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Meromero Days

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Kirarin:
Feels especially bad to say this after how well things were going last time, but same thing happened again, I fell out of it. Soon after my last entry, my attention returned to some other stuff in my life I had been neglecting, and before I knew it I had suddenly gone weeks without forcing. It felt like a huge setback, like the final nail in the coffin on my belief that I'm even capable of sticking to this long enough. But I got help.

I wrote a while ago how it was being investigated into whether I might have ADHD, and how this would explain this persistent issue throughout my life. And it turns out I do. The thing I've been trying to explain to people all my life, that I can really, really want to do something, but somehow end up not seeing it through without ever changing my opinion on whether I want to do it, is actually a problem I'm sharing with tons of people, researched extensively, and demonstrated in neuroscience. And more importantly, they got medications for it that generally work pretty well. I got prescribed Ritalin. I was hoping everything would start falling into place again with the first pill, but obviously it's not that simple. The real effect came when I actively tried putting things into place. I noticed that I can decide to do something, and then actually see it through. Even if it's something I don't particularly want. It's fucking amazing. I mean, it still takes willpower if I don't want to do it, but I don't get the cognitive paralysis that I got intimately familiar with while failing last school assignment.

It definitely helps with forcing. The constant urge to get up and do something more mentally stimulating that I've been fighting with in nearly every active forcing session is mostly gone, and I can force for much longer as a result. The actual habit of forcing regularly didn't come automatically, but it's so much easier to build productive habits in general now. I'm trying out a morning habit, after breakfast, but before doing anything that might distract me. I haven't counted, but I feel it's been working pretty consistently the past few weeks. As long as I don't wake up feeling like shit and use it as an excuse to fuck around. Hard to defeat that one.

And we're making progress too. Though I felt like I had regressed at first, Melo now feels more autonomous than ever. On several occasions I've noticed her grabbing my arm and dragging me along to show me places, some more vivid than others, but always places I felt I had no part in thinking up. Recently I found myself questioning whether she had learned to pick up my slack, when she pulled me from feeling lost in thought to having perhaps the most vivid adventure so far.

I still have some emotional baggage regarding all this. 2 and a half years of second-guessing everything and anticipating the next setback seems to have lasting effects on my attitude today, and it's not something I'm able to undo overnight. Even posting here gives me some negative feelings, since I've come to associate it with my own naivety about my future failings. I suppose it's just going to be part of the process to identify these thoughts so I can distance myself from them, and let them fade to the background as they're invalidated by actual progress.

Main thing on my mind right now, though, is getting from autonomy to vocality. We still haven't made any progress towards vocality, which I find curious. Maybe it will start coming as I force more, but the lack of progress in this one area in particular makes it seem like there's some prerequisite I've neglected. Any ideas?

Bernd:
Good to see you're still around!
While I'm not a fan of such medication, and I think neither is Colonel, in the end what matters is what works best for you. Anyway, I recommend to regularly practice meditation to keep distractions at bay. It's an extremely powerful tool.

Regarding vocality I guess the most straightforward approach would be to talk and listen. Talk to Melo whenever you can, even better if you can do it aloud. Ask questions, voice your opinions, involve emotions. But don't forget to quiet down and actually listen to what she has to say in between. I found that was the hardest part. Getting rid of distracting thoughts and outside stimuli. I had the best progress while hiking in the alps for a week in absolute solitude. It was completely quiet except for the sounds of nature and I talked to Alice aloud all day long. You inevitably start to hear voices after a while in such surroundings. And tupper's voice became louder and clearer than ever before.
You don't have to go that far but the key idea is to eliminate any verbal stimuli until the brain makes up its own.

Sands:
Yeah, always keep an eye on if you might be experiencing weird symptoms that are bothersome so you stop using the stuff if it looks like it doesn't work for you. This is something you could treat without medication, so always keep that in mind and try to achieve that, even if you do need or think you need meds right now.

My big breakthrough in vocality was to actually sit down and try to listen with the assumption that the tupper can talk. Before I would talk a lot and ask questions, but I never expected an answer and I never really waited for it. There's two sides to vocality, tupper learning to express themselves in a way you can hear and you actually hearing them. Sometimes one of these will happen way earlier than the other.

Kirarin:
While it's reasonable to be skeptical of drugs that claim to enhance cognitive functioning, I feel it's a little misguided when it comes to treatment of ADHD. I was skeptical too, but the improvements to my quality of life are undeniable. ADHD is extremely well researched, and the medications commonly prescribed are highly effective in alleviating the symptoms, and despite numerous attempts at devising other treatment plans, so far nothing has been able to demonstrate the same effectiveness after peer review. Of course, no drug is perfect, so I consider myself lucky to have found a dose where it gives such a positive effect, without experiencing any notable side-effects. And I guess it's also worth noting that just because it works doesn't mean I won't benefit from combining it with other treatment plans, which is where stuff like meditation comes in. Particularly since Ritalin only lasts a few hours per capsule, I like the idea of combining it with something that causes lasting changes.

I have made a lot of attempts to talk and expecting an answer, I guess I'll just keep trying. Talking out loud is definitely something I could do more of, it's helped me before to keep passive forcing while playing video games. When I have some more time, I wanna find a comfy game that moves slowly enough that I can stay focused on sharing the experience. Maybe I can even work up the courage to ignore the chance of someone passing by my window and somehow making note of my moving mouth and the fact that there's no one else in my room. Which doesn't even compare to the courage I'll need when summer comes around and I need to open the window to avoid suffocation.

One thing I'm wondering about regarding vocality is how much of a barrier mindvoice is, if being bad at imagining anything other than my default mindvoice is keeping me from being able to hear her. When I try imagining a female voice, I can imagine the general sound, but I can't make it vocalize words. If I try, I just end up using my own mindvoice and echoing over it with the other voice. Though the cute voices I sometimes hear during hypnogogia are pretty vivid, so who knows.

Kirarin:
I have a feeling I just need to learn to disengage my mindvoice. I was trying the other day to see if I could make her vocalize some sounds, and noticed a clear difference between trying to add my mindvoice to force out some sentences, and just stopping and listening. I tend to see any kind of imagination as something I do actively, but I'm noticing a more passive aspect, where I simply need to be receptive instead of deliberately forcing myself to see and hear things.

Been making some attempts in talking out loud too. With passive forcing, it makes it extra clear where I'm directing my narration. Which quite often turns out to be nowhere at all. Even while playing a slow and comfy video game, it's surprisingly easy to lose track of the simple ideas that someone is listening to me and that they might respond at any time. Another thing that probably just comes down to practice. With active forcing, I feel that talking out loud allows me to separate narration from stream of consciousness, making me feel more organized and less prone to mindwandering. And listening feels more manageable to work on when I don't need to use my mindvoice at all.

Oh, and the hypnogogic hallucinations are getting really consistent now. They got a lot more frequent after I started up again, and while they used to be completely random voices of any gender without any particular meaning or intent attached to them most of the time, they're now always some kind of sweet and feminine voice that feels like it speaks to me, and it feels completely natural for me to respond to them. But if I get to enough awareness of try to say anything meaningful, it cuts off and I forget most of the details of what just happened. It's intriguing and pleasant, but ultimately feels useless in terms of progress.

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