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Sarah Mergen

@nekyias

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mapping the ineffable in the borderlands of mental health. Admin of CarlJungMemes on IG.

Los Angeles, CA
Joined August 2016
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
1 month
writing about metaphysics w/ the fun part of free bird stuck in my head
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
1 month
jung on his own institute in Zurich
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@james_f_thomas
James Frankie Thomas (of IDLEWILD)
1 month
I’m bored of this prompt, let’s flip it around: what line sounds like an online meme but is actually from classic literature or an old film? I nominate one from Singin’ in the Rain: “She’s so refined. I think I’ll kill myself.”
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
4 months
bc the results aren’t *for* the test taker
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@RatOrthodox
Ronny Fernandez 🔍⏸️
4 months
Why is the big five so much less compelling than the enneagram or mbti or mtg color wheel? Is it just me?
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
29 days
so crazy to me that most people I meet have never experienced derealization/depersonalization like … reality is just this solid thing for you huh? A tree is just a tree? that’s wild man
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
1 month
piles of research/testimony suggest there’s a usually a spatial quality to depression, where the WORLD comes to appear either objectively bad or as though it has lost some glimmer that can never be recaptured. It’s why I argue depression should be thought of as a place
@nosilverv
Guy
1 month
This will be “duh” to half of you and revealing to the other half but it used to be the case that, for me, I wasn’t sad. No. The world was sad and I was objectively assessing it. My emotion was projected onto the whole world and then “objectively” assessed as a property of it.…
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
7 months
does anyone on this web site have any interesting thoughts on “ ADHD” ?
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
17 days
I will simply use nonviolent communications on the bear
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
4 months
YUP “I must change myself” is still self-focus/ruminative and perpetuates the problem. “I must relax my understanding of what is real, valuable, &/or necessary” is more appropriate
@Temenosis
Temenosis
4 months
The depression is a message, however, keep in mind that “I must change something about myself” may actually be a symptom not a solution. What’s behind that need to change? Perhaps a horrifying conviction that you are irredeemably wrong/bad and must change yourself, but cannot.
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
4 months
hey TPOT if pain is objectively bad why do I like eating food so spicy it makes me see god
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
4 months
still probably my favorite oc meme
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
1 month
(pretending for a moment that these are two completely different things) how would you distinguish between a person with a “no one understands me” complex & someone who is genuinely less intelligible than most people?
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
3 months
it’s not the people who follow their dreams that succeed but people who recognize patterns, can’t unsee them & can’t rest until knowledge of the pattern is put to good use or materialized in some way
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
1 month
@TheBookMaven @DrAnnieHickox saying this with a lot of love, but what you are experiencing is withdrawal, not the return of mental illness. Dependency is not the same as addiction—it’s very easy to forget to take these meds because they are not habit forming, but your body IS still dependent on them
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
5 months
for the dry jan people unable to enjoy the Josh wine meme trend may I humbly present:
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
2 months
@the_wilderless best example that genuinely fits the description imo is normal people
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
22 days
man social media will make you feel like the scum of the earth for not wording a philosophical concept perfectly… for failing to include every bit of nuance in your post… & then meanwhile your patrons are like “your work makes me feel less alone & like there’s hope”
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
14 days
when people get really upset that something is “overly complex,” “too artsy,” “trying too hard to sound ____,” a disappointing amount of the time it’s bc they’re grappling with having to imagine audiences more important to the creator than themselves
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
1 year
the fursonafication of anima/animus discourse is why some wisdom should be protected by initiatory rites. “my pfp is what she looks like” no it is not. Florence Pugh cannot be your anima. you have made that up. you also clearly used to watch yugioh & liked the pharaoh spirit part
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
2 months
phenomenology would be such a pretty name for an unconscionable girls clothing brand
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
5 months
@VividVoid_ what’s so paradoxical about this too is that maintaining the victim narrative actually prevents you from finding real self forgiveness & inner authority? you can’t forgive yourself until you’ve acknowledged there’s something to forgive
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
4 months
my entire model of overcoming depression could be boiled down to the act of replacing or mitigating the need for self esteem with the building up of “world-esteem” or the consecration of consciousness & its objects. Funny how revelation only reaches us through the obvious
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
2 months
I know v little about the word jhana other than that it involves self induced pleasure & some people get there faster—I feel bad for being ignorant but also it means TPOT reads as a massive literal circlejerk & that makes me giggle. like what are u guys up to over thereeee
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
1 month
earned a block and a reprimand for unsolicited advice from the thread OP—a psychologist w/ 30 years of experience, apparently. The state of mental health care is so bleak. I’m not even anti-meds, but not informing a patient of withdrawal isn’t just unethical, it’s malpractice
@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
1 month
@TheBookMaven @DrAnnieHickox saying this with a lot of love, but what you are experiencing is withdrawal, not the return of mental illness. Dependency is not the same as addiction—it’s very easy to forget to take these meds because they are not habit forming, but your body IS still dependent on them
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
2 months
you ever get so excited to read something you lose the ability to read
@NTFabiano
Nicholas Fabiano, MD
2 months
This is a map of repetition among all symptoms in the DSM-5. 🧵1/10
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
2 months
@sighswoon I’ve been summoned (yes read him but do it when you have burning questions, feel called to work w/ the mystical side of the thinking mind, and/or are looking for a new path/teacher—not out of obligation! he’s not helpful for all paths)
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
4 months
@sighswoon yesss literally wrote this essay one time on how “toxic” actually has no concrete meaning beyond the metaphors associated with it—e.g. we’re supposed to “cut out” “toxins” from our diet. It’s like a one word spell that makes it “valid” to dispose of someone w/o specifying why
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
2 months
wifejak is the divine image produced by the transcendent function in response to the tension of the opposites. Jung predicted the resolution to the 2020s gender wars
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
1 month
“both/and” type of girl in an “either/or” type of world, making friends with “neither/nor” type of people—reaching toward the “not only/but also” type of understanding
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
3 months
I just don’t ever want to be that person who encounters someone who has dedicated their life to helping people/making the world a better place, and decides that they deserve to go to hell for getting 5% of their argument or personal life decisions wrong
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
4 months
aw man always so humbling when people independently share my work—thank you!! first two eps are free on Spotify, the rest are, for now, patreon exclusive but I’d like to make them more accessible the moment I can 🕯️
@JakeOrthwein
Jake Orthwein
4 months
I’ve just discovered @nekyias ’s Katabasis Anabasis podcast and it is ludicrously good It advances a new theory of depression by way of a fascinating exploration of Jung, myth, meaning & metaphysics Going to attach some links below for my own notetaking:
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
7 months
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
1 year
the greater part of depression lies in a feeling of impossibility. Usually an attachment that we can’t let go of & also can’t achieve. When a problem becomes impossible we either need a miracle or we need to reframe the problem—questioning assumptions is faster than a miracle
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
2 months
the secret pleasure in losing your voice… what is that called
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
3 months
FIVE HUNDRED PATRONS OH MY GOD THANK YOU I AM SO FUCKING GRATEFUL
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
3 months
17 but yeah, there are literally entire bodies of knowledge that are inaccessible w/o direct experience
@touchmoonflower
༺ 𐂂 ༻
3 months
i dont know personally i was 16 years old on 250 mics of acid when i first experienced the prelinguistic stratum of thought and nothing i’ve experienced since has caused me to question it
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
5 months
I like how people come on this website and make up just fucking ridiculous rules about How To Be Good & Right & Perfect —delirious takes completely out of sync w/ anything real, unaware (???) that there are people who don’t think about this shit and are twice as happy for it
@milky_selena
SELENA (the inevitable) 🐆🦈🃏
5 months
men should be able to cry in front of their woman is the PC answer but it is completely untrue in reality. malicious falsehood. any man with sense knows that it is wrong to put his woman in that position. you know this is true if you, as a man, have done this in the past then…
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
4 months
there is no good answer to “where should I start with Jung?” until you have an answer to “well, what do you want to know?” academia has us trained to “force yourself through the basics,” but for Jung that would either be the red book or CW XX (the general index)
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
4 months
how do you guys define trauma? not like clinically but in everyday usage—like when you refer to your trauma, what are you talking about?
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
2 months
curiosity has been the replacement for nearly 90% of the negative emotions I used to feel
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
2 months
@the_wilderless probably tmi but learning to approach luteal phase from this perspective was like going god mode
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
22 days
I genuinely believe all hatred is truly downstream of misunderstanding
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
3 months
yes—experiencing the self as an unsafe place is analogous to standing on the edge of a cliff; you’d be hard pressed to pay attention to a phone call when in imminent danger. Similarly, the world itself loses perceived significance bc our attention is imprisoned internally
@OrphicCapital
Orpheas
3 months
thinking abt this again — depression(-like) symptoms can also arise out of a loss of trust in the self & one's capacity to follow through rebuilding self-trust can also then be treated as an RPG, where you gradually complete bigger & bigger quests in doing what you said you will
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
2 months
if you’re dogmatically against the idea that thinking can bring about transcendent experience then either your definition of thinking is too narrow or you’re not thinking about the right stuff
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
3 months
dying at this comment on my first video interview (also pls go check it out, it’s on Jung’s mysticism and a lot more):
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
5 months
this is just such a lovely idea/thing to do, man. hello everyone!
@VividVoid_
Vivid Void
5 months
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
1 month
in light of all the Sky Posting wanted to share my solar events pictures, which are very special to me bc they were both captured on film/via the ever reliable Nikon F2
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
7 months
@OrphicCapital it’s the pattern recognition for me 😞 like a toddler losing its shit when the triangle thing goes through the triangle hole
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
1 month
I am usually very cautious about wading into the waters of medical discourse, or giving unsolicited “advice,” but it’s extremely dangerous to not know the difference between withdrawal and & depression symptoms. Dr Hickox should know that. This isn’t even controversial.
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
2 months
the level of meaning I derive from my work/research has made me less afraid of death! 😎
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
1 month
also I intuitively understand but am having trouble articulating why the “no one understands me” complex is considered juvenile ? Any thoughts on that also appreciated
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
5 months
you can turn an entire thesis into a meme & people will still have a meltdown bc you made fun of them for drinking “buzzballz”
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
2 months
obsession is the key, not to everything, but to most left brain/external adaptation tasks. if you don’t get obsessed with something new you’ll stay obsessed w/ whatever you’ve been thinking about already
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
3 months
internet-girl-mean & internet-boy-mean are such wildly different things!! both are usually just bad faith readings but girl mean usually tries to bring in ethics (You Are A Bad Person For This Take) & boy mean tries to convince you that you’re dumb or cringe lmao
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
5 months
this exact sentiment is one of the very secret truths hidden in Jung’s most esoteric book on alchemy (just did an entire episode on this but it still makes me need to stare at a wall to get my bearings when I think about it too hard)
@lauren_wilford
Lauren Wilford
5 months
the best case for exercise I currently have is that experiencing your body being able to do something it could not do before is a visceral, undeniable message to your subconscious that change in your life is possible
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
1 month
@AaronEstel it’s useful to consider suicide as a response to perceived impossibility rather than pain. Literally a breakdown in the perception (not the belief) of possibility itself. Like being locked in a room & your friend telling you “just go through the door!” but you can’t see any door
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
3 months
quick guys it’s Easter & my friend is coming out of a coma today, what’s like the funniest but least traumatizing thing to do when he wakes up
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
2 months
ppl who hate their birthdays dislike the added degree of self focus & ppl who love their birthdays find that the structure of bday celebration relieves the conditions that ordinarily put them into self focus (or just don’t struggle much w/ self focus to begin with)
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
4 months
what trying to solve depression will do to a mf:
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
3 months
anyone have any tips on dealing w/ hyperfocus? it has characterized my entire life although I don’t have adhd. Attentional switching usually requires a period of mind wandering beforehand & then I get massive flow, which is great for big tasks but terrible for small ones
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
5 months
will the shame Go Away if I get less weird or do I have to move through the weird. take it to its logical conclusion. you get what I’m saying right
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
28 days
@cosmictealatte that’s interesting!!! For me it was a very clear BEFORE / AFTER sort of situation, but I have always wondered if the ~sudden~ loss of normal reality/feeling imprisoned in an alien world was part of what made it so harrowing
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
1 month
@soundrotator there are 6 basic cocktail formats (old fashioned, martini/manhattan, margarita, side car, high ball/spritz & flip). cheapest way to make interesting cocktails is to understand the logic of how/why those formats work & then add herbs/spices or sub different citrus !
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
4 months
WHERE is my MOTH EMOJI
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
3 months
how do I tell the IRS my car burst into flames? TurboTax is like “oh so you sold a business asset” & it’s like… no, I got out of a lien by telling the tow truck guy I could only pay the tow fee by selling my dead relatives prized film camera & he settled for just the pink slip
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
2 months
“stress response” I think leads to a framing of the problem in which depression should be treated by removing the stress—“breakdown in adaptation” imo is more appropriate, in that insufficiently stressful lives can also trigger depression (ex: small-worldedness)
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
5 months
once again time to reorganize the home library bc I keep pulling books for reference & messing up the already arbitrary ordering system
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
5 months
I read this letter that marx (age 19) casually wrote to his dad my senior year of uni & to this day an untold number of my private opinions abt the world came from the realization that I didn’t know a single person my age w/ such a strong command of voice & thought
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
5 months
i make memes on ig
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
2 months
when the wine bar got near total darkness & boards of canada playing & on the menu there’s a dish that’s just tomatoes but they’re the best tomatoes you’ve ever had
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
15 days
just set bf up with a little personalized concert series for his birthday 🥲
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
1 month
@hopefulcynic206 I promise I read other books, but yes lol
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
4 months
alright which one of you meditation bros can tell me something abt incubation (thinking in the vein of p kingsley bc that’s how I’ve encountered it, unsure where else it might be taught)
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
4 months
update: I just needed to deep clean my living space
@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
5 months
will the shame Go Away if I get less weird or do I have to move through the weird. take it to its logical conclusion. you get what I’m saying right
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
4 months
watching the 3hr “nonviolent communications” on YouTube with my BoyFriend. I promised him we did not have to watch more than 20 minutes because there’s puppets and singing. but it’s been an hour and he’s concentrated now standing 2 feet from the tv with his arms crossed
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
14 days
it’s honestly so fucking funny to me watching people get mad at things they don’t understand. academics getting mad at mystics, mystics getting mad at academics, that entire discourse of “no one actually LIKES the taste of alcohol, they’re all pretending” 🙂‍↔️
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
14 days
if they *are* able to understand that these more important audiences exist, often there’s like this imagined conspiracy? “None of you ACTUALLY know what you’re saying/reading/watching. You’re all just PRETENDING so you can sound [smart/interesting/cool/better than me]”
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
2 months
truly been testing this for a minute
@KaliYugaSurfCo
Kali-Yuga Surf Club 🏄🏽‍♂️🏴‍☠️
2 months
How much Dionysus can your Apollo hold in tension without breaking? That is the question
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
4 months
IT IS SUCH A BEAUTIFUL DAY TO LIVE IN A GARAGE IN LOS ANGELES
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
4 months
travis kelce has the most tragic aura
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
5 months
divine feminine this divine masculine that… but nobody wants to talk about how men take 30 mins to shit bc they lack an embodied pushing instinct
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
2 months
@the_wilderless lmao, YES!! as long as you don’t get identified w/ the experience 🙃
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
4 months
when people ask me this question I always rec his autobiography, but any overview of his thought is good. It doesn’t really matter—the man was circumambulating ineffable ideas & the only real point of entry is whatever grips your soul
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
4 months
what needs aren’t getting met when someone comments/says “cringe?” like clearly the *feeling* is secondhand embarrassment/disgust/discomfort/maybe anger, but what is that person actually needing? What’s the silent plea there?
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
18 days
@algekalipso AHHH!!! If any commenter knows of any qualitative studies on this please god post them!!! I can only offer a rec to Matthew Ratcliffe’s Experiences of Depression, which is on the phenomenology of unmedicated depression (would make a really good comparison piece)
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
1 month
@exgenesis I’ve written over 200k words on how this exactly causes depression, but beyond that a lot of our current intractable problems imo are downstream of the pre-political stance that reality=truth (too much to fit, but ecological collapse & idpol spring to mind)
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
4 months
@sighswoon the QTs had me laughing until I choked. wasn’t going to say anything but so sorry all these people cRiNgE when they see ..what? a heartfelt expression of love?? like oh no theres a secret emotion u haven’t experienced, clearly, better publicly express ur distress abt it
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
2 months
we don’t know what our minds can do. We’ve been taught exclusively to use them to “grasp,” but they can also gesture. Thinking is not the problem, we’ve just forgotten how to think (also the rest of this thread is super insightful)
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
7 months
@cxgonzalez One amazing thinker who I am always pushing on people is Federico Campagna, his basic idea is that our modern metaphysics is dominated by an axiom that reality=truth, & bc truth has to be something put into words, then reality=language. He posits the existence of the ineffable—
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
3 months
and then there’s schizo mean which accuses you of a more metaphysical genre of evil than girl mean. like your vibes are satanic
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
2 months
it’s just like asking “why did you do that” genuinely instead of rhetorically. Same goes for most rhetorical questions (“why god??? Why does this always happen to me???”)
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
4 months
calling manipulation out has become the go to move in conflict, but it should really be last resort. Not bc people should be allowed to get away w/ horrible behavior, but because it literally doesn’t work unless there’s already established trust. Valid instinct, but ineffective
@losingcontrol23
𝔫𝔞𝔟 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔩𝔬𝔬𝔰𝔢 𝔱𝔬𝔫𝔤𝔰, 𝔰𝔎𝔦𝔭𝔭𝔢r
4 months
when you can see what a person is doing with language but it is not explicitly a property of the words they are saying, you are now bearing unspeakable knowledge about that being
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
6 months
THIS is what people misunderstand about projection/jungian psych in general. It’s not usually just that you’re bothered by things that are secretly true about yourself, it’s that you’re bothered by unmanifest potentiality embodied in the other
@the_wilderless
River Kenna
6 months
the cruddiest, most repetitive Twitter discourse runs on FOMO Everyone makes life choices that remove the possibility of other choices, Everyone has trade-offs, and everyone, to some degree, kiiiinda wants the benefits of what they’re giving up (even if overall the choice they…
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
6 months
bc direct experience as a means of encountering reality (and therefore reality itself in many ways) has completely broken down. fact-checked & communally approved phrases/categories/language/takes are the only pillars holding up a navigable world and structures of meaning
@adamisfigurin
adam
6 months
@image_origins why are all the kids constantly confused about whether things are real
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
1 month
@HolyFoolAbroad deeply curious as to whether this^ is the flip side to the perhaps not equally but still vaguely concerning obsessive-boy-mom approach? “All men have failed me & so I shall create one that is pure/innocent & he will be all mine forever” devouring mother archetype etc etc
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
4 months
@Jeanvaljean689 ahhhh it’s so fun encountering people who have read or are familiar with both!! Also really fascinating to compare mcghilchrist w/ Federico Campagna’s T&M, just way too many connections for there to not be something to it
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
2 months
realizing that my entire mission in life is downstream of this scene
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@nekyias
Sarah Mergen
4 months
this is still the funniest sentence I’ve ever read
@steph_mcca
steph
5 months
on top of everything else i fear I may have an unethical dentist
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