How to confess with armour on
For people who send daring emails
Mmmmmm good morning everyone. I hope you’re well or at least finding better words to explain your misery. In honour of Valentine’s Day today I’m going to be sharing an emotional defence strategy/ontological game I discovered two years ago.1 FYI this post is for a very select group of people—namely those who send verbal nudes2 over email. If this doesn’t apply to you please leave quietly now.
Ok?
…
Ok.
Hi class.
I’m a bit shy so I’m glad there’s just a few of us left [nervous laughter]. Today I’m going to be incorrectly drawing on Schrodinger’s cat to illustrate an exercise in feelings management that I discovered whilst sending a risky email to my crush back in 2023. It also works as an ontological game. Thanks for being here.
There’s no feeling more pathetic than waiting for a response from someone you like.
It’s pathetic for many reasons which makes it less pathetic but it’s _still_ undoubtably pathetic because you’re misguided about what a lack of reply usually means.
I, for one, like to think I can derive truth from silence:
“Oh, he hasn’t replied” = he doesn’t like me
“Oh, he has replied” = he likes me
That’s the basic pairing anyway—when really what I should be doing is interpreting this reality according to Jung’s rule for dream analysis which states that whilst dreams are physiological facts one should still suspend all understanding…
But it can be difficult can’t it?
That silence from a loved one which feels so
absolute
Which threatens to establish a mirror world to this one—a world in which they’ve chosen to operate. Alone.
Why?
(This is why the game exists. Some people think it’s irresponsible to play the game but I think it’s perfectly reasonable to play complex games with ourselves when we have to live with phones all the time… you can also think of playing this game as a form of ontological discipline, the kind which Oedipus was seriously lacking when he “needed to know”. Below you’ll find an introduction to the game, context for the game, and instructions on how to play…I don’t know, you may enjoy it.)
*.* INTRO *.*
Let’s imagine you send a frightening/daring/emotional/sexy email to someone you like/love/fancy. Let’s then imagine you don’t want to deal with the emotional fall out/in of sending that email (you already know this strategy btw it’s the sending a text then throwing your phone across the room strategy except this version is a bit more controlled and long-term—for example you can use your phone immediately afterwards which I thought would be useful on Valentine’s Day…)
-__- CONTEXT -__-
The first time I sent an admittedly risky email was in 2023. I had spent a good deal of time crafting it then slammed my laptop down right after sending it.
After a few hours passed and I still hadn’t received a reply I decided to move the email I’d sent from “Sent folder” to “Junk folder”. This was not something I’d done before but the logic is fairly obvious: out of sight/out of mind.
After that, the days went past pretty unremarkably—until the third day.
That’s when I realised I still didn’t have a reply…. which is when I started to panic: had I gone too far? Was my email way worse than I remembered?
So I went back to Junk folder to read my email again and what did I find?
Not only my original email (which wasn’t too bad) BUT ALSO a whole series of wonderful replies…
Because what I didn’t realise at the time was that if you move an email to Junk folder then every reply to that email will also go to the Junk folder (assuming it’s part of the same thread—)
AND SO THE GAME WAS BORN!3
(0)_(0) HOW TO PLAY THE GAME (0)_(0)
Think of an email like the cat in Schrödinger's thought experiment. The whole (tiny) world inside the box is the land of your recipient and their reception to your email determines the aliveness of the cat.
Two outcomes:
They do reply = the cat is alive
They don’t reply = the cat is dead
(I’m presuming you’re sending risky emails here of an explicit and/or confessional nature otherwise I don’t know why you’d do this. It’s quite impractical.)
Drag your dangerous email from Sent box to Junk box like the body bag it is and go on with your life.—but remember, if the person replies to your email then it will go straight into your Junk box as well which is why there are no equivalents for this game on other formats like SMS, iMessage, or Whatsapp because inevitably you’ll have to check those apps to talk to other people.
As long as you don’t check the Junk box then to see if they’ve replied you can rest easy in the ontologically-open space of: the cat is in the box, the box is sealed, the cat is either dead or alive—I know not which therefore both; and now you can read books and make jam (i’m talking about one of those stormy Sundays) and glance perhaps at the post box from the safety of your sofa… in other words, not having checked the post-box you can behave like a wave (swell and expand with overlapping possibilities) until you think you really are ready for Something—one reality, one way or the other—to hit you straight in the face...
Now, assess your feelings honestly. For as long as you care (deeply) about the living status of the cat, don’t check the box. Just don’t.
TIME CONSTRAINT:
Since this is a game there has to be a time-constraint. Email providers automatically empty your Junk box after a certain amount of time. It varies. You’ll definitely be fine for up to two weeks and if you haven’t stopped caring (deeply) after that then you’ve probably lost anyway. Enjoy it.
Only when you are READY to find a dead cat—only then, do you check the state of the box. And if you check the box at the right time you’ll receive a very neutral emotional pay off. You will also discover at this point whether or not you have assessed your feelings accurately. Did the death of the cat surprise you? Did the cat miraculously spring back to life? (Wonderful! What news!)
[*.*] CONCLUSION [*.*]
After using Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment as an analogy for waiting for a reply from your crush I was hoping to tell you this:
By not checking the box (the land of their reply,) you can actually alter the way in which they behave just like a particle that decides to get wavy away from a human’s stupid keen prying eyes…)
But to tell you that would be to grossly misunderstand quantum superposition (apparently) and the reason why Schrödinger thought-up this fictional cat experiment in the first place.
And yet, I would still like to acknowledge that it can certainly feel this way sometimes…
So good luck.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
Tilly x♥️x
Hello miaow. Yes, I discovered this emailing you.
This game is only to be played in extreme scenarios. Is your writing attempting to put someone else’s body under duress?
DISCLAIMER: this next part is where I’ll bring Schrödinger’s cat into it. Not only because my miaow like cats but also because this is one of those thought experiments which is always getting bastardised by other disciplines besides quantum superposition. Some smarty pant brings it up in philosophy class before anyone’s ready like they’re making a case for social justice—but what about Schrödinger’s cat? And we’ve all misremembered it ever since. After looking around the internet it seems like a lot of other people have misremembered it too, so consider me continuing the tradition here.