Your Jailbreak

[Cramulus]

This thread is for anecdotes and advice regarding jailbreak.

I'd like to hear about this room you dwell in and how you've changed it.

Are there any poignant revelations or experiences you've had? Can your experiences help others find the way out?

The jailbreak represents something different to each of us. Family, emotions, routine, money, morality, laughter... What was your cell made of? How did you realize it was a cell, something you need to escape from? What's it made of now? In short, I'd like us to illustrate different types of jailbreaks. 




Meta-thread note:

I am not volunteering myself or anyone else, but future BIP or Intermittens authors may want to grab text from this thread. Keep this in mind when responding - post which are full of quotes or links are difficult to edit for reprint!

[Cramulus]

I am writing this from my desk inside a cubicle, inside a large office building. This is, in many ways, a jailbreak for me.


When I was younger, I was decidedly anti-corporate. (one might say I bought into the "anti-commerical commercial") I never wore brand name clothes, I wheat-pasted polemic fliers all over my town, and I voraciously devoured as much cyberpunk literature as I could get my hands on. I felt very strongly about compromising my individuality by volunteering myself for the corporate machine. I didn't want to become another interchangeable corporate resource, basically a type of commodity.

But a tie is not a noose - not unless you let it be. Eventually we all have to whore ourselves to the system for one reason or another. The fact that I am writing about Discordia while on the clock should illustrate that this job hasn't successfully homogenized me. In fact, having a straight job and a regular source of income actually provides me with more freedom than when I was freelancing from home.

The self is constantly mutating. I sometimes wonder if the rebel 17 year old version of me would be disappointed in how I turned out. I've come to realize that my adaptation to corporate life does not represent a betrayal of my original ideals, my younger identity. When framed properly, it is the platform upon which my identity can flourish.



the new cell looks like this:

Am I any good at this?
Will I ever be promoted?
What if I lose my job?

[LMNO]

Doubt is my Jailbreak.  I have come to the conclusion that many of the bars in my cell come from Certainty.  So I've adapted a two-part solution to this.

The first is easy: Any time someone or something informs me of a "fact", I am skeptical, and I do not take their word for it.  I try to treat every related experience (and this works especially well for the consumer media culture) as .  Most of the time the information doesn't directly affect my life, and it easily falls away into background noise.  But it is great training when I run into situations where I am affected.  Even if it does get annoying, it helps me not take things for granted. As an added bonus, it helps me identify possible bars in other people's prisons, and observe how they work.

The second part is really hard: To identify and doubt the certainties in myself. Like the deep-sea fish who probably doesn't understand what "water" is, figuring out where your blind spots are is incredinly difficult, as you can't see the bars that blind you.  You have to think sideways, to see yourself through a different pair of eyes.  And then, even if you see what could be something, you then have to take it apart and decide how structural it is to your personality, and if you even want to change it; because I'm one of those spags who thinks that a human simply can't function without their Cell.  So you have to choose your bars.

But aside from the major structural parts of my cell, I feel I need to re-evaluate myself constantly.  My ideas on politics, culture, family, food, music, love, social dynamics, and science all have taken weird turns since I've learned how to look for my own bars, and question them.  I'd like to say it's for the better, but I'm still working on that part...

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

My first jailbreak was sort of like the one the poor sods trapped in the POW jail in Hiroshima experienced. I didn't break out of my jail, as much as the whole cell, prison, and everything I "knew" was outside of it went up in a blinding flash of light and heat... leaving behind a war zone where my psyche once was. For 23 years I had 'known the truth'. In some bizarre Orwellian sense, I cringe still at the use of that line. Inside the religion I was part of, the belief system is simply called "The Truth". Over a period of 6 months or so, I went from Knowing The Truth, to knowing that the truth, wasn't.... My family, my friends, my leisure time activities, everything I identified as my life had been built on the foundation of 'The Truth" and once I saw the Truth for what it was, all of that was gone. Since then 'truth' as a word and as a concept has felt like a hollow lie. Perhaps it is a bar in my prison still today.

It wasn't an intentional jailbreak, I didn't even recognize it for what it was. I simply went from a stable life and reality to complete chaos where no belief I tried to hold on to would stick for more than a few months. One pagan system got replaced by another, then I dabbled in Buddhism and Taoism and dropped them... every system I picked up, seemed as convinced of its Truth as the one I'd just escaped from. So I became an Atheist, sure that having 'no belief' in God would save me from the bullshit filled Truth. Instead, I found people just as crazy as the pagans and Christians.

Then I read the Principia Discordia. After I first found the Goddess, I slipped into a phase where I thought I knew the truth about what Discordianism was. It took Cardinal Machine, one of the most unlikable Discordians I ever met, to knock the wall down on that prison.

I have never been all that comfortable with the metaphor of a prison cell, but it seems like a good way to describe at least some aspects of my past in retrospect.

[Triple Zero]

Since then 'truth' as a word and as a concept has felt like a hollow lie. Perhaps it is a bar in my prison still today.

I'd say, most definitely, in some sense, it still is.

Not saying, you should embrace any kind of "truth", but your allergy shows Maybe try being a bit more .. definite .. about stuff, as an exercize. No "some people believe", "some but not all", etc

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Since then 'truth' as a word and as a concept has felt like a hollow lie. Perhaps it is a bar in my prison still today.

I'd say, most definitely, in some sense, it still is.

Not saying, you should embrace any kind of "truth", but your allergy shows Maybe try being a bit more .. definite .. about stuff, as an exercize. No "some people believe", "some but not all", etc

I've started trying that... though I generally find myself still sticking disclaimers in somewhere... It has become difficult to say "This is this" when I don't trust that I know if This is this or not...

However, one must push forward!

[Corvidia]

Catholicism was my first prison. It was such a huge part of my identity up until I was about sixteen, and then somebody (on xanga of all places) pushed me about it. I had posted something like, "RIP, Pope John Paul" and he mocked me for it. I was incensed! The Pope was a good man, how dare he say such things!
And the web guy kept pushing me and pushing me about Catholic dogma and evolution. He made me question and think about that part of my identity. Instead of letting me retreat, he mocked me into confronting what it was I believed in.

The next prison for me was the idea that I *needed* to know certain things. I don't. I don't need a creation story, I don't need to know how we got here or what my purpose is in life. I don't need to know there's some divine being who has nothing better to do than keep an eye on me.
I broke that bar when I was pagan. The form I chose to follow doesn't have a creation story in the traditional sense, only the story of how the Irish Celts came to be. That was enough, I decided. And then I figured out, as I left that phase of my life, that I didn't even need that much less anything else.

I think the current one is mostly a social one. I don't want to make extra work for other people, I don't want to be or cause an inconvenience. Not a useful trait for a prankster or for any of the various mindfucks I want to carry out. I'm working on it.

[Richter]

Ratatosk put it right, some "Jailbreaks" aren't intentional or planned.

Realizing around 5th grade that I read more (for fun, deadly sin), was less athletic, and thought on a different wavlength than 90% of classmates I had known since kindergarten was likely the one that started it all.  Until then, I was contentedly cruising with the self idea "I'm just a normal kid."

(Dealing with complications of self - awareness nonwithstanding)

[P3nT4gR4m]

Ratatosk put it right, some "Jailbreaks" aren't intentional or planned.

Realizing around 5th grade that I read more (for fun, deadly sin), was less athletic, and thought on a different wavlength than 90% of classmates I had known since kindergarten was likely the one that started it all.  Until then, I was contentedly cruising with the self idea "I'm just a normal kid."

(Dealing with complications of self - awareness nonwithstanding)

I never thought of myself as a normal kid.

One of my jailbreaks was realising this wasn't a bad thing.

[Triple Zero]

Hm, interesting, Richter. I grew up always thinking I was different, but then, for some reason a large part of my highschool wasnt into Gabber/Techno like the rest of the Netherlands, but into alternative/punk such as Nirvana and Green Day*.
Not everybody, but a large group of people and the ones I could relate to. So anyway, because they were "alternative"** (black sheep...), they were always busy being "different" and such.
It took me until 3 years ago to realize that I was not just really really good at "being different" or "doing my own thing", but that I'm actually different. Always thought I was, but hanging out with the "alternative" people, everybody was, right? But for them, "different" was a thing to "be", while for me "normal" was a thing to "be", so hanging out with them meant I didnt have to try as much. Like you say, different wavelength (doctors say it's a mild form of autism, but even that doesnt completely ring true to me). Discovering, realizing and accepting this might have been one of the biggest Jailbreaks for myself.
This is all reasoned in hindsight btw, I might explain it completely different a few years from now, because I've just started on the trip of figuring this shit out.
Back in highschool I never gave it much thought. But I did for the larger part of my college years, trying to figure out why I could never get shit done, I'm pretty goddamn smart, but being very good at thinking and coming up with ideas and solutions is no fucking use if you can only sometimes bring yourself to working, if the topic is new, interesting and fresh enough. In hindsight, school and college was sort of easy in that respect, lots of new interesting and fresh stuff to motivate my twisted head. Regular work is hell and costs me so much energy to get myself in gear that I fear I can never work a full-time job. Fortunately my area of expertise pays rather well, even in these crisis days.

Um, sorry for the bit of lifejournal there. It just sort of came out I was gonna talk about another different kind of Jailbreak that I learned from this place, PD. More something in challenging some of my political beliefs etc. But that's for another post.

HOLY FUCK SHIT POLITICAL BELIEFS--I GOTTA VOTE TODAY HOPE THAT SHIT IS STILL OPEN

*runs off*

* no discussion about music styles please this was high school '92-'98
** when I say alternative, I don't mean the really "different" poly-amourous goth-clubbing burning-man-TAZ-ing transgendering scenes I have heard described on here, but more the vanilla mainstream grunge pop alternatives wearing baggy pants and messy hair/spikes (hey I had spikes!) and just generally not being mainstream (except they were) but living the most important Dutch cultural mantra "Just be yourself, that's crazy enough" (might be a good memebomb, even. except it could be part of our national anthem, that's how ingrained it is)

[Jenne]

Well, I've never been popular, just feared.  That always bugged me, and luckily, I never really had to deal with it till I was a teenager.  My jailbreak started then, which made me work all the harder at keeping the bars around me.  But by college, I'd realized this wasn't going to work anymore, no matter how many Bible studies I led in my dorm room.

Dating an Afghan really went a long way to breaking me of the jail I'd been born in.  Ditching religion entirely sort of broke me out of the rest of it.  I have to say that it was a painful, fucked up journey, and along the way my dad was imprisoned, my family impoverished and my husband almost died.

But now, I see myself as more or less one of the strongest and weakest people I know, and all my shit is just real.  Life is too short to be surrounded by people who can't stand you (good gawd was that an awful jailbreak for me), and living life as you WANT helps to make fewer regrets.

I no longer really fear death, and I no longer fear much at all.  Which is odd.

[Iason Ouabache]

For most of my life I felt like I had no idea who I "was".  Not the normal, "I hate myself" bad self-esteem angsty all teenagers go through. I honestly didn't have any sense of self at all. Growing up I felt like a disfunctional robot. Just a bunch of wires loosely bound together. I didn't have any real likes or dislikes. No preference in anything. Didn't interact with other people very well. I just floated along on the breeze, doing whatever it was that others told me to do.

It didn't get better until I got a job as a dishboy at a local restaurant. The people in the kitchen were a fairly tight-knit group that made me feel accepted. I was forced to actually interact with other humans. About 6 months in I got an epiphany while washing some dishes: Hey, I'm a human. People actually care about me. I'm not a sack of shit. Things started to get better for me from there. It wasn't until my early 20s that I felt completely human. I feel like I still haven't met myself though.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I had a weird childhood that led, eventually, to me questioning everything. All the time. That's part of my ongoing jailbreak, actually; learning to accept things without constantly testing and challenging. A form of hypervigilance, is what my psychiatrist said it was. My mother is mentally ill, and also, until I was about 12, was a severely neglectful alcoholic. Turns out she's probably also slightly autistic. I was generally left in the care of my sister, who is seven years older. She had/has a host of her own problems, having been raised by the same mother and also having (at the time undiagnosed) Aspergers, and she used to occasionally beat me. I ran the neighborhood freely and by the age of six had a bus pass and the range of the city. A few rather terrible things happened, as one might imagine. I was very much a troublemaker in elementary school, and once, after being suspended in third grade, my mother pulled me out of school and I was "home schooled", which in her case meant she got me a library card.

When I was 11, my father sued for custody and my mom left my sisters, took me and ran off to the woods in Washington State. This began a period of poverty and interesting solitude, during which I think I formed a great deal of my personality. Driven by my empty belly, learning to hunt, fish, garden and gather occupied most of my time. I learned to work, as well, and kindly neighbors sometimes gave me food. I used to wonder if perhaps I was insane or mentally retarded, and no one was telling me... to be kind. When I was 12, triggered by an incident in which I pulled a knife on her to avoid having to ride in my drunk mother's truck, she quit drinking, and things improved after that. Not a lot, but some. I took as many odd jobs as I could find and was working full-time by fourteen. My mom went back to school for her Masters degree and eventually got a job that allowed us to live in a house with a floor and a bathroom. Then, awesomely, she moved to another town, and I had the place to myself. It was kind of far from town, about 4 miles, but I could ride my bike to work, the library, and the store, and things were good. Time passed, a couple more shitty things happened, I grew up, I moved back to Portland.

The first thing I did (after getting laid) was contact a therapist, and spent the next approximately four years in intensive therapy, for the most part learning to stop questioning everything, doubting everything, and watching everything, all the time. I learned to sleep. Eventually I even learned to make friends. The strongest bar in my prison, however, was a tortured conviction that I was unlikable; I believed that if people really knew me, they would not like me. That particular jailbreak came one day when I decided that IT WAS ACTUALLY OK if some people didn't like me, because odds were that I wouldn't like THEM, either, and the people I do like are most likely the people who like me back! It was a crazy epiphany... it really set me free. I still want to be liked, because I'm human, but when someone doesn't like me, it no longer breaks my heart or makes me question whether I am an acceptable human being. I no longer fear being damaged.

[LMNO]

So.......

(pardon the dickishness)








.....if that's so, where does the epic mourning of Grendlemouse come from?


(the lements are fairly awesome by the way. I didn't want to interrupt the flow by commenting.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Thanks.

I don't think you're being dickish, I just don't understand the question. The mourning of Grendelmouse came from falling in love with someone and then losing him... or at least, losing the possibility of him as a lover and as a partner. My heart may no longer be broken by random new people I meet failing to take a liking to me, but it's completely breakable in all the normal, usual ways.

I am not sure if/how that contradicts what I said about my jailbreak, but maybe you can explain how you perceive that it does?