i put my hand on a stove to see if i still bleed

(and nothing hurts anymore i feel kind of free)

(O is my research advisor / manager)

O: did you ever figure out the cause of the stroke symptoms?
V: not really… my blood sugar and cholesterol are a bit high but not dangerous. it could’ve been caused by holes in my heart? or just general stress
O: oh, have you been stressed recently? let me know if there’s anything i can do to help
V: yeah i have but it’s unrelated to research, so not really stuff you can help with
O: you know i care about you outside of research, right?
O: like, we met ten years ago and have only been working together for the last year
V: oh
V: a little stressed about love
V: but mostly stressed because i feel like i’m running out of time to do good work
V: which i know is silly. but like, my housemates are my age and working on all these really cool companies. and i wish i had evidence that i was capable of doing something like that, because so far i haven’t worked on anything great in my life?
O: didn’t you get multiple gold medals at the IMO? is that not great?
V: i don’t think so
V: i started learning math really early on, but i don’t think my results conditioned on starting early were that good
V: it feels like i often underperformed when it mattered most? like, in 2019 i had four hours to solve a single problem and didn’t. i’ve always thought someone in that position should’ve been able to do better
O: this is a very interesting standard to have
V: i guess gold medals are also just not something i value? they’re not actually useful
O: what about the work you did for the Transluce launch? i thought that was pretty great and useful
V: i think the launch went well but would’ve gone fine without me? worst case it would’ve been delayed a few weeks
V: maybe it’s because i wasn’t driving anything, i mostly had a supporting role in D’s project and K’s project. every great project i’ve been a part of has been driven by someone else
O: well, you’re driving your current project. what would it take for you to feel happy with that in, say, a couple months?
V: i’m not sure… i think i’ll know when i see it?
O: i’m worried that if you don’t define what success looks like now then in a few months you’ll look back and find something to be unhappy with even if things went well
V: that’s fair. but i think ultimately it is just about whether i feel happy with the work or not?
V: like, i used to care about how many likes i got on my blog posts, or how viral they went. and then i wrote a bunch of posts that never went viral but it turned out i was happy with them anyway because i decided they were good. so nowadays i feel like that’s basically all there is
O: sure, i still think it would be helpful for you to have intermediate goals you’re happy with
O: i believe in your ability to do good work, and i think we can work together to get you to a state you’re happy with. but it seems like you have a really sparse reward signal right now, which makes it difficult to optimize against

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(T is a friend)

T: have you been meeting new people recently?
V: kind of… but i feel like i have a problem where the type of person i attract is disjoint from the type of person i’m looking for
T: ooh, what are the two types?
V: okay this is going to be a really inaccurate oversimplification
V: i’m looking for people who are very generative and know what they want
V: but i don’t have those qualities myself, and i think people with those qualities are usually interested in other people who also have those qualities
V: and i think i attract people who score even worse on these axes than me
V: for example, sometimes i write about being confused and that’s validating to read for people who are more confused than me, so i often attract confused readers
T: i see
T: i don’t really understand why you say you’re not generative or don’t know what you want though
T: from my perspective it seems like you create lots of stuff and know what to do?
T: you blog pretty consistently and people like your posts. when you decided you wanted to build a ddr pad you did that. right afterwards you decided you wanted to write a short story and did that too. and now you’re working on [REDACTED]
V: hmm, maybe i’m looking for a bigger-picture direction and view all of those as pretty small-scale projects?
T: maybe
T: but i wonder if you actually already have all the qualities you’re looking for and are just misrepresenting them for some reason

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(B, C, and D are three of my housemates)

V: i feel like there hasn’t been enough conflict in my life recently
V: all my friendships are super chill, which is very pleasant but makes it harder to identify growth directions
V: like how friction helps you learn more about yourself?
B: we can fight right now if you want
C: ooh vincent roast session!
V: ok sure
B: how honest do you want me to be?
V: whatever you want, i think it’s quite hard to hurt my feelings
…
B: your jokes aren’t funny, sometimes you’re loud and annoying, you neg people too much
D: here are specific instances X Y Z of those behaviors
B: also you should go to therapy
V: ok thanks, this is all helpful to know
C: you’re more open on your blog than in-person
V: i am working on this but yes i agree it’s an issue
C: you don’t believe in yourself enough
V: yeah it’s hard
C: that’s weird though? i find it easy to believe in you
B: they probably have some unresolved trauma to work through
V: probably
B: is there a reason you don’t have a therapist?
V: i think i can solve my problems without a therapist? because i’m very self-aware and good at working through feelings
V: when i need outside perspectives my mentors usually give very helpful non-technical feedback. also i only really became aware of my feelings last year and have already managed to solve so many problems since then
B: have you read the IFS self-therapy book?
V: no but i’m familiar with IFS and people have done it on me
B: if you’re serious about doing things on your own then you should read it, i don’t think having experienced IFS is a substitute for the book

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(an attempt at IFS that turned into something else)

V: you have some really weird self-talk going on
V: your friends and housemates believe in you. you work with the goat research advisor and he believes in you. people who have every right to be upset at you, like your ex and your former best friend, say you’re the most thoughtful person they’ve ever met
V: so why the fuck do you still not believe in yourself?
V1: i don’t know
V1: i really appreciate that people believe in me
V1: but i don’t view that as evidence for being competent?
V1: i guess in my mind the only real evidence that you’re capable of doing hard things is if you’ve already done them
V: yeah but then as soon as you’ve done the hard thing you stop counting it as hard
V1: true
V1: i’m not doing that on purpose though, things genuinely stop feeling hard the moment i’ve finished them
V: i understand, it just sounds like with this approach you’ll never feel capable of doing hard things
V: though i’m starting to think evidence of competence isn’t the real thing you’re looking for
V: that framing doesn’t really make sense? eg. see the line about you don’t become capable of doing hard things before doing them; you become capable of doing hard things by doing them
V1: yeah i know. i think deep down it’s not really about competence. maybe it has more to do with feeling good enough in some broader sense?
V: yeah, you also do this thing where you keep telling yourself that you’re uncreative, unfocused, uninteresting. what’s the point of doing that?
V1: i agree there’s no point, in the sense that telling myself this is not helpful. it’s just a reflex at this point
V1: or unreasonable standards maybe, since i’m always comparing against my most creative / focused / interesting friends
V: okay i’m going to focus on the feeling of inadequacy until i find the child part
…
V: i’m coming up on a bunch of memories of my parents criticizing me as a kid. how did that make you feel?
V2: upset? uncared for? confused? incompetent?
V1: wait i don’t care about my parents’ approval though
V1: they have really dumb values
V1: like if i listened to their preferences i would be living in nyc and working in finance and avoiding {ai, writing on the internet, coliving houses} and spending my free time going on hinge dates
V: i agree that you truly, genuinely do not care about your parents’ approval anymore
V: and i think that’s a great thing
V: quite literally all the best parts of your current life have come downstream of realizing you can stop valuing what your parents think
V: but that wasn’t always the case. the child version of you did need their parents’ approval, even if you no longer do, and we never actually acknowledged that until now
V: those things can linger and continue affecting you for a long time
V: i’m sorry you had to feel that, V2. i think i understand though
V2: the criticism was really overwhelming
V2: i think the actual content was reasonable, but it was delivered in a way that made me think i was doing a bad job and should feel bad about it
V2: and it was always framed as “here’s a thing you’re bad at” instead of “here’s how your life would be better if you improved at this thing” so the incentive to improve wasn’t clear, it was all just problems i had
V1: right
V1: at some point i remember thinking to myself - i’m never going to be perfect; if i fix this thing my parents are complaining about they’ll just find another thing to start complaining about instead, so i might as well just not fix anything
V1: actually i remember having that thought many times throughout childhood
V1: maybe that’s where some of the self-talk comes from - i’m not good enough and never will be, and fixing any individual problem won’t change that so i shouldn’t bother
V: do you guys still believe that?
V2: a lot less than i used to. i feel more cared for now
V1: and i think i’m learning to see flaws in terms of improvements instead of problems
V: i think you guys are doing great!
V: and i will keep checking in on you to see how you’re feeling
V1: do you ever worry that we’re going in circles without actually making progress though?
V: a little bit
V: i’m aware that last fall i wrote about escaping the scarcity mindset and this spring i wrote about uncovering my internalized pessimism, both of which are pointing at the same issue
V1: it seems like this comes up almost exactly once every six months
V: it’s not the same thing every six months though. each time it happens we understand the problem at a deeper level and begin addressing it closer to the origin
V: to me it feels like my heart thrashing against the walls of a cage it’s trapped in. it started off not even knowing there was a cage, and now every once in a while it comes into contact with a wall and learns a bit more about the shape of the cage, places where it’s weak, places where it won’t budge
V1: and?
V: i don’t know, maybe one day we’ll punch a hole in the wall. or we’ll see the cage clearly enough to realize the door was unlocked the whole time and we can just leave
V1: how long will that take?
V1: i’m worried it’s not happening quickly enough
V: me too
V: but look how far we’ve come in a year!

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thank you to a large number of friends for helping me organize my thoughts on this topic, including AG AH AY FX GZ JS JX JZ SZ TW and possibly others i forgot