Picking the Journal Back Up

↗ Read the original entry, in Syd's own high-context words

I lost access to my old account and took a break. I decided to post infrequently, with long gaps between sessions, to make participating more useful. The gaps have been the most useful part.

I have a stable sexual partner now. I almost fell in love once again, but I caught it early. I record catching it as the achievement, and the love as the thing successfully avoided.

For years I was preoccupied with attraction and romance. I now understand it was only ever about access to sex. Having understood this, I have kept the access and discarded the attraction, which I regard as streamlining.

I learned two things from talking to people. Attraction often fades, sometimes within two months. And a woman can stay with a man she is not attracted to. I found both facts reassuring and have organised my life around them.

So sex is now just what it is: mutual bodily pleasure, happening now, not projected onto a future. The future was the part where I would have had to keep showing up. I have removed it.

I prefer a friends-with-benefits arrangement to anything else. I never wanted marriage or children, which I put down to my neurodivergence. Wanting nothing lasting from anyone came naturally to me, and I have since built a practice that recommends it.

I am told this looks less like progress and more like preference.¹ I have considered the objection. I prefer feeling good, I now feel good, so the preference and the progress are the same thing. The objection therefore proves my point.

I realised my last post skipped what actually helped me get here, so I am recording it for posterity. What helped:

• Sincere awareness — paying attention and not lying to myself, which is what I now do instead of the method.
• Catching myself planning, again and again, until I mostly stopped — including planning to see anyone.
• Eventually appreciating the sense of just doing the actualism method moment to moment, which I had by then stopped doing as a method.
• Above all, a neurodivergent passionate energy, the same thing that drives hacker culture. It is, on inspection, the energy I already had, now aimed at myself.

From this, the things in my last post followed naturally, over time. I am not claiming enlightenment and I am not claiming actual freedom; I have no interest in that. I am claiming I feel good, reliably. The list above is mostly an account of the things I stopped doing.