Gilgamesh

Glorious photon
Invisible traveller
Light and energy
Galaxies zooming past you
A particle pure
Magnificent one
Emitting glow
Shining
How long must I journey on?

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard -- Gilgamesh (live at Field of Vision II '26)

I will say I had no idea that this lyric is an acrostic with the song title. What caught my ear here is the Invisible Traveler lyric. I started on a writing project shortly after diagnosis called Invisible Travelers. I have put it aside because I want to do it right, but I need to work my way into it by getting back into writing. So, I'm going to start with some easier more near term projects first.

Setting the bar impossibly high and then getting disinterested when I'm not able to reach it or even really get started reaching it has been a pattern for me. One I want to break. So, I'm working on trying to make things a little more achievable and give myself the permission to fail at things. Getting back into writing is challenging, but also exciting. I did some writing in high school and thought I might do more after, but I had also been into computers since a young age and decided that was the better creative path for me.

An invisible universal traveler should probably be a neutrino, not a photon, but I was amazed to find this lyric. It is not the inspiration for the project, but I think ties in nicely. I don't want to talk about the inspiration yet because the project is still gestating and we want to let it cook. Talking about things too early takes some of the juice out of them for me.

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I saw the Elizabeth Holmes "You Can See Everything" movie last night along with most of America it seems. Devon Price, again, has written a good piece, Love Is Brainwashing, that I enjoyed.

Just a few quick thoughts for now. I was struck by this building "monuments to love" and some of the EH dialog in the prison visit scene. I've recently been learning a bit about a feature of borderline personality disorder (BPD) called favorite person. Her trust and love for Billy felt genuine. The film presents it as unearned, tho he obviously arrived at probably a low point in her life and helped to get her excited again about making her invention a reality.

By the end of the movie the trust in particular is becoming more and more unearned as Billy spirals without her focused intensity to guide him. It feels like the kind of attachment and potentially others in her life that could be seen as favorite person attachment. I looked quickly, since I know right next to nothing about psychology, and I'm not totally off track here, tho most focus on other BPD features. She presents as highly autistic too. But, what is on my mind is not arm chair diagnosis. There seems to be enough of that going on.

Blind spots in our own personality is what interested me most. You can never quite tell where EH's blind spots lie. The Abbott & Costello bit seems genuine enough and this would be a large blind spot. The professed lack of interest in money or in Billy's ever increasing acting out and acting on his own best interests, would also. Maybe even the inability to see the shape of her own personality that fits so nicely with these men in her life who try to borrow her intensity and focus and direct it.

The film hints at many diverging perspectives. Presenting evidence on this side of the line and then some on the other, dancing back and forth between master manipulator and psychologically fragile victimhood. But EH's presentation is consistent. She is the same person throughout the film. She is highly believable in her ability to hold a naive position that diverges from common sense reality. This does feel autistic to me and I can relate to several things going on here. The blind spots and the genuinely not understanding the rules that make up the consensus world-- even the energy when she talks about her ideas and trying to bring them into the world.

The other takeaway tho is the performative nature of personality. The parts of the movie that got super meta with layers of performance and Seyfried replacing EH in scenes started to make me very uncomfortable. For a highly masked autistic there is always a performative aspect going on, and I think everyone is performative at some level. But, my very rough understanding of how neurotypical brains work is that most conversations are lower stakes, with less conscious processing and less performance.

The irony is that highly masked autistics, who are by nature unskilled performers, are thrust or thrust themselves into this role so thoroughly that the performance and the personality become blended. We perform for survival in heightened states of anxiety and in very, very conscious ways, but some aspects of the compensation become part of our personality I think. It has to in order to pull off the performance. I don't think this is entirely clear in my head, but I will say confidently that it is the antithesis of a flow state. Whereas, a skilled performer I believe is in a flow state. They are not doing the conscious mental processing.

What a fish bowl to live in though. You sometimes forget this is a real person under this microscope, willingly presumably for this film. But, what a fish bowl.

Photo: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard by Bruce from Sydney, Australia, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; resized.