I don’t know how to assign this to parts yet, and I’ve talked about it in the armor of Apathy section, but I realize there is a huge push pull between the emotional and logical “decision making team leads”.

It’s not just one or the other, it’s a fight between the two for how to distribute the emphasis. And they disagree because it feels like they both want to devolve into the other rather than support each other.

Logic wants to explain away emotion. Which uses the same muscle as fawning adjacent efforts require, so I can ironically see the logic in that. It makes sense.

Emotion wants to dominate logic, which looks like manipulation when it manifests in the world. It prefers convincing over understanding. It fears understanding is a sunk cost dead-end.

I feel like that’s more coalition vs coalition than it is part vs part. Although it might still be pitcher vs batter in the sense of it’s often 1v1 in the ring - and me overall unsure how to make a decision when the tools I’d use to be objective are the ones being hijacked.

In conversation this can lead to a tug of war where instead of working together each side just uses the most recent perceived failure to justify stealing the reins from the opposite side.

This brain badminton match isn’t even a necessarily negative experience by default. If the conversation is with somebody who there’s some shared understanding with, this can just be a spirited debate - and notably one of my actual favorite activities.

Thinking about it now, it’s probably because it helps me optimize that dynamic to be more effective at the blended approach, rather than an “either/or affair”.

But that is a delicate balance, and the Shame/Rage adjacent parts are like parents who will shut the whole thing down if the kids start breaking shit and creating too much stress during playtime.

The problem is that the parents have still been using the wrong gauge to measure the mayhem. They both watch for external threats and therefore react to perceived external threats rather than to internal conflicts.

That leads to a tenuous safe zone where the kids can play and the parents don’t start getting increasingly upset, if the energy from the other person, or a situation itself, starts to feel volatile or unpredictable.

It also means the parents aren’t actually watching the kids. So the kids could start being little assholes and pushing the boundaries of the sparring match too far, and actually end up pissing off the other person - without the parents even being aware of their role in the escalation.

Suddenly, the other person has a legitimate reason to feel put down, or manipulated, or otherwise slighted - and the rage and shame duo think they’ve found a legitimate threat to stop.

Reflexively, they scream at the kids: “shut up and go to your rooms, NOW!”. In that moment, rage and shame have already turned to face the newly detected threat united in justification, with no plan of attack and no acceptable retreat.

The other person is no longer even sitting in the room with the same kids the debate was taking place with. The face is the same, but the conversational sparring match is now a street fight in a war zone.

The Aftermath

There are many ways it can go from there, but the outcomes are predictably grim. Only somehow agreeing to disagree and exiting stage left is likely to limit hurt feelings and permanent damage to the relationship.

The shame part is almost definitely ready to go, and to detonate the bridge on the way out. The rage part would rather call in the airstrikes while we’re all still standing on it.

I thought this chapter had ended but then found myself thinking, that when I write for the book, or in my journal or about my experience - or when I have clear comfortable moral boundaries that I know are justified - I don’t feel controlled as much if at all by that same reversing polarity.

The comfort to transcend them in large part as decision makers, is because the only external party I’m loyal to in this process is the truth of my own internal experience.

In every other situation, dissonance is not only necessary, but expected. The dissonance between how you tell the gas station clerk your day is going, and how you actually feel.

Drawing fake sharpie lines on truth is a necessary part of social interaction.

To me that feels fundamentally like having already lost the game. I need to learn how to stay calibrated to better gauges, more often.

The parts driving the cores of my processor cause wild swings between whether I’m more drawn to pulling others toward the truth, or fumbling over trying to figure out how much dissonance I can stomach for the sake of social dynamics.

All at the expense of the one thing I understand how to relinquish the reins and anchor toward. A defensible truth.

I don’t believe that’s the wrong struggle for me to be having, but I do believe I’ve been forcing the meaning of truth to be something other than what it really is.

I always knew it was ok to tell the gas station guy I was feeling grand, even if inside I was feeling like I was losing the will to exist.

I didn’t know how to decide which things that were technically true, also simply didn’t need to be defended once we got very far outside the “this man is making barely more than minimum wage, trying to be polite and doesn’t want to hear about how disappointed you are that you cried while pumping” dynamic.

Truth is a shapeless shape that I was trying to draw a border wall on to keep out any subjectivity and external emotion from crossing. The truth borders got drawn using a red sharpie to make sure they stand out.

I think I can continue to orient myself ruthlessly toward truth, by redefining truth as what orients toward best outcomes without sacrificing essential needs, causing unnecessary harm or violating legitimate internal moral foundations.

I thought I was guarding my own sovereignty when I was really just putting up no trespassing signs in a public forest.

I just need to get rid of some red sharpie lines that I’ve drawn over time where they don’t belong.

This chapter gets a poetic ending, because Marlon Craft manages to blend the emotional and the logical into the perfect lyrical concoction for the moment.

“Seek truth and make peace with it. Don’t do that backwards.” - Loved, by Marlon Craft

For them, indecision is a math problem.

I just wasn’t applying it correctly, because I was drawing red lines and calling them truth.

But the truth is that there is no truth if it can’t be pursued - and there is no peace when red lines get crossed.