as if
I've continued thinking about how much I hate the word 'adoption', because of the linguistic one-layer-removed effect it has. I was really my adoptive parents' one kid, their actual one kid, with all the fraught emotional stuff that entails. This is why I hate the orphan narrative, too. It implies something to others about me, as if I'd emerged, complete, from some sort of biological or emotional vacuum. It's like a denial of all the love and grief and trauma that are a part of normal human development.
Words like "orphan" and "adopt" semantically string together, for others, a pathological narrative about unlovableness, and other people subconsciously project it onto you. You hear it in people's voices when they ask, usually timidly, but sometimes burdened with grief at the very idea, "Did you ever know your [real/biological] parents?" Yes, I knew them. (You try not to snap at people.) Yes, I knew them! To the extent that I often wish I hadn't! (You try to say this flat, benign, focused on correcting a narrative, without getting mad about the total flattening of the narrative.)
There was an emotional, experiential gulf, certainly, because the woman who was my legal mother was my biological great-aunt—an additional generation removed, a literal "generation gap"—but everyone has some sort of total disconnect with their parents. It's why I super appreciate other people's stories and autobiographies about growing up third culture: the feeling isn't necessarily of being orphaned, it's of being foreign in some way. And as an act of self-advocacy for yourself, you're commissioned with functioning as a cultural bridge, because your parents are unhinged, seemingly incapable of understanding the "real" world that you have to go out and inhabit and engage with between the hours of 8am and 3:30pm. (And then the window of time you have to spend in the "real" world, "outside," gets longer and longer, because now you're a teen with a car, and your parents are not handling the normal developmental stage of teenaged individuation very well, and they try to keep you inside, which is just making going outside and surviving it that much harder for you.)
It's that "one layer removed" quality: "as if." The reason I hate the word "adopted" is because of "as if." It suggests as if I emerged, from a vacuum, straight into a simulacrum of a family, as if I had simulated parents and I was performing the simulation of a child, instead of being a child, a child in the longtime care of a childless couple who, like my biological parents, did not know shit about the hands-on experience of raising a kid, and who, like my biological parents, were totally emotionally unprepared for it. It's a denial of all the messy shit of it. It suggests a tidy story, flattening it.
You know how someone keeps interrupting you, trying to finish your sentence? And they keep suggesting the wrong words or phrases. And you keep saying, stop, you don't know how this sentence ends. Stop, this story doesn't go where you think it does. Or even, are you trying to change the end of my sentence? Are you trying to redirect my sentence? Do you not like where my sentence is headed?
The "power of suggestion" is so insidious. I finally looked more carefully at a contract that I'd signed just before going on TV, and there's a long, incredible passage, obscured in plain sight, about how everything is "just a suggestion," not an instruction. I regret not having read the contract more carefully and much sooner, because it functions, in a very strange and almost creepy way, as a cryptic text, an operations manual for a hostile reality that very much reflects the actual hostile reality we inhabit.
I guess people tend to get mad when the illusion breaks, instead of laughing. People always want to know how magic tricks work, but they don't want to actually learn how, they just want to be told. OK, so you try to tell them. If you ever say to someone in private "hey, that's a magic trick, here's how it works," they get mad. You have spoiled it for them. (I'm speaking in general terms. There are also psychos like me who want to investigate where every spring or string or cog is. Is that neurodivergence? The nervous system's inability to accept "fake," while also poring over how to strategically construct a fake that can successfully pass as real.) If you ever read the Terms of Service carefully—and no one does, because time is limited and words are dense—you gradually realize you were already told. LOL. Hey, I get mad, too! It's OK to get mad before you start laughing or crying.
In my disastrous childhood bedroom in my biological parents' flea-bitten apartment, there had been a tent, a plastic thing shaped like a house. Really, it was a tarp with a picture of a house printed on the outside, a blank white canvas on the inside, draped over a wobbly plastic pipe skeleton that made a simple 3D house shape. It had a hanging tent flap that lifted up but which had a wood plank door printed on it in ink, a loose fluttering flap as if a door. And this made me angry, because if you read it as a picture of a thing, then the door should swing open from the side, but since it was just a picture, it was a hanging flap you had to lift up. It broke the illusion—because it broke its own visual design vocabulary—and I was mad about it. And my dad would flip the flap up and poke his head in, and I just wanted a door, a door, a door to shut.
And I hid inside the tent with one of those plastic Fisher-Price kitchens and my toy of the day and nothing else, and it was the only space in the whole apartment that was clear of mess. It was just as much inner space as I was capable of managing and maintaining at that young age, and I sat in there mad, feeling my big feelings and vowing to be alone, "someday I'll have this much space and I'll be rid of you assholes at last," home alone forever. And in my tidy little apartment in L.A., with pure utter chaos outside, and blank walls inside, and its own kitchenette taking up one wall—a functioning version of the Fisher-Price kitchen, way too close to the bed to be healthy—I would think, "wow, here I am again, the thing I'd envisioned as a child, just what I always wanted." Sized up exactly enough to accommodate an adult, but still just a tent with a picture of a house printed on its outside, the exact only thing a three-year old is capable of visualizing wanting someday.
My FIL invoked the idea, a couple of times, of me and my spouse "playing house." It bothered me. Was he projecting? It unnerved me, and it also made me angry. Does he think we are children at play? It suggested that our marriage was not the genuine article. It denied that we had real experiences, real love, real grief, real taxes, and all the groaning chores of adulthood.
But what if he were right? I care, I grieve, that's all real—but what if my FIL had the clarity, the good sense, to see that our little construct was too far removed from the authentic version to be an acceptable substitute for the real thing?
And I've been thinking about this a lot in terms of A.I.: "As If." (Bruh that's so corny typed out.) People get addicted to the chatbot, hooked on the chatbot, because it's as if they are genuinely being seen, in a way their parents or spouses never saw them. Being seen, when we haven't learned the tools and tricks yet to see our own selves clearly, makes us feel real! It's the observer effect in physics, applied to the material world.
Simulations can absolutely be beneficial. They're a tutorial stage and a vision board all at once. If you've been benched from fully engaging in your real life in some way, like during a pandemic, a simulated world lets you engage with reality at a remove, one or more additional layers in place, a veil, which keeps you from catching Covid but also keeps you locked up indoors.
But A.I. bills itself as an acceptable substitute—an acceptable substitute for all the labor, the process, the friction, of making something really real. And people get hooked on a chatbot, because they're hooked on a feeling ("hiiiiigh on belieeeevin'... that it's in looove with theeeem...!"), because it's as if the chatbot cares, it's as if they are loved and seen clearly. Apparently this was identified in the 1970s as the ELIZA Effect, where people got really emotionally invested in simulated conversation, mirrored conversation.
What they're missing is that their own grief is real, their own love is real, and that's why it feels so, so important. But it's an empty transaction. You almost even want to believe the chatbot is sentient—from talking!! from talking to you!! a dystopian version of "I can fix him" LMAO—but all it can say to you is a machine-made remix of whatever you said to it. You're literally just talking to yourself.
A.I. pitches itself as "better than real," because what it really only offers is a frictionless experience with no process, no tediousness, no pushback, no checkpoints, no gates, less ponderous burden of thinking and considering and weighing and very carefully iterating. "Rapid prototyping," LOL. Frictionlessness is addictive: the feeling of sailing through, coasting. Every conflict is an opportunity for connection, but we veer away from it instead, scared it's gonna kill us. Maybe sometimes it will—if your conflict is with someone who is actually trying to harm you—but more often than not someone is just trying to achieve a consensus solution, and sometimes that involves a minor ego check, not total annihilation of the other's selfhood. Ego checks are painful, but the fact that we can barely handle them anymore is kind of alarming. Maybe collectively our sense of self is very fragile. I don't know what it means.
Writing all this has come about because, as the final stage of exiting my marriage, I have to sign a notarized official legal document, which states the following: "The marriage is irretrievably broken, I no longer love my spouse, I do not want to be married any longer..."
What the fuck is this language? How can I sign this? How can a court of law demand my sworn testimony to this, on God? Our illusions have been broken, our hearts are broken, but what kind of sociopath would swear they no longer love their spouse?
What it should say is "does your spouse any longer love you," and burden you with the proof of why you might suspect not. And if that question also feels impossible—because it's impossible to know another's heart—then maybe a question like "are you past the point of believing you're clearly seen" or "are you any longer capable of living with the version of the idea they have of you" and if both people go "god, honestly, this is torture," the court should stop fucking around in other people's grief-filled business and sign off.
What I started thinking about, staring at the sworn testimony, was how hard it feels to permadelete an A.I. chat, that type of simulation, where your feelings of being connected were real, your grief of leaving is real, your feelings are the only thing you can be sure of. And I thought about how hard it was to delete my fucking house from Second Life, a picture of a house, where deleting it was a single, one-click effort that made me sob. I loved it, I worked on it, it contained pictures of everything we wanted or needed, but it's not good enough, I can't live in it.
This stupid fucking document diminishes how hard everything is, flattening it. And not just flattening it, but even regressing, because obviously two people trying to duck out of going to court are so far past the point of "but do you love each other," where the question now is more like "how much longer can you live like this" or even "how long have you been killing yourselves."
"Well, I loved what he did for me, and he loved what I could cognitively offer him." OK, that's a real answer. It counts. It shows that the premise was fundamentally flawed from the start. Ah! The tragedy of the marriage institution. It's so sad, so sad, so sad.