Jessica
Lake
It’s no fun when a septuagenarian has the rug pulled out from under her.
But that’s what happened.
Therapy let Jessica see that what had seemed metaphor was something inconceivable. How could she have been so wrong about so much:
“Picture this.”
“Remember when?”
“Trust your intuition.”
“I miss you.”
“It’s like I’m there.”
Childhood. Intuition. Love. Eventually, just who is Jessica?
What happens when your life story is a dictionary.
Who are you without a past you can revisit?
And then there was the trauma from first to twelfth grade.
Isolation.
Peer and adult abuse.
Severe punishment.
Self-denial.
Self-loathing.
Love as servitude.
Jessica first approached SDAM and trauma separately. One concerned what she could not remember. The other concerned what she could not forget—even when she could not remember it.
“Jessica does not do narratives.
She begins with an anomaly, then tracks it wherever it leads. Sometimes she loops through associated subjects in different pursuits. She continually reappraises a subject through changing lenses.
Jessica wrote these papers to stand alone, so some background recurs. Conclusions may change as the investigation advances. Earlier terminology and conclusions are retained so their evolution remains visible.
These are not maps.
These are discoveries.”
YOU AND I
You remember your life; I know mine. Two kinds of memory produce
profoundly different experiences of time, love, identity, imagination,
reading, and even an ordinary conversation.
SELF ARCHAEOLOGY
How do I write an autobiography about a life I cannot revisit?
I reconstruct it from what survives: facts, fragments, rules,
relationships, and the configurations they produced.
KNOWLEDGE IS KNOWLEDGE
Experiences disappear. What I learn remains. Autobiographical knowledge
is not privileged in my mind. Knowledge is my continuity.
That is how my life accumulates.
THE ABELIAN MIND
My knowledge is associative rather than chronological. Relationships
survive while the path that produced them disappears. A wonderful way
to organize knowledge. A terrible way to store a life.
THE MISSING MIDDLE
I can know A, then later know B, while losing the transformation
that connected them. Semantic compression preserves the resulting
structure while the history of its construction disappears.
ARE YOU CERTAIN?
Semantic conclusions can survive after their derivations disappear.
Certainty tells me an answer has emerged. It does not necessarily
tell me where the answer came from.
CREATING TIME
Without a felt past behind me or an imaginable future ahead,
change supplies a time axis. I don't experience time moving forward.
I experience change moving forward.
CONFIGURATION ≠ IDENTITY
What if there is no persistent object hiding behind my changing selves?
Instead of asking who I am, I can ask what constraints and rules
produce the configuration that exists now.
FLAT CONFIGURATION
One configuration. A collection of semantic rules: triggers and
deliverables. Some appear invariant. Others accumulate, weaken,
strengthen, compete, and reorganize expression.
INTRUSIVE VOICES
The voices were never people. They were never hidden selves.
They were the conscious sound of semantic rules becoming active
when their triggering conditions were satisfied.
WHY A CHANGELING?
Childhood changed much of my configuration. Yet one requirement
apparently refused negotiation. Perhaps I was never replaced.
Perhaps I was adaptable—except for one thing.
MYSELF, RE-ENGINEERED
I set out to understand myself and found an architecture: an engine,
semantic constraints, and a lifetime of compressed generators
from which understanding can be regenerated.
FREE WILL & STUFF
Whenever I look for the chooser, I find another decision process.
Perhaps choice is not made by someone above the machinery.
Perhaps the competition itself is the chooser.
LIKE WHAT YOU DO
I thought adaptability was a philosophy of life. Perhaps it reflects
something deeper. When reality changes, I adapt.
I don't decide. I become. I emerge.
LITTLE LOST ANGEL
I spent a lifetime measuring myself against the wrong exemplar.
Perhaps my gift was never holding fast to who I was.
Give me reality, hardship, or a role—and I adapt.
CONSTANT CRAVING
Experience sublimates, leaving knowledge behind. For someone without
autobiographical continuity, understanding may be more than useful.
It may be how I remain attached to my own life.
I AM A SWAN
I spent a lifetime failing at someone else's definition of belonging.
Perhaps nothing failed. I was not a duck with issues.
I was a swan in a pond without swans.
MEDICAL DRAMA
When someone I loved needed something, I often failed to recognize
myself as an equally legitimate claimant. Love cannot be servitude.
There must be two people in the room.
TWO WITH ONE STONE
Two adaptations that looked unrelated may be siblings.
I turned punishment inward and fulfillment outward:
the Pejorative Self and the Surrogate Loop.
SEX WITHOUT THE SEX
I spent fifty years asking what my sexual fantasies meant.
Sex was largely a prop. The engine sought maximum change,
difficult adaptation, and the moment the transformation became irreversible.
ROLE OF A LIFETIME
Perhaps these were stories about a shapeshifter who cannot choose
a shape. The antagonist supplies direction. The protagonist supplies
adaptation. Together, they can finally have an adventure.