This series has derailed slightly. I haven’t been spending much time in this dimension recently. I’m sure there’s not a soul alive who can blame me, given the present climate of the Human Realm. Checking out is just a means of self-preservation at this point, no matter where you fall on the Neurospectrum.

But the series thesis is still important to me. Among the things that can compel me to return to this dimensional frequency, Love is chief. I know that’s surprising to some, to whom I am an eternal mystery. When I socialize, I’m like Gandalf at a Hobbit party. Not a lot of people know how I got here, I don’t fit any of the furniture, and as polite and charming as I may be, I clearly don’t belong in this dimension.

The argument has been made recently, and I can attest to it personally, that Autistic people feel too much, that our delays and programming errors stem not from a lack of empathy or emotion, but from a surfeit^[1]. We are paralyzed by circumspection, and without a grounding element, it’s easy enough to get swept away.

So, to autistic folks, love is actually pretty important. Love is the only thing that makes us want to be in this dimension at all. If we didn’t love something, or someone, or a multitude of things, it would be pretty easy to stay in our respective dream ships^[2]. I have Disney+ and video games in here.

I previously mentioned the many different words that researchers and linguists had identified as categories of love, words that better illustrate the different ways in which we love the various external elements of our lives. The English language has done us all the disservice of smashing down these different concepts of attachment, affection, and emotion into the singular box labeled “love.” This isn’t fair at all. It’s confusing and frustrating, and leads to miscommunication and emotional injury.

So, when I think about relationships and connections, I find it more helpful to think in terms of feedback loops. What am I sending out, and what am I getting back? What are the impacts of either of these impulses, and are they of equitable value?

Within these metrics, categories begin to form, descriptors so disparate that the attempt to combine them causes my neural programs to crash. After all, I don’t love my mother the same way I love my dog, and I don’t love either of them the way I love pizza.

The feedback loops often exist whether we want them to or not. It’s just part of the burden of being a shambling mass of chemical reactions. Really, it’s a miracle that our cells have coalesced into a pattern at all.

The world has made me crazy and disorganized – more so than usual. As a result, I am spiraling toward the original thesis of this series like a Tasmanian devil on a water slide. Consider this 2/n of the series, and eventually I will get to my point.

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^[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/a-radical-new-autism-theory

^[2] Dream ship is, of course, my catchall term for temporal/dimensional logistics systems. How you manage your dimensional cohesion is between your consciousness and the atoms that have chosen to align with it.