I went to the vape store tonight and as I was sitting at a traffic light on Route 6 in Brooklyn, CT, I was thinking about the people in the other cars and wondering how they make decisions - or why they even need to - if they aren’t dissociative.

If they don’t argue with themselves in the sense that I do, then where does their internal conflict and tension come from in the first place?

That might sound ridiculous, but as is often the case, it’s the curiosity of the ridiculous that leads me through some of the most interesting and insightful mirrors.

I asked Gemini 3.1 Pro: “I feel like I’m having trouble now like understanding what does someone who doesn’t have dissociative disorder experience when they like have trouble making a decision, for example, when they have like, oh, I don’t know. Do I want to do this or they change their mind? Like what is that experience for them if it’s not kind of dissociative?

Gemini talked about a few different things, but the two bits of information that resonated the brightest and loudest were “In a dissociative system, changing your mind often isn’t a pivot; it’s an override.” and “For them, indecision is a math problem. For your system, indecision is often a geopolitical conflict between parts that hold entirely different realities and stakes.” that lit the lights and rang the bells of understanding that couldn’t decide which analogy they wanted to settle on here on the page.

That was a meta tangent that glimpses at how the writing here comes to light, and is relevant here in this chapter as well. I don’t think of an analogy and then decide how I want to describe it here on the page. I realize there’s an analogy shaped piece that needs to get slotted in and I watch and listen to the shapes in my head until I see the one that looks like it fits.

Here, in I suppose some sort of self-imposed irony, I saw light bulbs, the NYSE bell being rung, heard the “ding DING ding ding” from the song Sensory Session by Jkyl & Hyde that’s been stuck in my head, and a series of other visuals that kept changing and never settling into a shape other than this one.

That’s what it feels like when I’m making an easy decision. When there’s not really competition for the mic, it’s more like everyone is brainstorming together on the same multi-modal whiteboard.

Other times it feels different. The experience depends on the input/output format too. The more it’s intended to convey emotion, the more cadence becomes prominent in the experience.

The more it’s intended to convey logic, the more it’s about how the shape demonstrates a relationship between concepts. Cadence, visuals and audio may still play a role when logic is the primary format, but in support of surfacing those relationships and their meaning visually.

Whereas the center for processing emotional outputs is attempting to channel meaning itself from the source of all meaning in a way that skips the logical processing center of the audience and gets absorbed by their emotional core with less translation conflicts in its shape.

If it’s not an easy decision, it’s a lot more volatile, and can be more like a hostage negotiation or a tense back room deal. Parts with distinctly competing needs clashing over control of the wheel, not trying to make the arguments on a whiteboard. More like “look, if we can just do this now, then you can have what you want later, ok?” or “If you don’t let me do this now, I’m going to make your life very uncomfortable the entire time anyways, so you might as well just give in.”.

Sometimes I can hijack my own reward mechanisms so bad that I can use double accounting or feel a sense of completion that feeds the desire to justify “rewarding myself” but when I consciously try to look for what I did to earn it, I realize it was the sense of completion without the underlying structure. That feels like dissonance and throws a wrench in the negotiations.

So making a decision to me feels like anything from flipping through a photo album looking for one that looks like a good fit, to a full on meltdown in the boardroom that results in withdrawing, or making bad decisions, or making good decisions for bad reasons.

Not that it’s all bad - and we have really gotten better at working together, even before I realized there was a we in me.

I don’t even know if I would trade it for a more neurotypical experience, I guess that depends on how well I can turn the friction into superpowers going forward now that I understand the mechanisms that are operating underneath and the fact that they have needs, desires, goals and skills that may be divergent from the others or from my true self.

But where was I? Oh yeah, I was trying to understand why it’s hard for other people making decisions. First insight: They don’t have full on internal conflicts, where decisions made without unanimous consent can result in declarations of internal war that have lasting consequences to their external circumstances and relationships.

That’s not all of it though. There’s more to it than that. That helps me understand why they don’t experience it like I do but doesn’t get me all the way to understanding what they do experience.

“For them, indecision is a math problem”.

The scenario that I can imagine from my own experience most readily, involves the struggle I have often when I want to make sure I go to bed on time.

Where their experience (or mine when feeling not all bounced around) might be “I’m tired but also want to watch the next episode”, the experience unique to living with dissociated parts like mine often feels more like “I refuse to not watch this episode and I’m extremely upset that means I won’t be getting enough sleep tonight”

The way I plan to continue to explore that is to do try to keep this as one of the flash cards of comparison I can pull from when I am able to use awareness to recognize the granular, distinct clouds of feeling that are colliding in the moment - rather than just experiencing them as the resulting lightning strikes.

There may be a cloud that has an easy math problem. If that were the only cloud in the sky, that would be most like the neurotypical, non-dissociative experience. The fact that there are other clouds colliding with it that aren’t interested in doing math at all is what makes my dissociative experience different.

I wrote a lot of words and so far the Armor of Apathy that this chapter’s title references has still managed to remain out of conscious cognition. So, where does the armor come in? Where is it? Is it always on? Am I wearing it right now?

The Armor of Apathy only comes out when the internal boardroom devolves into conflicts that result in making bad decisions that the system will have to pay a price for later, or that put the system in a state where there’s a risk of one little thing going wrong causing a total collapse of the reward output the decision was intended to extract.

The difference lives inside the distinction between, “there’s nothing I can’t handle”, which is a state of external circumstances that matches internal needs in a healthy way - and the version that adds “because I don’t fucking care” to the end of it.

The “because I don’t fucking care” energy being a necessary condition for any part of the agreement being signed is what makes apathy the hidden star of the show with the ability to scream “CUT!” at any time, regardless of the cost.

The “because I don’t fucking care” apathy means that if the external circumstances no longer serve the Venn Diagram of needs the agreement was intended to fill to satiate the warring parts, we can suddenly without warning find that everything has been inverted - the tire pump is still connected but the compressor isn’t on anymore and so the air is actually blowing OUT of the tire instead.

We don’t have a plan for what to do when that happens, because it was exactly where the negotiations were stalling out. That’s why the “because I don’t fucking care” clause was included in the agreement to begin with.

Now that I can see the suit of armor for what it is, apathy not invincibility, and I think it will be easier for the conductor to take over in the boardroom, do the right math, and make better decisions. But that will take work, conscious effort, and compassion for the parts and their unique individual needs.

That’s a lesson I can apply both internally and externally, everywhere in my life. The Armor of Apathy can become the Imperfect Invincibility of Internal Integrity when the conductor is at the podium.