What Are These Walls

I use Wall as a metaphor for an impassable barrier. I use Invisible Wall as a metaphor for an impassable barrier that others can't see. I can't go through them, but others can't see that I can't go through them.

The Mechanism

At its heart, the mechanism is simply my brain's instinct to avoid 'bad stuff'. How that manifests is the problem. Likely this problem has been there since early childhood: I attribute it to autistic traits. Over the years, I have built up a practised exterior, a Facade that 'pretends to be normal'. The trouble is that everybody has seen the Facade, nobody has seen me.

The Problem

The problem is the nature of the inhibition. I cannot vocally express my thoughts anywhere near as easily as others expect. To express thoughts, they have to go through a long production line of planning and mental rehearsal: when I am speaking confidently, it is because I have already thought through what I am saying in advance. In absence of such pre-rehearsed conversations, I fall silent. People just attribute this to a 'quiet character' or something like that.

It is similar with doing. I struggle to make myself do things. On the medication I take to prevent mania, this difficulty is increased. The strength of the avoidance instincts is the same, but my capacity to work against them is a fraction of what it would otherwise be. So proportionally, the strength of the inhibitions is massively increased.

Then these inhibitions are complex in nature. Because they are part of my psychological makeup, they see my thoughts much as I do. If I think of a path around my inhibitions, then those inhibitions see that path as a potential path to something to be avoided: trying to route around my instinct to avoid paths that lead to bad stuff is, itself a path that leads to bad stuff and thus is a path that must be avoided. Often this means that when it comes to opportunities to make progress against this instinct, they are all one-shot affairs: once tried, the avoidance instinct will know and recognise them, and thus prevent my trying the same approach twice.

Trying to communicate this to family has failed too many times. Trying to communicate this to friends has failed too many times. Trying to communicate this to mental health services has failed too many times. For the most part, I lack the capacity to make further attempts.

Consequences

The main take home should be this:

1. I can know that I need to do or say something;
2. I can know how to do it, or what to say to whom;
3. I can want to do it, or say it;
4. Yet I cannot.
5. Nor can I easily explain this to others:
   1. I know that I need to explain this to others;
   2. I know in my mind how to explain it to others;
   3. But I can't make those others appear and listen;
   4. I can't lift a finger to make those others appear.
   5. The best I can do, for now, is to write this.

Moreover, this isn't simply doing, or saying, but also thinking. If thinking about something gives rise to anxiety-avoidance, then there is a growing urge to think about something else. And of course once the mind learns that distractions draw its attention away from the source of anxiety, it learns to get distracted from sources of anxiety ever more quickly and strongly. Until essentially there are walls in the mind itself preventing things being approached. For most of those things, I can only think very roughly and abstractly, and completely lack the capacity to think through actual details, absent a friendly third party who can encourage and keep my mind on track.

Explanations

Why I Can't Get A Job

This is one explanation, about the simplest I've managed so far. It doesn't convey much of the nature of Wall's in practice, but at least gives some hint of the mechanism. Any simpler and I just have to say something like 'magical multidimensional invisible walls that nobody can see' and they try to explain that I'm not talking about some kind of 'evil fairy magic' or a hallucination of some kind. Wall's and The Maze are an intuitive metaphor to describe what is going on, just as the desktop and folders on your computer are metaphors to help users understand how data is arranged.