Thread by @avflox

Growing up nerdy and weird, I never learned the importance of the face in connecting with others.

I loved the internet because I didn't need a face. I didn't need a gender. It was a magical time, living what sci-fi had promised -- free from the body.

I didn't have any respect for the body. I thought it was limiting -- a sad, already deprecated artifact. It afforded me some pleasures, but mostly it trapped me, limited me, and made me feel consumable. I resented it.

I didn't resent the culture that made me, as a woman, feel consumable. I misdirected my resentment toward my body. If only I could upload my consciousness, none of this would be an issue -- so I thought.

I made my resentment fairly clear in how I treated my body. I did my best to train it to understand its needs were subordinate to my thoughts. I fed it garbage if I remembered to feed it at all. I never rested it. I experimented on it.

I'm amazed I survived.

I didn't see feelings as the state-of-the-art alert system they are. I saw them as a weakness -- early socialization had taught me any feeling could be exploited for control, even good ones. Unbeknownst to me, I'd already developed sophisticated ways of muting them.

Almost entirely disembodied and all up in my head, I arrived in adulthood thinking that people who reacted to their feelings were messy, unpredictable, irrational, untrustworthy. "I don't 'do' messy," I would say, totally serious, and go on feeling more than slightly dead.

I used adrenaline to not feel dead all the time, only some of the time. I used limerence that way, too. Limerence, what we experience when first attracted to another person, is superior -- I've seen limerence interrupt even trauma response. Its catalyzing force surpasses anger.

Using limerence to feel alive is a perversion of "love heals" where instead of getting a health and regeneration bonus from belonging and connection with others, you use other humans to manufacture the chemistry that you devour, like a vampire drains the living of blood.

And so the one trapped in the body that gets objectified and consumed detaches from that body and its sensations and, finding herself lacking life, eats the living.

I wonder sometimes whether this is the reason that polyamory is so popular among people who are equally up in their heads as I was -- and still am some days. Polyamory makes the vampiric gorging on chemistry socially acceptable -- even "more evolved" in some circles.

Our culture is so toxic that maladaptations like these don't only pass as normal, but are rewarded.

Culture made it possible for me to disavow my body. It told me I must be really committed to my work when I no longer stopped to eat or sleep. It told me I was brave when I no longer felt fear. It told me I was tough when I no longer felt physical pain.

I started this thread talking about the internet, but this isn't a screed against technology. Our technology has the potential to be amazing. But toxic culture can only make good tech by accident.

What we build isn't a thing apart from who we are. What we build is informed by who we are. Who we are has everything to do with how we're dealing -- if we're dealing.

We're not dealing.

Silicon Valley suited me at my most disembodied and that disturbs me. The juicing, health food, team workouts, standing desks become sinister in that context, one more way to dominate the mortal flesh we can't yet escape or replace with something easier to control and manage.

How often do we hear trainers tell us, "listen to your body and don't push it beyond what it can do. Trust it to know its limits. Trust it to know what it needs." We hear the opposite. Health and fitness get twisted into one more to-do that won't fix the disconnection.

If we aren't connected to ourselves, we cannot connect to each other. And we need to connect to one another to experience somatic safety and belonging, things that help us physically regenerate, healing physical injuries and maintaining the immune system.

As social mammals, connecting with others is a biological imperative. Isolation kills us -- not only psychologically, but physically as well.

I once took great pride in knowing how to be alone and preferring it to other humans. It's bizarre in retrospect -- like saying you have a device that can connect to a network but you won't let it. You've shut off the wifi and disconnected it and feel very superior as a result.

It's the same with feelings. It's like removing all the smoke detectors in your house because you've decided that having them go off makes you look weak. You're just gonna let your house burn -- that's how tough you are.

It's a disaster. Our bodies are the most sophisticated system we'll ever encounter.

Neuroception is so powerful, it takes our narrative-building processes hours to catch up with that our senses have already relayed to the brain in nanoseconds. The number of data points is so huge and the process so fast, we never become aware of most of them.

Who would disown such a powerful thing? Or hold shame about its power? What kind of messed up culture would not only allow but encourage maladaptations that reinforce disempowering attitudes and beliefs? 

One that wants you disconnected and vulnerable.

But what if all along we've been the machines of loving grace of our technoutopian dreams? What if all we need to do is reconnect and learn how to be and how to use the powers that are already ours?

All of which is to say that I'm updating my profile photo, after maybe ten years of covering my face with my hair, because I now recognize the importance of the face in connecting with one another and I want to use technology to facilitate that.

Here's to a future where we remember the human, as we used to say on Usenet. Not just in the sense of "don't forget there's a human on the other end of the machine," but in the sense of remembering what it means to BE human.