cognition should be directed towards affect in differentiating and establishing precise congruence with the data affect holds about entire relational field. 

I believe we are not aware of that we vibe, and feel every single moment. Feeling never leaves the body even in the most insignificant of contexts.