Identifying Scare Quotes

The majority of people have successfully alienated themselves from change; they tediously arrange their lives into a familiar pattern, they give themselves to normalcy, they are proud if they are able to follow in auspicious footsteps set before them, they take pride in always coloring inside the lines and they feel secure if they belong to a batch of others who are like them. Now, if familiar patterns bore you, if normalcy passes before you unnoticed, if you want to create your own footsteps in the earth and leave your own handprints on the skies, if you are the one who doesn't mind the lines in the coloring book as much as others do, and perchance you do not cling to a flock for you to identify with, then you must be ready for adversity. If you are something extraordinary, you are going to always shock others and while they go about existing in their mundaneness which they call success, you're going to be flying around crazy in their skies and that scares them. People are afraid of change, afraid of being different, afraid of doing things and thinking things that aren't a part of their checkerboard game of a life. They only know the pieces and the moves in their games, and that's it. You're always going to find them in the place that you think you're going to find them in, and every time they think about you, you're going to give them a heart attack.

All problems with writing and performing come from fear. Fear of exposure, fear of weakness, fear of lack of talent, fear of looking like a fool for trying, for even thinking you could write in the first place. It's all fear. If we didn't have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way. A lot of studies say that despite all our fears in this country - death, war, guns, illness - our biggest fear is public speaking. What I am doing right now. And when people are asked to identify which kind of public speaking they are most afraid of, they check the improvisation box. So improvisation is the number-one fear in America. Forget a nuclear winter or an eight-point nine earthquake or another Hitler. It's improv. Which is funny, because aren't we just improvising all day long? Isn't our whole life just one long improvisation? What are we so scared of?

Self-regulation can be taught to many kids who cycle between frantic activity and immobility. In addition to reading, writing, and arithmetic, all kids need to learn self-awareness, self-regulation, and communication as part of their core curriculum. Just as we teach history and geography, we need to teach children how their brains and bodies work. For adults and children alike, being in control of ourselves requires becoming familiar with our inner world and accurately identifying what scares, upsets, or delights us.

The war mentality represents an unfortunate confluence of ignorance, fear, prejudice, and profit. ... The ignorance exists in its own right and is further perpetuated by government propaganda. The fear is that of ordinary people scared by misinformation but also that of leaders who may know better but are intimidated by the political costs of speaking out on such a heavily moralized and charged issue. The prejudice is evident in the contradiction that some harmful substances (alcohol, tobacco) are legal while others, less harmful in some ways, are contraband. This has less to do with the innate danger of the drugs than with which populations are publicly identified with using the drugs. The white and wealthier the population, the more acceptable is the substance. And profit. If you have fear, prejudice, and ignorance, there will be profit.

If you have a son, how will you love him? She is pacing the living room, while the Thanksgiving Day Parade plays behind her, a montage of inflated cartoon bodies, floating slow down 6th Avenue, smiles painted onto their faces. I consider not responding. I consider explaining that I can love him and not trust him. I consider saying that I won’t love him at all. Just to scare her. Instead, I say, If I am ever murdered, like, body found in a ditch, mouth stuffed with dirt, stocking around my neck, identified by my toenails, please don’t go looking for a guilty woman. ("My Grandmother Asks Why I Don't Trust Men")

Well, all speaking is difficult, whether peril attends it or not. Sometimes peril to the body, sometimes a more intimate, miniature, invisible peril to the soul. When to speak at all is a betrayal of something, perhaps a something not even identified, hiding inside the chambers of the body like a scared refugee in a site of war.

Where the slanting forest eaves, Shingled tight with greenest leaves, Sweep the scented meadow-sedge, Let us snoop along the edge; Let us pry in hidden nooks, Laden with our nature books, Scaring birds with happy cries, Chloroforming butterflies, Rooting up each woodland plant, Pinning beetle, fly, and ant, So we may identify What we've ruined, by-and-by.

You can grieve for me the week before I die, if I’m scared and hurting, but when I gasp that last fleeting breath and my immortal soul flees to heaven, I’m going to be jumping over fire hydrants down the golden streets, and my biggest concern, if I have any, will be my wife back here grieving. When I die, I will be identified with Christ’s exaltation. But right now, I’m identified with His affliction.

Many people are so identified with their shame-and-pain stories that they’re scared to shift out of that identity; they would rather remain miserable than take the risk of stepping into a new story. Remember: resistance clings to the familiar at all costs, even if what’s familiar is making you miserable.

(My Jungian therapist taught me something that I find quite comforting—that although it feels like the palette of human feelings is limitless, in fact every emotional shade, like every color, is derived from just a few primary emotions: sad, mad, glad, scared. For those just learning an emotional vocabulary, as I was, it’s less overwhelming to learn to identify only four feelings.)

We’re all scared. Yes, all of us. I’m afraid every day. If I’m not afraid, I must not be doing something I need to be doing. I believe that when you’re doing important work, you feel fear because you don’t want to fail. The challenge is to not let the fear stop you from doing the work that will enable you to achieve your goals. You need to recognize the fear for what it is and allow your “why” (your compelling vision) for what you’re doing be bigger than the fear itself. So where do you start? Identify your fears. As they say, "name it to tame it." Then, move forward.

One is One Heart, you bully, you punk, I'm wrecked, I'm shocked stiff. You? you still try to rule the world--though I've got you: identified, starving, locked in a cage you will not leave alive, no matter how you hate it, pound its walls, & thrill its corridors with messages. Brute. Spy. I trusted you. Now you reel & brawl in your cell but I'm deaf to your rages, your greed to go solo, your eloquent threats of worse things you (knowing me) could do. You scare me, bragging you're a double agent since jailers are prisoners' prisoners too. Think! Reform! Make us one. Join the rest of us, and joy may come, and make its test of us.

With the help of your therapist or healing ally, you can identify who makes you feel uneasy, concerned, scared, or defensive.

Children have no way of identifying a lack of emotional intimacy in their relationship with a parent. It isn’t a concept they have. And it’s even less likely that they can understand that their parents are emotionally immature. All they have is a gut feeling of emptiness, which is how a child experiences loneliness. With a mature parent, the child’s remedy for loneliness is simply to go to the parent for affectionate connection. But if your parent was scared of deep feelings, you might have been left with an uneasy sense of shame for needing comforting.

Artificiality is the reality of the mind. Mind has never been and will never have a given nature. It becomes mind by positing itself as the artefact of its own concept. By realizing itself as the artefact of its own concept, it becomes able to transform itself according to its own necessary concept by first identifying, and then replacing or modifying, its conditions of realization, disabling and enabling constraints. Mind is the craft of applying itself to itself. The history of the mind is therefore quite starkly the history of artificialization. Anyone and anything caught up in this history is predisposed to thoroughgoing reconstitution. Every ineffable will be theoretically disenchanted and every scared will be practically desanctified.

LJ felt a strange pull in her heart that she could only identify as pity — pity not because they were so scared that they might be told to leave, but because she couldn’t understand why they would want to stay so badly.

Imagine you're trying to find someone, or even you're trying to find yourself, but you have no senses, now way to know where the walls are, which way is forward or backward, what is water and what is air. You're senseless and shapeless--you feel like you can only describe what you are by identifying what you're not, and you're floating around in a body with no control. You don't get to decide who you like or where you live or when you eat or what you fear. You're just stuck in there, totally alone in this darkness. That's scary. This,' I said, and turned on the flashlight, 'This is control. This is power. There may be rats and spiders and whatever the hell. But we shine the light on them, not the other way around. We know where the walls are, which way is in and which way is out. This,' I said, turning off my light again, 'is what I feel like when I'm scared" (263).

NEUROBIOLOGISTS HAVE IDENTIFIED ‘mirroring’ as one of the neural routes activated in the brains of primates – including us – during interaction with others. In a connected age, the mirrors get bigger. When people feel scared after a horrific event, that fear spreads like a digital wildfire. When people feel angry, that anger breeds. Even when people with contradictory opinions to us exhibit an emotion, we can feel a similar one. For instance, if someone is furious at you online for something, you are unlikely to adopt their opinion but it is quite likely you will catch their fury. You see it every day on social media: people arguing with each other, entrenching each other’s opposing view, yet also mirroring each other’s emotional state.

My job as a therapist is to help victims of trauma understand that they are not to blame. They are not responsible for the bad things that happened to them as children, nor are they responsible for the personal problems that developed as a result. What they are responsible for is fixing those problems. This can only be done by bravely facing the past, identifying the effects that the past has on the present, and working through all the painful emotional baggage.- Scared Selfless

So, to take just one example: during the great Ebola panic of 2014, only one person died in the United States, but a poll in November of that year found Americans identifying it as a more urgent priority than any other disease, “including cancer or heart disease, which together account for nearly half of all U.S. deaths each year.” In fact, in a typical year more Americans are literally killed by their own furniture than are killed by terrorists, but when you ask them, they will tell you they are far more scared of terrorism than of nearly any other threat.

When we regress into the outer critic, we obsess about the unworthiness [imperfection] and treacherousness [dangerousness] of others. Unconsciously, we do this to avoid emotional investment in relationships. The outer critic developed in reaction to parents who were too dangerous to trust. The outer critic helped us to be hyperaware of the subtlest signal that our parents were deteriorating into their most dangerous behaviors. Over time the outer critic grew to believe that anyone and everyone would inevitably turn out to be as untrustworthy as our parents. Now, in situations where we no longer need it, the outer critic alienates us from others. It attacks others and scares them away, or it builds fortresses of isolation whose walls are laundry lists of their exaggerated shortcomings. In an awful irony, the critic attempts to protect us from abandonment by scaring us further into it. If we are ever to discover the comfort of soothing connection with others, the critic’s dictatorship of the mind must be broken. The outer critic’s arsenal of intimacy-spoiling dynamics must be consciously identified and gradually deactivated.

How do you feel?” Claudia Jewett Jarratt (1994) recommends a strategy to begin helping children identify their emotions correctly in a technique called “The Five Faces.” Five cards with simple drawings of faces depicting sad, mad, happy, scared, and lonely are used to facilitate conversations about which feeling the person has. To learn the “game,” the toddler might be asked, “Which face shows how you feel about having macaroni and cheese for lunch?” Gradually, the cards are used to talk about more important emotionally reactive situations. Even children whose language is not sophisticated enough to participate in the dialogue, but who seem stuck in the “angry” mode, can benefit from an exploration of emotions.

Already, though, the fiction has become blurred. Am I Mr. Y? Do I have to be for the book to work? When I was a kid I always made an agreement with myself never to identify with main protagonists, because bad things or, more troublingly, big things tended to happen to them and I couldn’t cope with the feeling that these things were also happening to me, to the self that you project into fiction when you read. So I would decide on a secondary character that I would ‘be’ for the duration of the book. Sometimes I died; sometimes I turned out to be evil. But I never had to take centre stage. Now I’m older, I read more conventionally. Right now I’m scared for Mr. Y/me and I feel as though it must be raining outside, even though it isn’t.

Cyclic karma is not a metaphysical approach to the meaning of life because you can see it in history books. The world always attracts that which scares it the most, as if ignorance was not an excuse to avoid responsibility. And the world of today, is as silent about that which has been vilified, as in the case of the Muslims and other minorities, as it once was about the German Jews and other persecuted groups. But likewise and as before, by the same spiritual law, when you ignore that which you don't identify yourself with, you are dragged into a war you didn't choose to have.

Amaryllis felt overwhelmed with a sudden rising emotion she could only identify as love, and that scared her to death. She had never expected to feel so much for another human being.

In tense situations like this, the traditional negotiating advice is to keep a poker face. Don’t get emotional. Until recently, most academics and researchers completely ignored the role of emotion in negotiation. Emotions were just an obstacle to a good outcome, they said. “Separate the people from the problem” was the common refrain. But think about that: How can you separate people from the problem when their emotions are the problem? Especially when they are scared people with guns. Emotions are one of the main things that derail communication. Once people get upset at one another, rational thinking goes out the window. That’s why, instead of denying or ignoring emotions, good negotiators identify and influence them. They are able to precisely label emotions, those of others and especially their own. And once they label the emotions they talk about them without getting wound up. For them, emotion is a tool. Emotions aren’t the obstacles, they are the means. The relationship between an emotionally intelligent negotiator and their counterpart is essentially therapeutic. It duplicates that of a psychotherapist with a patient. The psychotherapist pokes and prods to understand his patient’s problems, and then turns the responses back onto the patient to get him to go deeper and change his behavior. That’s exactly what good negotiators do.

observe what is actually happening in a situation: what are we observing others saying or doing that is either enriching or not enriching our life? The trick is to be able to articulate this observation without introducing any judgment or evaluation—to simply say what people are doing that we either like or don’t like. Next, we state how we feel when we observe this action: are we hurt, scared, joyful, amused, irritated? And thirdly, we say what needs of ours are connected to the feelings we have identified.

That’s part of the problem, of course. If you can be scared out of talking about the problem, no one can do anything about the problem. And most people do deal with this from their Monkey brains, where talking critically identifies you as an enemy. As you will, but for the next few paragraphs, work to stay in your Human brain with me.

1.Notice your present state of mind or feeling. It could be mad, scared, joyous, hating yourself, bored, neutral. 2.Love yourself for what you are experiencing. It matters not if you do not know how to love yourself. At first just say the words if you can’t figure out how. Say “I love myself for (not being able to love myself, being scared, feeling happy, etc.).” After a while you will probably identify a physical sensation of loving yourself. 3.Stay with it as long as it feels interesting and comfortable. 4.Remember, you don’t need to go around loving yourself all the time for your life to work wonderfully. You just have to go around being willing to love yourself. Willingness lets you flow with the stream rather than against it. WHAT

The philosophical view known as Idealism posits that reality is, in some necessary way, linked with and dependent on cognitive perception and the understanding of ideas. This is not necessarily to say that the physical matter of one’s body or things outside of one’s body occur only in consciousness, but that one’s knowledge of their reality only occurs in consciousness and thus, their reality is interdependent on consciousness. Even if one doesn’t agree with Idealism, one could still agree with the premise that our mind creates – or allows – our sense and experience of being. And so, if our mind and consciousness are lost upon death, then we are faced with a non-being of reality. A point at which we could no longer even imagine everything in the universe being removed because, as the imaginer, we would be too. This of course would potentially be the absolute nothing. It is strange and rather terrifying to consider this; that we can be something for now and nothing forever. But perhaps only because of the fact that we are nothing forever, can we be something for now. A negation of all other things across all other time and space, a being amidst everything else, and nothing more; and perhaps only because of which, we are something right now. The nothing comes first. Nothingness precedes consciousness, and the conscious act of negating, or imagining nothing, is an act that is derived from the nothingness. In other words, the non-being acts on being, allowing the intellect to negate everything except itself back to it. For example, by self-identifying our self as our self, we have determined that we are our self minus everything else, which is to also say, we are who we are and nothing else. Our total sum of perceptions and understandings, all determined through this same process of negating every individual thing from everything else, consolidates into the last and final negation of self-knowledge. Nothing isn’t the opposite of being nor what everything come from per se, but what allows something to be at all. It is possible that nothing doesn’t necessarily create everything but rather, serves as the backdrop that allows everything. Like a blank canvas is to the painting, nothingness is to the being of the canvas itself. Likewise, to the painter painting and every particle involved. It could then follow that, at the risk of more seemingly rhetorical wordplay, everything and nothing are one, in simultaneous, interlocked coordination with one another, everything contained by nothing, nothing supposed by everything. The blank canvas to the painting. The nothingness to all space and time. In the words of Alan Watts, “So in this way, by seeing that nothingness is the fundamental reality, and you see it’s your reality, then how can anything contaminate you? All the ideas of you being scared and put out and worried and so on, it’s just nothing. It’s a dream. Because you’re really nothing. But this is the most incredible nothing. So, cheer up! You see?

This is another thing to recognize: Doubt comes from within. Your fearful mind is almost always trying to seize the steering wheel and change your course. Its whole function is to rehearse catastrophe, scare you out of opportunity, and throw rocks at your dreams. It enjoys having you flooded and doubtful. Because then you’re more likely to stay home on your couch, nice and passive, taking no risks at all. Which means that defying your fear almost always involves defying a part of yourself. To me, this is a vital aspect of the decoding: You have to learn how to identify and then tame something within. You have to practice past those fears. The more you practice, the better you get at it. Each leap I’ve taken has only made the next leap easier.

When people are chronically angry or scared, constant muscle tension ultimately leads to spasms, back pain, migraine headaches, fibromyalgia, and other forms of chronic pain. They may visit multiple specialists, undergo extensive diagnostic tests, and be prescribed multiple medications, some of which may provide temporary relief but all of which fail to address the underlying issues. Their diagnosis will come to define their reality without ever being identified as a symptom of their attempt to cope with trauma.

(these are my highlighted parts of the book) Not human, thought Maura, as the hairs stood up on the back of her neck. My god, what have I brought back from the dead? This poor woman's already died once. Let's not have it happen again. Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you are about to give to the court in the case now in hearing shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God? Corpses have woken up in morgues. Old graves have been dug up, and they have found claw marks inside the coffin lids. People are so terrified of the possibility that some casket makers sell coffins equipped with emergency transmitters to call for help. Just in case you're buried alive. The resurrection of Christ wasn't a true resurrection. It was merely a case of premature burial. When they ask you to play a child, it means they want you to be scared. They want you to scream. They enjoy it if you bleed. It's not strength, Mila. It's hate. That's what keeps you alive. Duplex rounds are designed to inflict maximum damage. In marines, we call them "torso meat tags" because they're useful for identifying your corpse. In a blast, there's a good chance you'd lose your extremities. So a lot of soldiers choose to get their tattoos on their chest or back. The world is evil, Mila, and there's no way to change it. The best you can do is to stay alive...and not be evil. You're worse tan a whore. You don't just sell out yourself. You'd sell out anyone else. But these bars look different; these are not to trap people in; they are meant to keep people out. Come on baby. Stop being so goddamn stubborn. Help your mama out! Some babies are born screamers. They refuse to be ignored. God put mothers on this earth for a reason. Now, I'm not saying it takes a village to raise a kid. But it sure does help to have a grandma. Human. A02/B00/C02(7cm)/D42 Scalp hair. Slightly curved, shaft is seven centimeters, pigment is medium red. Reality's a bitch, ain't it? And so am I. Whenever there are big boys playing with a lot of money, you can bet sex comes into it. When I open my eyes again, I see more of Anja peeking out from the sand. The curve of her hip bone, the brown shaft of her thigh. The desert has decided to give her up, and now she is re-emerging from the earth. Nothing that happened to you was your fault. Whatever those men did to you - whatever they made you do - they forced on you. It was done to your body. It has nothing to do with your soul. Your soul, Mila, is still pure.

Sometimes people can’t identify their feelings because they were talked out of them as children. The child says, “I’m angry,” and the parent says, “Really? Over such a tiny thing? You’re so sensitive!” Or the kid says, “I’m sad,” and the parent says, “Don’t be sad. Hey, look, a balloon!” Or the child says, “I’m scared,” and the parent says, “There’s nothing to be worried about. Don’t be such a baby.” But nobody can keep profound feelings sealed up forever. Inevitably, when we least expect it—seeing a commercial, for instance—they escape.

She was an ogre, clad only in a short, ragged tunic in spite of the damp. “Are you cold?” Daine asked. “We have a horse blanket somewhere.” She found one and offered it to the immortal. “I said Daine would welcome her,” Maura informed Tkaa. To Daine she added, “Iakoju’s our friend. She wants to help us get rid of Yolane and Tristan.” Iakoju stared at the blanket, pointed ears twitching back and forth. At last she took it. “Thank you,” she said quietly, and bowed from the waist. Maura helped the ogre drape the blanket around her shoulders. “She’s running away,” the ten-year-old explained. Placid eyes met Daine’s without blinking. Despite skinniness and poor clothes Iakoju was clean, and smelled of soap, earth, and something vaguely spicy. Daine sniffed, trying to identify the spice odor. “Are you eating something?” Iakoju smiled. “Maura give me candy.” Maura blushed. “Well, she looked so scared when I found her, and I remembered what you said, about people being mean to them and maybe if somebody was nice…

All problems with writing and performing come from fear. Fear of exposure, fear of weakness, fear of lack of talent, fear of looking like a fool for trying, for even thinking you could write in the first place. It’s all fear. If we didn’t have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way. A lot of studies say that despite all our fears in this country—death, war, guns, illness—our biggest fear is public speaking. What I am doing right now. And when people are asked to identify which kind of public speaking they are most afraid of, they check the improvisation box. So improvisation is the number-one fear in America. Forget a nuclear winter or an eight point nine earthquake or another Hitler. It’s improv. Which is funny, because aren’t we just improvising all day long? Isn’t our whole life just one long improvisation? What are we so scared of?’ No.

First, we observe what is actually happening in a situation: what are we observing others saying or doing that is either enriching or not enriching our life? The trick is to be able to articulate this observation without introducing any judgment or evaluation—to simply say what people are doing that we either like or don’t like. Next, we state how we feel when we observe this action: are we hurt, scared, joyful, amused, irritated? And thirdly, we say what needs of ours are connected to the feelings we have identified.

The Blue One will live to see the Caterpillar rut everything they walk on—seacliff buckwheat cleared, relentless ice plant to replace it, the wild fields bisected by the scenic highway, canyons covered with cul-de-sacs, gas stations, comfortable homes, the whole habitat along this coastal stretch endangered, everything, everyone, everywhere in it danger as well— but now they're logging the one stilling hawk Smith sights, the conspiring grasses' shh shhhh ssh, the coreopsis Mattoni's boot barely spares, and, netted, a solitary blue butterfly. Smith ahead of him chasing the stream, Mattoni wonders if he plans to swim again. Just like that the spell breaks. It's years later, Mattoni lecturing on his struggling butterfly. How fragile. • If his daughter spooled out the fabric she's chosen for her wedding gown, raw taffeta, burled, a bright hued tan, perhaps Mattoni would remember how those dunes looked from a distance, the fabric, balanced between her arms, making valleys in the valley, the fan above her mimicking the breeze. He and his friend loved everything softly undulating under the coyest wind, and the rough truth as they walked through the land's scratch and scrabble and no one was there, then, besides Mattoni and his friend, walking along Dolan's Creek, in that part of California they hated to share. The ocean, a mile or so off, anything but passive so that even there, in the canyon, they sometimes heard it smack and pull well-braced rocks. The breeze, basic: salty, bitter, sour, sweet. Smith trying to identify the scent, tearing leaves of manzanita, yelling: "This is it. Here! This is it!" his hand to his nose, his eyes, having finally seen the source of his pleasure, alive. • In the lab, after the accident, he remembered it, the butterfly. How good a swimmer Smith had been, how rough the currents there at Half Moon Bay, his friend alone with reel and rod—Mattoni back at school early that year, his summer finished too soon— then all of them together in the sneaker wave, and before that the ridge, congregations of pinking blossoms, and one of them bowing, scaring up the living, the frail and flighty beast too beautiful to never be pinned, those nights Mattoni worked without his friend, he remembered too. He called the butterfly Smith's Blue

When a person feels threatened, scared, nervous, or begins to experience some other negative emotion, that person will display discomfort. This is part of the second category of clusters that combat profilers attempt to identify. Just as dominant behavior resulted from the limbic system’s fight response, uncomfortable behavior comes from a person’s flight response. People who perceive a threat will either want to remove themselves from the situation or do something to protect themselves. Distancing behaviors, using barriers, and pacifying behaviors are clear indicators that someone is uncomfortable. However, any combination of three indicators from the following list should immediately identify someone as uncomfortable.

A bubble is a fragile thing, and often in the evening the professors talked worriedly about its bursting. They worried about political correctness, about their colleague on TV with a twenty-year-old female student screaming abuse into her face from a distance of three inches because of a disagreement over campus journalism, their colleague in another TV news story abused for not wanting to ban Pocahontas costumes on Halloween, their colleague forced to take at least one seminar’s sabbatical because he had not sufficiently defended a student’s “safe space” from the intrusion of ideas that student deemed too “unsafe” for her young mind to encounter, their colleague defying a student petition to remove a statue of President Jefferson from his college campus in spite of the repressible fact that Jefferson had owned slaves, their colleague excoriated by students with evangelical Christian family histories for asking them to read a graphic novel by a lesbian cartoonist, their colleague forced to cancel a production of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues because by defining women as persons with vaginas it discriminated against persons identifying as female who did not possess vaginas, their colleagues resisting student efforts to “de-platform” apostate Muslims because their views were offensive to non-apostate Muslims. They worried that young people were becoming pro-censorship, pro-banning-things, pro-restrictions, how did that happen, they asked me, the narrowing of the youthful American mind, we’re beginning to fear the young. “Not you, of course, darling, who could be scared of you,” my mother reassured me, to which my father countered, “Scared for you, yes. Vith this Trotskyist beard you insist on wearing you look like an ice-pick target to me. Avoid Mexico City, especially de Coyoacán neighborhood. This iss my advice.” In the evenings they sat in pools of yellow light, books on their laps, lost in words. They looked like figures in a Rembrandt painting, Two Philosophers Deep in Meditation, and they were more valuable than any canvas; maybe members of the last generation of their kind, and we, we who are post-, who come after, will regret we did not learn more at their feet.

Chinese techno-authoritarianism scares the West. The language used is dystopian, and the fear heightened. Readers or viewers are meant to take away the idea that Beijing under President Xi Jinping is destined to create a global infrastructure of control, a unique threat to the world and incomparable to any other nation. Take a September 2020 article in the Atlantic in which journalist Ross Anderson painted a petrifying image of China wanting to have worldwide domination of artificial intelligence. “In the near future,” he wrote, “every person who enters a public space could be identified, instantly, by AI matching them to an ocean of personal data, including their every text communication, and their body’s one-of-a-kind protein-construction schema.” He noted that algorithms will soon be able to gather a multitude of data points, such as reading habits, purchases, travel records, and friends, as well as predict political opposition before it occurs.

Sometimes people can't identify their feelings because they were talked out of them as a children. The child says, "I'm angry," and the parent says, "Really? Over such a tiny thing? You're so sensitive!" Or the kid says, "I'm sad," and the parent says, "Don't be sad. Hey, look, a balloon!" Or the child says, "I'm scared," and the parent says, "There's nothing to be worried about. Don't be such a baby." But nobody can keep profound feelings sealed up forever. (...) With two chaotic parents who argued with abandon and liberal strings of expletives, sometimes so loudly that the neighbors complained - she had been forced to act as a grownup prematurely, like an underage driver navigating her life without a license. She rarely got to see her parents acting like adults, like her friends' parents. She'd had to parent herself, and her younger brother too. Children, however, don't like having to be hyper-competent. So it's not surprising that she wants me to be the mother for her now. I can be the normal parent who safely and lovingly drives the car, and she can have the experience of being taken care of in a way she never has before. But in order to cast me in the competent role, she believes she has to cast herself as the helpless one, letting me see only her problems. Patients often do this as a way to ensure that hte therapist won't forget about their pain if they mention something positive. Good things happen in her life too, but I only rarely hear about them; if I do, it's either in passing or months after they occurred.