One of many reasons I find the “immortality is a curse, not a blessing” philosophy silly is the length of time required to overcome PTSD. Another is the difficulty with which my neuro-atypical brain acquires formalized education and/or technical topics like music theory.

Repeat exposure is vital in both cases: Repeat exposure in different contexts, during different moods, from different sources, results in different ways of processing the incoming information. What I missed the first 9 times is incidentally captured on the 10th: suddenly something fits into place. Without the prior 9 exposures, I wouldn’t have been equipped to find success on the 10th.

With trauma, the brain and body need many experiential examples to learn that “these stimuli are not indicative of guaranteed harm”.

With technical topics, it’s like a collection of vague-but-associated notions finally snaps onto a coherent framework that promotes cognition of the whole.

Throughout childhood, there were areas of interest that, when allowed to be explored causally, slowly developed into specialization. When confronted by formalized instruction, these topics would transform into frustration & resentment, as the instructors presumed uniform function in all students.

My late teens and early 20s were an era of ruining intrinsic interests by requiring them to become marketable through someone else’s rigid concepts of how to learn, what to learn, offering little to no explanation for anything; pushing rote memorization as the route to monetization.

It near completely walled-up my interests behind PTSD-adjacent emotional responses to topics with which I’d tried to go somewhere “professional”. Instead of experiencing joy in exploration & play, I experienced the resentment & disappointment of remembering the outcome of efforts to formalize them.

In later years, through erratic compulsion (psych drugs & abuse), or [post-drugs] through force of will (“I WILL sit down and make SOMETHING!”), I slowly grew my abilities, but at a much slower rate of gain than when it had been fueled by intrinsic motivation and joy of discovery.

My rate of development was a snail’s pace anymore. Sometimes I’d push myself to read or work through some formal documentation or process in a way I hadn’t been offered before (usually hands-on, via software tools & video tutorials). Something would snap into that grid of “everything I know so far”.

Similarly, formal therapy went nowhere. It was retelling toxic experiences to a person offering no feedback, validation, or mechanism of action to change things, re-traumatizing myself in the process by telling & describing. Occasionally pushing myself to live life did much more to subdue triggers.

Looking at my progress in moments where I notice “I’m okay with this, this time” has been leaps & bounds more valuable than mining the toxic events for validation & answers I’d never receive. Part of this is simply allowing the memories of toxic experiences to fade, instead of keeping them fresh.

Taking breaks between experiential trials and expenses of mental effort is a major factor in my brain turning a cluttered pile of vaguely familiar parts into proper understandings. It doesn’t seem to be a process I can force. Forcing it via a one-size-&-schedule-for-all prescription is antithetical to development.

That doesn’t mean formal education or associated materials are without value. It means that I need a wide range of contexts and angles of approach that cannot be scheduled. I can learn & develop, but I cannot fulfill the prescriptive demands of higher education. I’m not alone in this by far, but we are a minority, so these systems persist.

Had I not been given PTSD-adjacent roadblocks to development in various areas, BY systems of formalized education (and employment, AND family), I’d have developed faster on my own than I ultimately did. The harms of prescriptive demands poisoned my own processes. The farther I get in time from those experiences, the more functional I am.

It takes half a life to realize these things. I knew most educational systems were ill-suited for me by way of experiencing them for 12 years. Being forced back into them for higher education was an effort to appease and compromise with parents for their selective aid in improving my circumstances. Over time, I learned this was a compromise too far, but the damage was done. I had the emotional understanding of it up front, but I suppressed it to be “reasonable” and “responsible”, to play along with what was presented as my only options. The full realization of the harm done came late.

Here I am, with all the damage done by prescriptive education & societal expectations, plus the damages of abusive bosses & employers (and malicious spectators, once I took to blogging). Mid-life crisis is taking hold as I realize I’m an above-average person in scope, but a mediocre person in any area of specialization: everyone in “my class” moved on while I languished.

I languished in a purgatory of PTSD responses and meager efforts expended within the context of my subsistence living: I lacked access to resources (or social connection to peers) due to being driven into disability status and survival-mode (in which I remain today).

Every now and then, I re-expose myself to a concept I couldn’t grasp previously, finding myself able to grasp it now. No magic tricks involved; just an outcome of repeat exposure, breaks, and unconscious bits of comprehension being catalyzed into clicking into place for a coherent understanding.

My neurological deficits still exist. They will never go away. They’re getting worse with age.

Yet, I can see that time & repeat exposure have been far better educators & therapists than any prescriptive and time-dependent procedure (these had occasional value in disconnected chunks).

While I struggle to identify myself as a middle-aged adult (self image is still lodged in a post-high school era), I’m aware of many ways in which I have greatly developed, intellectually, since the formative years of my life. This implies I could continue to improve over more time [and opportunity]…

…but there’s a fundamental limit to this: Mortality.

Aging & mortality are quite offensive to me in this context. I want MORE from my life than has been available to me within the parameters of shitty cultural/socioeconomic constraints and neurological & familial deficits I was born into.

I want more time to improve my thinking, my skills, my knowledge. I want the opportunity to become a non-disabled person with value to my society enough that it will compensate/reward me for work.

That won’t happen in the time I have left. The system that broke me in the first place is now far worse than it was.

“Why would you want to suffer this indefinitely?” the immortality-is-a-curse people will ask.

“I want more time, because time is opportunity”, I reply. At this point, the only thing that could possibly work in my favor is more time. A few more lifetimes-worth.

Crumbling systems & toxic culture won’t improve within my lifespan enough to allow me to mount a new effort at membership in society as a worker. I want time to wait it out; to improve myself enough to even figure out what my function is; what my value is. Today I’m told it is “nothing”.

I want the time that’s required (by the constraints of PTSD and the neurology I was born with) to develop myself to something akin to the level that people without those constraints were able to develop in their teens & 20s. I want my fair fucking shot at self-realization and societal membership, like anyone else.

Why do I hate bigotry? Why do I want us supporting fights against it, seeking equanimity?

I might not know what every other vulnerable person’s constraints are from the inside, but I absolutely appreciate/respect and sympathize with the FACT of those constraints. I want us all to have a fair chance.

Within the current constraints… in context to how our culture & systems are structured to serve the wealthy & privileged, and suppress all people who fall outside those parameters… I fall back on one very emotional and impossible demand:

“I want more life, fucker!”

PS: this was me expressing ongoing thoughts about life realizations, COMPULSIVELY, as an interruption of trying to practice music theory concepts with Logic’s Arpeggiator MIDI plugin, after reading some micro-articles on chords & modes at Music Radar. It’s a PTSD-adjacent response to learning 🫣

Important context missing above: Somewhere between 1-2 DECADES of my life (where I should’ve been developing, progressing in my self-actualization) were wasted by a confluence of trauma, abuse (via other people’s pathologies, including intentional malice from some), and “mental health” inflicted “help”. Once again, prescription did harm, in opposition to self-actualization.

So I need at least that amount of time extra to even attempt to recover from damage done by interference (including some intentional acts of malice). Unfortunately, PTSD requires far more time to heal than it takes to develop, and I don’t have a way to get 1-2 decades of “bonus” life as reparation.

[The above is an expansion of a thread I posted on BlueSky. It is not meant to be nihilistic negativity. There are notes of self-acknowledgement here that should be seen as positive and optimistic, but they are constrained by circumstance. If you identify with anything here, please also try to take note of the potential positives for yourself as well.]