Actually, My Experiences Are Universal! Author Note - 05/09/25
"Actually, My Experiences Are Universal!" is my second published story, and it's a weird one. My first story, Let Her Collecct Stamps, was going for as emotional as possible; it's a point of pride that I was able to make so many of my loves cry reading it. This story, however, has a much different goal - getting as weird as possible in as short a time as I can.
Before we do anything else, let's talk about the publishing journey of this story. Much like my first story, this story was written in one sitting. I edited it a couple days later and then sent it out. Unlike Let Her Collect Stamps, it took this story a really long time to find a home. I knew going in that this weird little hasty piece was probably going to get a lot of rejections, and I was okay with that - in fact, I wrote it with that in mind. It was something to just have out on submission while my thesis kept me from writing new stories. And then the call for hex literary opened. I'd been sending this story to every place I could find that accepted microfiction, but even before getting rejection letters I already knew this piece didn't have a home there. When I saw that hex was opening, the piece just made sense, snug amongst hex's other oddities. I had a good feeling, and it got accepted. I stand by my belief that you should send out stories wherever possible - don't self reject! - but at the same time it's become clear to be that there's a special feeling you get when a place just seems like a perfect home for a story.
So what's up with this story? Okay, first things first, "umwelt" is a real word. I thought it was better-known, but multiple friends asked me about the origins of UMWELT's name. "Umwelt" means the world as experienced by a specific organism, and it has this connotation of trying to imagine the world as experienced by something with a very different sensory experience of reality. Take a bat - we can understand how echolocation works, but do we actually understand what it feels like to echolocate? Whenever I try to imagine it, I just imagine something like a radar - in short, I just imagine *sight*, not actual echolocation. So the word "umwelt" connotes the uniqueness of perceptual reality. This word fit my character perfectly. There's a huge focus on her perceptual reality and her sensory intake, and there's this ironic kick where her reality is treated as the objective one to aspire to, even though the name itself suggests subjectivity.
It's a weird confusing abstract story. Hearing friends and acquaintances react to it, not everyone knows what to take away from it. I have some ideas as the author, but the response has shown me that what I've written is more confusing than I realized; it's so entrenched in these ideas of philosophy, and honestly, I love that for this story! What's more fitting for UMWELT than a story that different people have different reactions to? One thing I heard is that it's spooky, which I wasn't really expecting but which I totally see. It was hard figuring out how to make my little collage art for this story, given how conceptual an umwelt is. In the end, I tried to balance the human aspect of UMWELT (using James McNeill Whistler's painting The White Girl) with the computer-pills; the hands struck me as last minute inspiration as representative of sensory input and flesh - I think they add just enough creep factor. I love trying to get across a weird idea in a handful of words. This is the kind of story I wouldn't know how to tell in a longer form - it only works because it limits itself in scope to just crank up the weirdness. It says a lot that my reaction to my idea of universalizing experiences was to crunch it down into a couple hundred words with no discernable protagonists. I could write another blog article on my disdain for writing plot - maybe I'll do that soon.
Why this idea? Why do I care about umwelts? I think I love that word, that idea, because my own umwelt, my sensory experience, often feels unreliable. I ultimately don't really trust my own experience of reality. Multiple people have told me I'm likely autistic, and I think that impacts me here. I struggle to communicate via tone and others often react to notes in my tone that don't reflect how I'm actually feeling, and I struggle to tell how others feel if they don't directly tell me. Lots of foods are really hard for me to eat for no apparent reason, and even though I love physical affection, when touched, my body sends distress signals to my brain. So my sensory perception is already a little fucked. Combine this with a general lack of self-confidence (I'm working on it, promise!), and I wind up being very aware of the subjectivity of my umwelt, my inability to make sense of the world without the bias of this body interfering. While I do want more confidence, I actually really like that subjectivity. I think it's freeing and beautiful to know that my experiences aren't universal, that I can't imagine what it's like to be a bat. It makes me feel small, which is a pretty nice feeling sometimes.
And so Actually My Experiences is creepy because it's a denial of that feeling. UMWELT's experiences are pretty clearly subjective, as evidenced by her emotional experiences in the last paragraph, but she's not treated as such - her experiences have to be the default. I think it's pretty clear that whatever is happening to UMWELT is bad news; this girl is having a rough go of it and is being taken advantage of, her supposed objectivity obscuring the horrors of her sitution. It's that fear of being gaslit. I think another element in the story's spookiness is the implication that all of UMWELT's anxieties and fears are experienced by anyone on her drug. Sometimes when I'm feeling shitty I wonder if everyone's just supposed to feel this bad. When I feel lonely, for example, I wonder if maybe everyone feels like this and I just don't know how to handle it. The sublimation of the subjective in this story is terrifying because we don't want our suffering to be universal. We don't want others to hurt, of course, but we also want to know that we will not always hurt, that we can move past our traumas. Suffering is a part of the human experience, but something you need to hear sometimes is that something *isn't normal*. I didn't realize for twenty years that not everyone feels actual dread and panic when someone touches them with a fingertip - hearing that this wasn't normal was necessary to recognize my touch aversion and learn to start treating my body with kindness, setting boundaries that I needed. If we had UMWELT, then I'd just be fucked, right? I don't want to just tell you what this story means, the different interpretations mean a lot to me, but this is what was on my mind when working on it. I love subjectivity. I'd be pretty fuckin bummed to get rid of it.
A less serious last minute note! I didn't have a theme song for working on this story because it was written so quickly, but I'd assign this one "regulate you" by underscores. The whole album is UMWELT vibes, but this song is about emotional regulation and pushing feelings back, trying to get yourself to feel a specific way - that's UMWELT! :D
