Defective Detective

#4 LAB: Send Out Ripples

thecakelin Season 1 Episode 4

How do we live in reality right now?

What are our reasons for the things we do? How do we align our actions with our values? How do we should up as our authentic selves? How do we practice sustainable activism? How do we form community? How do we work with internal and external chaos and uncertainty? How do we survive late stage capitalism?

These questions all have a larger impact for disabled, neurodivergent, immunocompromised, and chronically ill people like me. The disability community includes members from all other oppressed groups. Millions of people with Long Covid have now joined us. Covid is a mass disabling event. Climate crisis, pandemics, fascism, and eugenics are intensifying.

Public health and most of the people we love have left us behind.  I am full of grief, rage, and despair. What does the future hold for us?

Embodiment is the opposite of oppression. We can uproot our conditioned strengths and limitations. We can trust our bodies to be a compass towards our true and dynamic strengths and limitations. Even if that body has pain, trauma, illness. Through increased connection to our bodies and true selves, we can regulate our emotions and energy better. We can find ways around the limits of language, through creative expression and safe, consensual touch. We can seek the clean pain of full awareness of ourselves and reality.

We can use our emotions, attention, and social connections for our benefit instead of being exploited through them. We can let ourselves be messy and confused and still.. we can act.  Creativity and rest are resistance. We can practice accountability to fight the perfectionism of white supremacy. There's no real comfort in denial, avoidance, and apathy.. it's only dirty pain.

Our actions are a vote for the world we want to exist in. Some of us are waiting to find out if we will exist in that world at all.

🎨♿ Special Interest Leaves - a chance to contribute your interests to disabled art!

📚 Books, Books, Baby

Sacred Contracts
Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
How Emotions Are Made
The Wheel of Consent: the Art of Giving and Receiving
Four Thousand Weeks
The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

🔦 Other Resources

CAT-Q test for autism masking and social camouflage
Insight Timer - app for meditations (search Renee Sills or Yoga Nidra)
Psychedelic integration guide and tattoo artist Bear Cunningham

[00:00] Upbeat electronic music intro, fades to voice

[00:10] Immunocompromised Solitude

Hey, it's Cake [laughs]. I'm sitting here wearing a banana shirt, I got a wrist brace on because I have a ganglion cyst. My underwear are a little bit too small for my ass. But I bought a six pack of these organic cotton undies and just need to wear ‘em! [laughs] It's a Saturday night. I can hear some music and drumming across the street from my house, because it's some sort of outdoor concert thing is what I will say. I don't have any plans with people. Just like I don't have plans with people most Saturday nights, because COVID rates are too high and I'm immunocompromised. And I don't want to participate in spreading infectious disease. Which I guess at this point in society makes me an outcast. Things are rough right now. I am learning in a lot of ways to just embrace solitude at a level that I've never done in my life before. And I think in a lot of ways, it's really good for me. And I'm spending a ton of time outdoors with Pepper. And a lot of time on my projects. I also spend way too much time on Twitter and Tiktok. 


[01:26] Judgment, Archetypes and Betrayal

Today I was just engaging with people on Twitter that don't believe that masks do anything [laughs]. I was like “I'm a scientist, I'm determined, I'm going to send you all the research articles.” Once people have made their mind up, how much am I going to really judge them when I've done the same thing? Do I think that my perspective on the matter of whether or not masks work is more accurate and the better long term decision, the better decision for society? Yeah. That's exactly why I think that I'm right. I mean, all of our worst traits are also our best traits, right? Mine would probably be that I'm judgmental. Recently, I did some archetypes work from this book called Sacred Contracts. Archetypes are a character that is repeated often, like a magician or tons of different characters that show up in stories. And the reason why that's so important is because we mostly learn from stories. We have all of these ideas about the ways that people show up and the roles that they play and what that means for the people that are around us. When you meet a person that either you intensely like or you intensely dislike, but you're drawn to.. something's going on there. The book calls that a sacred contract with that person. One thing that I really liked about another one of this author's books, is that she talks about betrayal as this archetypal experience that you have to have in order to get to a deeper sense of order within yourself. You need to have the external world disappoint you so that you will find something within yourself that you've never had. If I were going to say one thing to the universe right now, it would be.. can we, can I, can I, get a little bit less of that? [laughs] I don't know if I can do more of it at this point. I'm just so disappointed in other people and myself a lot of the time. I have more self-trust. I have now had a business for two and a half years. I still really don't know what I am doing. I still struggle every day to force myself to work on the things that I know will actually make me money so that I could survive under capitalism and continue to do my creative work. It's just frustrating. My ass was starting to hurt. So I had to shift positions right as I was talking about how difficult things are [laughs]. 


[03:52] These Times

How do I explain this? Everything is intensifying around us with this really high level of uncertainty. I'm an older millennial, I think. I'm 34. I was in undergrad when the financial crisis happened. We've had a lot of things happen in our lifetime. The pandemic has definitely been.. Like Trump's election and then the pandemic. It's a lot. It's a lot. [laughs] What makes me optimistic right now, is that a lot of people hate capitalism. I'm completely radicalized at this point. If we could burn capitalism to the ground, sign me up. It's just.. it doesn't work. Capitalism will always intensify wealth and resources in the hands of very few people. And then they will rationalize that, as if somehow capitalists having all of this money.. the very super wealthy people.. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, these D bags. If they have all of the money, then they're going to do innovative things and it's just not true. They're not going to solve the problems that we have. And that's exactly why our species is at this point. Climate crisis is intensifying.


[05:19] Embodiment and Uncertainty

I got a burp stuck. One of the things that happens with Ehler’s Danlos is I like, have to burp myself sometimes. It's really embarrassing and I'm not a fan of it. It's either Ehler's Danlos or it's all of these different meds that I've taken in my life. I don't know. It’s editing Cake swooping in to say.. This could be anxiety. I saw on Instagram today that anxious people swallow more air. Instagram has a high journal impact factor right? [laughs] I make terrible science jokes. Anyways, don’t tell Covid pretenders that I’m anxious because they’ll accuse me of “living in fear”, womp womp. Embodiment is something that I’m going to talk about a lot. And I can feel within my body right now, this resistance to wanting to look at this fully and live fully in reality. And say “This is how fucked up things are.” Not that everything is bad or that things are worse than humanity's ever been through before. I don't know any of that shit because I haven't been alive [laughs] the whole time that humanity's been around. Things are pretty bad. The problem is not really that things are bad. It's that things are so uncertain and unstable, that we really don't know what's going to happen. And when you don't know what's going to happen, you can't make choices for your own life. This is causing me a lot of friction and issues. Because I will be thinking about how much I want to make this wild website that [sighs out] is to sell my art and explains the shift in what my business is, in a way that still ties into the same thing that I'm doing. 


[07:07] What I Thought I'd Do By Now

The name of my business is Nudges, IO. My original plan, which I was working on in 2020.. so many things have gone wrong in the past couple of years. I would not recommend starting a business in February of 2020 being unaware that the pandemic is about to hit. Umm [laughs]. I don't know, I've been working towards something for many years before that. Trying to figure out how to be an entrepreneur, trying to figure out what this idea was. Maybe I'm this person who had a failure to launch.. It takes the time it takes. It takes the time it takes. I just don't really know [laughs]. So I do feel embarrassment and shame in my body when I go to talk about everything that I thought that I would do that I haven't done. Also a very human experience, right? “Oh, these are all the things that I thought I would do that I haven't done”. I couldn't have predicted any of the things that have happened. I didn't think Trump was gonna win. I don't think all these things would have happened in my life since then. I didn't see the pandemic coming. I know that there are people out in the world who did. It wasn't most of us [laughs]. And that's usually how trauma feels. Trauma usually feels like you're chugging along and you've built this path in your brain. And then something jumps out and is like “No, fuck this, you're not going to do it. This is not going to happen for you.” And then you have to make this decision. Do I keep pushing for this? Or do I give up? I have to tell you, I don't know. I quit my PhD and I don't regret it even though I loved the shit out of science because it was slowly killing me. And maybe quickly killing me at times. I quit two different startup jobs. I was on short term and long term disability. I'm estranged from my parents. And I've lost most of my close friendships since the pandemic began. Due to different issues that were mostly all related to the pandemic. Sometimes I just have this thought like, I'm a loser. I'm sitting here on a Saturday night, and I have nothing to do, no one to be around.. Because I don't want to get an infectious disease [laughs]. 


[09:24] Reality, Illusion of Control, and Surrender

That's just not reality. But it's what my brain wants to tell me. Because thinking that it's my fault is so much easier than recognizing that most humans either don't believe science enough or don't care about other people enough to just do risk mitigations. So the most vulnerable people like me, who are immunocompromised, have to give up fucking everything. And I'm so tired of that. And I'm not saying that I have it worse out of anyone in this country or on this planet. I don't think that. I'm extremely grateful for saving money last year so that I barely made any money this year and could just try to survive for this third year of the pandemic [laughs]. I know just how lucky I am. That's exactly what I'm trying to say. It's this concept of surrender. Are you going to keep pushing yourself and pushing everything and just forcing things to make them happen? Or are you going to try to develop a sense of ease? And go along with the things that you notice around you and opportunities as they pop up? Most of that we don't have control over. Humans just have this illusion of control, this cognitive bias. If you lose that illusion of control, where you think that you can influence your environment, and you think that you have control over the events that are going to happen.. is basically depression. You lose your motivation, because you don't think that you can bring things to life around you. I had this whole conversation with my EMDR therapist earlier this week. Another thing that I feel really lucky about is being in EMDR for a little over a year and being really close to the end of it, because I desperately needed it [laughs]. And a lot of people don't get access to therapy. The way that I have, the way that white women do. I identify as nonbinary and a white woman, because I don't think that race and gender can be separated. So yeah, I am a they/them. But I'm still a white woman, because that is the box that the world put me in. And that comes with bad things and good things. 


[11:44] Our Parts and Perceptions and Predictions

The problem is that we've all been put in these little boxes that we’re expected to fulfill. And it cuts off chunks of ourselves or it cuts us up into parts. And we have to decide “What part of myself am I going to be today?” Which then, every time you try to make a decision, you gotta get this consensus from your parts. You gotta get them all together and be like, “what are we going to do next?” And some of those parts are going to be like, “Well, I don't know if this is anxiety or attraction that we're having to this person.” I was in a super unhealthy relationship in 2020. I held on to it way too long, because I didn't want to be alone during a pandemic. Would never make that choice again [laughs]. It's exactly the same in a relationship as it is in the world where you don't want to admit what's happening. So you can sort of live in a fantasy version of things. Everything is a fantasy version of things, because our senses are this small slice of our perception of the world. We build these perceptive models in order to make predictions about what's going to happen. It's not so that we have a perfect memory of everything that has happened in our life. It's just so that we can build predictions. When those predictions aren't what we expect, we adjust them. We update our predictive models to meet the outcomes that we've seen. One of the problems with that is you can overfit them. So you can think, “Wow, this didn't turn out the way that I thought it was going to.” You could write an article. And you could put the article out on the internet and no one would read it. Maybe no one is interested in this. Maybe I'm a bad writer. There's all these different conclusions that you can come up with from one event, but you don't really know if that's the reason.


[13:43] Why Do We Do Things

We don't really know what the reasons are. I was reading this book called Alchemy. I'll try to remember what the.. the guy's name is Stuart [Rory Sutherland]. The author, maybe? I don't know. I don't know. I'm sorry. I read a lot of fucking books. He brings up this science theory, I guess is probably the best way to put it, where it's possible the only reason that we come up with reasons about why we decided to do something is to convince other people. And he tells this very specific example, which is of a rabbit running. And if the rabbit was trying to decide where they were going. How they were going to zigzag as they were running. They would actually be easier to catch as prey than if they have this very random run. So it was just explaining that then, after you’re done, you'll think that you were running in a certain direction in order to evade it. But really you were just acting on instinct. I found the quote. It’s from the book Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense, by Rory Sutherland. Which is not anywhere close to Stuart [laughs].

A fascinating theory, first proposed by the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers and later supported by the evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban, explains that we do not have full access to the reasons behind our decision-making because, in evolutionary terms, we are better off not knowing; we have evolved to deceive ourselves, in order that we are better at deceiving others. Just as there are words that are best left unspoken, so there are feelings that are best left unthought. The theory is that if all our unconscious motivations were to impinge on our consciousness, subtle cues in our behaviour might reveal our true motivation, which would limit our social and reproductive prospects. Robert Trivers gives an extraordinary example of a case where an animal having conscious access to its own actions may be damaging to its evolutionary fitness. When a hare is being chased, it zigzags in a random pattern in an attempt to shake off the pursuer. This technique will be more reliable if it is genuinely random and not conscious, as it is better for the hare to have no foreknowledge of where it is going to jump next: if it knew where it was going to jump next, its posture might reveal clues to its pursuer. Over time, dogs would learn to anticipate these cues – with fatal consequences. Those hares with more self-awareness would tend to die out, so most modern hares are probably descended from those that had less self-knowledge. In the same way, humans may be descended from ancestors who were better at the concealment of their true motives. It is not enough to conceal them from others – to be really convincing, you also have to conceal them from yourself.

End quote. I have also seen some research in this area about lying. Where the most convincing liars are people who are somewhat lying to themselves at the same time. 


[16:54] Emotional Range, Regulation, and Toxic Positivity 

When we perceive things at our highest level of consciousness, it takes a lot of energy. Our brains use a lot of energy, relative to our body size compared to other animals. We have to program ourselves with all of these unconscious instinctive habits and reactions. Which are very tuned in to our attentional control and our emotional regulation. One of the things that I hate most about [sigh] ADHD stuff.. I have ADHD.. is that it will focus on these external life hacks. All these systems that you could do to trick your brain into doing shit. It just takes a very deterministic view of how your brain functions as though your brain can never change as though neuroplasticity is not a thing. But trauma is a huge part of ADHD. Trauma is a huge part of any kind of neurodivergence. As my emotional regulation has improved, my ADHD symptoms have improved. That could also be because of 100 other things. I wish that we wouldn't ignore it because it's so uncomfortable to live fully in your body and actually process your feelings. Like earlier when I was trying to talk about how dire the world is. Then I brought up the relationship example.. You don't want to feel that way, who wants to feel that way? We all want to feel pleasant and content and society has conditioned us to, especially as Americans, to have this toxic positivity. We're always happy or at least calm. That's not serving us. Emotional range, especially being comfortable with all the different negative emotions, negative in quotation marks, all the different uncomfortable emotions that we push away. Being really familiar with those is an advantage to us because those emotions are meaningful data about the choices that we are making and the things that we really want. We just ignore it. Or at least I have. For the majority of my life, I would either be in a dissociated state or I would be in a state of emotional crisis. And I would just oscillate between those two as if that [laughs] was healthy functioning. And now, if you know polyvagal theory, which is basically different states that your nervous system could be in, I'm in an emotionally regulated state most of the time despite the fact that we're now living through one or two pandemics. 


[19:43] Pandemic Boundaries and Lost Friendships

I don't know if monkey pox even is a pandemic because I can barely handle it with the COVID changes and I still have a hangover from the CDC guidelines a few days ago. Not an actual hangover because I haven't had a drink in six months, but y’know, the kind of emotional hangover when you're like, "Yeah, people really don't care about whether or not I survive." [soft laugh] Even if someone were to say “It's not true, it's not that people want you to die, we just want to not wear masks and go do whatever the fuck we want to do.” Okay, if you're burning down all the food that I needed to eat and you just destroyed it all. Then I wasn't gonna have anything to eat and then I was gonna die. And you were okay with doing that, I would still say you don't care about me [laughs]. One of my friends, for my birthday in May, we were going to have an outdoor lunch. And I hadn't seen him in eight months or something since his birthday. Which was a party that I didn't expect as many people to be at as there were. I was kind of upset about it afterwards, because I should have left when I got there and saw how many people were there. And I didn't leave. I didn't go out to the bars, when people wanted me to go to the bars. Cause obviously I wasn't gonna do that. Actually seeing in front of me a party and people that I could be around where I wouldn't have to be alone and making some sort of really difficult decision to go home, I chose to go into the party. This was back in November. So before Omicron. [sighs] It's been a really, really difficult couple of years, hasn't it? [Laughs] I set boundaries with people. I don't want to hear about all the social stuff that you were doing.. a long time ago, maybe back in December or November, even before Omicron. If you're traveling, if you're doing things in groups of people, don't tell me about it. I can't handle it. I had some really rough times in December and then things chilled out a bit. He didn't volunteer any of this information about what his risk level was going to be when I wanted to see him and maybe we both had this unspoken expectation that I was probably going to cancel because I didn't trust him. This is someone that I loved, that I still love, even though they're not in my life, very deeply. And are you wearing a mask anywhere? Are you raw dogging COVID? And he was like, “Yep, I have to admit it. I'm not masking anymore. I'm raw doggin COVID.” You were just gonna not tell me that? Not offer to take a test? Not offer to wear a mask for a week before you saw me? Literally anything that you could offer to keep me safe? No. Okay, well. 


[22:22] Love Requires Safety

In response, he was saying how much he loved me. This isn't love. Love is an action. Love is a commitment, a choice that you continually make to have shared safety and mutual investment. Love is not harming someone, not volunteering that information. I can love someone that I don't feel safe around or that doesn't value my safety. But I can't have a relationship with someone that I don't have safety with. There's no point.


[22:57] Thanks For Being Here

I knew this was gonna get ranty when I started, but I wasn't really sure where I was gonna go because I'm not following a script. Nor am I following an outline. So welcome to my chaos gremlin life. Does it really matter? I'm recording a podcast. I'm doing it. Maybe my eighth one. This one's getting posted. I don't even care. I don't care how bad it is. I don't care how rambling it is. I don't care how many different topics I bring up that seem unrelated to other people. I'm just going to continue to talk about all these things I'm thinking and have learned and where I think it's all going. It's a Saturday night and it's what I can do. So wherever you are, if you're listening to this hanging out with me, thank you. Because it makes me feel less alone to know that I can at least put my voice out there into the world, even if I can't exist in it. 


[23:51] Music

[24:02] Categorizing Emotions

So as soon as I said that, I could feel the tissue around my eyes was starting to feel different in the way that's like “are we gonna be generating tears soon buddies [laughs], like what are we doing?" There's these subtle changes in your body that happen when you feel emotions. I historically, usually, often couldn't feel emotions at a lower level. I don't know if it's because I'm autistic. I don't know if it's because of trauma. I don't fucking know. It could be chronic pain related. Who really knows. One of the books that I really love is How Emotions Are Made. It talks about chronic pain and emotions. All these things are just a set of sensations in your body. When something happens to you, you'll have these internal perceptions, this set of internal sensations that will give you a state that you are in. It could be hunger, it could be pain, it could be you're tired, it could be you're sad. It could be you're angry. You could be anxious. It’s just a word that you learned that matches what's happening in your body. It's all framed around language and culture and growing up. The way that we are educated by our families. So little boys learn anger more, little girls learn sadness more. It's entirely possible that it could be similar sensations in our body and we've just categorized them wrong. One thing that can happen to people who grew up in chaotic homes or with abuse, is that you can categorize anxiety as being attracted to someone. Which can then cause you to get into relationships with other people who will end up harming you. You're re-enacting your original trauma. And I'm done with that shit. I'm done with so much shit. 


[26:06] Autistic Masking in STEM and Art

I had a dream. Oh, yeah, this is where we're going. I can't stop now [laughs loudly]. I had a dream. I was in some sort of art contest. An art business contest. I was sitting there looking at this giant scoreboard. It was a mile high because, y’know, dreamworld. I had made all these different art pieces and the only thing that was up on this scoreboard was my math skills or something I had done with math. I remember just being really upset and looking everywhere for my art. The other night, I was sitting in front of my art. I make this light up art and I'm obsessed with it. Doesn't even really feel like I made it because I love it so much [laughs]. And I've never felt like that. I felt like that about my research. I don't feel very proud of most of my tech work and it burns me out. I feel like other people treat me like a robot or like an encyclopedia.. You know, a little autistic bot that they can just put a bunch of data and code in front of and then get some answers out of. 


[27:12] Autistic Burnout

It's upsetting because I desperately want to [laughs] unmask at this point. I need to, it's killing me. It's causing chronic stress. I don't know if it's from the pandemic, I don't know if it's from moving into a different apartment, whatever, my infections stopped. I haven't been on antibiotics for, yeah, almost two years. Just huge for me. I've had chronic infections, since I don't know, it was like two or three years old, I can't even remember because it's the earliest thing that I can remember, is having infections all the time. My body is stable and healthy. And I am not chronically stressed minus the isolation and the pandemic. So maybe if the pandemic actually ended and I could still be this person and exist in the world. Maybe part of the reason why I am less stressed is because I'm not around people and I don't have to mask. I took this CAT-Q score for autism. It told me that I am extremely high social masking and camouflage. And what's the section of autistic people that are most likely to experience burnout? It's autistic females who have high social and language skills that are able to mask. That's what I've been realizing is crumbling in me, is my language abilities. I won't be able to check certain websites. I can't force myself to go into the website and look at if people have commented or left me notifications. I can't force myself to reply to certain people. I think my most universal feelings about people is this sort of low level stress that I can't tell what it is that they want or expect out of me. So I am just waiting for me to not do whatever it is that they want. Then it's a disappointment to them and then they'll probably harm me. Disclosing that you're autistic to other people, I found out last year, also doesn't help. So I have now been through four autistic burnouts. I didn't even know that three of them were related to having autism. And they've all been different, which is mind blowing, because I would think that they would have a similar feel. They say that it can take you years to heal from burnout and even longer if it's autistic burnout. So I've only been not on a contract or working for other people since last October. [laughs] Coming up on a year here without making very much money. What am I going to do? I can't not work for another three years or something [laughs]. I'm trying to figure that out. I'm hoping that it's gonna be selling my art but I'm struggling to want to work on a website to sell my art. I've been struggling to do it for months, just like I struggle to work on this podcast. And I don't know if it's because these are things that I could give up on. Or if I'm just really burned out from several years of living through a pandemic that had a lot of personal trauma in it for me. I, I, I don't know. 


[30:18] Building an Inner Compass

But that's why I'm putting all this energy into EMDR and figuring out what is going on inside myself so I can develop, continue to develop an inner compass that will point me in some sort of direction, you know. And it's working. I have a way higher level of discernment about other people. I think I'm more self-aware. I think I have more space to work within where other people's reactions to me don't trigger or bother me. I think I'm better at regulating. Earlier when I was talking about the feeling of my face, where I thought, “wow, because I said this, I can't even remember what the thing is that I said now, but I can remember the emotion”. Is this going to be a moment that I'm going to cry? Then I noticed it inside myself and I was like, No. And sometimes.. Had to get a little water, a little H2O.  Sometimes that feeling is something that you need to come out. But in that moment, I was like, ”I'm recording a podcast and I'm not gonna dive into this emotion”. I'm not really sure how often I'm doing this [laughs]. 


[31:30] Pauses to Check in With Your Body

I'm trying to build pauses into my day. I’ll often just put my hand on my heart and I'll just think what am I perceiving right now in my body? How am I reacting to the world around me? And what does that mean? Because I truly, truly believe that embodiment, collective healing, and figuring out what it is that is unique about each of us. What it is that we're called to do while we're on this planet. Whether or not that's a paid job, whether or not that's an interest, whether or not that's relationships. We're going to need all sorts of kinds of people. 


[32:11] Strengths and Limitations Are Connection 

My limitations are your strengths, your limitations can be my strengths. My limitations build space for the strengths of others. We evolved to be these social creatures who have vastly different abilities and skills and perspectives and sleep schedules. Then we just decided, let's make everybody work a nine to five or go to school from eight to three, including the fact that teenagers have a later sleep phase. It's not about optimizing us, it's about controlling us. It's about how much can they force us to mold ourselves into the little boxes that were put into. Stay in your little box of stereotypes and nuclear family, cis-hetero-patriarchy family, two kids, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Whatever the expectations are, for your identity, and they're different for each of us, depending on the big soup of identities that we've collected or inherited. We just get.. We just get chopped up. So I've been trying to put all these parts together and it's a big part of.. I’ma have to sit on my feet, I gotta do it. It's the bisexual way. Maybe I'll just leave all these chair sounds in here too. It's just so you guys know that one of the things that I struggle with most about podcasting is sitting fucking still for five minutes. My body hurts, it's like one of the first things that they taught me about EDS is that I need to change my body position all the time. I think a physical therapist even gave me a handout about it. That I needed to lay down [laughs] several times during the day. Cause my body doesn't hold itself together. That's not the box that our bodies are supposed to be in. And that's a big part of it. All of this stuff, it seeps. 


[34:04] Conditioned Limitations

It's not just affecting the experiences of our life outside of ourselves, it seeps into us. That's the thing that just drives me batty. I hate the feeling inside of myself and I've hated seeing it echoed in other people. Where there's something that they want, or there's something that they're wanting to do, something that they want to be, whatever it is that they're interested in. And they have just told themselves that they can't do it. Because there's too many obstacles or because they're not the type of person who "should" be doing it. And I find that heartbreaking. So there's a difference between our natural strengths and our natural limitations, and the conditioned ones. That's what my dream was about. See, I swear to God, even though I'm rambling, I'm weaving it all together [laughs]. When I was a kid, my dad would introduce me to other people as his little math genius. And that's what I was meant to be. I was meant to excel at math and science. I didn't always do that. I did end up becoming a computational biochemist, even though I did not finish my PhD. In order to do those things, I had to shut down a whole other side of myself that was an artist. I drew all the time as a kid and I was always obsessed with all these patterns around me. And that is part of my spatial 3D reasoning and my hyper connection of all these different disciplines and special interests. And it's something different. It's something that's just visual.


[35:41] Visualizations, Internal Mess, and the Limits of Language

So I do Yoga Nidra tapes, different kinds of somatic guided meditations that help you figure out the subtle feelings in your body and map them to emotions. I do tapes about intuition. These are all on an app called Insight Timer. I'll put that in the show notes. I'll put that in the show notes. It's so fun just to be able to say that I'll put that in the show notes. I'm a podcast host [laughs] I'm a podcast host and I don't talk about being an alpha male. Most of the time. Now I did actually lose my train of thought because I started thinking about me with a beard. God damn you, TikTok. One of these tapes that I'm talking about.. tapes, audio recordings. Do we still say tapes in 2022? Is that like an old school term? Recordings is better? I don't know. When I listen to these things [laughs]. One time I was in this white room and I was.. you try to go into your psyche into like a lower level of consciousness and see what the fuck is going on in there. And it's messy. There's a lot of shit just happening, you know. I think that's one of the most authentic things about being in relationship to other people, is when you can see each other's mess. You're just like, “yeah, you're in a process of becoming, I'm in a process of becoming, we can witness each other's pain and joy and suffering and confusion in this time that we're on this same floating rock together, right?” That's a thing that I adore about being human and being connected to others. So I'm trying very hard to not pressure myself to not have any mess in order to do things in order to have a podcast. Which is like part of the whole working in public thing is you just put your shit out there before you're ready and so you get more feedback. And then things become better, because you're getting feedback. Or people ignore you and you don't get any feedback, because it's not interesting. You know? I don't really know. So back to this visualization [laughs], I was in this white space. And I was building a web of knowledge around me with all my special interests and just investigating it. And it wasn't so much that I was building it. It was more like I was discovering it. It was connected to this glow coming out of my chest. I truly know, I'm not even gonna say I believe, I know that this is true. I can't stop learning. It's just an inherent part of me. I'm so curious about everything. Curious about molecular structures. I'm curious about social structures. I'm curious about.. I thought that I never had any interests in financial systems. And then I started reading books about money recently. Once you learn about one thing, it gives you just like a little taste to something else that's connected to it. That's where the curiosity comes from. If you know nothing about a subject, you're usually not that curious about it. If you know everything about a subject, you're not that curious about it. And I'm the kind of person that I just coast at that low level of curiosity about fucking everything [laughs]. I love it. I love it. I love chasing it. I'm still figuring out how to pair curiosity with creativity. I think. Maybe more on that later. I don't know, I just had that thought and I shared it with you, because we're being messy in this here, y'all. This web that I was visualizing in this space, in my mind [laughs], this sounds so bizarre. And I'm not saying that this is a vision from God, this is coming from my psyche. It's a way to access parts of yourself that aren't limited by language. And language is really tied into our conditioning of how we perceive everything and communicate with each other. So to have this other way around everything that is purely visual, I think helps me with autistic burnout, and also helps get around trauma and conditioning that is more linked to language and narrative. I could see these people in my past who have harmed or hurt me come into this space and they couldn't see.. They couldn't see or delight in this beautiful, shining, multicolored fucking web thing that was just like gorgeous that you could explore in. People who have special interests, whatever kind of neurodivergence that you have, and yes that's much more than ADHD and autism. Or even people who are or would consider themselves neurotypical and just have really strongly held interests.. You know the feeling when you can share something with someone else and they are as excited as you.


[40:34] Sharing Special Interests and Authenticity

You feel like you're playing in this interest together. I guess. It might not even be that it's also their interest, but they can meet you there. I think there's such a difference between when a person can meet you there and a person who's not going to try, who's not going to see it. I’m not saying that that's necessarily a bad thing, it just means that you're not aligned, right? I could see these people who had come into my life in the past and they just wanted to cut a chunk off from this exploration that I was having. They would want me to do that because whatever it was, that I was supposed to cut off, was profitable or advantageous for them. So I saw myself starting to hide the glow in my chest, because it dimmed the web of things around me. And I don't want to do that again. I don't want to have to stop stimming or being who I am. Because other people think it's intense. I think it's vibrant. So I am going to build everything that I can into my body, into my environment, into the relationships that I have with other people, that lets me show up authentically as who I am. A big part of that is being fully connected and fully living within your body so that you know who you are. I think a lot of times we talk about this, “oh, you're trying to find yourself or find your passion" or whatever. And I'm not saying you have to have a passion. Your passion could be taking naps, I don't care. To just know what you want at any moment. We are so disconnected from our needs. 


[42:02] Music

[42:18] The Wheel of Consent and Touch

Another book that I really loved this year is called The Wheel of Consent: the Art of Giving and Receiving. It puts things into four different quadrants. One of them, and I'll explain this book more again in the future, or you can just look it up and learn about it. Yeah, you want that little rabbit hole? Yeah, you do [laughs]. So one of the quadrants is the Taking quadrant. It's when you are the one doing the action, but you're also the one receiving. Usually we think that if you're the one doing the action, you're always giving to another person, but you can be touching someone for the experience of touch in your body. That is a different thing. The book has these touch exercises that I'm hoping one day, I'll have someone in my life, or I'll ever be able to touch a person again [laughs]. I shouldn't say that, I have gotten some hugs. And I, I know there's other immunocompromised and disabled people who haven't hugged a person in years. I'm not completely deprived. I do miss the really heavy amount of affection that you tend to only get in romantic or sexual relationships. I hope that at some point, I can do these touch exercises with someone about Taking and about just becoming totally in tune with your body and the thing that it wants in that moment and the way that your sensations feel. I think that is just a huge clue what is pulling you towards something. 


[43:53] Accepting I'm an Artist

If you've ever had moments of creativity that feel easy or clear or brilliant or something. It feels so much more like they are coming through you than like you're consciously thinking about them. At least that's how it feels about my art. There is a part of me that hopes that I can take that out of my art and put it into tech work or something else like that because I know the amplification powers of tech. Art is also a really powerful thing to have in moments of great precarity and uncertainty and possibility. I do think art is important and I do think it's important to be an artist in these times. I'm just still struggling accepting that I am one. Because at every moment in my life I was conditioned to not be. 


[44:38] Erotic Art and OnlyFans

Another big part that I want to bring up about this is OnlyFans. As I have been making art in the past six months, I've also been exploring my sexuality and sensuality through what I consider to be erotic art. Or you can call it pornography. It's porn. I don't know, I don't care. I don't really care if it's porn or sex work or erotic art. As long as it's just connected to me and I'm doing it. I briefly gave that up for the past month. I did a whole recording where I just tried to talk about OnlyFans and it was a fucking mess. I wrote a bunch of stuff thinking that I was gonna give advice to other people about OnlyFans, but I don't really know how to be successful at sex work. 


[45:20] My Uncertainty Mirrors the World's

I think it's also a problem or not the way that I would want things to be, that we only decide that we're going to talk about how we've done things when it's working. I want to be here right now telling you that it's not working, I don't have a profitable business. At this moment in time. I did last year, I was selling my time, I was very stressed as a tech consultant. At this moment in time, I've barely made any money this year. And I don't care, I'm just spending all my savings. And I'm still giving to mutual aid and stuff because I don’t know what the fuck is going to happen in 2023. I don’t know what the fuck is going to happen tomorrow. It's possible that we'll be in an actual civil war in the next couple of years, or will at least still continue to have all of this violence, because Republicans are trying to steal elections, and climate crisis and pandemic deaths and the fact that the climate crisis is now intensifying hundreds of diseases. And you know, maybe I needed to have that moment earlier where I didn't say all of that, because I just gave you this big long cushion where you could just hang out with me for a while listening to my voice before I was like the world does seem to be on fire, and is actually on fire in some cases. I know we all acknowledge this and see it and talk about it. There's just such a big disconnect between being aware of it and committing yourself to action that goes against it. And it's really unclear and it has been for many, many years, how we can figure out what actions are going to go against what seems like our fate as a species at this point and the fate of our planet. I'll just tell you what the decisions that I've made are.


[47:03] My Resistance and Building Community as a Disabled Person

I am consuming as little as possible. I'm not working at an evil place where I'm compromising my ethics doing shit about people's data. I turn down tech recruiters from companies where I would get paid a lot of money. I could reply to those recruiters in those places. It's possible they probably wouldn't hire me, I don’t really even know. I am a senior engineer at this point. Definitely. Whatever the fuck that means. I do think that I am a valuable hire for a lot of places and that I am talented at tech and product work. But I'm an artist. And I'm gonna explain in a bit how I have connected those two things. I'm trying to rest, I'm trying to be creative. I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to have community with other people. Right now I'm really focusing on having community with other disabled and chronically ill people because I do not feel safe or trusting with most other identities or communities at this point. Because [sad laugh] we've really been excluded and left out of society and left behind. I'm also trying to sign petitions and read books and share things that I learned and do this podcast. I think all of us learning together and resting together and trying to just grow is what's the best path forward. Is that going to stop the 100 top corporations from doing most of the damage to our planet? No.


[48:32] Sending Out Ripples

There’s certainly ripples that we can send out into the world. I don't have the answer on how to solve all of the different policy and social issues that we have. I don't. I can barely, even with my hyperconnected, spatially oriented brain, map all of those different issues out in my head and see all their connections. The only way we're going to solve these things is if we develop a lot of people who are generalists who are embodied and have emotional intelligence and have psychological safety and can make space for other people's perspectives. So that we could have truly interdisciplinary intercommunity work that will take into account all of these different factors of these very complex, wicked problems. The problems go across many different domains and disciplines. Which means any kind of interventions that we have in the problems, like a pandemic.. it’s very hard to determine what the effects of those interventions will be. My bet is amplifying other humans. Trying to connect with other humans. Hopefully surviving capitalism on the way. And I'm doing that through art. I'm doing that through erotic art because I think as a nonbinary person, I truly want to help heal some of the issues that we have between [soft laugh] different genders and with sexuality and with porn and objectification of certain types of bodies. What's the opposite of objectification? With the way we disregard other bodies and ignore them. I'm disabled but I'm not visibly disabled. I do have a pretty good quality of life most of the time. Body permitting [laughs]. I was gonna explain this like 45 minutes ago, but it's gonna have to happen now because now is when it is happening [laughs].


[50:36] External Nudges from Behavioral Economics

Nudges IO is my company. A nudge is typically a thing that exists outside of yourself, that changes the way that you behave. So an example of a nudge would be putting fresh fruit by registers by registers in a lunchroom, so that people would grab some fruit before they check out. It's a change in the environment that causes someone to make a different decision. And the problem with externally based nudges is that most of the research that we have done into them is paternalistic. Paternalistic, meaning.. I don’t know, maybe that has a male tone to it. Parental, control oriented, I guess. Where government or companies or whatever exists outside of ourselves, would be making the choices to change our environment in certain ways, so that we make the kinds of decisions that they consider best. But that might not necessarily be the decisions and choices and behavior that we consider is best for us. Another example would be auto opting people into retirement savings. Most people would say, “Yeah, that's a good thing.” Is it? A lot of us don't think that we're going to be retiring [laughs]. A lot of us don't think that there's going to be a world to retire in. What's an alternative to that? Those were just two examples. If you actually consider the effect of nudges on our online behavior, it's huge. That's what an ad is. It wants you to click on it and go to it. That's what all of these sites being designed to be addictive and keep us on them as much as possible. I was mentioning earlier, I spend too much time on Twitter and Tiktok. Today, I don't know if it's considered wasted time or not. Probably. I do really like this perspective from this book called 4000 weeks. It talks about how.. Oh, wait, maybe that's from a different book, I don't know, time that you intend to waste is not time wasted. Because you already planned on wasting it. I don't know how the fuck you qualify that. How do you know, how do I know that I wasted that time? What if it led to some amazing thing in the future and I just didn't see it coming because I didn't know or blah blah blah. It just really presumes, assumes it's presumptive, it's assumptive. I don't even know what word I'm going for, at this point. It’s editing Cake in to save the day.. I don’t know if that sentiment was from Four Thousand Weeks, it seems to come from lots of places. I absolutely adore that book though, so here’s a quick quote from it:

This confrontation with limitation also reveals the truth that freedom, sometimes, is to be found not in achieving greater sovereignty over your own schedule but in allowing yourself to be constrained by the rhythms of community—participating in forms of social life where you don’t get to decide exactly what you do or when you do it. And it leads to the insight that meaningful productivity often comes not from hurrying things up but from letting them take the time they take, surrendering to what in German has been called Eigenzeit, or the time inherent to a process itself.

End quote. You’ll notice me saying “It takes the time it takes” often. It is one of my favorite affirmations. Okay back to it.


[54:00] The History of Nudges IO

Nudges are these things that have influence on us. When I was talking to a business accelerator, I pitched what I was doing to them. Hoping I was gonna get into their program, which I didn't. Their feedback did lead to me renaming what I was doing to nudges. I decided years ago that in order to help.. this was like after Trump got elected in 2017. That if someone could get all of their data into one place and had tools to make something out of it, whatever it is that they wanted to change, the way that they're getting influenced, the way that they're getting nudged by these external forces.. then we could start to fight back. We could start to take back our actions and align our actions to our values. Through that we could create true movements. Where every activist would be empowered to do the things that they were able to do. If that activist has social anxiety, don't be calling your political representatives. Pick a different action, but pick something. At least continue to try. I'm not going to become apathetic and give up because that's what capitalists want. I wanted to be able to build all of this data infrastructure and part of me still does. I started to build it in 2020. Then I stopped building to focus more on the design side. I planned on having this podcast as being interviewing people about data. I would still like to do all that.


[55:34] Internal Nudges and Sustainable Activism

I just don't know if it's gonna be happening now. I think there are parts of my brain that are starting to come online more. That are wanting to engage in technology again. I'm not going to make any promises other than I will keep doing what I can to move things forward and to figure out how to contribute. However, I did want to bring this up because it's something that I haven't really worked out in my personal audio journals very much. I'm just gonna do it here right now. In a different visualization, how many visualizations and dreams can I bring up in one episode? I thought about nudges in a different way. Instead of seeing these externally based nudges, I thought about internal nudges. Where you've built the space within yourself and the embodiment that you can feel something change inside of you in a way that causes you to make a different decision. To make a different choice. To do something that does align more with your values and actions. That is much more based in the work that I've done in EMDR and psychedelics, as a Buddhist, with mindfulness, meditation, yoga, all of these things to build a connection to my body. Because the root of all oppression is disembodiment. Because if we were connected to our bodies, it would be just like How Emotions Are Made. That it's the sensation of things that we map to a certain word. When we can do that, we can budget our energy. Because we can label what's happening and we can predict outcomes based on our energy use by being closely tied to the sensations in our body and to the labels that go with those sensations. So it's easier to regulate your emotions if you have more emotional vocabulary. So instead of saying you're angry or frustrated, you're annoyed. The closer that those states are, the more specifically you can regulate your energy. A big issue with being neurodivergent or disabled or having any other kind of marginalized identity is that there's so much shit going on outside of you and so much shit that's been conditioned into you that you don't really ever get a chance to figure out how to regulate your body in that way. Where you could create and you could rest and you could be engaged in sustainable activism. Not activism that burns you out. Not activism that takes everything out of you. Which is what I've been trying to do for years is to push and push and push. Yeah, I honestly just wished that at different points in time that I could just trade my life for these other things and just have it be over. I don't feel that way anymore. I want to live my life and have joy and connection and fulfillment and enrichment in exactly the ways that I want to. And I want that for other people. And I think.. My butt’s getting numb. I think it's possible. I think that we could have that. I don't know how exactly that it's gonna happen. I think it's just gonna be a bunch of individuals figuring it out.


[58:50] Our Social Influence and Interconnectedness

The really cool thing [laughs] that I was saying earlier about being human, is the influence that we have on each other. If these things change in you, and you invest in your body, and you invest in learning about who you truly are. It will travel through your social networks to everyone that you know. It's just like being a generational trauma cycle breaker. Except you're not just affecting your children. You're affecting everyone that you would ever interact with, and everyone that they would ever interact with. Because we're all connected, we have a chance. I don't know how those ripples are gonna get to the people who really need to stop harming the planet. I'm hoping that happens. I'm hoping that we could do the least amount of harm to the planet and each other. That we can all figure out how to live in a sustainable post growth world. I don't have all the answers. I don't know what's going to happen. I'm trying to develop self-trust. I'm working on my sense of trust in other people. So that I can have really rich collaborations.


[59:53] I'm Grateful For Your Influence

I'm very grateful because there are a lot of amazing disabled, chronically ill, neurodivergent, other marginalized identities.. People who have put their perspective out into the world in Tiktoks and tweets and books and art and all of the ways that we express ourselves.. and podcasts [laughs]. I'm so grateful for all of those voices. Because would I be sitting here right now as the person that I am if I wouldn't have been exposed to all of those ideas? To all of those practices? If I wouldn't have had an invitation to change in a way that could serve me, that could serve my communities, that could serve all of humanity, because we are all interconnected? And we are all interconnected with nature and animals.. Would I have that? Would I have just discovered all of these ideas on my own? No, I don't think so. So whatever it is that you want to create or make or talk about.. Even if you don't think anyone is going to listen. Even if you don't think that it's going to have an influence, maybe it will just have an influence on you. I don't know if anybody is going to listen to this podcast. Maybe I'll just listen to it later and it'll have an influence on me. I make a ton of audio recordings where I just talk to myself. My nickname for myself is Cakie Bakie. I just process things. I'm alone a lot. I am alone a lot. And while it does feel like rich solitude much more than it used to, there's still pain in the things that I have lost and in the parts of myself that I have lost even though I am discovering new parts. 


[music]

[1:01:40] Quaking of America Book, Clean Pain vs Dirty Pain

I want to introduce you to one more concept. This book is called The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning. I found it from a Tiktok randomly. In it, the author Resmaa Menakem introduces a concept called clean and dirty pain. It just fit some things that I already knew, but that I didn't have.. Not that I already knew, it fit feelings that I have had [laughs] with language that was very clear. So here's a quote from the book. And this is related to what a lot of people talk about, which is how hard it is to feel your feelings in your body. 

Only by leaning into your pain can you move through it and out of it, and metabolize it. When you accept this pain, and use it to stand in your integrity and activate the best parts of yourself, this is clean pain. Clean pain can help you metabolize trauma, resolve conflicts, transform, and grow up. Nonviolent resistance to oppression, terrorism, and inequality is a form of clean pain. So is Somatic Abolitionism. Your other option is dirty pain, in which you respond from your most wounded and unexamined parts. You become cruel, or hollow, or conniving, or violent—or you physically or emotionally run away. This only prolongs your pain and deepens whatever conflict activated your initial discomfort. Dirty pain is the pain of avoidance and denial. When we refuse to accept and metabolize clean pain, or try to blow that pain into other bodies, we create new conflict and difficulty. Meanwhile, our own pain remains unmetabolized. Dirty pain can manifest as urgency, avoidance, blaming, accusations, hypervigilance, panic, hyper anxiety, hard-and-fast demands, gaslighting, extreme manipulation, desperate attempts to control other people, or violence. Sometimes it shows up as self-harm: drinking, drugging, other addictive behavior, or self-inflicted violence. All of these only make the existing conflict more difficult, more complicated, and more painful. In short, clean pain is about going through something. Dirty pain is about trying to get around something. Being willing to go through something helps you grow up. Trying to get around something makes you more hard-hearted, less mature, and temporarily less able to access your humanity. Also, it never works in the long run—nor, often, in the short run.

End quote. I just think that's really powerful. I was really terrified of doing EMDR for many years, because I did not want to relive my trauma. But in all actuality, I was reliving my trauma in many of my relationships and interactions with other humans, because I had not healed it. To commit to trauma Tuesday's to every week, reliving what had happened to me, as an abuse and sexual assault survivor.. Reliving it in my body has been so necessary for me to grow space inside myself so that I could show up in relationships in a different way. Where I wasn't trying to project my shit onto other people. This is why I'm saying that embodiment is so powerful. And I highly recommend that you read that book. I'm only part of the way through it, because I'm trying not to rush. Because there's a bunch of body based practices in it. I don't want to rush through it and be like, yes, another book down, another accomplishment. 


[1:05:21] Gentle Chaotic Change

I want to make sure that I truly absorb what it is that I'm learning. Which is part of the reason why I read a bunch of different books at the same time, which is something called spaced repetition. That helps you integrate that knowledge into your life and fully practice it. So much change is possible from these tiny ways that you can be gentle with yourself and make just a different choice here or there. And to keep going and even when you have to take a break. Maybe I'll write a book about this, I don't know, I'd love to be an author someday. I want to help people who are internally chaotic, develop these kinds of nudges where they can not go with default programming and instead make whatever decision aligns with where they would like to go. And also become more in touch with their bodies in the process. And I think one of the ways to do that is self-tracking. But there's a lot of other things that I have tried that I'd like to introduce.. not that I made up any of this stuff. I've been thinking about that as chaotic habits or chaotic routines. Most people base things on streaks. So are you going to do something every single day, for a week or a month, a year? I don't think neurodivergent, chronically ill, many other types of people are capable of that. It's not only because of our internal chaos, it's also because of the things that we're subjected to in order to live in this world. There's a lot of things that can just knock you off track. Could be your own body, it could be dealing with the healthcare system, it could be 100 other things. I think people deserve more. I think people deserve to have cycles of rest and creativity, whatever that natural cycle is for them. Maybe your natural cycle is that you work on a project a lot for three weeks and then you never finish it. Maybe that's fine. Maybe you learned what you were going to learn from that project. And you don't have to finish it. Maybe your natural cycle of creation is to work on something and then let go of it for a long time and come back to it. Do you enjoy what you are doing? Or are you only spending your time in a way that's gonna get you to some destination? I have to ask myself this all the time. My psychedelic integration guide Bear blew my mind with that.. They asked me what if I just enjoyed all my time? And it wasn’t about forcing myself to do things? I had no idea that was an option. I don't want to be living in another moment that's not now. Look at this moment right now. I'm talking to people and I don't even know what people I'm talking to. Well, somewhat, because I'm trying to talk to the people that want [laughs] that I want to. In other ways you're unknowable to me. Doesn't that kind of give you a lot of power, as a listener? I don’t know. I’m being a goofball now. 


[1:08:19] An Art Ask: Crowdsourced Special Interests

I want to leave you with something. What do I want to leave you with? Oh, I do have an ask for the community. And by community, I mean disabled people, chronically ill people, neurodivergent people. And if you identify as chronically ill, but not disabled, it's still enough. If you're not diagnosed or you're self-diagnosed, that's still enough. As far as I'm concerned, you qualify. Honestly, most other disabled and chronically ill people will feel that way too. At least the ones, those of us who have been doing this [laughs] for a long time. Definitely value and understand how long you can go undiagnosed or, you know, I'm only self-diagnosed for autistic. I talked to my psychiatrist about getting diagnosed. And she was, “Why bother? You already have therapists that you like and doctors that you like and you're not likely to get diagnosed anyways because of gender.” So. And I appreciated that because I didn't want to go through that process [laughs]. It's probably better that it's not on my records. But there's enough other things that if.. whatever is going to happen to this disabled community, it's going to happen to me. I’m fully out in every part of my life as who I am. And it's totally fine if you aren't. So I'm going to make a survey. I'm doing the biggest lead up to this ask. I'm just, I'm just a butt right now. I'm just messing around. I'm working on a piece that has this web that I've talked about in the background and on each side are trees that are knitted, believe it or not. And these trees are going to have little leaves on them. Probably going to be made out of this brown recycled paper, I upcycle most of my stuff. Maybe have some like little white speckles on them. What I would like to do on each leaf is to put some kind of special interest, maybe with a little icon of what it is, maybe just the word. And I would like to crowdsource those from the community. I'm trying to think of some examples right now that would be really good. I liked rock polishing as a kid watercolor would count, researching 18th century embalming techniques, whatever fucking weird ass thing you're into, you know what I'm saying? Something that lights you up inside. Something that you're just so drawn to it and you don't even know why. And it doesn't have to be a thing that you participate in all the time. You don't have to be a world class weaver or something. Pick something you suck at and you just love it. Pick something that you are great at. Whatever it is. And I want to put those on the leaves of the tree in this ridiculously gay art project that's going to have knitting and tiles and mirror pieces and rainbow fairy lights [laughs]. Yeah, I would love that. And I'll put something in the survey that if you want to include a social media handle, I can tag you with your leaf somewhere. I'm going to try to do that. The other thing is that I might make a digital version at some point, because I thought that would be really fun. And maybe in that digital version, I'll cluster people's special interests by how similar they are to each other. I don't know. I don't know what future Cake’s gonna do. I trust that they will do things. I just don't know what those things are in advance, if you know what I'm saying. One option that I could do is if other people want to work with that data.. I could open it up to others, I'm planning on doing it as an Airtable survey. So I could just make the Airtable open or have some sort of CSV download whatever, you know, whatever people want to do. 


[1:12:16] Don't Worry, Only Disabled People Will.. Thrive

I just want to show the variety of things that we can be drawn to and the things that we find joy and flow and engagement and fulfillment with. Because I think our bodies and our lives and the things that we go through are important. So even if society, even if the director of the fucking CDC says that our deaths are encouraging, even if everybody excludes us from society, like I am fully excluded and just home alone all the time. Even if all that happens, we're still fucking human. We still wake up every day and have interests and thoughts and perspectives. And we have fucking sex. Whether or not people think that about us. I fucking love disabled people. I love being disabled. I love that it connects me to every single other community. I love the way that it has changed my relationship to my body. I love the way that it has made me aware of so many different things that I wouldn't have been aware of. And there's 100 other things that I'll tell you about later that I don't like about it [laughs]. Because I don't completely subscribe to the social model of disability. I just think disability is a mismatch between us and our environment. And that that could be on either side. And it could be brought together on either side or we could embrace that gap.


[1:13:43] Sankalpa: I'm a Question

My intention, the thing that ties everything together about the work that I do, which at this moment in time is light up art, erotic art - although taking a little break from that, reading books, making diagrams, making Tiktok content about things that I read. And possibly maybe starting to do some tech design stuff, I'm not sure. Things around data, things around design, things around science, things around learning. I'm a polygon gargoyle. My intention, my sankalpa, which is sanskrit for intention, is to ask questions. I'm a question. I'm a question I'm constantly asking. And I think we all can be. And I think that can shift things. 


[1:14:31] Individual Healing and Self-trust Can Heal Our World

And I'm not going to say I'm hopeful because I think that hopefulness is not the best thing to have at this moment in time. Because it does mean that you're clinging to a future that may or may not happen. I think investment in action. I think I am confident at least in myself. I'm confident that I will make the best available choice that I can make at any moment to not harm others or myself. If we could all do that, maybe we'll be okay. I don't know. No guarantees. None of us are getting out of this alive. That's actually one of my favorite parts about Buddhism is that you do a lot of work on accepting death [laughs]. Not to get super dark at the end here or anything. Anywho, yeah, so I will put a link to that survey in the podcast. If you’re here, I super appreciate you and even though I don't know you, I've got love for you. I think that we can do this. I believe in us. I believe in our potential for change and healing. I think that I always will. So that's it for today, folks. That's it for Defective Detective, bye!


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