Playing catch with infinity like a game of wall ball was my one of my adaptive responses to the trauma I experienced. My best guess as to why is that it was an (almost) always on pilot light of terror with unpredictable flare-ups.

That’s in addition to the the predictable flare-ups that felt like struggling in place, superglued to the tracks, listening to the horn get louder, as you start to feel the heat of the lights and brace for impact.

The real problem with infinity though is just that there’s so many of them. Every direction I look in has them, but even the ground I’m standing on can become one.

When I say the ground I stand on can become an infinity, I’m expressing primal fear, not a pleasant experience. I go from feeling like the star of the show. Standing on stage. The entire universe bumping to the same rhythm in my soul, the lights, the energy - everything in harmony and synchronicity - to the plug getting pulled in an instant.

When the plug gets pulled the entire world just starts to dismantle its reality and I am left standing alone. The energy that was carrying me, now laughing at me, judging me, shining a spotlight on all of the shame that brings up and recursively digging its heels in causing a spiral that is so disorienting that it feels like I forgot I was supposed to be breathing. Like I wish not breathing would stop me from feeling.

Feeling that dissonance inside of me immediately translates into a shame avalanche in my mind. The laughter. The judgment. That’s the shame of me not even knowing how to experience being happy without intruding on other people in a way that makes them want to pour water on the campfire roaring in my heart.

“That’s kind of loud, can you just turn that down a little bit please”.

That’s all it takes for someone to pull the plug when I’m standing on that stage inside my mind.

The way it feels to me is as if the audience (Kelly, or whoever it may have been) either didn’t see the me I thought was present, or saw it and thought, “this is in my way, let me move this out of the way real quick” instead of seeing it as the perfect configuration of the current moment that I was experiencing it to be.

I wish I could unmake the whole thing so I don’t have to feel the distance between where I was and where I am now.

That’s the dissonance. Not just that I want someone to see me. But if they don’t, I want to turn back time itself. Stop the infinite spiral into the abyss. I don’t want the show to come back at and resume at that point. I want the show to have never happened.

I had to wait until I had that experience in my real life before this chapter was ready to write itself. I couldn’t perform it. I feel it. Right now. In this moment. The show is over.

The chapter has just begun though. I need to go recover from the show first. I need to box up this infinity so I can stop the free-fall before the rest will be ready to be written.

I thought as I got this stuff out I was going to start seeing my experience of life as less different than the world around me. It’s actually reflected back that my experience is made up of a lot of shapes I don’t yet see reflected back in the world.

The shared experience is found in the variety rather than the sameness. That’s the ingenuity of adaptive responses anyways it seems. The adaptation comes from the constraint. The constraint comes from the context. The context comes from the infinities the universe pulls from as pools of possibility.

The incredible nature of our human experiences is how they uniquely adapt to the infinite shapes that come from that infinite possibility for constraint and context - and yet still manage to see themselves when they look across the room.

That’s hard to accept when I feel viscerally in the moment (and generally as a state of being) that my particular variation isn’t recognized as happening in the eyes of the geists that look back at me.

That’s the synthesis recursively dropping the syn, becoming its own antithesis and finding itself back in the dialectic trap every time it escapes. That’s the problem of infinity.