Not all shapes that I experience are ones I want to explore. Some of them become forces of negativity, disorientation and dissonance. Some of them don’t become shapes at all. I call those, malformed shapes.

The best way I can describe a malformed shape is like a blackhole in my soul. A shape that demands I look in its direction, and refuses to show itself when I do. Like looking into a light bulb inside a fully lit room and seeing nothing but darkness.

This is what becomes an intrusive thought fragment when its shape is mirrored semantically in my consciousness. Not an intrusive thought in the sense of “I’m thinking something disturbing and I don’t know why” - we can handle those no problem. Having thoughts that are out of alignment with my own thoughts is basically my internal system’s Nash equilibrium.

These are thoughts that don’t ever make a point. More like feelings, but not in a sense of “I felt sad” or “I felt happy”. More like “I felt like I just experienced gross interacting with the inside of my being” or “I felt like I just experienced the collapse of time itself and got slapped back to now”.

I’m well-aware that those are difficult examples to follow, but that directly mirrors my experience. They are things I feel are happening to me, don’t feel good and have no real semantic meaning.

When expressed they might be more guttural incantations, or like “I just grrrr”. Or that thing where you’re listening to a language you don’t speak and it feels like you almost should understand the words, but you don’t.

But when I am writing - particularly if I write physically in the journal - that has a grounding, protective effect from them being able to demand my attention.

Early on in my journal, while I was still feeling completely destabilized and hopeless from the system collapse that losing Kelly represented to every part of me (“we” agree on substance, it was the disagreements on methods that really held us back in the relationship - laugh it’s ok, this stuff is heavy to read - imagine how I feel!) I wrote the following passage in my journal that illustrates the malformed shapes conundrum like this:

“I’m almost a little afraid to stop writing, because writing keeps the thoughts that survive complete sentences from being able to seize control of my means of emotional production. When I start writing, those swirling, spiraling thoughts feel like they instantly start to lose their power.”

The swirling, and spiraling are referring to the fact that they feel elusive and recursive, like they want something that I don’t have, and that they don’t have the ability to receive. Like watching somebody try to deliver an email to a post office drop box on the corner of the street.

This seems likely to be the experience I’m least likely to be able to map directly to what other people experience and it’s unclear if that’s in any way related to dissociation. They could be some form of DPDR type experience, but at the same time feel more like traps that are set to pull me there, rather than the “there” itself.

I don’t know where they come from. I can’t always remember if I even had them recently if they aren’t something I’m battling in the context of that moment. I imagine the lack of phenomenological stickiness is a function of the fact that they don’t actually carry any meaning with them when they attempt their infiltration into my consciousness.

They are like smoke with no fire… and no smoke when you actually turn to look either. Disorienting and more impactful than they are real. They’re like where thought should have been. There’s not just “no thought” in its place though. There’s anti-thought.

I don’t want to leave it there even though that ending feels poetic, because while this experience is uncomfortable, dissonant and makes escaping negative feelings more difficult when paired - it also makes it sound more pervasive than it is.

The malformed shapes that try to become thoughts but can’t survive complete sentences isn’t something I experience as a constant phenomenon, nor is it something I feel untrained to weather.

It is just uniquely visceral or physical when it’s happening, relative to other forms of disorientation that I experience from things I’ve already pointed at and named here in this book. That’s why I referred to them seizing control of the means of emotional production rather them actually existing as the resulting discomfort in an emotional sense.