1. The Instant “No”
Sometimes I hear something — a claim, a fact, even a throwaway joke — and my mind slams it out of reality before the sound has even faded.
Not “I’m skeptical”. Not “I’ll think about that”.
Just No.
It’s not a choice. It’s not even a thought.
It’s a hardening in the chest, a tightening behind the eyes, a micro-freeze in my breathing.
The muscles at the base of my neck brace, as if they’ve just been told to hold up the whole world.
And in that instant, there’s relief — like shutting a door against a sudden wind.
Sometimes, I later realize I locked the door against something I might have needed.
But by then, it’s already outside.
2. Indoctrination: Where the Reflex Learned to Breathe
I grew up inside a system that couldn’t tolerate contradiction.
Anything that didn’t match the official frame was automatically fiction — disposable.
If a piece of scientific information didn’t align with the sanctioned worldview, my mind didn’t wrestle with it — it simply slotted it as “false” and moved on.
If a story world contained ideas that didn’t match the moral frame I’d been taught, the entire thing lost its claim on reality.
And it wasn’t just big, obvious contradictions — I caught the small ones, too.
Hyperlexia meant I was parsing every word at high speed and high fidelity, even in ordinary conversation.
If a preacher’s sentence shifted tense in a way that undermined its own logic, or if two Bible verses didn’t line up exactly in meaning, I felt the misalignment instantly.
But instead of exploring it, the reflex directed me to eject it before it could gain a foothold.
The contradictions didn’t vanish — I removed them.
Even in moments of casual social interaction, the reflex was there, silently stripping out anything that didn’t fit the map I’d been given.
I felt no curiosity, no ache to know more — only the clean, cold release of having maintained alignment with the only frame I was allowed to trust.
Inside that world, my mental pipeline was brutally simple:
- If it matched the map, it was real.
- If it didn’t, it wasn’t worth the breath it took to say it.
That wasn’t arrogance. It was survival logic.
Being “right” meant staying aligned with the group, which meant staying safe.
Being wrong meant exile — and when your safety net is the size of your whole world, exile feels like death.
Even my heartbeat seemed to know that.
3. Deconstruction: When the Bypass Collapsed
Leaving that system didn’t just change what I believed — it destroyed the secret bypass lane in my head where “truth” used to speed through unchecked.
Suddenly, everything had to pass through the same bottom-up coherence test.
On paper, that sounds like freedom.
In my body, it felt like the brakes had failed.
Every new idea came barreling straight into me, and my only defense was the same split-second rejection that had always kept me “safe.”
But without the pre-cleared worldview, there was nothing underneath — no map, no ground, no structure to stand on.
Just the void.
For the first time, I wasn’t defending a known territory — I was defending the sheer possibility of finding one.
Any contradiction didn’t just threaten an idea — it threatened my ability to trust my own discernment in the next step.
And often, the reflex wasn’t so much defending something I’d built as justifying a lack of attachment altogether.
Safer to hold nothing than to risk holding something that might collapse.
So the reflex doubled as proof: See? Nothing is safe to anchor to yet.
This is where the two threads merged — a genuine need for discernment intertwined with a learned instinct to stay unattached.
They look the same from the outside, but one keeps me honest and the other keeps me drifting.
4. The Reflex Beneath the Reflex
Evolution built this thing long before religion touched it.
Our ancestors survived by keeping a working mental map of the world — where food was, where danger lived, which paths were safe.
A bad map could get you killed.
So the safest move was to reject new information unless it proved itself fast.
That’s the model-preservation reflex:
- Contradiction = danger.
- Protect orientation first, investigate later (if ever).
And here’s the kicker — preserving orientation doesn’t just remove danger, it feels good.
The brain’s endogenous opioid system makes relief from a perceived threat more rewarding than a neutral-to-pleasure gain.
When the reflex ejects a contradiction, you don’t just return to “baseline safety” — you get a chemical hit of being safe again.
Relief is addictive. And religion knows this.
High-control belief systems deliberately induce attachment-threatening danger — the fear of losing God, community, or eternal life — so that reaffirming belief feels like rescue.
It turns rejecting contradictions into a neurochemical reward loop:
- Threat to belonging → opioid tension
- Return to belief → opioid release
- Release > pleasure, so the next time, you’ll want to reject even faster.
Indoctrination hijacked that reflex by making disbelief feel like stepping into open air over a canyon.
Deconstruction took the canyon away but left me with the same rope-bridge gut feeling every time my discernment — or my willingness to attach — is tested.
5. Overfitting Meets Zero Latency
Here’s where it gets intense for me:
Most people have a moment — even a fraction of a second — where they can hold an idea before deciding what to do with it.
I don’t.
There’s no “maybe” space in my architecture.
Contradictions hit me at full speed, with no buffer, and the reflex fires before I can breathe.
When I encounter a scientific claim that conflicts with my current working model, my first instinct is to eject it completely rather than investigate it.
When I enter a fictional world and its internal logic breaks, the whole thing collapses in my mind — not just the moment, but the entire constructed reality.
And it isn’t limited to ideas on a page.
In conversation, I’m constantly parsing language at full fidelity, every word measured against structural coherence in real time.
Hyperlexia makes me fast at decoding, but speed doesn’t mean ease — it means I detect misalignment instantly, even in casual speech.
Every social exchange carries the low-grade pain of contradiction, because my brain refuses to blur past what doesn’t fit.
Where others glide over inconsistencies for the sake of flow, I hit them head-on, and the reflex is there — reject, eject, and either protect discernment or prove that nothing here is safe to attach to.
It feels like an immune system response: rapid, total, and final.
If I want to update my working model — whether it’s about the structure of the universe, the rules of an invented city, or the unspoken logic of a conversation — I have to go back to where I was before the contradiction hit.
Most people can do that intuitively.
For me, it’s a deliberate act — finding that earlier version of my thinking, putting the new information in its place, and seeing if the whole structure still holds.
If it does, I can attach to it.
If it doesn’t, the discard stays final.
It’s not a posture I’ve chosen — it’s simply how my mind maintains discernment without locking onto something unsafe.
6. The Ghost of Being Right
Even without religion, my body still believes that being wrong is dangerous.
That’s the leftover wiring from Terror Management Theory in my upbringing — where the “right” belief didn’t just keep you in the group, it kept you safe from death itself.
Now the threats are social or intellectual, not cosmic.
But my nervous system didn’t get the memo.
Every challenge to my current orientation still feels like someone’s about to take away my ability to navigate — or worse, trick me into holding onto something that will later collapse.
The breath shortens, the jaw tightens, the shoulders lift just slightly — ready to hold back the collapse.
It’s not an argument in my head — it’s a full-body “No” rooted in survival.
7. What This Means
- For me: I’m not impossible to convince. But your idea has to survive the reflex long enough for me to reload the right mental state and actually test it — and it has to feel safe enough to attach to without risking collapse.
- For others: Instant rejection doesn’t always mean arrogance. Sometimes it’s the survival part of someone’s brain protecting their capacity to discern — or guarding them from unsafe anchors.
- For systems: You can’t bulldoze a reflex this fast. You have to approach sideways, give it room to relax, and sometimes never trigger it in the first place.
8. The Reframe
I can’t rip this reflex out — and I wouldn’t want to.
It’s the same precision that lets me spot structural cracks before they cause harm, that keeps my search honest, that refuses false alignment.
But I can choose, more often, to hold the door open a second longer.
Sometimes that’s all it takes to turn a rejection into a reconstruction.
The reflex that once guarded a belief system now operates in a split role:
- Protecting the search for coherence.
- Keeping attachment on probation until coherence proves itself.
It’s still fierce. But it’s mine now.
Living with it feels like building a compass in the middle of a storm.
Every gust of wind, every shift in the waves, threatens to knock the needle off true.
Some part of me is always shielding the mechanism from stray debris, testing and retesting whether it still points where it should.
And until I’m certain it’s steady, I won’t lash it to the deck — because a false compass is worse than no compass at all.
Mind Stuffing 