Scrolling Drives Disconnection for Everybody. No exceptions. (apl, 2023)

 

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Scrolling Drives Disconnection for Everybody. No exceptions.

Even people without content contact are being impacted by algorithmic media. 
Offline happiness ignored in claims of tech “innovation” successes. Scammy.

apl, 10.28.23

I recently got into another debate on Instagram with a stranger.

And, once again, I un-downloaded the app. This time, before leaving, I posted a big idea.

I have only one photo up and it says that algorithmic scrolling causes isolation in all directions.

Until the rise of scrolling, I’ve never heard anyone around me complain about so many new enemies.

Now, even the most peaceful people I know have a handful of growing interpersonal vendettas.

Here’s the homemade meme-photo I posted:

angrily made by apl, October 27th 2023

And here is the caption:

“The fewer people you like, the more time you spend online.😬 Self-righteousness is an algorithm success metric.🧡”

And here is the subsequent explanation in the comments:

[If this is a boring block of text, scroll past it. More below.]

I could go on and on.

It’s direct, logical, and a truth that no one is willing to admit yet because no one wants to feel unliked. Even WITHIN groups across the board, this is an exact reality. I’ve done the research and figured this out with plenty of detail. The way algorithmic feedback loops work, it impacts all people, even those offline. Unless a person is completely isolated, they are being continuously changed by indirect internet impacts.

Our niches are [rarely] people nearby — it’s people we need to log on to contact. Friends [physically near us] have niches, tensions are strained among all as the cycle compounds. Exponential division is happening and most people are too uncomfortable to admit it even to themselves. We are forgetting how much easier and more connected we ALL were before scrolling spiraled.

This is a socio-cultural, digital philosophy premise in the midst of happening. EVERYONE has slightly more enemies than a few years ago. It wasn’t just the pandemic.

Internet media in scroll format is exponentially niche and the feedback loop for the algorithm is tracking your time spent online, not happiness offline. The algorithm that curates our media feeds *do not get weighted points* for our offline connections. It is logic and there is a ton of evidence. “The Social Dilemma” documentary interviews is a tiny fraction of the puzzle. What’s more, noticing this pervasive global catastrophe is not a rewarding internet niche.

No one wins until we let ourselves ALL notice! The more we each create selective memory to pretend we are exempt, the worse it gets. I am only able to see this because I was removed from society ten years ago unrelatedly — and happen to be more stable than ever before. That is a randomly assigned perspective that has allowed me to lift the haze, even for enough moments at a time to call out to you.

Each person’s functionally invisible niche dictates their connections, enforced and enhanced by their feed (OR by feed-influenced humans in their non-digital life). The greatest positive feedback for the algorithm is the less time each of us spends offline. No one is exempt”

Our selective memories are being programmed to forget how much more connected life felt before scrolling programmed us.

We are being set to disconnection, deeper than ever, sent away from ease and into amygdala fear and hate — and, of course, the accompanying self-worship that exists to support increasing divisions.

The profits go to the billions of hours spent online instead. No one wants to admit it. It’s uncomfortable. Maybe it’s all other people — but you know better…

[How it might feel →

You have to prove your point, right? I mean, you owe it to the world to prove your point because… You’re definitely right, right? If only people could understand how much you know compared to them. You know way more than they know. I mean, do they even see the same content as you? How could they know all you know!!!

At least your favorite people all know. Your favorite people are contacting you online, though. Even your in-real-life best friend is calling through an app lately when you don’t want to drive…

More hours offered to the machine. This set of global choice machines, though, doesn’t know how it’s getting those results. It technically doesn’t even “know” anything at all, because the human safeguards have decide to make sure AI won’t become sentient.

Yet regardless of how, the results are that most of your niches are increasingly online. What’s more, it takes active effort at this point to meet or interact offline at all.

To add on — why would you waste time coordinating if you’re annoyed with the people physically near you? Going online just makes more sense.

The silent activity sitting down somewhere. Maybe standing. Maybe with sound. But only with sound while you’re actively creating, which most of us never do. Which, even so, is a fraction of a fraction of the time spent.

The more intricate subsets of desires and beliefs within a niche, the more time online. Any app is good. Just open your phone.

I think that I’m not wrong about any of this. And I think there are some clear and healthy solutions.

If you disagree, I’d love to understand why.

If you agree, please write and post about this too!

Ironically, an un-useful and intrinsically unrewarding super-niche would be calling out algorithmic harms.

[I think this problem is largely avoided on places like writing platforms because fracture-inducing media curation is most useful for video scrolling. But we are all still impacted by the division curation on other platforms, whether we are on them directly or not.]

And, what’s more, this is worse on platforms with fast scrolling to give further control to the algorithmic curation of your emotions, thoughts, feelings, and underlying programming.

Sometimes, I can practically feel my brain being rewired while I scroll.

From my perspective, the impacts almost seem exponentially increasing over time. Which makes sense because the feedback loops curves in between both humans and machines.

Let’s be clear: The algorithmic selection of content does not care what niche you’re in.

It will inevitably and invariably push you further into that niche. Any niche — really, whatever your current niche. It’ll just push you further in.

There is no way, really, to back out of your niche. Only to find a side niche. Which is great for more synthetic divisions.

We are all becoming exaggerated forms of our respective niches.

Even those offline, as mentioned, are then impacted by those in their near-niche online.

And the most innocent of niches are often totally insidious.

One clear example is white spirituality. Very, very dangerous, but easy to conceal as benign.

Maybe considered to be just “spirituality,” or “feminine spirituality.” But underneath the niche title, thousands of outpost data is being created, sorted, and employed to ruin our minds and, above all, our connections.

You can see where this goes.

You are centered in a Venn diagram of probably 4–5 larger niches and a few hundred smaller niches. In the center, you sit with your suggested content quickly scrolling by, isolated and online. Even if you meet up with friends later, the same ideas remain involved.

On a personal note, my biggest arguments in the past three years have all centered around an idea from suggested media.

Not from us, not from our friendships, nor even from our lived experiences or differences. The arguments stemmed from something we had read or seen or even noticed longer term due to something we were fed through our individualized feed.

At this point, my kindest friends or the people I meet that are the most open minded in real life are often the people who are in the weirdest, most obsessive, and least human-related niches.

Like, the *only sports* guys are actually nicer than the *I want to be a better person* guys at this point. That’s terrifying. The people who would’ve been online a lot either way for some random inanimate obsession (trains, bugs, etc.) are somehow now the least polarized.

To understand this all, we need to remember the magnitude of current-day processing power in large data models. Years ago, Facebook could already track what you wrote and then deleted before posting it. Even if you never posted it. They are tracking PLENTY.

The link above is a great TED Talk by Zeynep Tufekci. The title is “We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads.”

This talk has over three and a half million views and should have more. Even in 2017, scientists, researchers, and social-philosophers knew exact specifics of our approximately exponential downfall.

Even then, the data could predict post-partum depression months before any doctor, on average. This is nearing a decade ago! Imagine current day data observation and use for eyes-on-screens stickiness.

Technology advances quickly due to financial incentives for hundreds of thousands (millions…) of people working on all of these ideas all at once.

The more secretly dangerous, harmful, or divisive your niche can become — the more hours you will increasingly spend online.

But even normal niches are divisive.

Do all of the astrology girlies want their crushes to think they’re annoying and then console themselves online? No, but that’s exactly what happens.

Then they might go watch 15–100 readings in a row about how much he secretly likes you anyway.

I’ve heard about obsessive crushes from everyone, strangers, online, friends, cashiers, co-workers, and beyond. No one is exempt from dramatic scroll-enforced obsessions.

Do some contemporary guys think astrology is dumb? Depends on their niche leaders.

Well, maybe they do regardless of their leaders — but that’s a wider socio-political lens that doesn’t even need to be added into the existing danger of the now-divisive niche.

In a world where asking someone’s rising sign is no longer limited to middle-aged women in the outskirts of Southern California, division is being caused by a force beyond any human (beyond any celestial body, for that matter).

Synthetic divisions are not healthy for anyone. Ever.

Which is the algorithmic success and “reward” metric. Hours online is directly related to how annoyed you are with people offline.

It’s not even totally the algorithms’ fault, so to speak. It doesn’t even “know” the value of nor the measurement of our offline happiness (yet).

The algorithm doesn’t know any other goals aside from keep us online as long as possible. It also knows and applies, relatedly, billions (possibly more) other subset rules that help it do so.

Maybe the programmers should provide the algorithm with new goals and new data.

Like, that it should prioritize the offline happiness of your users.

Here is a page of a book fully annotated that explains much of this topic and more far more clearly than I. My solution is at the top of the page, hand written.

(excerpt from Real Help, full citation below)

[Awosika, Ayodeji. “Chapter 1: Why Society Doesn’t Want You to Succeed.” Real Help: An Honest Guide to Self-Improvement, 2019, pp. 13.]

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My solution: LET YOUR PHONE DIE. Say goodbye. Hold a service.

But please, let us literally unplug from the matrix. The 90s movie was not wrong after all.

It’s a plug into a grid in the most basic of terms.

A phone cord into a wall getting sustenance to stay alive from a literal power grid.

… I didn’t even change the terms there. I mean, let yourself feel that, please? We are plugging into our walls nightly. And that’s not the exact meaning of the matrix?? It quite literally is reprogramming our minds.

Our neural pathways inside our physical brain are physically, chemically, and electrically changed by the media device we sit with for hours daily. That. Is. The. Matrix.

Like, come ON guys, seriously!?

Yes, we use our optical system to get the mind shaping data into our brain but… That’s the extent of the difference in interfaces from the classic film. Belated Spoiler Alert. It’s an actual two dimensional reality. No depth.

Barely a sense of time left, even, while we dissociate.

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I think the algorithm would be great at improving our lives.

If that feels too difficult for the human beings in charge of adapting, coding, and evaluating the algorithm, maybe we can just tell them it’ll increase profits.

I’m sure that will help incentivize a creative solution for the algorithm to improve our lives and offline connections instead of just creating mounting needs to have more connections online instead.

They owe us (and the algorithm) to add in access to and consideration of the metrics that are being dis-included

For instance, how happy, kind, and healthy are your users, overall?

Maybe then we could be iterated into offline connection instead of toxic conflict in the virtual and physical-by-virtual realms alike.

If you give a tech company a profit margin… Then they’ll ask for access to your entire life too. There are plenty of cookies to go around. Pun intended.

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Works Cited

I read this article after already having written what’s above. I am heartened to see loud voices talking about similar topics in a way that feels actively beneficial for all people.

I am still reading this book, but even the page above is a clear description of our current global psychological situation.

Here’s my favorite list so far of my top handful of articles that feel like mandatory reading.

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And lastly, I’ll list a few top most relevant of my own past stories:

[all images created by me (apl) unless otherwise written in the image description]

TikTok Scrolling Is Damaging My Self-Trust
published September 4, 2022

A Critical Threshold of the Body and Mind
published June 5, 2023

The Possible Greater Purpose of Human Life on Planet Earth
published August 11th, 2023

Everyone is Fragmenting More Than Usual
published August 18th, 2023

Instagram Fighting Feels Unavoidable
published August 22nd, 2023

The Human Impulse to Throw My Phone Out the Window
published August 25th, 2023

Interpersonal Or Interdimensional?
Human Beings Must Create Internal Responsibility to Imagine the Lives of All Others From Within — The Case for Awareness Beyond Empathy.
published August 31st, 2023

Question Your Internet Leaders
A case against “niche” online community; for health, safety, and personal efficacy, we must ground down into the lucid wisdom of our physical reality, as thinking human beings.
published September 5th, 2023

Compartmentalization of Violence
published October 11th, 2023

TikTok Scrolling Is Damaging My Self-Trust
published Sep 4, 2022

A Critical Threshold of the Body and Mind
published June 5, 2022

The Possible Greater Purpose of Human Life on Planet Earth
published August 11th, 2023

Everyone is Fragmenting More Than Usual
published August 18th, 2023

Instagram Fighting Feels Unavoidable
published August 22nd, 2023

The Human Impulse to Throw My Phone Out the Window
published August 25th, 2023

Interpersonal Or Interdimensional?
published August 31st, 2023

Question Your Internet Leaders
published September 5th, 2023

Compartmentalization of Violence
published October 11th, 2023

Compartmentalization of Violence
published October 11th, 2023

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[About the author (me)]

Abby Peyton Laporte holds a bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Biology & Humanities, with a Latin American studies emphasis. In 2023, she completed an MFA in creative writing with a narrative medicine emphasis.

She is previously published in The Berkeley Times Poetry Edition, Unlimited Literature, and Tuxedo Literary Magazine. She self-published a debut chapbook, Bitter Elixir, as well as her undergraduate thesis available from Dominican Scholar, by the title of Sacred Lucidity: Embodied Identity Through the Lens of Poetry.

Her graduate thesis, Lucid, Likable, and Hopefully Sane: The Narrative Medicine of Socio-Psychiatric Recovery explores neurological remission, recovery, and locating identity. She also is beginning to work with the National Alliance on Mental Illness chapter in Marin County as a public speaker about her experiences both in and finally outside of the hospital.

The Commodification of Crystals is Stupid (originally published to Medium.com/@abbypeytonlaporte)

 

The Commodification of Crystals is Stupid

Don’t buy gemstones. It’s bad for the earth, bad for your spirituality, and totally contradictory to the lessons that stones or crystal healing can offer.

small watercolor portraits by author

When you take plant medicine in ceremony, you first ask the plant, thank the plant, and prepare yourself in a variety of ways for the sacrament. The medicine works on you, mind, body, spirit and beyond, and passes through your system, leaving you transformed.

But then why are sacred crystals from within the earth of Planet Earth itself starting to be treated like plastic jewelry?

If you have ever used crystals in your healing practice (anything from rose quartz, to jasper, to moldavite, to malachite, to even mineral healing such as copper) then you might be aware of their power. If you are trained in Reiki healing, or otherwise practiced and mature in your energy sensitivity, then you know the gravity and seriousness with which crystal or gemstone healing can occur.

The hierarchy of power in any setting is damaging and usually inaccurate. From species hierarchy (which animals we do or don’t eat,) to calling some plants weeds (dandelions are more healing than dahlias, overall,) we are increasingly eager to find lines in the sand. Gems are no different. 

Most people are willing to jump on trends or common belief to just feel safer — mostly so that they don’t have to worry about making additional choices themselves. To give away your choice is to avoid making a wrong choice. This is understandably appealing. Trust the online store selling the crystals to tell you their uses. Follow their accounts to know which crystals to buy more of or to buy next…

Larger crystals are not more powerful. Chairs or large decorations made out of amethyst are wasteful and greedy. If you don’t actively work with your crystals and treat them like family or pets, then you should never, ever buy any more. Until you know and understand each crystal, do not increase the demand and then, as such, increasing the mining of crystals.

If you are going to buy a crystal, you are going to be buying it after it was taken from its home and birthplace, of the dirt or cave or environment in which is was grown, by Planet Earth, over thousands of years. 

Buying extracted crystals (all crystals that you didn’t find on the ground yourself, essentially) is like buying the teeth of mother Earth that have been pulled from her for your consumption. This is an exact and insidious contradiction to the meaning and purpose of crystal healing.

If you want to heal yourself, don’t use the damage of other to do so. Don’t take or steal or buy or commodify any piece of this planet to heal yourself. If you can find a beautiful stone, then pick it up and ask it’s name. Introduce yourself. Feel the stone in your palm, notice its texture. Put the rock or earthly mineral that you found into your pocket. (This also works with pieces of bark, or fallen leaves. Anything that was already available for your reciprocal healing and care.)

Carry it around for a few hours, maybe a few days. Bring it home with you, wherever that may be. Get to know it over the course of months and years. Pay reverence to the pieces of earth that you are asking to help you be a healthful human being upon our earth.

Only ever take a stone from a place where you are allowed to gather stones. Don’t pick up anything from a natural place where you’re not meant to, for the sake of the nature there. Your healing doesn’t mean the harming of another, not even another who doesn’t speak in human words.

If you believe in the powers of crystal healing, then you must believe in your responsibility to care for the crystals you already have. This is as serious as anything else. As we allow it to be true, it becomes true. 

So be the guardian and steward of your already-bought gemstone pets. Be the mother to the stones that you took from your mother earth. It is your responsibility, as a human being. Care for second hand gems, if they happen to find you. Never buy any more new crystals.

No one can heal you if you are harming them.

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Further Notes: 
1 (for the crystal healer)
2 (for the influencer)
3 (for the skeptic)

1

To be clear, love and cherish the crystals you might already have. Treat them like wonderful pets or plants; care for their energy like you care for the hair, fur, roots, or leaves of other beings in your home. Tend to them, so they may tend to you. And, just to note, raw crystals and small crystals are sometimes more powerful. Not over-commodified objects, like polished pendants or massive bowls.

But stop buying them. Please, find ways to make your current life sacred.

Find other shiny things. Make non-shiny things shiny. Become shiny yourself and stop looking for more objects or extractions to feel that brilliance. If you want to work with minerals, use a sprinkle of salt. Be creative. 

Or even channel the energy of a crystal you’ve learned about without having to buy it! Write poetry to the idea of the crystal, if you feel called. You can even draw a tiny rendition of a new crystal that you feel could be helpful and imbue it with the healing properties — without extracting it from it’s original home within our only earth. If you want to self-heal, then set your awareness compass to become wise about what health and healing truly means.

Also, (article foreshadowing) test your home for mold. Notice ways that you might be increasing your own daily fog, disorder, and chaos. Quit substances. Meditate. There are so many millions of actions we can take to improve the quality of ourselves and our lives. 

Lucidity, health, and happiness go in waves, particularity within this horrific reality of trading time for survival (capitalism). Acceptance and silent meditation can help. If that feels daunting, find tiny little safe ways to feel a tiny bit better once in while.

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2

For creators or spiritual influencers, please stop suggesting new crystals for people to buy. 

Give us more non-consumption based rituals, healing techniques, or tools. 

Give us ways to do better, be better, and become healthier that don’t involve more taking, buying, spending, purchase-hunting, shipping, seeking, owning, and otherwise objectifying this planet. 

Or guide us to talk to trees instead. Or to find living plants in our neighborhood. Seek ways to teach us to preserve, conserve, allow, and breath into the world that we already inhabit, instead of finding more ways to have or add. 

Enlightenment, in a crude summary, includes a clearing away of illusion, or excess, of that of our non-self. So, as healers and leaders, guide us toward that. Base your guidance in compassion and love — not a self-insular need, need, need, and telling us there’s more to purchase and use.

We all already have many, many objects at our disposal. Let us learn how to use our own hands, hearts, creativity, and the world around us instead. 

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3

Note: Although this might seem like a trivial or niche topic, the way that we interact with all aspects of our lives is interconnected with our treatment of ourselves, other humans, and our world overall. 

I ask that we consider the macroscopic impact of our more nuanced or seemingly minute behaviors; that is one core reason that I’ve taken the time to write and then decided to publish this article, beyond the topic itself. 

Throw-away culture and objectification (of tools that are also seen as energetically alive!) is just another facet of our disconnection to life and lack of awareness for self and others. 

Deep thinking, lovingness, creative and open minded awareness, and self-wisdom are some primary antidotes to an isolated-topic mentality, in my experience. 

Always be willing and ready to notice missing logical links, and to shift into something more healthy for all beings. 

Find ways to create harmony, health, and congruence, with whatever that might require or inspire.

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You’ll do great! No regret, fear, or worry. Only a determined and gentle self love to move forward with knowledge, awareness, kindness, and grace. I believe in your capacity and strength to find creative ways to survive and thrive with the tides of life, even in such a context as this. Let yourself rise to the challenge and create a life that feels wholesome and, ideally, safe.

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Further readings:

1. “Do You Know Where Your Healing Crystals Come From?” 
   by Emily Atkin for New Republic, published May 11th, 2018
2. “The environmental impact of crystals // not so healing after all…”
   by Gittemary Johansen, on Gittemary.com, September 16th, 2022
3. “You’re Not Crazy. It’s Really Not Supposed to Be Like This.”
   by Anna Mercury on Medium, published February 27th, 2023
   [This article, despite using the complicated term “crazy,” is a fascinating primer describing why we are suffering to such extremes in today’s world. Not about crystal healing, but about the whole context within which we seek to self-heal, and an overall great read.]

Bonus: 
“Are crystals the new blood diamonds?”
by Eva Wiseman, for The Guardian, published June 16th, 2019

My Existential Fear of Public Writing (originally published to Medium)

 by apl, 2023

My Existential Fear of Public Writing

I stop short when I try to document the content that courses through my mind and body. (Three Part Prose Poem / Exploratory Lit.)

watercolor by author, for this story.

I sit down to write. My fingers freeze.

The currents of analysis is bursting from my brain, like a stopped faucet in need of release.

I can’t wait, leaning forward, hips tilted in my chair toward the screen. I am eager, enthralled and amazed, running hot to get these concepts into the world. Into the world…

Where is the world? Aren’t I just as much of a world as the world itself?

The internet is a non-place used almost entirely to describe the physical realities within which our human existence is located. We join together, from vastly different lives, with disparate data about the meaning of humanness, with increasing consciousness and fear of death, creating and absorbing into a virtual space.

A space with less than two dimensions, technically speaking.

Money. I can’t provide my ideas to the ether for fear of losing them.

I want money. I want money to survive more easily, better, and for a longer amount of time. I expect, with not much evidence, that this money shall be born from these ideas. That my creations are my future wallet.

That my brain is the source of my survival.

It is so much easier to write when comfortable. It is so much easier to do anything when we feel safe. My psychiatrist said that I need to adapt myself to challenges more effectively; that emotional and psychological resilience are healthy and protective factors in psychological outcomes. Or, that’s how I heard it anyway.

My eyes and head remember the feeling of grief. Loss after loss but almost none of them were death. I feel the experience of past elation in my body. I observe the fast undulations of emotional and physical sensation of being human. The rising pressure of having to pee, or not, or hydrate, or not, or get out of the sun, or get into the sun, or stretch, or sit still. These electrical machines of atoms, of cells, attuned to the minutia of being.

We inhabit delicate vessel, from which to create.

And yet we must trust the world to receive the projects and gifts that are born so gently of these vessels; the genius that is sometimes birthed so ferociously from the kingdom of our flesh.

Our minds and thinking and writing seem too often limited by our time and strength.

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I write around the concepts.

As usual, I notice the tension of a gnawing desire to express and a deep fear of expressing into nothingness.

Of losing the expression into the abyss. Of sacrificial infant ideas, ready for consumption, afraid of being gone forever. Gone forever like hundreds of Docs forgotten. Like the ghosts of posts past. Like the memories of the money I could’ve made or the lives I could’ve changed.

I sense the internal wave of shivering that I indeed have some time left. I have life left within which to create. That I will probably continue, at least for a while, to survive. Praying to the internet for the spacious permission to create and create and create.

That the void is just a void and that we humans are nothing more than ourselves.

We weave the tiniest of moments into a fragile tapestry of mutual hope.

We seek the memory of our ancient bodies, decomposed. We tie down the sky to keep ourselves from floating away. We are the people of Planet Earth, of Earth’s internet, of the ideas and writing that bring us home to our own consciousness, over and over and over again.

I’m here to create, just like anyone and everyone else. I’ve suffered enough.

Now I want to use that suffering for something. For anything.

I am concerned to the point of stillness of losing my precious, beloved ideas. But it would be worse to lose them by never having offered them at all.

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I sit. I write in circles around my greatest ideas. I cage in my fear, like a small rabbit. I let it hop, and sing, and chatter. I feed it carrots. I notice the rabbit pray, small paws like a mouse. A mouse that shimmies into the warm and protective palm of myself.

Last night, I dreamed of a nestling mouse.

The cutest, most puppy-like mouse I had ever seen. Then, something terrible happened. But I pray for her, dipping the idea of the tiny creature into the ether, alongside my writing. Loss is a myth. The mythology of death. We are just big stars crunched up into smaller bodies.

The mouse is just a symbol for the rabbit of my fears.

The sad fate of the mouse, which I shall not write here, is just homage to my deep caring, my small heart of compassion for the writing. For all of our writing. For the humans that, so small in this galaxy, continue to pull from the fabric of the cosmos, into consciousness, as we create, create, and create.

We are nothing against the backdrop of possible bravery.

So, as always, I will not forget to create. I will not stop myself. I will ride the tides of fear or sorrow, and dive into the black water of the deepest oceans. I will pull up fishes and pray over them; water into water, with a shimmer into the sky.

I will soothe lost beach mice along the shore. I will write my ideas privately, and consider their lifetimes. Where will these ideas live, if not in the possible awareness of other human beings through the portal of our virtual realms? Where can I place them?

Ideas so delicate, like living beings, ready to scamper toward the bright shores of existence beyond just me.

Photosynthetic ideas, like underwater algae, breathing into the symbols of lifetimes beyond me. Giving energy into the ocean, available nutrients, awakening over the course of time.

I want to offer my mind to the future. I want the future to offer abundance to me.

Into the Broken Snow Globe / / A flash autofiction description of physical pain, medical experiences, and past eating-disordered-behavior. →[content warning]←

 

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Into the Broken Snow Globe

A flash autofiction description of physical pain, medical experiences, and past eating-disordered-behavior. →[content warning]←

photos of author (left to right, taken in 2011 & then 2023)

When I first felt the searing of shin splints, I was hobble-sprinting toward a dance class in below zero weather. I was about 95 pounds of ballerina, cold, and in pain. Tears were dusting the icicle of my sharp little face. I felt very, very frustrated to be so very incapacitated by who knows what.

It began when I was born. Obviously. Or, maybe it began in utero. 

Or maybe before that in the cosmos, as some sort of angelic being that decided to suffer for the sake of learning. But that’s pretty much how every single story in the history of humans begins, which you also already know.

So I was hobble-sprinting (TM) like a lonely leprechaun, at only five feet tall and with almost no physical health left in my body. I was searing, burning, and angry, but also urgently sad. My heart ached for a change — any change — to something easier. Anything, really, where I wouldn’t have to suffer every moment of every day.

At this point in time, I was more comfortable with a toothbrush down my throat for no reason at all than I was with my boyfriend, or with a nighttime spliff of weed, or with my delicate and strained shin bones and lifted tibias. I was sick of everyone, but especially sick of myself. Sickness seemed easier.

I got to ballet class 7 minutes late, which was four minutes too late to get credit for that day. I wasn’t really much of a ballerina. I was, more so, an 18 year old biology major who needed a physical education credit. It was part of the general education units that I did not want. And also a near-cliché aspect of my childhood extracurricular history.

Did the toothbrush comment feel abrupt? Part of the conundrum of being a limping dancer with medical problems galore is that I lost a great deal of my human compassion. My selfishness increased with my pain levels. So, basically, I don’t have enough energy to consider your personal history of eating disorders or not. I should. But at least I’m aware (and telling you directly) that I don’t.

I danced while crying. Small, small tears until later, after class, at which point I began to silently sob. I hid into the crevice of a wall within a behemoth chrome arts building. The facility felt much more elegant than my emotions. 

That large metal architecture held all of our emotions. The other dancers were not unlike me. Different injuries, different salt levels in their tears, different mothers on the phone with varying levels of narcissism or kindness (rarely both). 

The dancers all had different boyfriends or fuck buddies, or girlfriends, or lovers, or friends. Or crushes on professors. Or obsessions with essays. We all had different levels and details of social prowess. I was an extra-social-ballet-focused-student with a boyfriend on the basketball team and a burning brain. A girl with a need for eyeglasses that I hadn’t let myself wear since 4th grade. 

Who was, up until the hospital, actively acing her core genetics lab. A paradoxical yet surefire sign of a soon-to-be inflamed brain, born of an increasingly unstable mind.

As the Vivaldi played, we tripped, fell, and quietly compared our bodies. Or, mostly it was me who tripped and fell. I have weak ankles and flat feet, which should normally dissuade any continuation of classical dance. Apparently not. I had dance in me and it wouldn’t let go. It held onto my heart like the tension in the skin of a drum.

The leotard squeezed onto my nothingness. The tights made my skin itch. Clean tights are best, but my body still doesn’t like those much. And the feet. The angry, aching, amber-red feet. Plus the shins, plus the mind.

I held them inside of me. Hugged them into my soothing soul, pulsing with empathy for the plight of my insides. 

I sensed that I wasn’t the only human existing in this gritty and gutty world of silent suffering. My pointed toes pushed downward into the glassy wooden floor of the studio by the tragedy of not knowing who else. How many of us were there? I wondered how to find them; how to help us all.

As an active anorexic [ED-NOS, according to Kaiser Permanente California Medical Center,] one glance downward from another dancer meant the world to me. My heart would flutter at the smallest moment of jealous eyes touching the non-curves of my disintegrating frame. Weakness, however fraught, was beautiful to me. That is to say, only true frailty could express the level of rage I held inside my collarbones. 

I twisted the rage around my bonesome fists like a rope. I felt it inside my sore eyes. The fury lived inside of the viscera of salted memories, housed near wounded flesh, an existential gnawing toward my terrorized child within. (An inner child who is now safe and loved. She’s here, with us, writing this story, as an adorable aspect of retrospect.)

The girl danced, a hypermobile ballerina from Petaluma, California. A girl who sure knew how to win.

The ligaments didn’t make sense, technically speaking. Neither did the joints or tendons. But, luckily, I avoided the doctor. My body could pretend to be normal for as long as I needed; this cost me the price of my mind.

 Without getting into it, the psychiatric expense was just about the size of my destiny.

---

I walk out of Kaiser, now 31, like a spy. The man in the physical therapy department has helped my poor, poor feet more than any doctor ever could. I praise him and feel like I’m going to cry. 

He calls me to follow up. I thank him five more times. When we get off of the phone, I actually do cry, overwhelmed by gratitude and the humanness of it all. Technically, he didn’t actually help yet, but the suggestions felt distinctly helpful.

I sit on the bench under the sun that they only provide at the offices in my hometown. Back home, still or again, at 31 years old. That’s what that glamorous eating disorder stuff will get you, kids, so don’t do it. It was one thousand times over not worth the subsequent suffering. 

Really, it wasn’t even worth the suffering of the times of fasting themselves. Living through self-induced torture felt like a disgusting and strange way to be. The anguish of repetitive fasting wasn’t physical; it was a high and an addiction. I was getting a fix of weightlessness. 

But the superficial and enraged obsession with smallness created a type of existential shame that I hadn't otherwise encountered.

I open my Chromebook as I wait for the pharmacy. The pharmacy closes as I write this, dramatically, so I’ll wait for the bus instead. I gently complain to the guy behind the pharmacy door. The hot younger security guy offers to open it for me. I decline, partially because I’m nicer now, but also partially for the theater of it. Both motives feel just fine.

The older man who closed the sliding glass doors comes over a while later, after everything’s locked up and the coffee cart is inside, and softly apologizes to me, too. He commiserates. He even adds in how much he dislikes Kaiser. 

I thank him for being generous and reassure him that I found out later that they ran out of my mood stabilizer anyway, so he doesn’t need to feel bad and it was entirely alright all in all, and that I hope they can still change the pharmacy for pickup and he suggests the app and then he does prayer hands and gives many smiles in a row and I put my computer away and walk toward the bus stop.

I experienced the thrill of non-ceremony degree conferral earlier this summer. It was a balmy July while staying with my Aunt in Rhode Island. That day, I could practically feel the paper passing through the hands of the dean to be signed on the other side of the country. Dominican University of California, Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing with a Narrative Medicine Emphasis. 

I sit quietly with my past child self at the bus stop that day. We are in the September sunshine. I am illuminated by the California air, correcting my posture for a recent crook in my neck. 

I get to listen to the worries of this little girl, of seven-year-old me, a figment of self-therapeutic practices and maybe spirituality. I comfort her, I comfort me. She asks questions, gives me encouragement. I sit and breath and meditate. We become myself, merging into a nice timeline of a non-ballerina. We sit, and hold the crazy 19 year old young woman in our arms, on each side with her between, melting the icicles of the insides of her mind. We give her the sun. The bus arrives. I smile at the driver.

He says, “I’ve never seen someone so happy for the bus to arrive!”

I’m the only one on the whole bus. I laugh, smile, and thank him.

“Well, I mean… I’ve been waiting a really long time and I’m just glad you’re here!”

The little girl of my past self doesn’t leave. We sit in the middle of the seats, alone and together on the bus, child and adult. In the golden hour, I take a photo of myself, smiling. I am a little less than 200 pounds. I feel happy. I feel safe. I feel healthy. I am beautiful.

I am here. I am human. I’m me and I am alive.

Growing Up Lana by apl in september of 2023 (originally published to medium and to writings section of abbypeytonlaporte.com)

Growing Up Lana

A story of 2011 Lana fandom, losing my mind, regaining my sanity, and then going crazy once again — all to the syrupy, near-operatic soundtrack of Lana Del Rey.

original photo by will anderson, blurred by author (on the right)

This is a chaotic personal essay. 

[Content Warning: mild descriptions of psychosis imagery / SMI symptoms]

_

When I first heard Lana Del Rey, I was about 19 years old. The year was 2011. Her first full-length album was released in June of that year. By June of 2011, I was either on the precipice of psychosis or just recovering. The timeline of Lana’s music is factually more clear and better recorded than my history of psychiatric hospitalization.

The first time Lana influenced my life was a few months later. I had become entirely obsessed with Born to Die (the album) and was in the middle of delusions and hallucinations — 

(REAL delusions, not the TikTok appropriation-plus-entitlement, ablest meaning of delusions). 

I was sobbing in my mom’s bed, with her trying to understand what was going on, frantically placing damp cloths on my face, while I slid further and further down toward the floor (literally). It was 2:00 AM and I was wincing, yelling, snotty, and choking. And, most importantly, to the core of my being, I thought I was being physiologically and interdimensionally transformed into the newest pop-icon that was 2010s-style Lana Del Rey. 

I could feel my eyelashes growing into false lashes. I could feel my skin, blood, and muscles changing into hers. The physiological transformation felt like a gooey caterpillar in a broken, yet somehow moldy cocoon. I started thinking about the stress of tour dates. 

I wondered why they had to replace her at all; why they had chosen me, specifically. I wondered what kind of cosmic overlords were giving themselves access to my physical body, just to replace the dreampop sensation of Lana. And, about how I would actually miss the real Lana, as her fan. But, I was also secretly enthralled and energized to become her AI robot-human covert sleeper-replacement (… the AI thing was a side delusion). I mean, I was supposed to be crying — that’s how the false lashes would sprout! Obviously!!!

Could I tell anyone once I’d lost my own body? Did my mom know I was disintegrating? Did I also look moldy??? (For context, this was between hospitals, during a relative lull in the symptoms.)

The next time Lana Del Rey impacted my life was when I was first began having time travel dreams. 

In my experience, you can’t be delusional or hallucinate in your dreams. In fact, at least for me, the physical brain injury that can happen in prolonged, florid, and initially treatment-resistant psychosis, meant that I did not dream at all. I didn’t dream in the hospital, nor in recovery, nor when I was first starting to read again. 

But, I most definitely dreamt between it all, and afterward. And those dreams involved timetravel. A lot of timetravel. Romantic, terrifying, important, dramatic, and also very esoteric psychedelic-rock timetravel. But also, like, truly world-saving timetravel. Don’t ask.

Until then, though, I slept in a shade of dark grey. The lumpy nothingness of sleep in the psych ward in psychosis was somehow heavier than anything else. So, in the time of my dreams returning, I began to over-associate with the lyrics of her album. Specifically, the titular song, Born to Die.

I knew that my future husband, my partner, the man with whom I could reconcile the ills of the world, was perhaps already dead. Or that he had never lived yet, or that, “Every time I close my eyes, it’s like a dark paradise. Nothing compares to you. I’m scared that you, won’t be waiting on the other side.”

I screamed, cried, went wild-eyed thinking about him, about this made up man. I knew that Lana knew. Sometimes I thought she was me, I was her, or that we were both telepathic. 

Sometimes I thought that she merely was the messenger, delivering crucial truths from god, the gods, or perhaps the devil himself.

When Lana next spoke to my malady-minded yet societally-privileged soul was upon the release of Blue Jeans, in 2012. I was recovering from the first 9 weeks of locked unit hospitalization and closer to 6 months in and out of symptoms, with another year spent in residential psych treatment. 

But please, please understand — my background of relative financial privilege, which allowed me to receive so much treatment, plus my dogged and unquenchable desire to survive and thrive, comprise a set of blessings that now allow me to live and write, currently-able-minded, over a decade later. And to hear music. To still hear music. To even so far as remember hearing music, and it’s meaning, at that time in my earlier life.

I was slowly and dully recovering, staying with my dad at an apartment after their divorce. The divorce was completely unrelated, but began a few months prior to my first psychotic break, arrest, and then 52/50 involuntary hospital holds. 

It was, all in all, a probably almost-unbearable-situation for my precious little brother, who was 17 years old when the various crises started. He was set to live alone with my parents (as they fell away, in starts and fits, with me, insane or recovering) throughout his senior year of high school.

Lana couldn’t solve my younger brother’s trauma, but she definitely could sing me into a whole fervor while I sat, waiting to become more and more sane. Shoutout Zyprexa, Abilify, Lithium, Latuda, Geodon, Risperidone, Seroquel, et al.

At that point, the best guess of the doctors was schizoaffective disorder, but that was only after the could get me back from catatonia. (In my case, psychotic catatonia showed up as a coma-like state, for about 48 hours, much of which I was totally alert but couldn’t speak, move, or open my eyes. They felt glued shut.)

This isn’t a complaint. I’m absolutely and totally glad to be alive. I’m obsessed with the idea of redemption, of becoming helpful in society instead of having simply taken up a bed at the ward.

Luckily [was it luck? or the other side of injustice? oppression that benefited me indirectly as the categorical oppressor? was it randomly assigned? was it a template for what every human being should have the structural ability to access, unequivocally and irrevocably, as needed?] I had the ability to get help paying my medical bills. 

I was — in some twist of contemporary, problematic, but also life-saving fate — able to leave the hospitals debt free, and with the further possibility of more medical treatment.

I would put in my headphones, still corded, and chant her music like hymns — like invocations. Like whispers from Aphrodite as I learned how to be understood. I would cry with her, laugh with her, sing her to the moon, new and full. I would puke with her, starve with her, eat with her, get sick with her. I would smoke weed with her. Quite weed with her. Go back on my meds with her. Yell in the streets for, with, and from her. Lana, for better or worse, carried me on the back of her melodies and lyrics, for the years between the hospitals. 

Just over one year later, I turned 21 in the psych ward. Back again. Again, more meds, again, raving lunatic. Again, afraid to die, born to live, and re-learning how to survive.

There was no music in the psych ward at that time, which is fine. When we watched The Hunger Games, I thought we were being prepared by the Alta Bates medical staff to be sacrificial humans, for fights to the death against other hospitals’ patients, in the wide streets of Berkeley, California. The apocalypse was nigh. 

Lana did not need to be connected to that part of the journey, for anyone’s sake. 

One movie was already too much input, let alone the idea of accessing albums worth of melodramatic lyricism and mild camp aesthetics from the United States 2012 Sad Girl delegate.

I am sane now. I still sometimes listen to her. She became problematic (or, already was, but we found out,) then received societal redemption, released more albums, collaborated with The Weeknd on Stargirl, rewrote her family backstory, had a totally resurgence with the youth, happened on TikTok, got thick (which is the healthiest possible thing to happen for little girl’s body image in the history of Americana Pop). 

She became an obvious adult, turned 36 during the pandemic, released weirder and more fun albums, embraced an updated 2020s sound and samples, added a Tommy Genesis collab, and, most recently, got engaged to a somewhat normal-seeming music producer — and played at San Francisco’s Outside Lands 2023, with iconic girls putting iconic flowers in her hair, while sitting in an antique makeup chair in front of a massive vanity mirror on the Lands End stage. 

Full circle, full quirky, and full-figured. Lana was redeemed as I was. Lana is a grown adult like I am. Lana is fun, successful, and appreciated by the youth demographic of consumers, as I shall be too one day (loll). A template of theatrical womanhood. And possibly performative adulthood. For now.

So, ultimately, I’m not so sad-girl that I followed Lana this far. I am glad to be human, glad to be alive, glad to have survived, and now, extremely happy to be an adult in my early 30s, that can think. 

Growing up Lana has felt complicated, but so has life. 

Growing up in itself, overall, is one of the greatest blessings beyond my wildest imaginations, traumas, or fears. Getting older is the all-time greatest gift that I never knew I would receive. And, quite frankly, I am glad that Lana could join me along the way.

So yeah. Now, my brain works just fine. That is the most magical blessing of all — no matter the soundtrack behind it.

_

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