I just looked inside my body and saw how consciousness works.
It was a lot of fun.

Just like your brain,
you will get answers—

but you have to be the one asking.

Als je iets natekent, begin je vaak met de omtrek.

Als je bijvoorbeeld een boom tekent.

Maar als je goed kijkt, hebben dingen geen omtrek. Het is de som der delen die het doet lijken alsof er een omtrek is.

Bewustzijn is ook zoiets. Als ik een mens nateken, begin ik vaak met de omtrek. Van benen bijvoorbeeld. Maar eigenlijk is het alles bij elkaar opgeteld dat het laat lijken alsof het een ding met een omtrek is. Het is een stapeltje van al je gedachten en gevoelens en organen en je wipneus en dat je van chocolade-ijsjes houdt, die het laten lijken alsof er lijnen om je heen lopen. Maar die lijnen bestaan niet; dat is de afdruk.

When you copy something, you often start with the outline.

For example, when you draw a tree.

But if you look closely, things don’t actually have an outline. It’s the sum of their parts that makes it seem as if there is one.

Consciousness is like that too. When I draw a person, I often begin with the outline—of the legs, for instance. But really, it’s everything added together that makes it look like a thing with an outline. It’s a small stack of all your thoughts and feelings and organs, your upturned nose, and the fact that you love chocolate ice cream, that makes it seem as if lines run around you. But those lines don’t exist; they’re an imprint.

Would you have a burnout if you didn’t know what a burnout is?

I once saw an interview with a man who worked 20 hours a day.
They asked him whether he had ever had a burnout.

“I don’t know what a burnout is,” he said.
He had never heard of it.

So he hadn’t had a burnout.
He had just been tired for a few months.

*The dangers of knowledge

The hardest part of an eating disorder is the basics.

By “basics” I mean this: any time during the day when you feel something is off—when you don’t feel perfectly fine—do this check:

1. Did I drink enough?

2. Did I eat enough?

It sounds trivial, but it’s unbelievably hard to notice when you’re used to numbing your own feelings.

Stand up for yourself and say: “I am hungry.”
“I am going to take care of my own body right now.”

“I have one task on this earth, and that is taking care of my own body. Everything else follows from that. If I don’t take care of myself, I can’t take care of anything else.”

Again: it sounds easy. In practice, it’s hard.
Before you know it, you’ve spent hours wondering, “Why do I feel so bad?”

You are going to mess this one up a couple of times. It’s the combination of suppressing an emotion—like sadness—and putting a self-made rule on top of it, like not eating.

Try this:

1. Try to feel the sadness as fully as possible.

2. Drink and eat.

You and your mother change everything in the living room. You decide it’s not it. You put everything back.

If someone walked by before and after, that person wouldn’t see any difference. It would be as if the two of you did nothing all afternoon.

But something has changed.

Do you know what it is?

There are a lot of eating disorders in people with a normal weight. Those will never be visible in psychiatry.
At the same time, psychiatric diseases get overdefined—probably because of medical-ethical reasons and insurance reasons. The DSM is extremely detailed, way too detailed for general things like depression.

This creates a weird dynamic: you want to name something, so you name it, and by naming it you actually make it worse. You are right that there is a problem, but that has very little to do with the underlying problem.

In other words: depression is only an observation. It’s not a diagnosis.
It’s a point in time. And that point is the result of a big wave of decisions, habits, stress, and adaptations.

It takes many years to “get” a depression.
It also takes many years to lose a depression.

Because of this, the moment somebody goes to the doctor and you observe a depression, you are almost guaranteed to overreact. Not because people are stupid, but because the measurement is late. In reality, the whole thing is 99% prevention.

How do I know this? I have tried both.
I spiraled into depression and psychosis, and now I am “normal” again. Stable is a better word.

These two measurements—late observation and overdefinition—result in one of the biggest misses I have ever seen in my life. It’s unbelievable.

The funny thing is that this overlaps with regular science. There is a constant confusion between observing something and understanding what that observation actually means.