Living the Aftermath

The content on this page doesn't engage in interpretation of experience, but is merely an attempt to outline the facts of the aftermath as it was experienced.

Childhood desire for self-observation becomes unintentional awareness practice

The Bizarro World of Post Spiritual Emergence

It was only after I met A. that believe it or not, I felt I had actually entered bizarro world. Bizarre is the only way I know to describe it.

On one hand I was still high as a kite on love. On the other hand, I had become completely disconnected from myself, and I was completely unaware of it. Because I had no memory of it, the high of my state completely obliterated the effects of the traumatic event. I had been left with mere emotional impressions of his accusations which combined with the empathy I had had for his fear. This made it seem like nothing that serious had happened. Because I didn't remember, I couldn't consciously observe its effects until years later when I was triggered to remember parts of my experience that night. 

The dissociation was invisible to me for a long time. I thought I was fine, still riding the high of my experience, just trying to navigate what I thought was an intense but ultimately manageable experience. The spiritual emergence, and everything that surrounded it, naturally became the focus. Everything else in my life seemed average at the time.

I remember how, in those days, it seemed as if there was an unmistakable flow between me and the way the world responded to me. Because the shift happened over night, it felt bizarre to me. It was nothing extreme, but there was a visible shift compared to before. Had this shift not been so sudden I would not have been able to observe it as what I can only describe as a flow between my internal and external reality.

People, at least the people I would interact with, seemed different. Kinder, more careful with each other, as if the social atmosphere itself had softened and brightened. 

This was most observable at work. At times, what I perceived as luminosity(positivity) around me was so pronounced that it was as if people, my colleagues, clients, all had a similar shift to mine, and I thought I just wasn't aware of it. I didn't remember people being quite like that, and there were plenty of moments when it felt like uncanny valley to me. This was a small town in Eastern Europe where I remembered rudeness, gossip, friction, assertiveness veering into dominance being a part of the culture. 

Because I had just moved back home, at first, I dismissed it as the usual politeness of a new working environment, but that did not account for the length or depth of the change. Besides, I could observe rather consistently a different use of language and behaviors displayed by the same people, just never around me. 

My firmness for example wouldn't trigger the usual expected defenses, and the everyday frictions I expected seemed to barely activate around me. It is true that my own demeanor, and the way I was inhabiting the world had shifted, but because it wasn't something I was forcing myself to be and because of sudden it was, it still felt markedly different from before.  

Gossip might have been the clearest marker. In a setting where it normally circulates, it largely stopped in my presence. It wasn't that people's conditioning disappeared, but it didn't feel like performance either. For a while I just went with it, enjoyed it as it was, while I was constantly doing my back and forth reasoning somewhere in the back of my mind. 

I wasn't observing what people might imagine 'perfect harmony' where everyone was all rainbow and roses. It did feel and look like perfect human harmony plenty of times though - the kind that allows for everyone's existence to just be. It wasn't entirely frictionless, but frictions were much less frequent than I would have expected them, were unintentional, didn't escalate and repaired quickly, without amplifying into grudge or gossip cycles. 

I was aware that in theory, the (relational) field should react to my high coherence state and ripple outwards, but it was so uncanny at times, that I would end up panicking a little inside. When I would start panicking I would also start scanning my environment. I would eventually catch glimpses of people's cynical realities and mindsets, the ones I had been accustomed with throughout my life. This, however, almost never happened in my immediate presence. As odd as it sounds, those glimpses would comfort me. They meant continuity in my before and after realities. 

It seemed that my high coherence state which implicitly affected my demeanor made coherence more available in the people around me, as if their better tendencies had more room to surface and their cynical baseline had less room or maybe desire to express itself. 

It felt every ounce of magical-bizarre, although I believe it sounds more magical than the logical structural explanation for it. My inner state had tilted quite sharply over night and people naturally react in accordance to another's inner state, way of being, presenting, etc. What made it so uncanny for me was that the shift was abrupt, and despite understanding the mechanism and expecting it to happen, it still felt almost unreal. 

It was as if the entire relational field re-organised around me. This contrast was a source of internal panic at times. It felt like the world refused to push back in the way I was used to, and the lack of counter-force felt surreal. My old world would return most visibly when I would begin to panic internally and doubt would enter my system, which would prompt me to start scanning for evidence of incoherence as if trying to verify the reality I remembered. Those moments confirmed that the old baseline still existed behind the lighter surface of this new and unresisting relational space. From the outside it looked average, like ordinary social interaction, but from within, it felt jarring at times. 

Something seemed markedly different about the way the world was responding to me. 

Spirituality and Spiritual Communities

I was all alone, not knowing what to make of my experience. I needed help to make sense of it all, and I didn't know where to turn. The spiritual communities were helpful only to a point. I wasn't sure if I wasn't understanding what they were telling me, if they hadn't actually had a spiritual experience as I understood one, or if I misinterpreted what I had experienced. It seemed like everyone was speaking another language than I did. I was willing to question myself, my perceptions, and investigate the gap I was observing.

Despite my best intentions I was never able to get on board with many of the ideas I encountered. Oftentimes it felt like I was asked to embrace a new kind of dogma. Everyone seemed to speak in quotes from texts I hadn't read, they talked about meditation, mindfulness, presence, and yoga as if they were the end all be all, while I was completely clueless. What bugged me though is that I was constantly left feeling that if I wasn't engaging in the same rituals, in the same form and shape they required to appear in, it must have meant my experience was lesser. 

I was more than willing to question and learn, but not if it meant erasing myself and my experience, and oftentimes it was how I was left feeling. 

Plenty of times when I tried to connect with people from spiritual communities, someone would start wanting to teach me. They didn't want to share, to exchange - they wanted to become my teacher. I had never asked for that. I wanted exchange. I wanted human to human, and they wanted to position themselves as my teacher. And when I resisted the dynamic, I clearly wasn't getting it or was being difficult. For the most part, my desire to contrast and compare, my desire for human connection and exchange meant that I hadn't arrived, and it made me and my experience lesser. 

I tried to look into some of the most popular practices within spiritual communities by myself. I tried to look into the rituals and engage with them, to learn and understand them. I was however left unable to deny that every time I went online, and tried to follow a video asking me to empty my mind as if it was a goal in itself, I felt offended. Why would anyone want to do that? Just empty your mind, as if the mind is there as decoration. It's never why is that thought there? What does it tell me? Just will it away. Looking back, I presume the goal is to shift focus toward or away consciously, although not only do I not consider this in itself to be a distortion unless it remains in contact with reality, but the practices were always packaged as if emptying the mind was the goal in itself. 

Then it was the presence thing. Be present, just not with your thoughts, or actual feelings for that matter. To this day I find the interpretation of presence I kept stumbling upon to be bothersome, and all I hear in it is pretend. Pretend everything is great. Pretend you are enjoying the walk in the park, even when you don't. Pretend your world is magnificent. Pretend things are not as they are. I still haven't read the texts, but I don't believe it is what they try to say about presence. From where I am standing presence means being present with what is, and sometimes 'what is' isn't peace in the park, or at home, and that is valid. Sometimes 'what is' lives in the past still, or in the future. There is surely a fine line, but being should never be about denial or avoidance of 'what truly is'. 

I do not pretend to be acquainted with genuine Eastern philosophy practices, or the insights one is supposed to take from them, so I can only speak from what I observed and interacted with on my path. One of those observations is around what was presented to me as the concept of the Observer. It seems to be treated as transcendence achieved by standing outside the experience but not inside it. I, personally, do not like that. That triggers me dissociative. It reads as detachment from reality to me, rather than conscious movement with reality. From where I am looking, experience is not outside of reality, but to my perception is both within and without simultaneously. From where I am looking staying entirely outside reality is a form of spiritual bypassing. 

I kept running into the kind of mindset that insisted suffering meant failure. The kind of thinking that implied that if I was in pain, confused, or angry, then my experience was somehow lesser. I was supposed to feel blissful 100% of the time. No anger. No frustration. No desire. Maybe they had all arrived but me. And yet, I couldn't shake how the advice felt as though I was being asked to deny my feelings rather than move with them, and to replace honest emotion with a performance of serenity. 

I stumbled upon these ideas often enough to leave me feeling out of place. I am sure that many of the people in these communities were, just like myself, trying to find their footing, and path, yet I can't help but find pop-culture spirituality a misunderstanding. And that it's a misunderstanding is not even an issue - it only becomes one when everyone insists on wisdom about perceptions I can't help but find to be unwise. From where I am standing today, relinquishing control is allowing the future to remain open, whilst maintaining agency and discernment, and remaining fully present within reality as is even when that means discomfort.

As a whole, it felt as if no one was seeing me, hearing me, and I had no plans to pretend my experience was any different than it was. 

Reality-Testing and Sanity: Dreams & Memory

As time went by, I only became more confused and disoriented. I tried to understand, to process, but what was I supposed to process exactly? 

My spiritual emergence got tangled with the archetypal activation A.'s existence set in motion, while my reality around him remained suspended. My reality in general also remained suspended along with it. He was a key figure in the structure of my experience, and I only had fragments - emotional impressions, vague memories, and a cluster of observations I didn't know what to make of. 

I was always prepared for A. to be the vehicle through which the Devil archetype would manifest. I allowed both possibilities to coexist: that he might represent Self, Devil or both simultaneously. When it came to the Self hypothesis, I couldn't reconcile what I had observed as a great degree of similarities in our natural orientations - beyond what I had ever experienced before. As for the Devil figure and symbol - it had been very much a constant and stable presence throughout my life, and dismissing it would have been difficult. I tried to investigate, and tried to grasp the meaning of my experience.

While I had been fully upfront with A. about my experience, I didn't really know what to make of his short, and vague replies. The contradiction between what his apparent values and his actions had me consider his silence might be simple confusion, deliberate, or that it might simply betray dysfunctional gender dynamics. It was however too soon to make an assessment at that point.

I considered that maybe he hadn't yet managed to wrap his mind around what happened. I thought he probably needed space; anyone would after something like that I told myself. I could reconstruct how I must have appeared to him: this strange woman suddenly entering his life, speaking in religious coded symbols, claiming she'd dreamt of him as a child and teenager, that she had grown up labelling him the Devil, and that she believed they had the same soul. Given the context, his abrupt withdrawal after intense emotional and physical intimacy, and subsequent vagueness had me consider he might have been feeling hurt coupled with a quiet, no evidence my marbles were intact. 

I had no sense of time, so the length of time that had passed didn't jump out at me. I cognitively understood the amount of time, but had no emotional relation to it. For a long time, I believed that maybe I hadn't expressed myself clearly enough, and that if I managed to do so, the logic behind it all would become visible. 

The reality of my spiritual emergence had remained the most stable and undeniable part of my new reality. I didn't question its existence internally, but his reaction to it and to me, left me fearing external questioning. I figured to engage in that questioning of my own accord, in order to pre-empt what I was now anticipating as outside judgement. 

I also thought that in absence of his input, and willingness to communicate, by determining the reality of my spiritual experience beyond any skeptical reflex, I would also be able to settle my reality around him. If my spiritual emergence happened, then so did my dreams, and it must have meant he too existed. It was all so blurry, so overwhelming and scary that I was questioning if he actually existed as a human being on this earth. His human existence felt more surreal, than the reality of my spiritual emergence. Priorities, I suppose, lol.

Besides, whomever he was and regardless of the meaning he held for my experience and existence, I felt he was a reflection of my social reality. 

I began by verifying every part of my experience, testing each piece for stability, reconstructing reality fragment by fragment. 

I first tested the spiritual experience by testing the existence of the dreams. If the dreams happened, then so did my spiritual experience, and it must have meant A. also existed as a real flesh and bones human being.

I first verified if the dreams were real, or if there was any possibility for my memory to be playing tricks on me. The overwhelming amount of memories anchored in my then daily mundane teen reality, left little room for doubt that the memories couldn't simply be a fabrication of my imagination. This was also supported by the fact that plenty of the memories regarding the dreams involved, stayed throughout my life. They had always remained available to my immediate awareness. Available enough for them to pop up organically whenever the subject of dreams was brought up in a conversation. 

The fear of having my reality dismissed had me thinking that my relationship with dreams might have seemed unusual from the outside. It was only later on, that I gained confidence against perceived external pressure to point to their memory being carried by their emotional vividness.

My engagement with the process of attempting to disprove the existence of the dreams, also ended up having more details around them resurface. If at first I was scared that no one would believe me because of how wild it all sounded, I now became scared that no one would believe me because I could not possibly remember mere dreams in this much detail. My consistent questioning made it harder for me to dismiss them, but also bigger, more detailed. 

After some research into memory, affective psychology and neuroscience I gained more confidence in my observations around the process of memory retrieval: each time I connected with the affective sensations surrounding the memory, more details would gradually open. This observation was part of what eventually led me to posit that affect is the first registration of coherence in consciousness. It was also what I believe helped me to eventually retrieve nearly all of my memories from the second night I met A., when I later on consciously engaged the process in wanting to test my observation and well retrieve the memories. 

Ironically, I was able to exclude imagination early on, because guess what? My cousin was right. I don't have that kind of imagination, and certainly not the kind required to make up this kind of story. What started as a childhood wound of being told I lacked imagination, became the very thing that helped me confirm my reality decades later. The same orientation toward truth over fiction that made me boring as a child made fabrication structurally implausible as an adult, right when I most needed it.

Trying to downright question the existence of the dreams by looking for any inconsistencies, only ended up having me unable to shake the amount of memories I had around them. The more I tried to question the existence of the memories and the dreams, the more details rose that clicked into the existing puzzle. Instead of shrinking, the picture kept stabilising, until I was compelled to determine and accept them as a part of my lived reality.

Once I could no longer easily dismiss the dreams, it meant that the spiritual emergence also happened. While its subjective nature could be dismissed outside of its context, the emergence itself relied on the existence of all the dreams that led to it. Those dreams were spread over the course of my entire life, and the emergence was connecting my life before, and the one after. 

This, in and of itself however, did not settle the question of A.'s existence as I had hoped. It only made it clear that the dreams that featured a man with his physical characteristics were real. It did not settle the matter of whether or not that man existed or if I had somehow ended in an alternate dimension or something. The question of whether or not he was an actual real person who lived on planet Earth, arose again. I had so little from him that given the circumstances and the symbolism, I genuinely questioned whether he existed beyond my mind. 

His rare replies were short and vague. I didn't feel I could write an email to ask him "are you a real person?". Not only did I believe I must have seemed strange enough to him already, but the fear around the symbol made me feel the need to be cautious. It was that 'just in case' that nightmares with a figure you had labelled the Devil could instill.

Even if I was aware of the irrationality of my fear, my reality had shifted over night to include what appeared as God, who was then met by the possibility of the Devil - not the kind of reality one could label conventional. Despite not even believing in the existence of a Devil, and despite my rationalism, the fear encoded in the symbol highjacked me. I feared even the smallest fraction of possibility of a worst case scenario, and in such a scenario it was not as if he would say 'No. I do not exist as A.. I am the Devil himself out to get you.'. 

Eventually, Google and social media confirmed he was a real person with a real life that lived on planet Earth, and it had nothing to do with me. Never before, did I feel as much comfort at the idea that a man's existence didn't center me, or revolved around mine. While the symbol remained active, the fear loosened (almost) completely. 

Ironically the information I found on Google, and through his social media presence strengthened the idea of a shared structural identity between us.    

After testing the elements of my experience, realising they stood against my skeptical and rational mind, reality hit me hard. Confirming the dreams, the spiritual experience, A.'s existence didn't yield the resolution I was expecting. If a series of unreal seeming, insane sounding experiences had happened across the entirety of my life, weaving into one another, and into the banalities of average life, while maintaining a logical experiential structure, what did that say about my reality? 

For the first time I started fearing I had gone mad, so I started questioning everything all over again. I began taking into consideration the possibility of my spiritual experience having been a psychotic episode. It all felt real, passed the stress tests, but I had next to nothing in the external world to confirm the existence of my experience. 

The only people who had offered me any semblance of validation were those in spiritual communities but who was to say we weren't all psychotic? At one point, I started feeling so overwhelmed, that I considered checking myself in - somewhere, anywhere.

By then, I would have sought help for depression at least, but the institutions of psychology and psychiatry didn't spell safety for people with experiences like mine. I heard myself and understood social reality. I saw no other option but to avoid the likelihood of trauma, try to do my own research, and figure it out on my own. 

In the midst of the fear over having my reality treated with dismissal, I came across the terms spiritual emergence, spiritual emergency, and transpersonal psychology. I remember the feeling of relief when I discovered a body of research that made me feel normal, and didn't pathologise my experience. It was the first time I truly stopped questioning my sanity, as I understood that spiritual emergence, and spiritual emergencies are recognised human phenomena. 

I am glad I came across the terms, because after some more research, I became convinced that it was unlikely for the medical field as it is established today to have diagnosed me any other way but psychotic. It seems it is how spiritual emergencies are treated anyway even when recognised for what they are. I can only imagine the trauma that results in. 

Learning these terms brought relief, but not yet a sense of normality. I didn't want to retreat from the world, but I didn't seem to know how to co-exist within it either. 

You'd think I spent all those years hiding my experience from those around me. I didn't. I actually made it a point to not hide myself, and it still ended up feeling like hiding. I wasn't offering the information, but I wasn't trying to hide myself either. 

I told friends and family, but stopped talking about it when I saw they couldn't connect with what I was saying. I believe their consciousness couldn't perceive this kind of reality, let alone connect or relate to it. As for the rest of my social environment, it turns out one can live in full view and still be invisible. People don't ask questions about realities that fall outside their own.

The context of this entire circumstance made it easy for me to withdraw from social life with no one really noticing. I had just moved back home, so I think most people I used to know here, thought I had maybe found new friends - it was just a case of having lost touch. I was functional. I was going to work. My life seemed average from the outside.

I didn't purposefully withdraw. It just happened. I kept trying to connect with people, only to be left feeling unseen and unheard. Connection didn't seem to happen. Before I knew it, I had become a recluse. 

I hadn't even noticed it until I started feeling people's silent judgements. All of a sudden it became noticeable to both them and me that I had spent years by myself. 

Memories and Fragmentation

I understood some trauma was involved in my experience, but not only did I fail to understand its full depth, it also deepened over time.

Trauma was a reasonable assumption I was making given the kind of experience I had had. I saw the reality inversion, I saw the contrasting structure, but for some reason I thought no biggie. Nothing I couldn't handle. I was taken with the structure of the experience and that kept me somewhat unbothered. I was absolutely fascinated and downright in love with the structure and all those contrasts.

I intended to observe the structure and dynamic early on. I became aware of the opportunity I had and what I would be observing. I was quite confident I should know my way back from what at the time I understood had to be darkness. Symbolically, it was a descent back to hell from the heaven my spiritual emergence represented. My spiritual emergence was unexpected for me, so I hadn't been paying close attention to the movements and process that led to it - and this was my opportunity to do just that.

For the most part I thought my work should be rather straightforward - I'd make my observations, see the process and dynamic, and get out. It wasn't straightforward, nor was it fast or clean because while I understood trauma was involved, I failed to understand its depth.

I believe what helped me to not lose myself and my reality completely during this phase of was that I had already established that my spiritual emergence and A. existed beyond any reasonable doubt. Up to this point, my struggles had been more intellectual than existential and I had been navigating the experience, rather than drown in it. While this was the case, my spiritual emergence was tangled with what had happened between us. This meant I couldn't fully process my experience without determining his role. My biggest struggles, cognitive and emotional, came when I could no longer go around this entanglement.

I knew the thread of what had happened between me and A., or so I believed. I had the narrative of my internal reality, so I thought I had the thread, and wasn't missing anything, or not too much. I thought my struggle to see the bigger picture was solely because I did not have his side of the story. As the trauma deepened, my internal reality became more fickle and I started doubting even my internal reality on a near constant basis.

I had noticed my memory was misfiring from the beginning, but whenever I noticed I didn't remember something, it was regarding smaller things that would usually be triggered into memory in a matter of weeks. There were also brief moments when I wanted to reach for what I had said, or what he had said that second night but found myself unable to connect with anything, but in this context I was too afraid to even try harder, so I didn't think of them as real memory gaps. I thought of whatever memory lapses as normal given the mental and emotional load such an experience would come with. At the time, I knew the experience around him had not been all flowers and roses, but I mostly connected it to the Devil archetypal activation and simply the nature of the experience. 

Looking back it is as if my memory was struggling with the integratory function, with the moments I would experience in the aftermath, particularly whenever it surrounded elements of my experience of those two nights. The integratory function of my consciousness seems to have been impacted, with the trauma establishing a rupture between my Self prior, and the Self after. I was aware of there having been a shift, and I considered it to be normal, but I didn't see it as specifically a rupture. Looking back, I seem to have experienced a generalised difficulty to manage and maintain the continuity of my consciousness, even moment to moment in my daily life, but then again my daily life was itself significantly impacted by this sudden shift in my understanding and relation to reality. 

I remember this moment, when I first wanted to engage in deliberate and consciously directed self-observation, specifically in trying to see and try to conceptually map a dynamic I believed I had already observed before, but hadn't paid specific attention to the process - my self-observation attempts would return nothing, as if there was no motion within, nothing but stillness and opacity. I attributed it to my own inadequacy. Because my awareness practice had started when I was a mere child, and I didn't remember its inception and it being deliberate and consciously aware directed self observation, but simply a part and background process of the banality of my life, I thought deliberate and consciously aware directed self-observation was a different beast entirely than what I had assumed to be self-observation throughout my life and I just wasn't good at it. 

By 2021, if not much earlier, I had already started trying to deconstruct and map in depth all sorts of moral concepts in trying to integrate the understanding that came with my spiritual emergence: forgiveness, enabling, and the boundary between them, where control starts and where it ends, what quantifies as deception and manipulation, what love is, does and how it moves, how fear arises, why truth matters, etc. It's not that I didn't know what love, truth, deception, forgiveness, enabling and so on were, but my spiritual experience expanded their territory in my consciousness, but their map wasn't yet articulated. I was also interested in the essence of things - wanting to determine and understand how and if context alters their boundaries. I observed myself struggling - it was as if I was having to do double work to comprehend, and even then something wasn't clicking. I once again blamed it on my inadequacy and the complexity of my experience, and I would reorient thinking I might be missing the information necessary to conceptualise the understanding of my experience. As I am writing this, I am wondering if formal philosophical knowledge would have helped. I am not quite sure if it would have, or if it would have only introduced more information I would have had to parse and try to map onto my experience. This is leaving aside the fact that my bandwidth was occupied with psychologically surviving my own experience.

I remember moments when I kept circling the same questions, feeling foolish, as if my own thoughts were slipping through my fingers.

I then moved to try to take myself apart, piece by piece - trying to define and separate thoughts from feelings, beliefs from knowing, etc. Everything inside was indistinct. I couldn't distinguish feelings from thoughts, beliefs from real knowing. I thought that maybe I never knew how to distinguish between them, but I couldn't help not observe my thinking was heavy and sluggish. I kept circling the same question over and over, unable to reach for an answer. It was as if my thoughts just couldn't connect and form any sort of relations between them - it made no reasonable sense to me, because while my experience may have been complex, and while my reasoning may have been inadequate, I didn't remember ever struggling to at least say that two thoughts don't belong together and why. I had never felt as helpless before to make connections between thoughts. This was the first glimpse that something strange might be happening to me.

This was also the moment when it felt as if my mind as completely fragmented, but I still didn't quite grasp it. Momentarily, the thought of taking each fragment and comparing it with all others, and then repeat, combine, and re-combine did cross my mind, but it did not seem like a feasible or kind thing to do to one's own mind judging by the degree of fragmentation I perceived. The observation, however, came and went just as quickly, with this stream of considerations lasting for a mere few seconds without any of them actually registering. I also remember this brief feeling, as if I had very little control over my mind, unable to direct it, as if I was observing everything through fog and was unable to commit to any direction.

Looking back, nothing held long enough in my awareness to form a coherent, integrated picture of reality. Every struggle, every observation would appear briefly in my awareness, and would fall off just as quickly.

I distinctly remember moments when I was in fact observing the act of observing myself think, trying to reason, and figure out how to act, and yet, the observations simply didn't accumulate. They surfaced and dropped, surfaced and dropped. It had become an endless cycle of watching myself think and act, being all strange, but without the strangeness landing in my body. I would see the strangeness, note it mentally, and moments later it simply fell outside of my awareness. 

Looking back, I also realise how for years on end I operated on auto-pilot, as if I was performing myself. I was moving through familiar gestures, habits, ways of using language but unable to recognise myself. It was as if my body was giving a rendition of the Self I knew myself to be, while I wasn't fully there to inhabit it. I would sometimes catch myself confused. I would recognise the familiarity with my own self, yet be struck by the strangeness. 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. At first I considered that maybe the first real moment of true embodied Self was during my spiritual emergence, and now I was having to find my way back to it while navigating shared reality.

I would sometimes overcompensate, and other times hold back all while trying to be precisely authentic. It was as if the moments prior to having to act or speak, my mind was circling, split in countless directions trying to locate my own Self in experience. When the moment would come to act, whatever my mind was on, in that specific moment, would become my action, or my spoken words. It was like my body was trying to act on self but did not have any context for self, and my mind would have to start from trying to contextualise and locate myself in experience. 

This confusion was true even for daily functioning but it did not have noticeable impact in that domain of my life, as daily functioning implied automatisms and low stakes interactions, although I don't remember or could say to what degree it was an effect of the prolonged epistemic opacity, and inability to determine my reality, or if it had been there from the start. 

The internal fragmentation made communication with A. nearly impossible. After we met, I had only sent him a total of eight emails, spread across eight years; attempts at dialogue that were met with silence or short vague responses. I tried to respect what seemed like a boundary while working through my understanding on my own.

Impersonating myself, and still using the symbolic register of my experience to communicate, probably didn't help. Looking back, at least for a while, it was as if I had to hold onto that register in my communications with him. 

Symbol speak held the last memories of my true Self inside of them. The symbols were a part of me after all - just not all of me. Letting go of them would have felt like self-abandonment and self-erasure. And yet holding onto them made me sound like someone I wasn't - or wasn't only. The fact that he never addressed anything made it even more difficult, because I couldn't pretend they weren't spoken into existence - they existed in the shared space between us. I would have gladly switched registers, but I didn't know where to start.

I think the first time I first started noticing that I wasn't being myself was in my emails to him. I feared he thought of me as both religious, and not that intelligent. What was worse is that I was now questioning my perception of self too. 

I had never perceived myself as religious, but I was questioning my past perception of myself. I couldn't reconcile this knowing of 'not religious' and the deep fear that had installed in my body as 'religious woman'. I had this knowing, but I also had the memories of how I would hold the bible to my chest, the dreams with religious symbolism, a connection with what I understood as God. I didn't know if I had been religious but had never admitted it to myself. I was also remembering myself as a decently intelligent woman, but I thought that maybe I thought of myself as more intelligent than I actually am. My observation of the struggle to connect thoughts, or concepts to one another surely didn't help this line of questioning.

There were times when I tried to signal 'not religious' with various words, or blanket statements, while still maintaining the symbolic register my experience was delivered in. Then there was the time when I used a different spelling for 'chaise longue' on purpose because I didn't want him to think I was trying to appear too smart or too cultured. While doing this, I was thinking that using the spelling I normally would have would be me overcompensating for fearing I looked dumb in his eyes. My mind was so broken that I was linking actual inauthenticity to 'not overcompensating'. Trauma logic.

The irony is that I wasn't trying to make myself smaller in the slightest. I was actually trying to hold the line, but my trouble was that I did not know how to act. The cognitive memory of Self was there - there was knowing of Self, but my confused behaviors were telling a different story. There was a split between the memory of who I remembered myself being, and the self that had become shaped by the trauma. It was as if his actions that night simply erased any connection with my felt sense of self.

He had told me early on how the physical implications would create unnecessary complications for him. It was his prerogative, yet I always believed that his short vague replies, and the lack of clarity weren't right. I considered turning to feminist frameworks to explain why his vagueness was not cool back then, to point out the double standard, but his silence was making me question whether or not I had done something wrong and my mind was now blocking it. Going there from such a position felt risky, because I didn't know what I would be getting myself into. Even without my mind having blocked anything, I still felt unable to defend myself adequately, and assumed it was only because he had never point blank addressed anything. 

In 2017, I thought that just in case his silence betrayed gendered dysfunction he wasn't aware of, I should probably mention that it all was bigger than the romantic implications for me. His short and vague reply was telling me among others, how time had moved on. I was still hoping for romance with the man I believed I had valid reasons to believe had the same soul as mine, but that wasn't what I was asking for.

I ended up sending a rather bizarre and confused short reply in my disorientation in trying to stay with the integrity of my reality when his short reply seemed to simply ignore the extent of the reality I had just shared. I stayed with my post spiritual emergence reality - a reality I considered might be worlds apart from his, but I wasn't going to let go of mine on that account. 

I may have been willing to question my understanding of my reality, but I also only trusted myself to make an accurate assessment. I wasn't going to let others to define me and my reality, when hardly any of the people I met had even brushed with such realities. I thought that would be a disaster waiting to happen. For this reason holding onto my reality in my emails to him was important to me regardless of his perception. I did however sound bizarre at times because I saw this very large gap, one I didn't know how to fill in, when he didn't seem to be willing to communicate. 

I didn't even really know if there was a gap indeed, because it wasn't like I had kept him in the dark about my experience or reality. I just had no idea how much he actually understood. I held nothing back. I held nothing back because it was only by putting it all on the table that I would have the opportunity to assess the truth, and reality implicitly. I told him plainly about my mindset, my inner state that night, I told him about my dreams, that I thought we have the same soul. He never addressed anything. Not to agree, not to disagree, not even to say 'you are seeing things that aren't there'. Only ambiguity.

I thought it was possible that his vagueness was deliberate - either conscious avoidance, or strategic information gathering. I was hoping for the latter. I also thought it was possible that he believed I was making things up and he wasn't seeing the reality inversion that he had engaged in that second night. I also considered that he might still believe I was prejudiced, or even that I might be failing to see my prejudice. 

His failure to address our interactions left me disoriented about whether I could even trust my own assessment of whether prejudice was involved - not only did I not remember my exact words that night, but he was the expert on the issues he faced at the end of the day. 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 me and my character. Yet his vagueness left me suspended. 

I was unsure whether he believed my account, thought I was delusional, was avoiding something he could not or did not want to face, or genuinely believed I had been bigoted. I was left unsure of the reality I was inhabiting.

I said I did nothing wrong multiple times. I even went as far as to say I had no intention to apologise for what he 'silently' accused me of, because I wasn't guilty of it. It was silent alright, but an implication that was repeated over and over again, yet never named - I assume he chose to merely imply it because while my words had the form of what he associated with prejudice against Muslim people, the substance of my words didn't. 

In return to my attempts to communicate, his replies would be short, polite, vague and ambiguous, with the occasional 'you are a lovely person', 'considerate', 'sweet', 'bright', 'it pains me to think of you being traumatised' without actually addressing anything I was saying or had happened those two nights. This made it all even more confusing for me, and I remember thinking 'that's not what i remember you thinking of me last we interacted'. 

Since his accusations were never named, and I was now only hearing positive words from me in regards to me, it amplified my disorientation. I couldn't force him to talk to me, and through the amount of overwhelm and confusion I was navigating, I may have not been able to articulate myself adequately either.

My internal reality throughout had remained largely stable, and I wasn't aware I had less access than I should have to the external reality of those two nights. I suppose the internal reality I was experiencing was overwhelming as it was, keeping me busy inside it. I hadn't considered chasing for details to analyse, to  determine the possibility of prejudice with the utmost precision I possibly could. I never expected he wouldn't offer something as banal as communication. I now saw no other avenue but go after what I believed were details, to try to determine and make sense of my reality and experience. 

I remember struggling a lot to recover precise memories of my internal reality related to my words, reactions, my thoughts, my feelings surrounding his Muslimness. I had always had awareness of my internal reality, but I couldn't seem to be able to retrieve any exact memories. 

Quite a few years had passed at that point. I remember thinking I should have done it earlier. Even if I thought that time must have done its thing and loosened the memories, I also thought it was a little peculiar I was drawing what at a first glance seemed like significant blanks. I also thought that my mind was blocking memories because I might be too afraid of what I might find. I didn't feel the experience of fear in relation to my memories per se, but for some reason I thought the lack of fear as an emotion wasn't normal in itself given the circumstances and context of my experience - I expected there to be a lot of fear -, so I thought I was too afraid to feel the fear - fear of fear of fear. 

Realising I didn't seem able to feel through, my only way in at that time seemed to be through my cognitive faculties - to try to find experientially logical psychologically plausible pieces in my puzzle that would fit in with the pieces I already had. I have no words to say what it is like to try to recover memories through cognition alone. It is absolutely excruciating. My mind was constantly contorting onto itself. Loop, after loop, after loop, trying to reason and logic my way to the memories. 

I don't remember how exactly, but at one point I caught a small thread, and that became my way in. I was holding onto that thread looking for other pieces. I logic-ed my way towards more fragments, trying to connect that thread and the memories that had remained stable. 

I would go through every psychologically plausible possibility after possibility trying to see if it could fit in the gaps I was trying to fill. I kept narrowing the plausible possibilities, until one clicked close to my memory and would trigger parts of it to emerge. I kept on going like this, until I found another thread. When I found the first fragments of thoughts related to his Muslimness, I got scared not knowing what their presence meant - if it meant I had been prejudiced, and said something awful I couldn't remember. This was the first time that fear got anywhere close to landing in my body.

In trying to see if the thoughts I had had could have been there because of unconscious prejudice, the easiest way in that moment seemed to be to analyse my past behaviors. I couldn't try to retrieve the memories of our actual interactions to see if those thoughts had anything to do with it. To do what I had just done, retrieving memories through cognition alone, again? That would have been the death of me. Besides, this time around I was actually afraid of what I might find.

I ended up deconstructing the entirety of my relationship with prejudice, racism, and Islamophobia. I did. I deconstructed it. In its entirety. I was thorough. I even went back to my childhood. I analysed every single thought, feeling and their associated behaviors. I wish I was exaggerating but I am not. It was almost seamless. Surprisingly so, and yet I was still unable to register the visible pattern of behavior affectively - my core beliefs. There was a clear pattern of behavior, and yet my registration of my very beliefs, the ones that led to a consistent pattern of behavior, remained suspended. I didn't know why I couldn't register my beliefs and worldview around the issue. 

And then I noticed something. For the same behavior, what I had labelled as memories-of-feelings and memories-of-thoughts seemed to have quite distinct texture and content. That meant that I wasn't confused about the distinction between thoughts vs feelings. So why could I not separate them now?

I then realised I couldn't find any feelings at all. Nothing within me seemed to fit the texture of the memories-of-feelings I had become aware of having existed in my past in the deconstruction process. 

I kept looking, comparing and contrasting and there seemed to be no feelings within me. That seemed impossible. Everyone has feelings. 

I turned to Google, assuming I must simply be unable to recognise my feelings. Nearly everything I found pointed to alexithymia. Having grown up in an emotionally illiterate environment and lacking any vivid emotional memory of who I used to be, it seemed to fit.

This discovery naturally led me to consider being on the spectrum. While I figured it was possible that the memories-of-feelings I had, had just been a label I attached to them at the time, the possibility of being on the spectrum remained a mere consideration.

It remained a mere consideration because judging by my memories I had to have felt rather intense feelings those two nights. I seemed unable to connect with any feelings, but given that they involved A., I didn't inquire further. While I couldn't connect with any feelings around A., I also distinctly remembered that my spiritual emergence was not only entirely emotion based, but it also was intense and heightened emotion.

At no point during the deconstruction process did I notice that I didn't connect with any of the feelings contained in the memories that had the label 'feelings' onto them. I was simply able to observe a different texture and content compared to the memories I had labelled 'thoughts'. The memories came already packaged so to speak and simply lived as 'feeling' and 'thought' in my memory. 

I proceeded to read more about the autism spectrum. I was doing research for a while now when a vague, uneasy association began to surface - something to do with autism. It was as if there was darkness around it. I sensed anger but it didn't make any sense. Why would my consciousness make an association between the autism spectrum and anger? I found it odd.

That sensation was neither here, nor there. It kept tugging at me for the following days, as if a memory lived inside my body. The sensation was triggered by my research into the autism spectrum, and its persistence correlated with ongoing research. I was however, unable to see that association as having any basis in my reality. None whatsoever. There was no image, no context, only the weight of it, and now an association.

Then, one day, a sliver of memory appeared: A. angrily asking, 'Are you autistic?'. It had no context, and there was only darkness around it.

At first it seemed almost unreal. I thought I must be imagining it, yet I felt wanting to connect more with the sensation around it, to see where it would lead. Details began to surface. They were disconnected at first, but the contours of the memory were being traced.

That moment was the first glimpse into the heavier part of that night. For years I had been operating under the illusion that our interactions had been far lighter. My emotional impressions had been vague but generally benign, centered around the sensation of having been 'silently' accused of prejudice.

All I remembered all those years was that I had empathised with him. It was only when this fragment of memory resurfaced that I started realising there were far more gaps in my memory than I had presumed. It seemed too significant of a memory to forget, no trace of it had been there all those years. It had simply vanished all those years, nowhere near my awareness, and yet now there was this fragment. The memory was blurry, but the fragment slowly stabilised leaving little room for doubt that he had actually angrily asked me that. It was blurry at first, yet the more I was connecting with the sensations around the fragments of memory, the more clearly I was remembering it happening.

There was nothing but more darkness around this fragment. It was as if it stood disconnected from everything - in the middle of something. There was no context around it. Just this fragment that had this quality of living in the middle of a vast dark background. It carried the association that there had to be more fragments in that vast darkness - fragments that would connect the middle, with the memories that had remained relatively stable. 

It was quite confusing because I wasn't able to put my finger on anything. I wasn't sure if there was indeed more, how much more, or just me inferring based on how this fragment first popped up.

Even after recovering this memory, I still didn't have enough to anchor. I just became aware the memory loss was real and trauma related. I had never experienced memory loss related to trauma before, but I knew of the association. It was the first time when I realised that the trauma was more severe than I initially believed.

And from there on, it still took some time to see the amount of memory loss. It was only when I found myself saying several times 'This was too significant to forget' that it started landing, but even then it wasn't fully clear because I just had fragments that were disconnected. My memory of the night remained fragmented and hazy for a couple more years. 

I wasn't yet able to say 'I forgot almost the entire night'. Wherever there were gaps, the emotional impressions left by my internal reality that was empathy based, filled them, even if I did not have a stable narrative for them. So the sensation was that not much was missing, even when there was.

Relational Ethics: The Cost of Withheld Clarity

By 2023, 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 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, something something same consciousness. 

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 my interpretation, unless it was true. I was just trying to anchor myself in something real, and I was left with more confusion. It had never been about him as a person, but given the context and existential nature of my experience his silence was creating a problem in my reality, leaving it unstable and undetermined, which implied disorientation and inability to orient myself.

His words lingered without context. They weren't saying much of anything, and yet some of the words seemed like agreement with my interpretation, and indirect acknowledgement of permanence. I wasn't sure if they were social pleasantries, distance disguised as care, or care disguised as distance. I had not only been unable to shake the Self hypothesis, but it only grew bigger with time as seeing his social media seemed to confirm that what I had initially intuited about him was accurate. 

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 social media behavior showed a brief exception against an otherwise long pattern of political engagement alone. 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'. 

I kept my composure for a while, then tried to explain my state. I wasn't fond of sharing my state with him, but I was desperate. I thought that by 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; my body was under so much pressure  that annihilation became an urge, one I was cognitively trying to override. The urges were sudden and necessarily violent impulses (towards myself alone) with a pull that required active effort to push back against. I desperately needed to anchor myself in reality and only he was able to help me with that, given that he was the primary actor in what for me was an existential experience. With no anchor in reality, my mind was going wild switching between countless possibilities and scenarios, and my self was crumbling under their weight.

I could barely think during that time. During that time I was severely struggling to make connections between one thought and the next. I barely had any energy, and my anxiety skyrocketed with it showing in my body as restlessness and vomiting. My mind would rapidly cycle through extremes as it was trying to make sense of it all.

Whenever my mind would pull some fragments of information that seemed to form a small pattern, a possible reality would briefly settle. I would then catch a feeling trying to settle, only to realise that another piece of information was contradicting that pattern, and I couldn't rely on it being true. Then the feeling that I had sensed trying to settle would be yanked away. This wasn't minute length, but seconds.

There was too much contradicting information pulling in opposite directions for me be able to rely on any possible reality my mind would try to piece together out of fragments of information. Truth, at least some truth, some answers weren't optional for me at that point. It was the lack of clarity and truth that was weighing me down, rendering me unable to orient in reality. 

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 expecting validation of my interpretation. I 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.

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 was problematic on principle alone: man who had claimed love, man who had unfairly accused me of religious prejudice, to then verbally assault me to the point of near consciousness 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 functioning. Barely, but I was able to go through the motions of daily life. I think what ironically helped me was that I couldn't remember my baseline, so I wasn't aware of how unwell I truly was.

His silence made the entire experience incomprehensible for me. 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, and my reality, and it seemed equally as excessive as I imagined my attempts at clarity must have seemed to him. 

I couldn't wrap my mind around how someone like him, and those around him I tried reaching out to 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 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 kept circling the same unanswerable question: how do you heal from something you can't even name and no one treats as a wound? It was as if I knew there was internal bleeding, but I didn't know where I was bleeding from exactly; they could see me acting all disoriented, but I wasn't allowed to name it as a wound because everyone kept acting, as if insisting that whatever hit me wasn't real.  

I wasn't looking to shame, to judge, just to be able to stop the mental loops, and find some stable ground 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, finally resolve and make sense of 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.

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. 

My suicidal ideation became so severe that it turned into active planning. 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 wanted to live, but I simply couldn't bear it anymore. It was pressing down on me like a stone tied to my neck. Even if I preferred life, I wasn't afraid of death. I, however, didn't want to suffer, and 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 keeping you alive, and merely causing loss of consciousness and possible permanent physical damage.

It all turned into deep anger; the bigger his silence grew, the more anger was becoming experientially real, because the injustice was becoming undeniably clear.

That's when the need for release took over, and I started hitting myself in the chest. It was the first time I engaged in what would be 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. 

While others may be overwhelmed by sadness to see themselves cry, the tears brought me joy. It was the first time in years I felt remotely alive. I was now experiencing the contrast from the previous dead woman walking to woman feeling something, even if that 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. 

During this entire time my emails to him never stopped, except for very short breaks after our exchange in Feb 2023. They initially were meant to serve as a way to achieve some form of closure for myself, until a week after I told him I was suicidal at that point, and a short week after, I received a notification that someone had not only logged into my instagram account but had spent 52 minutes logged in, which opened the floodgates during a time when I was severely struggling both mentally and emotionally. It was when I started articulating various possibilities for reality in my emails, and saying everything I felt was left unsaid. I was hoping that if I managed to articulate reality as it was the silence would stop. I was sometimes aiming to simply articulate my internal reality, which would be a complete miss as by this point my access to my affective dimension was almost if not completely inexistent. This would send me into a tailspin because I was still able to recognise that not even my internal reality was clicking for me, and what I believed would end in embarrassment and the general emotional overwhelm where my feelings would go to extremes based on the reality I could only imagine being true, would have me try to re-articulate my internal reality in yet another email, or explore yet another possibility.

Until late 2023, I must have explored countless possible realities, and sent a multitude of incoherently articulated emails. I remember this moment when I was struggling with a lot of anxiety, and everything was so dark that doomsday scenarios felt more salient. There was this dream I had always wanted to share with him, one I felt was particularly relevant to his existence, a dream I had had before I met him, where he was a part of my conscious awareness, but the reality I was inhabiting seemed to be set in a society engaged in violent societal conflict and I was also aware that in that reality a genocide against Muslim people was happening. I really craved to share that dream with him, but I didn't want to add more of the same kind of elements he made me feel crazy for. Because I was struggling with anxiety and doomsday scenarios triggered by various dream related memories, I merely composed the email, and scheduled it to send itself if things came to the worst. My plan was to reschedule the email until I weathered that phase. I am sure I rescheduled the email, and yet when I wanted to reschedule it again, I discovered it had sent itself. Needless to say this sent me into yet another tailspin. I was imagining that in his perception I was being excessive, and I kept trying to pre-empt, and apologise for it, however, the silence was clearly unsustainable for my mental wellbeing, and I eventually ended up telling him that if he didn't engage I was going to write to his partner, which I ended up doing. 

I reached out to her on instagram with a polite message, in which I both reassured her and explained where I was coming from. The message remained unread. I had however noticed, that shortly after sending him the dream message he deleted his twitter, and almost immediately afterwards, his partner had started liking nutrition and obesity related twitter pages, which was an exception to a long held pattern of behavior. That felt targeted to my body image issues. I weighed it over first, and later on, I ended up sending him an email saying it was shitty of her to do that especially given my mental state. It could have remained a mere coincidence if after sending that email, she hadn't both blocked me on Instagram and updated her threads bio immediately after to include 'nutritionist in the making', an identity that had never been part of her social media bio, nor did I see any association with it anywhere. This was the moment when exceptions to patterns of behavior started emerging, and although I did observe them, I couldn't overly interpret them either.

His silence continued, despite the fact that at that point it was visible he was receiving and reading my emails. I still found myself questioning everything. His silence though was data in itself. By 2024, the emails had become a way to find relief from the distress I was experiencing and generate 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 be the output to my input - it 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 reality, and what was projection. It was the only external mirror I had left to test my perception against.  

In January 2024, I ended up sending her a message on whatsapp. I wouldn't have reached out to her, but he had blocked me on whatsapp in Jan 2023, and several months later in April 2024 blocked my phone number directly. My initial message triggered her to block me - her pfp became inaccessible, a block I tested by messaging. About 30 min later her pfp was once again visible, which prompted me to test by messaging. This time around, I received a reply in which she was telling me she didn't know who I was or what I was talking about, despite it being rather clear, not to mention the phone number I was writing from which gave my country away. When I apologised for the mess, she said there was no mess contradicting his Feb 2023 statement during our last short exchange: 'My partner found your messages and it was an absolute mess', I was polite throughout and she seemed to be polite as well at a first glance, although she completely minimised my entire reality, and despite mentioning my distress, and saying that I am looking for an explanation, and closure, while she not once denied the nature of my and his connection despite my explicitly stating it in my emails, she simply ignored it and reduced my grievances to 'woman with romantic interest', despite me saying otherwise, only saying 'he wasn't interested in being with me'. Given my state at the time, I did not insist, and let it go as I was both in significant distress, not thinking clearly and was unable to hold myself and argue against her dismissal with clarity instead of a position of weakness. Her insistence on reducing my needs to romantic interest, and simply ignoring such a large statement as 'judging by your partner's actions and choice of words, he seemed to indirectly acknowledge the nature of our connection', coupled with her previous deliberate targeting of my body image issues, what I felt I could easily establish as guilt consciousness in her threads bio update, and yet another exception to a pattern of behavior I had observed right after it all escalated in early 2023 when she had also started liking multiple neuroscience related twitter pages, yet another new behavior that hadn't been visible in any of her social media at any point - an interest one might pick up in trying to erase the possibility of shared consciousness - all of these couldn't pass unnoticed by me.

I continued writing emails trying to say all the things I had always wanted to say but never could. The emails had become a source of both processing and data generation. Later on in, in May 2024, strange things started happening on my fb that I couldn't help but see with suspicion. It might have been my need for something in my external environment that could help me settle my reality, although the anomaly was still there. I had started getting weird friends suggestions, and later on, around Sept/Oct 2024, 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. Since it became clear he wouldn't participate in helping me to settle my reality, the only available route was to remove all variables, to be able to follow structure since I was having to reason from inside conditions of maximum uncertainty. I was particularly careful from the first moments the friends suggestions, and later on 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. My online behavior hadn't changed at all, and I was particularly careful whenever I looked at their social media, precisely so I wouldn't trigger shifts in algorithms. I was mostly doing so out of fear, and anxiety, and I was more concerned with the algorithmic shift that could happen on their side.

Besides, his accusations made me fear engaging with any kind of content related to him, particularly his culture, anywhere online for most of those years. Yet there it was, all of a sudden - content related to particular interests of his, and cultural background was excessively 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 on end, back to him somehow. I didn't know what to make of it, and I started taking screenshots to make sure I wasn't seeing patterns where there weren't any. The pattern was there, the content and my friends suggestions were mirroring his culture and particular interests. This didn't make it any easier to anchor myself in reality, and the constant questioning of my perception of reality would have me spiral sometimes, sending chaotic emails. My mind was going wild in circular loops trying to understand what was happening. 

However, remembering his data analyst and his partner's social media marketing professional backgrounds had me unable to rule out such significant algorithmic shift, that had no correlation with my online behavior as mere coincidence. The excessiveness of the ads made no sense for the algorithm, and my engagement patterns. The combination of timing, content, excessiveness of the content, departure from my normal feed and the professional capability had me unable to rule out outside intervention, as it had me suspect he was still receiving my emails. Then in late 2024 I simply sent an email asking him to stop whatever he was doing if he was in a relationship, and the content stopped. The stop seemed abrupt. While there seemed to be a correlation between my email and the abrupt stop, the patterns didn't seem enough for me to piece my reality together. The content resumed in equally excessive fashion in my feed just 3 months later, immediately after reaching out to his sister on LinkedIn, who blocked me almost straight away. I found it unlikely that a simple LinkedIn search for her name would trigger my fb algorithm to abruptly shift content to that degree.

The blocks were only keeping me engaged, because I couldn't help but find it incredibly nonsensical coming from people with human rights values. In may 2025 I ended up tagging both A., and his partner, separately on bsky. He was completely opaque, and never replied or reacted, but in reply to my thread @her she changed her bsky name to 'I can't magick you anymore', and about 13 minutes after, unprompted, she changed it again to 'I can't fix you'. I know it was about 13 minutes, because having seen 'I can't magick you anymore', made me feel I had to take multiple takes because for her to seemingly admit to 'magicking' me - a term I couldn't help but wonder if it stands in for deceptive tactics in trying to dismiss, erase or manipulate my reality, or in relation to magical thinking - in the context of all the shifts in her patterns of behavior I was able to correlate as involving my reactions and communications, was rather shocking.

While the emails never stopped, 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. Each email felt like my pulse was slowly returning, and like my language was starting to remember the body it was coming from. Writing and externalising my reality, my anger, attempting to express feelings I merely believed I felt, and my experience in the relational space between us, became the way I knew to reassemble my Self. I was aware that could be an outcome as I wasn't ready to abandon my Self. I only wanted peace, and freedom whichever would be the outcome, and I constantly hoped my turmoil would end with each and every email I sent. 

In my emails I always tried to speak the truth as I perceived it, as I felt it - angry, apologetic, affectionate, grief stricken, confused, pathetic - and the emails themselves started to show countless mirror shards that would reflect back the fragments of my self. It was through those emails that I began to discern what was true and distorted in my perception of self, to see patterns in my behavior, and separate trauma responses from the truth of my being. Shard by shard, the mirror was coming together like a puzzle. Using words to express what I thought I felt, or what I sometimes started to feel, became a tool to calibrate my consciousness. I would sometimes test words in the external shared reality between us, so I could feel if they fit me. It was by writing, that the fragments started to piece themselves together, and degrees of coherence would start to take the space of confusion.

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, others to express love and affection, others to process 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, and having been treated by his partner as competition to eliminate, and generally reduced to woman with romantic interest alone by people who presumably understood human rights wasn't sitting right with me, or with a coherent picture of reality. 

The greatest source of trauma that emerged from those two nights was not the archetypal activation, but the failure to acknowledge and address the reality we shared. It left me unable to make sense of an existentially charged experience that had in actuality started when I was a mere child. It had left me all alone in an experience no one understood or was able to relate to, yet one that seemed to engulf, and drown everything else in insignificance. No one seemed to understand what it's like to wake up with a completely different relationship to reality over night.

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 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 the darkest of times, 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 emotionally connect with the memory of me. I had nothing to compare that state against. My feelings were gone and I had no felt 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.

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 neurodivergence. I was no more the intelligent woman with strong pattern recognition skills I had once thought of myself as. My trauma had become evidence for everything that wasn't quite 'right' with me. The autism hypothesis gave me a framework for what was inexplicable about myself. 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.

During the darkest of times, I had even ended up trying therapy. I was now 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 depending on the counsellor. It wasn't that the two counsellors I tried didn't believe me, but one of them didn't have the tools to truly grasp my experience, which left me feeling more unheard and unseen than I already was. The other one 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 deepened over time. I then had no energy left to start all over again with someone new, only to risking feeling unheard and unseen.

Nowadays I am significantly better, although I want to be cautious because better does not imply healed, or well. I am no longer experiencing severe distress, my cognitive function has significantly improved, but there is still a lot to process and integrate, with it happening on a background of significant exhaustion. It is however, a type of exhaustion that at least at times seems to have a sense, or maybe hope of aliveness beneath it. Although, alongside this sense of aliveness that may be awaiting somewhere on the horizon, there is also at times a sense that the structure of my consciousness was impacted by the content of the trauma. I re-established access to feelings, and my felt sense of self, although calibrating and aligning with my consciousness is an ongoing process. Processing and integrating this is a work in progress, and I can't yet say I reached my baseline, although currently, I can at least sense its texture from where I am. The more I process, the better I am, but the length of time the processing requires compounds to the wound.

Because I reestablished access to my feelings, healing started feeling accessible at least at times, while other times I feel discouraged by the amount of processing healing requires after this kind of trauma, a kind of trauma that impacted nearly every domain of my life. I believe that what makes it more difficult is that there is significant trauma around the relational component of my existence which makes it difficult to feel safe with, trust and connect with people in general.

While I am significantly better, at times I am not entirely sure what to do with myself. There is a sense of lack of direction, although I assume that is in part at least due to the ongoing lack of accountability, and acknowledgement of the harm done. Short Conclusions 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.

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 intellectual and 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. Reality is a relational field by its nature and abandoning responsibility for the relational space is therefore a form of reality erasure. Within the dynamic between me, him and those surrounding him I reached out to, gender stereotypes were involved and their constantly blocking, ignoring me constantly made me feel as the irrational, obsessed, unstable woman, and my direct spiritual experience stigmatised. 

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 and very existence was worthy of acknowledgement. This registered in my affective field as existential erasure. My suffering was rooted in silence, ambiguity and the refusal for repair. While I imagined that 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.

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 an embarrassment that is externally imposed by societal conventions that are both dysfunctional and disproportionately placed onto women. This is especially true for women with complex experiences that fall outside of what is approved as 'normal'. Awareness of that shame being externally imposed, and it going against nature in this context helped. 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. 

**

Some Observations on Consciousness, Affect, Cognition, Coherence, and Memory

Despite struggling at the time, I discovered that all the abstract reasoning I engaged in was not in vain. Once I was able to integrate to a sufficient degree, what was once abstract became closer to embodied understanding. The very concepts of consciousness, reality, and experience are themselves no longer abstract.

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 the field's coherence, with cognition as consciousness' function for differentiation and articulation. This is supported by several mainstream and widely taught lines of work in psychology and neuroscience (Jan Panksepp, Antonio Damasio). 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 articulation and language evolved.

Affect as registration of the field's coherence became most observable during the post-crisis exhausation phase. During this time, I could feel every possible orientation/direction cognition would render on top of affective sensation as having the ability to make or break my nervous system. I felt the movement towards coherence or incoherence in my nervous system. Depending on how I oriented - it literally felt as if the wrong turn could collapse my nervous system, so I would reorient cognitively until the signal I registered felt soothing to various degrees. This was almost moment to moment, and visible whenever I tried to structure affect via cognition - poor interpretation, and implicitly structure, and subsequently navigation registered the incoherence in my nervous system. Whenever I aligned cognition with affect my navigation registered soothe and relief. Symbolically, my experience is a good representation of the movement from Dark to Light. My spiritual emergence was a state of coherence that registered as Light, with the following inversion of my reality turning Light to Dark. My consciousness remained in darkness, until I started to differentiate and use the registration of the coordinates between the poles to move towards the Light (Love/Safe/Trust) pole. This implied moving towards whatever felt safer, more trustworthy, more stable regardless of outcome. Affect as the field's registration, and Cognition as articulation. A recursive movement where each movement of navigation turns into a new signal that needs further articulation again.

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

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. I noticed that already integrated affect + cognitive structures were easier to access in memory and work with.

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.

For example, as I write, awareness holds a vague image of my hands on the keyboard, the screen in front of 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.

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. 

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 the possibility of having recounted 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.

Based on my observations 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.

I don't believe in any way that cognition is secondary, or inferior. I am a big fan of reason, and have always been, but I also believe that cognition should be faithful to affective registration, in establishing precise congruence with the data affect holds about the entire relational field. We may not be aware but everything we interact with in our environments has a vibe - we feel at various degrees of intensity, in every single moment of our lives. I was most able to observe this, during the long 'flat' affect period. During this time, when I was unaware I didn't have access to more feeling, I deliberately inquired, and I would find affective registration in the smallest and most seemingly insignificant moments. For society to have ever considered it wise to render feelings as inferior is akin to rendering an entire dimension of what it means to be human to inferiority. As per my experience, feelings are not noise, but data.  

From my perspective, coherent human consciousness is the successful moment to moment coupling of affect and cognition, where cognition articulates affective registration.

The End

Disclaimer: This website reflects my personal memories, perceptions, and interpretations of past events. All ideas are my own, and names and identifying details have been changed. Its purpose is healing, restoring coherence, and self-expression.