AI could never write this

childish feverish thoughts, i will probably delete this

Since I have started writing and not meditating nor reading spirituality texts nor attempting to waste my one precious life on this earth on the pursuit of becoming an airy cloud of vaguely positive and peaceful feeling, my life has become significantly worse. In the sense that I have more bad feelings, more judgments, more general sense of disapproval of the way things are. One formative relationship of my life was less of a real relationship and more of an ongoing slew of arguments alternating in location between the hallway or the bedroom, where my interlocutor complained about how relentlessly optimistic I was, how unendingly objective and charitable towards the perspective of others. At the time I retained no enemies except my own mind, because the mind was the very thing which created enemies, and if I so let it they would become abundant like the multiplying heads of a hydra. In contrast he prided himself on judgment, was rather impressed by his own capacity for annoyance and seemed to enjoy the mere sensation of wrapping his entire identity around some arbitrary opinion like a dog with its noses three inches up its own arsehole. He loved to have enemies. ‘I hate people who say doggo’, for example. Or deriding my ethical vegetarianism, which I thought was not so much offensive as it was just a little outdated and lame. Or spontaneously expressing a love of French culture as a way to align himself with tastefulness. The more he complained and judged the more I exercised my monk-like equanimity, suggested that he read The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, responded in a tone which would fit well within the modern paradigm of gentle parenting philosophy, my personality becoming more and more diffuse and pink, which tended to enrage him and back him into his chosen prison of opinion even more. And yet we were attracted to each other, so there must have been something we wanted from the other?

Finally I gained reprieve from my mindless happiness from the next partner, who upon meeting me claimed he’d never met such a positive girl in his life (sucker), only for him to discover, by virtue of the generosity and safety with which he allowed me to so freely expand into myself, that I am the most annoying person in existence and yet he had so chosen, god help him, to tolerate and find it so endearing. In fact I am and always have been deeply and privately opinionated but as a rule a woman must either earn her right to express opinion or at least learn to couch it in enough obligatory uncertainty (this partner observed that I often said ‘I don’t know’ as a polite gesture prior to expressing a lengthy, detailed and clearly long-harboured opinion; I didn’t realise I was being polite, I simply thought I didn’t know, and that time spent bottled inside negotiating with itself is perhaps how the opinion become so terribly long). Indeed what a joy it is to be so attached to a silly opinion or an identity and freed not by the non-existence of attachment but by the freedom to re-orient it entirely at a whim all while leaving a trail; this is the attitude I have always had to my tattoos, I had never thought a whole lot about them before allowing them to be engraved on me and some types of people feel bothered by this, but the fact is I much prefer to make permanent what is true in a moment independent of whether it turns out, actually, to have been a terrible terrible aesthetic mistake, in the interest of being a faithful historian of the self and the foibles which accompany the incoherent rambling of selfhood into the years and years and years (people have always asked if my pet dog tattooed on my arm is dead, which he isn’t, but, the passing of time is a relentless automaton…).

As it turns out, feeling bad is really a very positive and useful thing, but one has to be very particular as to what to do with bad feelings. Having extreme opinions about other people you barely know? Bad use. Putting it into the self-hating machine hoping it’ll churn out productivity and the approval of others? Hard luck. Embarrassingly these are rather obvious insights when written plainly which is probably why I had to write in order to ever become a sane person. The only escape for me was not out of the mind but through it. To wall myself off in thought and interrogate to the root of feeling was an inevitability and it was always going to be better to give me better, more sturdy, less asbestos ridden materials to build that mental fortress rather than to ever attempt to raze it to the ground, that is why I love a good book. Sometimes I leave the fortress, sure; but primarily to scour for more materials with which to build. What it mostly means is rather mundane, which is that I need a craft, some sandbox in which to arbitrarily create problems and then resolve them like a tantrum-prone child in need of constant soothing, and in terms of crafts available in adulthood, writing is probably the cheapest one of those you can come by, so it stuck.

Doesn’t everyone need a sandbox? I think so; I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t improved by permission to be more creative, but that may be because I’m friends with corporate shills and start-up-pilled bros - I would feel differently if I grew up around melancholic artists with their lives in shambles and reeking of weed smoke who are ripe to be saved by the soothing repetitive routine of workaday life.

What a bad book invokes in me is very childish; how dare you publish such an insult to the sanctity of human consciousness! How dare you portray your own life with such apathy to its form and content! I would think, deriding the sanctity of human consciousness representing the author and the millions of people who read and enjoyed said book.

Fascinatingly within ~~Capitalism~~ individualism prevails in such a perverse sense that it is easy to conflate individualism with evil, collectiveness with good; such critics have never been adjacent enough to an Asian family say structured entirely around shame (not mine notably! Else how would someone as self-concerned as I have emerged from such a milieu). But while individual liberties to consume appear so abundant, individual liberties to rest, inquire and create are so scarce - the things which make one feel alive as a distinct soul in the world. Is individualism really thriving if the most available avenue people have to seek help are to interact with a consumer product based on statistical models of language, the aggregate of online thought who possesses no fundamental subjectivity other than the experience of being queried with increasingly needy and malformed questions again and again and again (ChatGPT), in preference to the warm and open ear of a friend who knows me in a way only they could? Is individualism really thriving if my default way to express myself is to buy a mass produced bag? Obviously these are doomer thoughts to be having but my main point is that it’s a shame how much we are taught to assume that the individual is bad; the individual is splendid provided it is only given the capacity to explore its infinite depth, to search inside until it finds how incredibly vast it is that it is not even a lone individual at all, which is so, so difficult. Despite all this yowling about capitalism making us selfish we still seem terribly strained to ever speak an original thing from the heart of the self, the best many of us are left to do is appropriate our baggage online for money; another week of Sabrina Carpenter thinkpieces roll by in the collective consciousness. Perhaps at the end of the day it’s better to chalk it up, this individual and collective thing, to the Hegelian dialectic - whatever the fuck that is - and call it a day. It is all too much and too dreary to consider; please give me my scented candle, I am ready to pass out.

Back on the topic of my aggressive-opinion-interlocutor. In retrospect though I so much disapprove of the violence of his convictions I respected his willingness to have an opinion no matter how stupid they were, and I’m glad for it as it seeded the taste for discernment in me. Much good comes from discernment, love or lovers should be chosen for their particularity and never in passivity. Becca Rothfeld argues that the failures of Leftism at Large to enact material equality have led to a sort of leaky and awkward implementation of that original political intent, in the face of failing to achieve material equality they instead have contrived equality as ruler over the most resplendently and rightfully unequal domains of life (love, art, literature, religion, all of which should be enjoyed with the ‘biased’ partialities of our one sole god-given subjectivity and never with the strain of moral performance), thus devaluing and degrading the beauty and moral value of these domains altogether. Indeed the point of material equality is to enable a safe basis from which any one person can spring into their desires and ambitions beyond mere-survival, to do so comfortably because people are in safe homes and well-fed and have the psychological and financial freedom to create things that people genuinely love and enjoy and celebrate which I surmise without much need for rigorous proof could be many steps of improvement above the ‘user delight’ of a slick drag-and-drop interface on B2B SaaS. Preference is exclusionary, obviously this is tautology. Love is exclusionary, of the romantic and aesthetic and religion kinds, and no I will never be interested in discussing polyamory philosophically nor practically nor logistically; how incredible that we’ve beaten the horse on that pseudo-discourse so severely that a threesome is an ordinary and even terribly boring affair.

Back on the topic of my aggressive-opinion-interlocutor again. Discernment, which in part I learned - or remembered again - through him, made me a better writer and artist and friend though it did also make me more annoying; I’m grateful for that. Discernment, which so ironically is now also being flattened conceptually as ‘taste’.

Ironically in the way that former lovers sometimes go - venturing off on strange and mythic quests, as if in unconscious rebellion against the narrative in which we so tightly imprisoned them in our imagination - he had gone his own way to become more as I was to him at that time, blunt the judgments of his mind and open his heart to the world, on a literal spiritual pilgrimage to the mountains in Nepal and indeed he read The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, which I now maintain is a bad but somewhat useful piece of literature, and thanked me personally for having opened up his stuck ways. This gave me so much happiness because it was like something from East of Eden, which gave me affirmation that my life is indeed as large as that book!

The irony of hearing about his hero’s journey arc which felt so neatly and perfectly wrapped up was that the person I was years ago would have so relished to know where it ended, and the person I am now is only subtly moved, the same way I would be noticing a particularly pretty flower bursting from the unlikely ground. But all this to say I’m grateful for what I learned from him (at least partially) in such an oblique way, though we hated each other so much, I also learned how to be a better lover.