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To start off, I have this icky feeling; this grimy, constraining, painfully intense capture of my attention. My mind is focused and boiled in on something in particular; my body is cold. Why is it cold? I never ask that question. It just is. And I feel a faint jitteryness. My body is on end; it staggers before this powerful force that grips its nerves and squelches, moment by moment, a life force that used to be there.

Its from this perspective, this hell-hole of perception, that I have to speak; and talk, and hope to communicate to another person the viciousness of an embattled nervous system, conditioned by terror at a vulnerable point in neurological development, and ever-so knowledgeable of the weakness and hypnotic sting of a sterile being.

The vagal system is the way the human body automatically prepares the body for a metabolic activity: emotion is metabolically costly; the good types expand and augment cognitive attention; the bad ones constrict and disable it. Evolution has hardwired the mammalian nervous system to preempt situations by heightening or relaxing certain types of awareness.

There are two components to this system. The ventral (below) and dorsal (above) vagal nerve fibers. The dorsal vagal nerves are evolutionary older, carrying information from the sub-diaphragmatic afferents in the stomach, heart, gut, etc, to the lower brain, where it is integrated with higher cortical fibers that deal with memory, spatial orientation and visualization; the ventral vagus nerves carry information from the supra-diaphragmatic afferents in the pharynx, layrnx, and cranial nerves.

The body is systematically organized to deal with social reality. When I enter a certain situation, with a certain face, and a simple look takes in the perception of a wider variety of variables, a feeling is enacted; a perceptual "take" is made; and the thought that occurs may be bad. I may feel, within me, a foreign activity; a messy turbulence of affect that scrambles my mind; leaves it hollow, clears out all preconceived intentions and suggestions. Life is living. The memory carries facts, and the body, brain and mind enter realities that carry salience. When salience is noted, attention dissociates: a sub-diaphragmatic fracture stultifies the feeling of flow; the flow is stopped, and in its place is a hollow breathing; a freeziness in the gut and limbs; and a message from my mind to my linguistic centers: be afraid of speech. And the linguistic centers and the larynx - frozen and impaired by the sub-diaphragmatic s**t-storm of endorphins such a dynorphin, paralyzing all attention to the world; focused sharply, utterly hypnotized by the quiet storm; of not feeling; of not being; and fearing to be because the effort to be passes through the defective properties of my vagal system; the autonomic nervous system wants to f**k me: evolution fucked me; or more true, the dirtiness inherent in the feral human instinct, fucked me over.

I didn't want to be short. I didn't want to have a mom with borderline personality disorder; unpredictable, bitchy, yelling, complaining; a darkness that could never be fixed; and the ploy, and the scam, of being seen by her sometimes, with such cheerfulness and kindness; to be betrayed by her time and again, suffering her anxieties with her and eventually feeling the world just as she feels it; but with far less tenacity; a fear, a frozeness; a want to pull away yet stay close by. A NEEDINESS. I certainly didn't want that, yet here I am, structurally enacting those fucked dynamics.

And my dad. Who didn't have a dad; so who didn't know how to be a dad to me. Who was weak and quiet when people criticized his suitability as a competent father to just take the errant criticisms of his mother in law, not fighting and demanding that his role and feeling of being a father preceded all that his mother in law had to say. To make it clear to her. But it was not to be. My dad, scarred from own betrayal; feeling, very deeply in him, the wounds of a father who walked out on his family. At 13 years old. One day, your dad leaves and never comes back. Fast forward 41 years, and he has a son with developmental trauma. A link in the chain; the chain of familial histories. More than just my history, but linking and affecting all histories.

And so I grew up feeling sensitive; if I spent alot of time with my boisterous 16 year old uncle, I feel better; more positive experience: hes teaching me how to be in the world. I feel his awareness and eventually I physically and emotionally embody experience. My nascent mind, not particularly attached to anything, was drawn into his mind, and in that intersubjectivity, I became a person with a strong sense of self.

But then I was taken from those conditions. More and more time was spent in a context of subtle and complex disorders. A husband who grovels to his wife; a wife who takes advantage; who mere agitation in affect would lead to a maelstrom of projection, a state of perfect psychic equivalence: I'm irritated, and you, person and being who has passed into my field of awareness: you are somehow responsible for this. Subjectivities are ignored; inferences that usually occur for others are bypassed by her. Her body organizes her perceptions and gears a strong sympathetic response, an adrenaline rush, that is strongly connected with a cognitive orientation of blame: You. Simply because you passed into her view; became an object of her fury.

By the time school happens I take on bizarre personas, shifting from the neighborhoods I lived in to the future that I eventually inhabited. Moving was a constant feature of my early existence. I never established a stable group of friends; too much moving around; too much interruption between lives. When I did etch a niche, it was clownish; although me in fundamental ways, there was too much self-deprecation in it.

I'm not really interesting in recounting a history as I am in understanding the history. My history. The history of my body and my mind. I look at this, it seems, as if from the position of the homunculus. Metaphorically speaking, the ability to dissociate away from personal experience is itself, at least implies, an advantaged position of awareness; where even the self and its medley of experiences become "objects" that are objectively deal with in an open, impartial, and simplistically accepting position.

I'm writing to bring clarity. Acceptance, what is that? It's a feeling more than anything; it is also a thought through: I say "acceptance" and a feeling occurs. The feeling feels like an openness. The thought seems to access a feeling. The feeling expand chestwards out, and the mind feels a surge of mental acuity. Thinking about my thinking is more clear; an approach is established, and action ensues. The thought "acceptance" formulates attention towards "positive" situational targets: whatever is being discussed, I am in it; I follow a stream of genuine interest and attachment. Ahedonia no longer plagues me. I can feel pleasure. A movement outwards. Even an aggressive movements possesses self existence; but ahedonia, alexthymia, the death of the psyche-soma, destructs self coherency. Emptiness suffuses experience. Confusion and genuine perplexity control my mind. I fall into the want to act; and painfully, hypnoidally, enact this 'not-me'; its in me; its become me; and it's obsessing me; the mind is on it; feeling it; doing it; and underlying it all is a nasty self aggression; a rigorously oppositional want to 'not-be': not be THAT. Hate it, despise it; get away from it. One part of my self fights with another part of myself; both different, structurally separated by neuronal systematization. They fight inside a singular mind, yet the mind is many not one. The many perceptions that pass through and emblazon awareness, calling forth the person into activity: into embodiedment. But don't take the subjectivity too seriously; its real, but its also fake; it follows rules that we can learn to pay attention to and employ to our own good.

We got biases that affect our attention; emergent in us as evolutionary instincts; basic parts of our biology that determines the way we think about something so as to protect ourselves from anxiety; anxiety is the "bad stuff" in our evolutionary minds. The self - the illusion that exists within and between minds to interact and cooperate and unfortunately compete, leads us to thoughts systems that support a "stronger" self. The self need not be strong in any ontological sense. It merely becomes strong because it needs to in order to maintain "affective stability"; if were to apply an algorithm to it: thoughts and social perceptions tagged "good" are affectively desirable; they maintain a stronger self-ego, so they're selected and used as a way to hold off negative affect: shame and anxiety in particular.

Besides these basic emotion-self mechanisms evolution has geared our social nervous systems with, there are silly biases like verticality bias, availability bias, and other biases that emerge because the brain takes short-cuts to supply us with information. Its useful to pay attention to this too if you care at all about being a decent, rational, fair, and dare I say compassionate human being.

All this explains the violence that happens within me when I enter certain situations; or put certain virulent chemicals into my body that affect my psychological experience; in affect and cognition. A dulling of attention and a feebleness of mentalization. A distracted and grabby mind; wanting and desiring. Stupidly creating morbidity within its attentional circuits. Because it likes to smoke weed sometimes.

Ultimately, I need to notice the moment; the brand newness of each one. Every few seconds, an opportunity to begin anew. A minute or two to let the crappy neurojuice dissipate and the good stuff to pump through my axons. Each moment, a new chance. The moment, the truest point; the origin of being. To engage it; revel in it; celebrate it and the gift of life and the gift of being. And to ignore, and to minimize, the ego-body perceptions, the darts of fatalizing which condemn the mind to the limitations of its body; fat people, short people, ugly people; fated to feel less; to be worthless - in comparisons; with Channing Tatum or an Amber Heard. The dead end of comparison making; usually economically managed by self-systems to keep the dreaded perceptions away; something else must be emphasized; attention must look "there", focus, and go in "that" direction. But that routine only works in a "moderately traumatized" mind. To earn the PTSD label, traumatization and the neural scarring of cortisol on the nervous system, helps to keep in place a "sensitivity" to affect. New sensitivities are available; the body has and is structurally different because of these experiences. So when a stupid body perception occurs, as a thought such as "Mike is short" somehow this knowledge conveys the past history - the overcome history? - or why does it still carry such power from time to time, unless the body is 'attuned' in some way to it.

Attention breaks and the body goes into "f**k this s**t" mode. Divest from personhood, be a mind inside a body; but not a mind connected and feeling the 'thoughts' of its body. To feel the body risks shame; risks negative experience. And, good lord, the f*****g body has given orders to the minds that it be mindful of this: pay the f**k attention, the amydala says. And the damn brain follows suit.