ExitLoop()

When I was a kid, I’d memorise how to navigate screen after screen of Pac-Man. How to move to avoid the ghosts using only the patterns that kept you safe. This was not a dexterity or skill challenge, it was a memory challenge. It required no creative thought. You just had to learn the patterns and internalise them then you could beat the machine. If you trusted your own agency, the ghosts would get you.

Life works like this. Survival is algorithmic. We learn what works and drop what doesn’t.

Back to my story… Eventually a young man stops fiddling with his joystick and his thoughts turn to love.

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I got my heart broken (broken? Smashed into a million tiny pieces which were then set on fire and scattered across the Universe) when I was very young and certainly when I was too emotionally undeveloped to process it. After it happened, I stayed home night after night. I did not leave my room. I would go to work at a secondhand book and comic shop, pick up a curry and rice and 2 cans of Red Stripe on the way home, then eat it alone in my room, laughter from the shared space in the house filling any gaps in the music.

At the time, it was the height of rave culture and I was living in London. So, once a week between the ages of 20 and 21, I would go to a squatted house or industrial building where what the authorities of the day called ‘repetitive beats’ rang out from a sound system. I would get completely trashed and lose myself in the music. I didn’t meet new people. Dancing alone kept my heart from breaking again.

These safety algorithms crystallise and pass beyond any point of meaningful refinement. This is pure danger.

The moment you stop asking questions of your patterns is the moment you stop noticing they no longer serve you.

The ghosts couldn’t get me if I stuck to the pattern.

Neither could life. None of the experiences that make life worth living could get me either. I had protected myself against everything except surviving another day.

The patterns that keep you safe also keep you stuck.

I had to debug myself.

Here’s the programming for the 20 year old version of me.

While (awake) {
    avoidIntimacy()
    beSuspicious()
    suppressFeelings()
    dontLetThemKnowWhatYouWant()
    overthink()
}

Breaking down that programming function by function:

The avoidIntimacy function enforced the 2 cans of Red Stripe, curry and rice, close the bedroom door routine. The ghosts can’t get you.

The beSuspicious function kept me safe. If I didn’t trust anyone, I could never be let down. It also meant I could never let anyone in. I didn’t buy a car FOR YEARS because I couldn’t trust any mechanic. I used to learn how to do any repair work around the house rather than hire a tradesman whose prime directive, according to my programming, was to rip me off.

The suppressFeelings function. Well of course I suppressed my feelings, those fuckers got me in so much trouble and pain before when I fell in love and it went wrong that they lost their right to an opinion or expression. Permanently. I was only 20 at the time. That program ran for a couple of decades before I broke it.

The dontLetThemKnowWhatYouWant function works as follows: if they (whoever ‘they’ are) know what you want, then ‘they’ know your weakness. As long as you don’t let them know what you want, they can’t hurt you.

But if you spend enough time not letting people know what you want and not wanting anything, you stop knowing what you want and you can’t ask for it. And then watch how fast your relationships malfunction (there’s one person in particular I’d like to extend my deepest apologies to here).

overthink was the side effect of the other functions. I never took any action at all, I rarely left my head. My body was literally screaming “do something! Release the pressure!” I couldn’t sleep. I had a need to urinate that always manifested when I was furthest from a toilet. That last one was the tell. It was entirely too coincidental, there must be something else going on than the call of nature.

(If you haven’t already, read ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ to explore this, well worth your time.)

I realised it’s essential to train yourself to notice when the programs control you rather than the other way around.

These days I deliberately break the machine by sitting in a different place at a regular haunt, taking a different route to familiar places, and forcing myself to notice something new in a familiar view.

And when something goes wrong, yes I get irritable, I’m not a saint but I also try to see what this break in the routine might tell me about myself and how I operate. Why did I react like that? What could I do differently? Maybe this is actually better than what I had before?

There’s no jeopardy. This isn’t about embracing risk. This is about breaking restrictive patterns. Noticing your loops and dismantling them. Interrogating the loops to see what still serves you.

The machines love patterns, give them replicable behaviour and they’ll do it all day long. They never tire, they can do it in the dark, in the cold, without food and water, without connecting.

You are not a machine.

Notice your loops.

Break the patterns that keep you stuck, not safe.

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