it’s hard to feel motivated to do anything these days. my to-do list is massive—i deleted it because it boiled down to “learn everything”—and i flip-flop between imagining myself as a polymath and thinking that everything’s going to hell. maybe it’s always been like this.
i have a couple things lined up for nayuta: an essay on communication/sterilisation (which has been on the website even before i met her), a contextualising description of my experiences with fanfiction and lewd art, and a review of arnold’s “art history”. the most obvious reason for not writing that review is because I don’t have the necessary background, education, or experience to comment on any matter. due diligence is a confusing topic, and many would frown on me for daring to voice opinions without proper deference (as if they have the Dunning-Kruger graph in hand to solve for x). and i’m sure some more would frown at them for being elitists, but eh, at some point it just becomes noise that i don’t want to deal with.
then again, that’s just what i told the psychiatrist when they asked why i had difficulty with schoolwork. i didn’t mention anything else.
nayuta’s gone now—i don’t know if she cut ties or is just going through a period of self-isolation, considering her account’s ghosting everyone. an acquaintance suggested that her life may not be our business, but i replied that it influences the relationship: if she’s just offline for poverty/trauma-related reasons, then i’m obligated to wait around as long as it takes. but if she meant it as an attempt to cut ties, then i’m obligated to follow through and accept that.
my entire life i’ve felt like a child dragged up a mountainside with the person ahead of me suddenly going out of sight, the chain going slack. and when i inevitably make a wrong move—when i fall—i can’t see whether the chain is still attached to me or them; i don’t know whether anybody will chain me, only to drag me up whatever path they choose; and i don’t know whether, when i hit the bottom, i’ll die a miserable slow painful death. perhaps linking myself to mina and lacey and nayuta is my way of showing that i can still climb without a safety rope. but i don’t know if any of them will pull at any second. maybe other people are just used to climbing solo. maybe they’re just already on the bottom, scavenging.
and every time i think about family, society, and the economy, i feel worse.
i think about the way that my family controls me—to the point i don’t even know whether i’m hungry or full, because my mother can force me to eat when i don’t want to—and i cannot see a way out, because i will never be free of their influence. i’ll still be obligated to socialise with them and follow their recommendations even if i gain financial independence, and then i’ll have to take care of them when i get older. this only ends with their deaths or mine, and the former is not a possibility (barring fatal accidents) because everybody will be after me if i kill them, so i have to kill myself.
i think about the way that society controls me to such an extent that i take comments and webcomics and mundane sayings seriously, and limit certain language because i’m genuinely afraid the critics inside my head will lambast me for bias or discrimination or pseudoscience or simple hubris. i can’t even read most fictional stories, let alone nonfiction books, because they feel like they always end in some gotcha moment that aims to hurt or change the reader. everything hurts because debates are always about context and negative connotations and moral values and many would argue that’s a good thing—that i deserve to suffer. every discussion is a conflict when everybody is in a position of power above me, and they have an incentive to humiliate me because that’s how you win debates. and i’m not even exaggerating when i say this is the norm—see Medhi Hasan’s thoughts on political interviews, and see literary criticism.
i think about the way that today’s economy is hostile in many, many ways. readers here (if any, which i doubt, as my writing is horrid and my website is horrid and my ideas are horrid) will probably understand when i gesture vaguely at the USA and the UK and global supply chains. but i can’t prove it because i’m not familiar with economics—because everybody just tells me that things will get better and the system is trustworthy, even as so many people seem to be poor. i was told from a young age that i had to make myself unique for college and employers by virtue of extracurricular projects, to the point that i can’t even start a personal project without wondering what my parents and teachers and potential employers would think about it. i have a fetish for qualifications because nothing’s respectable otherwise. and for what? for an economy that will pay me low wages, force me to work long hours, micromanage me, stress me out, and lay me off? fuck that.
i don’t know what i want. i don’t know what i want because i’ve constantly been rewiring my brain to care about the things that people say i ought to care about. and then when i don’t know, people see that as evidence that they should train me even more.
so here’s what i want: to become god.
obviously that’s not really possible, but eh, i find omnipotence is a nice loophole when people ask what superpower you want (and it is an established superpower considering characters such as dr. manhattan, the beyonder, etc.).
and honestly, a billion dollars would work too. i wouldn’t feel obligated to my parents, and i’d have financial independence so i’d actually be able to live by myself and make my own decisions to eat and sleep and study. hell, i’d have the financial ability to actually help my poor friends and ex-friends so i can have friends in happy situations for once in my fucking life and know how they genuinely feel about me. i wouldn’t feel tied to society either because i could just become a recluse—because there’d no longer be as much of a need to constantly practise my social skills and talk to people who are mean to me. and then i’d have so much time and resources and energy to become a polymath.
or, y’know, i could just use the money to move to america, buy a gun, and kill myself.
meh.