two nights before new year’s eve, i got a call from a distant cousin in new york at 4 am. this “cousin”, whom i’ve never been quite sure how i’m related to or if we really are related by blood at all, was an omnipresent character in my childhood. he also had a less pervading brother who had vitiligo, a cut of white on his upper lip, and they both had slightly high pitched voices and maybe also a rift between them. i say this because the brother was rarely ever there at birthdays or family gatherings, and when i try to picture him in my childhood, he is missing from the birthday party where i had a guitar shaped birthday cake. my only recollection of him is a photograph i’d seen in my family album of me as a toddler with the two of them. i might even be forging my memory of this photograph altogether because my only concrete memory of him is from when i was much older, when i was 11 and we went on a vacation and he was somehow, of all places, in italy.

there, he gave us daily tours of parts of rome, and one time when my dad said no to something i wanted from the vending machine, he gave me a coin so i could have it. before we left, he gave me my first ever wrist watch, and he said it cost 50 euros. it was a dual watch with hands and an lcd display that both showed the same time and a red leather strap. at 11 my favorite color was orange, but the watch still turned into my prized possession, and i was awfully grateful to him for the gift. after returning home, i still hadn’t been able to fully grasp his apparition. he said he had a wife back home and a culinary diploma from malta, but he worked at the local florist, and he had made my parents read bengali poems that he had published in a diaspora magazine, which he carried around with him. my parents were less than impressed with his creative ventures, seeing him as wayward, as most older desi relatives do with people who don’t become a civil servant or an engineer or who don’t have children, and at that age i thought the poems were about his wife because his wife had asked for a divorce.

the cousin who had called and is now in new york, on the other hand, had also disappeared before i entered adolescence, and then near the end of high school, i heard from my parents one day that he had made his way to america. i remember being a little surprised because he did not have a college degree and i wondered what he was doing there, but i did not pry. he was suggesting that i apply to SUNY because he had seen chinese and arab students there and he reckoned i would fit in as well. when i did go to to new york for my study abroad semester, he added me on facebook, and i saw that he would sign off all his texts with MANHATTAN, NEW YORK, USA. i would show it to my friend and laugh. i saw him a few times there, thousands of miles away from home where i’d last seen him over a decade ago, and he would drive up in his car and tell me that he now had his own car and i should tell him any time if i needed anything. our meetings in his parked car outside my dorm never lasted longer than 2 minutes.

this time, i picked up his call at 4 am not out of familial bond, as bad as it sounds, but because the city where i live now is in my head a stark and constant contrast to new york, and i simply just wanted to talk to someone from that other city. he asked about my parents, and without prompting told me how bad the snow was. i asked how he felt about mamdani’s election. he embarked, with little need to conceal racial prejudices in the presence of kin, on a tirade on how mamdani had peddled to the poor and the illegal immigrants, that he was an indian and could never be as strong as trump. trump, he affirmed, was doing a great job deporting mamdani’s crowd, “cleaning the place up” before he left office. i made a half-spoken objection about trump being racist, to which he retorted that the issue had never been systemic. its always the immigrants who are up to no good, those doordashers. “i do good by others, i don’t harm anyone, and i’m doing well.” before we hung up quarter of an hour later, i was reminded once again that he had a green card and that i should spend more time with my aging parents.

for a while id been desperate for a change of scene, and with my apartment hunt nearing almost 2 months, i gave in to an ad looking for a flatmate. i wasn’t happy about sharing an apartment, but i thought i could still keep looking while i lived there temporarily, so i showed up the next day with my friends to check it out. the uber probably missed 5 turns before we found the guys who’d posted the ad who then led us to the garage of the apartment building. there was a bundle of rebar, which exactly 6 unusually large chickens stood atop, completely motionless, facing the wall. i would only come to know they were alive because when i went to pose next to them for a picture, one of them moved. the entire scene had enormous potential as a backdrop in a stanley kubrick film. a stairwell without banisters took us up to the first floor apartment, and it was like in the pictures, just about alright, maybe even more sunlit than i had expected. looking at the street outside from the narrow balcony gave the impression of looking through a telephoto lens; everything just a little too close to everything else. i looked around because it was the polite thing to do, and then turned to the guys. we locked eyes, shared a moment of unease, and i told them i’d let them know on the phone. we left without having asked my almost-flatmates any questions.

i had not anticipated, however, the neighborhood that this apartment was in and the dent it was about to make in the sort of insulation i had so far only deliberated on academically. i thought about how i had been so cozy reading george orwell’s description of pre-WW2 yorkshire in the road to wigan pier and had even given it 4 stars on goodreads afterwards. on the way back, i went non-verbal reconciling what i’d seen, and then i would eat my japanese fried chicken silently when we sat down for lunch and remained quiet for most of the uber ride afterwards. throughout the events, my friends talked non-stop about bumble. we listened to a voice note of some guy’s off-key singing and i also learned that one of her matches had asked my friend for money. one of them pulled out gemini to generate a response to a text, to which the guy replied in near-perfect chatgpt diction. at a brief natural pause in these jubilant happenings, my friend asked me to sign up for bumble. i mumbled i couldn’t muster headspace for anyone else right now. “are you saying you don’t have bandwidth?” they sniggered at this inside joke, to which i had nothing to say. nor do i have anything to say to my almost-flatmates i haven’t called back.

when i look around now i find that nearly everyone i know is in very different places in life. i asked my therapist if she thinks i too could’ve been elsewhere if i had gotten a degree in something i was more interested in. she paused for a second, then said maybe. maybe not. she said people who study history and get research jobs as historians are far too few compared to the number of history graduates. i could’ve studied history and ended up working at a bank, and then my circumstances would’ve been practically the same. hearing about the plight of history graduates, i felt suddenly relieved, and i happily conceded that i was indeed out of touch with their not so romantic realities. i like my therapist because she seems to speak my language, somehow reading between the lines and connecting the dots even when i trail off with it doesn’t matter. since my goal for 2026 is to engage less in self-narration, its nice that she can understand me in so few words.

reading the journal entries of eve babitz, i realized that mine are all aggressively inward looking, while hers had far fewer sentences with first person pronouns but still reveal greater insights into her being. for example, i met my friends from high school for lunch the other day; 2 of the 3 now live in different countries but are home for the winter, and one of them brought up how we once rescued an abandoned kitten after school. i have no recollection of the events because almost all my memories from back then are sadly of my feelings. in my first meeting with her, my therapist asked me to tell her about myself. “i can connect with people wherever i go.” “but it’s not important that you do that,” she immediately corrected. “i get along with people really well.” “so we keep our anger to ourselves?” she clarified again. i had nothing to counter her with save for an unspoken realization that it was time to let it go. i called my friend to tell her that my therapist said that im her smartest client. my friend replied her lebanese therapist had also told her the same, and i wondered if my therapist lies to me as well.

my main issue right now (there’s always one…) is that none of my reflections properly resemble the next. before the full-length mirror hanging from the back of my bedroom door, i look lumpier, older than the image of the 22 year old i can’t get out of my head. in the eyes of my group of coworkers-turning-friends, i am feigning avoidant attachment when really i just haven’t figured out a structured approach to narrating my lore yet. to an old friend i am off brand for reading System Design Interview by Alex Xu but if i could afford to id much rather be reading whatever performative core authorship ive always been a fond of. in the middle of all of this, i am somehow on the outside of myself, watching parts of me shrink and embolden, with the weight of having to sum all the right parts, of deciding whether i’m looking at my 25 year old self or just an aberration of the mirror, whether something deep within just doesn’t want new friendship at the moment, or whether taking a liking to Alex Xu is somehow betraying albert camus. all versions can be true, there is room for more than one truth, but regardless, lately i haven’t been adequately certain about any of them, certain enough to be able to say, “this is me!”

a few months ago i had decided to give it time and wait it out until everything falls into place on its own. back in march or april i told my boss during our 1 on 1 that i was giving my life time until november to sort itself out before i ended it. it is now november but in this time ive grown to believe that killing yourself is the cringiest thing in the world and my life is actually pretty normal with not much to worry about and hypothetically if i were to leave a note behind i wouldn’t even have enough problems to fill it with, so that would be lame. my boss did say i should see a therapist and i even looked up a few in my city but never ended up going because of this tweet i saw around that time that was like “Sure I ‘grind my teeth’ but it ‘happens while I’m sleeping’ so it’s ‘impossible for me to tell’. Oh you have a solution, and it costs $300. Sure yes I trust you ‘dentist’” and i thought the dig at dentistry was analogous to therapy. regardless, even if i were to see a therapist, i’m not sure what i would say to them to convey my desire to kill myself that really isn’t as much of a desire to kill myself as it is a twitter-bred expression for misplaced discontent (maybe that’s a good place to start?).

a little while after that conversation, i turned 25, and all of a sudden i started hearing people talking about income tax in the smoking zone at the office. to be fair i’m not exactly the type A kind, so half of it is on me for not anticipating word of taxes right now, but the other half is the sheer betrayal of being left behind by your own body as it grows to the kind of size that owes the government money, while you still keep finding reasons to linger a few steps back. this is not my first time showing up to life unprepared, but still, it was a different, even thrilling, kind of unpreparedness being on a plane to sarajevo and asking the passenger next to me what the currency of the country was just before the plane landed. they were life’s surprises but they were also, admittedly, on my own terms, and i suppose now, they are less so. like having your birthday surprise thrown at your own house as opposed to someone else’s, where you’re summoned to instead of thrown into; the latter is for obvious reasons less imposing. at some point i figured being old and alive is a laden task and if i just led with my career and got that sorted, that would naturally open up space for me to eventually get the rest in order as well. and so for a while, i did that.

i began to, and succeeded to a commendable extent, if i may say so myself, to assume a detachment entirely foreign to the real lover and ex-bpd haver zion. i began to speak less and less, and frequently ran out of things to say. when people asked how i was doing, i had not much to indulge them in, and so maybe that’s where i picked up lying properly for the first time. i would muster the most romantic image of paying my credit card bill or of a random side quest that i could, so as to convince the other that i appreciated them inquiring. except when i thought my stories should undulate a little as well, then i would pick a nearly harmless encounter and embellish my victimhood to elicit some sympathy, lest they felt like they were clapping for me too much.

a strange byproduct of this was that my already deficient memory got progressively worse. i would listen to people, chime in, until the spotlight was off, and then i would get ready for the next act. this was a lot of work on its own, and if i had to keep tabs of all of the things i was agreeing to (or disagreeing with, to even things out), i would’ve probably gone insane by now. i started going to the movies by myself every week, until i watched almost all of them, because for just $3 i could go three hours without having to answer questions about myself, or any at all, for that matter.

except, in work meetings. here, i was so loud with my questions and ideas at work in a way that would make all the other kids in the class hate you. i frequently got things wrong, but we all went ahead with it anyway perhaps because i was just so loud. i feel some regret here, because i wasn’t an expert of the things we were doing and i might’ve led a few collective missteps, but really, i couldn’t help it when everything faded in urgency next to my career. it was the door to everything that was actually important. ill get this sorted, and then ill deal with the next.

then slowly, but also suddenly, i looked up like in the movies when the character breaks the 4th wall, and i thought, prepared or not, i am 25, and i owe the government money. that life has been happening, all this time, notwithstanding my lack of consent or even dearth of awareness, not in a linear fashion as i was expecting it to be, but all at once. that i feigned affection in places no one would argue were any less worthy of real affection. that i spent all this time believing nothing is important except just One thing, over all that graces god’s green earth, that i even let myself decide on a whim what that One thing was going to be, which also led me to not saying the word “postmodern” in months.

i’m finishing this post on vacation, and with a return ticket with a set date in hand, i am perhaps even more wary of the passage of time. it is going to be the 16th of november one day and i am going to go back home, and until then i can choose to either care about anything in lahore or not, but it is going to be 16th one day anyway, and the time will have passed. i could pick one thing in this city to obsess over, and only think about that from the moment i wake up in my airbnb and go to sleep, and when i go back, i will only have one thing to talk about. regardless of how much good health and fortune that one thing brings me, when i recount my two weeks here, it is going to sound boring as hell to others and most importantly to myself. if we’re being honest, life itself isn’t all that much longer than two weeks either.

i usually write one of these posts right when i have a lightbulb moment with a capital P problem but before i’ve fully overcome it. i went to an art exhibition here and i saw this work with etchings in white fabric that was casting shadows on the wall that i thought was speaking to a different me, perhaps the 22 year old in the mirror. i thought it had something to say that i couldn’t (or shouldn’t) be privy to. i tried looking at it for a bit but had to look away because i felt some semblance of what was quite possibly shame. the exhibition is still on, but if i went back again tomorrow, even after having written these words and realizing how absurd all of this sounds, i don’t know if anything would be different between me and the shadows on the wall.

a lot of time has passed since i last saw the world in a different way, and i guess i have, irrevocably but not irreparably changed in some ways. i say that because i am too old to still have issues with self-acceptance, and this is just how i’ve grown to be over the past year. a lot of time has passed, but undoubtedly there is still time left, to make space for things and to laugh at things that are actually funny. maybe HR was plotting in my favor when they said i couldn’t take my work laptop to pakistan, and i actually had to take the whole two weeks off instead of working remotely, so i would get a little practice of doing that, away from work. or maybe not. regardless, if you want things to be good, you have to believe there’s something bigger than you that wants it to be good for you.

i had another draft with a more refined flow but i’m scratching all of it to say straight up that things are looking pretty bleak for me right now. i hadn’t even thought of that word to describe my current circumstances until i happened to be talking to a friend who lives in a city with all her friends and she described her own circumstances as bleak. on that scale then my days would happily rank in the negative. i am starting to get a little annoyed (and dazed) by the indefatigable routine of my days and my equally futile protests against it, and with this second draft i am making a resolute attempt to break free. every day i do about the same thing that i did the day prior, and when every now and then i pause to reflect on the state that i am in, i am filled with contempt – not the easy going contempt that is directed inwards but an uglier, unsociable, crime and punishment-esque contempt towards whatever that is orchestrating all of this. then once again as a man of incredible agency i make the decision to break free from this sadist orchestrator’s schemes and start doing things my way (another healthy habit?) to make things a little jollier for myself. it is a scene nearly out of a goya painting when you realize that your attempts to break free from routine has also, crushingly, become a routine.

there is regret, quite a bit of it, maybe even all of the contempt i speak of is only a thin film over the bottomless regret, and this is probably worth getting out of the way in the name of transparency. what saying something like this out loud could contribute towards making things better for anyone at all, really, is up for debate, but putting it out there lifts a few weights off of one’s chest, and, that’s good enough for now. a big portion of my internal dialogue sounds like some variation of “had i done this or that last year, or the year before that, things would have been different today”. in a way, i’ve developed an obsession with the past that i am not very fond of. a normal person, i assume, would be more occupied with the fullness of the present moment or their teeming future, but instead, i find myself thinking a lot about what has already been, and these thoughts seep into my conversations more often than i’d like. all the sentences that start with “this one time…” or “when i was in…” automatically excludes the person listening to you speak, and doing it too much doesn’t bring you any closer to them and certainly not any closer to the past. you can only talk about the past as much as you distance yourself from the present, and everyone in it.

the other thing i’ve grown to obsess over is computers, and i’m not too happy with this development either. everything is computer. maybe i’m trying to make up for the interest in computers i definitely should’ve harbored back then, and then things would’ve been different today. i posted on reddit asking if i should email my computer science professors an apology for not conducting myself with due discipline in class when it was time for it, and that i’ve changed now, and i care so much about computers now, and i wish i could go back to their classrooms, but people in the comments called me crazy and said i should see a therapist if it’s really that bad. the other day i was explaining to someone the difference between threads and processes and how threads share a memory space and processes don’t, so too many threads could yield poor cpu performance, and i, sickeningly, enjoyed it. they would’ve known this if they’d taken operating systems in fall 2022. i hate what i have become, because it makes me look like i care so much about computers and i hate that it is true. sometimes when i talk to my friends on the phone i think i am deceiving them by playing a part, because i am not who they once befriended, and when i talk to my coworkers in the office i don’t think they really know me because they haven’t seen who i used to be, and i think that version is worth knowing more.

i should make it clear that all of this combined is making me pretty miserable. i have so far been in denial, that this is just some sort of a bad episode, and i should grit my teeth and get through it. but this just makes me plain Miserable. being a miserable person, miserable being the adjective here, is one thing, and being Miserable, the noun, is another, and by my estimate, the latter is far worse. when you’re a miserable person, the adjective speaks only of your condition, but you’re still a whole person, with all the passions and whims and vivacity that characterizes personhood. the misery is still there, but it is only an ailment, nothing permanent to or inextricable from your being, and there’s a hoard of other things waiting to replace it in due time. on the other hand, being Miserable is reminiscent of soviet era destitution, it is all consuming, all of you being all of your misery. it is an umbrella, the root of everything, like how everything in russia between 1922 and 1991 can be explained by communist rule. “why was the child starving?”, “they were from the soviet era”, “oh, makes sense”. i liked it so much when i was so much more, and i miss the space where i could be as such, where i could buy cheap nail polish on purpose so that it’d chip in a few days, and no one would care. when i look back, i think fondly of when i could take a walk alone or do something on my own and on my way see something worth telling my friends about later. unfortunately, there are just too many eyes where i am currently, and even praise is uncomfortable now. i’d rather nobody sees me, or even thinks about me. i would be less miserable if i were invisible.

having embraced my misery, i’m just not sure how i would transition from being Miserable to being a miserable person, and i’m paying extra attention to not propose some new solution that will fall apart in a few days. this just takes up so much of my headspace, all the time, and i can’t even talk about it because what is there to even say? and then i can’t talk about anything, really, because this is all i’m thinking about, and again, i’m not allowed to talk about it. what is the way out? maybe this, maybe that. maybe i need to stop whining about Misery for a while and just be. would quitting my job help? i don’t even know. is it worth trying to find out? maybe not. if i quit, what’s the path to being who i used to be, path to what i’m missing? maybe if i had that figured out, i’d take a shot at it. but a gap on my resume right now will probably decide how comfortable my parents are in their retirement years or which school my children go to. i don’t have the means to take a shot at anything – there’s a glass ceiling just grazing my scalp and i guess all that’s left for me to say is we move. i don’t worry about running out of time, and i don’t believe in any of the lies that start with “your 20s are for…”. i think you can do anything in your 30s or 40s or 50s even that you could do in your 20s, except maybe for hiking and skydiving, and i don’t really care that much about activities like that. if i was 80 and i could go to a city where nobody knew who i was and i could take a walk and go completely unnoticed, i would say that i’m doing good.

i got myself a copy of My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. it was the assigned reading for a class i took in freshman fall, but i didn’t read it then, because it was a sociology class, and i thought my professor had assigned it just for gags. but now, all of twitter seems to be talking about it, and it’s the good side of twitter that i trust, so i thought i’ll give it a shot again. maybe if i like it, i’ll email my professor and tell him that i finally did the reading, albeit five years late, and that i liked it. maybe it will be another one of my attempts to cling to a past long gone. or maybe it’ll just be the first book i’ve read this year, and if i like it, it’ll make me want to think less about computers and more about things i do want to think about, things i like thinking about. i hope it’s the latter.

i got this laptop some time during my sophomore year and i have been doing all my work on it for the last few years, which kind of goes without saying because this was the only laptop i had. then a few weeks ago, i got a bigger, better laptop from work, which supposedly runs twice as fast, and i’m only allowed to write code for work on my work laptop, so it has somewhat become my default laptop. i keep my own laptop tucked away somewhere in my room, go to work with my work laptop, and then when its dinner time and i have to watch youtube, i pull out my work laptop again just because the bigger screen is nicer. but today i opened my old laptop for the first time in a while to write and was a little thrown off when suddenly it felt much smaller than i remembered, almost like it was a toy. everything on the screen looked a little crowded, the text too small, and even my hands felt too big for the keyboard. i should have just said “oh” and moved on, but instead i sat there for a minute in the corner of my go to cafe during the weekend rush while everything i have been inwardly whining about for months rushed back to me.

to admit out loud that yours is a small life is, primarily, a little embarrassing, and secondly, probably a little unkind to everyone else around you that is leading the same exact life. it is undoubtedly, a depressing headspace to be in, and as they say, a shared sorrow is half a sorrow, but in consideration of the greater good, you have to keep this one a secret and not talk about it. because there is outwardly nothing wrong with your life that you could point towards, so anyone living a different life somewhere else probably can’t see that your daily commute drains the color out of everything and makes your world look like cardboard, and you can’t even turn to your fellow commuter and ask if this is all there is to life, because then you run the risk of turning a normal, obliging commuter into a questioning, self-conscious commuter. it is just like when you feel bad about your grade and you tell someone how terrible you feel about your grade, and then they turn out to have the same exact grade and ask “should i feel bad too?”. harboring such a feeling, in private or in public, turns out to be terrible fuss.

however, what is a much bigger fuss is having a big mouth like mine. sitting in traffic, i asked my fellow commuter if this is all there is to life. actually, i’m glad i did, because i was met with a question that, for someone that complains about life so often, i do not think about enough. what do you want from life? so i thought about it, and my answer is, not much actually. i already have a lot of the things i wanted, and every day im grateful for them. it helps that i have a poor memory too, because sometimes i think i wish i had a vape, and then i remember i actually do have a vape, and i get to experience both the joy of being a disposable vape owner and the instant gratification from the yakult flavored nicotine all anew. but there are still a few have-nots that bother me in the background of it all. i wish to be alone and go unnoticed for some time, i wish to live in a walkable city, and i wish for a quiet cafe to sit in. obviously these are nice things to have, but not having them is sort of an unobtrusive thing as well. and i wonder if i’m only complaining about not having them because i used to have all of these things at some point in time, and now i don’t anymore. you’ll get used to it. this is something i have heard a few times now. maybe i will get used to it. maybe in the same way that i got used to my new laptop, or maybe in an act of rebellion. maybe i just have to let some time pass before i switch seats on my commute.

on the weekends, i go to my cafe, which has become my go to study spot in these past few months and has these long tables where people sit with their laptops and try to look like they’re really busy working. i found this place without much trial and error since there aren’t that many in my neighborhood to choose from anyway, but i became a regular because the long tables happen to be raised to just the right height, so the ergonomics somewhat made up for the below average tasting coffee. the patrons here keep asking the baristas to lower the ac temperature, chatter loudly among themselves, and stare out the big floor to ceiling windows, and in this regard they sort of bring a parisian lunch break ambiance to the cafe. they sit at the cafe as an end in itself, not to achieve anything beyond just sitting at the cafe. a distinguished and astute individual, were they to pay a visit, might observe that this is in fact a practice in sartrean existentialism, and in this way these people allude to the french in a second, more ontologically complex manner.

there is one person here who is not french presenting. this girl who is always at the cafe at the same time as me, sits at the same spot one table away, and speaks really fast on the phone in urdu, so i actually think she might be pakistani. secondly, she exhibits severe locked in syndrome as she takes notes from her outsized textbook and reads her own tiny handwriting under her breath, although from time to time she does get up to take a walk around the table. once when i saw her walk in and see her usual spot taken, she went to find another empty chair in a different, faraway corner looking visibly upset, but this outcome might have actually upset me more than it upset her. one time she asked me to watch her phone while it charged at the outlet beside me and she addressed me in formal personal pronouns in bengali, but i got so inordinately flustered in that moment that when i later got up to leave, i couldn’t even bear to tell her that i was leaving her phone there. she hasn’t spoken to me again and im trying to figure out how to telepathically drain her phone battery.

when i leave the cafe, i watch out for the overhead telephone cables that characteristically hang low over the sidewalks in developing nations. for the first time in my life i have my five year plan nailed down and it would be a little inconvenient to get electrocuted right now, with the potential injuries born of high voltage electricity easily setting me back a few weeks or even months. then there’s the whole infrastructural disavowal of traffic lights, so every time i cross the street i have to kind of wing it. it’s tough out here; the whole city is booby trapped. i used to be a supervised teen here, but to make it as an unsupervised adult i need to start building street credibility, and to this end i’ve started aggressively people watching. on the pavement, a woman my mother’s age trying to fight back late afternoon tears. a man selling fish outside the mosque kneeling down beside a tub of melting ice to smoke a cigarette. i think i see my old quran teacher from kindergarten, but i don’t say salam because he used to hit me when i read the arabic wrong.

in a city that exhibits little commitment to preserving life, it probably becomes really easy, if not urgent, for the citizen to believe in god. when he needs to look up to someone, because he cannot look up to his mayor or anyone in the ranks of government, he has to look further up the chain. otherwise, it would take enormous courage for him to just wing it and go about his day without some assurance of protection, and mustering the courage for this would constitute such an unnecessary act of rebellion that the average person simply cannot rationalize the whole drama of it. a popular argument among athiests happens to be notion of the god of the gaps, wherein theists fill in god in places where they themselves are impotent. the theist says, “i cannot explain it, so it must be god,” and the atheist laughs. but if god is what you name your claim to life, then it must be a necessary god, just or otherwise. so in my city, faith comes easy, even if you’re not really keen on accepting all the terms of faith, such as love for the fellow man, it helps to know that if your mayor won’t pay you restitution if you get hit trying to cross the street, at least god will. i’ve been listening to a lot of qawali songs, and in one of them, these two lines kind of ring the loudest.

نہ نماز آتی ہے مجھ کو نہ وضو آتا ہے

سجدہ کر لیتا ہوں جب سامنے تو آتا ہے

Neither I know prayers nor ablutions

I prostate whenever you come in front of me

i suppose this is my life, at least for now. i go to work, try to look mysterious, find people to go on smoke breaks with every hour, and if no one wants to go, i stand in the sunlight and enjoy the few quiet minutes, and on the weekends, i go to my cafe. and i think about god. not really in a religious way, but whatever it means when you look up. and even though i spent the last few hundred words complaining about things, i am compelled not to go before i say this because it is true: i’m happy.

i used to tell myself that it was too late to keep working, or at least that it was an unseemly hour to be sitting at my desk, so then i’d get up and quietly stay up much later into the night pretending to be asleep. i can never quite remember how i used to spend the following few hours, but my pale linen curtains would start to change color at 5 or 6 am and i’d pull them back and think that the last time i ate was at dinner yesterday, that yesterday i’d had said bye to my friends on call, and now it was today, and today i needed to make tea. so i’d sit on the edge of the kitchen table and watch the water boil around the edges of the pot, and then add milk and tea leaves and again for a few more minutes watch it bubble. i wish it was good tea but it was somehow always too watery, too sweet or too strong. i would still drink the tea, but with much less ceremony, because the quiet of the brewing tea had already passed, and whatever was to come was not so much important.

it was the same reason that i used to smoke cigarettes. i needed an alibi that sounded like im just finishing the cigarette! so i could pocket a few minutes from my 24 hour timesheet. no other form of taking some time off matches the grounds enjoyed by a smoker and a tea brewer. one could, in the literal sense, cross their legs, close their eyes, touch the tips of their thumbs to their forefingers, and meditate, but they’d still have to log the hours for meditation. what were you doing? i was meditating. on the other hand, picture someone putting out a cigarette or straining tea. unbeknownst to anyone else, they have just successfully carried out a grand heist and is now relishing the few stolen, meditative minutes they never have to give an account for. unless someone wanted to be really annoying, no one really asks what were you doing while you were smoking? because for all intents and purposes they were smoking, and digging deeper than that would be akin to ousting the time thief, and no thief likes that.

what’s just as annoying is for someone to assume that the person about to make tea just wants to drink the tea. i’ve fixed my sleep schedule, so by the time i wake up now my room is already sun kissed and copulated, and even worse my housekeeper is up and at attention. by the time ive brushed my teeth and gathered my bearings, she is already knocking at my door with a fresh cup of tea, and to make matters worse, the tea is not too watery, too sweet, or too strong. it tastes just right. i think, my life has been robbed of the last modicum of poetry, and this gives me something to grumble about. but not being able to make tea should theoretically be a minor loss, and the fact that i smoked the last of my cigarette carton that i had bought at the duty free is also pitiable albeit understandable, but surely this can’t be it. what has happened to all the other beautiful things that i was so proud of? i’ve lost some weight and my hair curls at the nape of my neck, so that’s nice. but im sure im missing something. have all the beautiful things been left, shocking if true, somewhere else?

four years ago i wanted to leave home, and i did, and there i had committed my original sin that i would make over and over again in the following years. i thought you only live once, and so i did everything for the here and now. i think i was complaining to a friend about love troubles once a few years ago and they’d said “young people worry too much about the future”, and i’m not sure why that stuck so much with me but in my naivety i stopped thinking about the future almost entirely, about everything that was to come once the four years were over. in reality, you live once at home, then a different life abroad, and then another one back at home. these lives depend on each other — whatever i did at home the first time around landed me a new life away from home, and whatever i did away from home led me back here. to wonder what i would have done if i were a little more forward thinking, is wishful thinking, and quarters of one’s mind as deep as where this happens does not befit the intrusion of the public. the wishful thinking still abounds, regardless.

i scheduled my first interview at a company at home the other day, and right then, once and for all, the sinking feeling belatedly took shape. my abu dhabi debit card or my etisalat sim that i’ve been continuing to use have only been instruments in making myself believe that i’m just a tourist here. that life over there that i thought was real and that which i was only putting on hold for a few months might have already ended, and i might already be a few months deep into my new life. (in the next sentence i will be fighting for my life not to use the annoying word “ephemeral”). i’m thinking now, exactly four months into my delusion, how bleak it had been all along — on the weekends, when my emirati friends used to say, “im going home”, they meant dubai, sharjah, or abu dhabi. i would also say the same, “i’m going home”, but i would just be heading back to my dorm room.

i might again someday in the future start another life somewhere else, but only after i see this one at home through to completion. these past few months, i’d get sad, annoyed, frustrated, sure, but sad, annoyed, and frustrated in the kind of way you are when your amazon order is delayed. you know that it will come anyway, at some point or another, if you just get through this dull wait. but imagine finding out that your amazon driver has driven off a cliff and your order is never coming, that now if you still wanted a beautiful thing you’d have to go and place a brand new order. you’d have to do it all over again.

when i found out my amazon driver had overdosed, self-immolated and floored it at the top of the grand canyon, for the first few hours it felt like one of those ai slop videos where everything keeps shape shifting and in the flurry of acrobats and dancers and surfers you can’t really make anything out. then a few days later i was reading an article on object oriented programming, and in there, of all places, i found some semblance of a grounding truth. in computer science, classes are like templates — they define placeholders for a set of properties. you can instantiate any number of objects of a class, and these objects will have real values for all the properties that they inherited from the class. the author of the article, in preambling his explanation of this concept, writes the following:

In the 5th century, B.C., the astonishingly brilliant philosopher, Plato, described what we now call the Theory of Forms. In this theory, forms are the non-physical essences of all things, of which objects in the physical world are merely imitations or stand-ins. Things, transient as they are, are not as real or true as the eternal concepts or blueprints from whence they come. So, for example, any given tree is not as real as the concept of Tree. But we cannot encounter forms directly, only through the objects that embody them, however imperfectly. It took us only 2.5 thousand years to begin to code in that direction.

this groundbreaking idea, which deservers a minute’s pause and then some more, is casually followed by some programming 101 code.

the canonical idea of being rooted somewhere makes you think that everyone belongs to a single place and leaves it to you to nominate the single place of belonging. so you go somewhere and when it starts to feel kinda right, you call it your home. but then one day you have to leave and some time later realize that you had only been a guest at the place you were so quick to call home. it is not unlikely that plato, astonishingly brilliant as he was, must have foreseen a boy in the 21st century falling to his knees realizing that the place that he presumed home was built with bricks of borrowed time, while the home he had at home did not even feel like his own. but if plato, in his theory of forms, is saying that all the places that feel right are stand-ins for an abstract home, and vice versa that the abstract home is the non-physical essence of all places that have felt/will feel right, then i take his word for it. because the abstract home is easier to come to terms with — it is eternal, and thus the fear of losing it is eliminated. a place that feels right, then, is just an instance of the eternal home. so if plato and a programmer walked into a bar and the bartender asked, “where’s home for you?”, this is probably what they’d come up with:

there is only one Home, and it is eternal. all the instances of Home, home1, home2, home3, and all the future instances of Home that will be created — don’t really matter that much. you could even write home2 = null to remove from your memory any reference to that home object, but the good things that mattered have already been added to the allTheGoodThings list.

in no way am i experiencing an original thought about home and belonging, only that i am experiencing this first-hand for the first time. i mean this is what everyone ever talked about in abu dhabi, and i used to think that they were thinking too much. i guess it’s just one of those things that you never think about, until you do. then when you do, it is a real hard-hitting topic, and if you were writing a blog post about this where you were leaving out a hundred and one follow-up thoughts that you thought no one else needed to know, you could still fill up a few pages just by scratching the surface. in fact, the delight that is yesmine’s substack is perhaps entirely dedicated to this, and im stealing her site’s name for this post because it fits only too well.

for a few hours every night, right up until fajr, my neighbor calls for god at the top of his lungs. at first i thought it might be some noisy appliance with a regular rhythm, perhaps an air conditioner that had been left on for too long and needed to be turned off. but once you stop pretending to be a tourist at a place of which you’re not a big fan, despite your reluctance, you start owning up to your spatial existence. so then i heard him, calling, “allah, allah, allah, …”. what could his prayer be for? for he enunciates the word so clearly, spelling out both syllables every time, as if to ensure that the one being called is aware of his calling. the unconcealed vehemence of his intonation speaks of the most private demand. the way his voice inflects up at the end of each repetition, makes clear the form of a desire, the content of which his neighbors are not privy to. but his neighbors really have no business knowing, as they are clearly not the intended addressee. either way, whether his calls really are being heard by Someone, is secondary. the primary understanding is this: the set of things that we can ask of one another is really quite limited. at some point, you just have to take it up with Someone higher up, whether they’re there or not.

as for me, i’ve picked up again the things i love. i’ve started reading a little here and there, i’m writing now, and i don’t shrug my friends off when they ask “how are you?”. in the words of seneca, "what progress, you ask, have i made? i have begun to be a friend to myself.”

during the nationwide curfew and internet shutdown of the last few days, all my private grievances, resentments, and indignation felt so small. i thought about everything one could possibly bring to mind, and with the remaining time, of which there was plenty, i read a few books, played the chrome dino game, made a pong game in p5.js, and wrote prolifically. each of the letters below were written in one stroke of inspiration and are tokens from probably the most ascetic period of my life.

my readers

language at zero degree is precisely this: the conjunction of two bodies. as such, the pleasure for a writer with even the smallest audience lies in seeing how the audience connects with his words, what new words emanate from the audience in reaction to his. i have always been dismayed at my capacity for speech, but i forever have all my friends to thank for keeping up with my writing here and validating my exercise of language. on the way back from a trip to 7/11, all four of our hands swinging bags of instant noodles, rishit once told me that my words on summer at home felt like his own. i write for no higher purpose than this.

myself

at the end of all this, i am left to look at myself with a certain bewilderment: almost like when you look at a person and you wonder what breadth of experiences had made them the way they are today. except it is myself that i am curious about, and i already know all my life experiences, yet i am bemused. of all fictional characters, i see most of myself in voltaire’s candide, and i am convinced beyond contention that were sartre alive today, he would have loved to sit down with me for coffee at le deux magots. i say this because i have the ineffaceable lens of an existentialist: i am naturally predisposed to see beyond the essence of things. in this regard i might take after my father, but it could also be a consequence of my poor memory. for example, i still find it hard to understand why a wild bird from australia is flying around in my room right now and pleading for head scratches. the “blue pill” is that cockatiels have been bred as pets for years, but the sartrean response is only a nauseating mystification. or how it used to be a source of constant bewilderment that all my friends went to the same university as me (what are the odds!) until someone pointed out that we are friends because we go to the same university. i just tend to forget the all the essentializing facts. how silly everything is without goggles of habit! human desire and suffering included. sometimes i look back on things and cannot fathom why i did what i did, but at least it was cinematic when the lights went out and i told this 33-year-old i loved her; she said i was too young and walked away into the dark street. last summer i learned about the lebanese civil war and burst into tears: why did no one else seem bothered about the fall of beirut? this time around, i bear a certain nonchalance. i don’t really care about lebanon anymore, plus i doubt anyone in lebanon is counting on me for anything. there will always be things to cry about, but you have to be conservative with your tears. i used to be so distraught about the fate of the prisoners in guantanamo bay, but i have decided to zero in on freeing myself for now until i can help the prisoners later in some meaningful way. i barely smoke cigarettes anymore, because i don’t like the smell and apparently it is bad for your health (they got me). people always say things so definitively, but i know that it depends. the most important thing is to be nice to people. i used to take kindness to be a quality, but i have since been told that being kind is the bare minimum for a human. i giddy up when i randomly recall when a friend was kind to me. i wish the same feeling upon everyone, all the time.

manal

my shifty nature has made it so that each person i know in return knows me slightly differently. for so long i have done the utmost to maintain a generally amicable air, which meant that i have had to stylize my persona differently throughout the day. but manal feels ahistorical in a way that annuls the possibility of such trickery. i first started liking susan sontag so much because i was reading the benefactor, under the impression that it was sontag’s autobiography. i was drawn to the narrator in an almost indecent way: she just seemed to float through life and seemed kind of lost. i suspect the narrator was autistic, but i never got to find out because manal let me know that the benefactor is a work of fiction. when i was 20 and an overzealous philosophy reader, doing more for the brand than for anything else, and i was struggling to finish the myth of sisyphus because the writing was so painfully undulating and self-referential, manal said i didn’t have to finish it because she could just tell me how it ends. i sometimes wonder how our interests managed to naturally develop in parallel for all these years. the other day i let on that i might have outgrown car seat headrest, and she said she also doesn’t have a place for it anymore. manal has born witness to every single one of my romantic pursuits, and although unbeknownst to them, her invisible counsel has guided me and each of these women quite a bit. she recently told me that i cannot lose hope. maybe she is right, and i believe her in part because i want to but mostly because she has rarely been wrong. i suffer terribly from a poor memory, so that sometimes the way i feel about things happen to be inconsistent with my lore. i am set on the right track only after confessing to her my suspicions, having been reminded of the events from my own life that have escaped my memory. sometimes i struggle to see her as real, beyond an orator with untapped wisdom who also happens to be my friend. this is not entirely my fault, since most of the things that happen to her seem pretty absurd. how she started levitating in the bathroom, why she was on abc news, or why she had to comfort the operator when she called the suicide hotline, is still a little unclear to me. her cat seems exactly how one would imagine her cat to be, so that when god wrote in his book we made you in pairs, he might as well have been talking about manal and her cat. i am glad that she lived through that car accident, although i am not sure if she has insurance now and if there is another one i will be at a severe loss.

today i woke up with unbridled joy and i thought it was a good time to write about everything else going on; a time to walk the calloused ground but with joy by my side. every day since i got back home, i have slept all day and stayed up all night worrying about my employment prospects. my skin has seen very little sunlight lately and has definitely paled a few shades (even my body is starting to forget abu dhabi). but yesterday i went outside and saw a few dozen lily pads in the lake. i keep remembering, as i did in this moment, about another time i stayed up all night and left my room to see a sparrow hovering about in the living room. the early sunlight in the room made the small bird look iridescent. the biblical quality of this sight was matched by my awe and wonder, so naturally, when i recouped a second later, i rushed for my phone to take a picture. the phone, designed in california and assembled in china, seemed to be an affront to nature incarnate in my company, and the sparrow, sensing the iphone in the room, escaped through the same crack in the window it had flown in. “great,” i thought. “no one’s going to believe me.” this is not the first time something like this has happened, and i learn from the mistakes of those who came before me, so i never told anyone about it. mary grew jesus in her womb, whom god himself had placed there, and whose birth led to all this, literally all of this (motioning to the whole wide world). but even to to this day, you meet some people who want more proof. “no way. mary is hiding something.” well, god placed a sparrow in my living room, and i am not arguing with anyone.

it’s just that something has slowly been creeping up on me all year. or if i am looking at myself from the outside, something has been peeling off of me very slowly. what i can pick out is that i look like i have shed the weight of my fears. (to say inner peace was creeping up on me would be so incredibly tacky and i couldn’t bring myself to write that.) i have already written about everything i used to fear, and i was dwarfed in a particular way for so long, that the entire public archives of my writing is a testament to a coalescent drive to fix something. i have only ever written about some inter/personal problem or another, and all of my posts have been about me trying to figure them out. in the end, maybe all of the talking and writing did pay off, and i can sort of trace the developments in my posts throughout last year. playboy carti’s words, from his song Long Time (Intro), ring heavily in the room right now: "just to feel like this it took a long time, yeah (Slatt, feel like)”. however, somehow at this moment, it feels like it happened all so suddenly, and i can’t remember ever being any other way, let alone the work that i had to put in to get here. it is as if i just snapped out of it one day. for a few days i have been terrified of what this might mean — that i cannot write anymore. so much of my writing has been along the same lines, and because the lines aren’t quire there anymore, i am afraid i might not have anything to write about. but my blog is so dear to me, and between my first website zoneoutwithzion dot com, a few more domain changes in the following five years, and now with blog dot zzzzion dot com, writing has become almost ritualistic. like a theist fears losing god to nihilism, i am scared of losing writing to contentment.

but i’m not entirely convinced writing is lost on me. i still think a lot, and observe, and i can rarely, if ever, relate to someone when they say their head is empty. my head is never empty, and i am actually grateful that i am this way. i would hate to be a blank slate for any moment that i am on earth, where i live among so many beautiful things: a cigarette at dawn, long running inside jokes with friends, and jstor, are all incredibly fulfilling things, and i cannot afford to waste any unoccupied time i have to myself not thinking about or enjoying them. i don’t think i’ll run out of things to write about as long as there are still things in my head. it is just that the landscape inside my head has shifted significantly, and the tool i use to navigate it, writing, needs a little adjustment. but this is not to say i am rid of fears, or anxieties, entirely either. i don’t think anyone ever gets there, and i have never tried. i am terrified about my path forward post grad. at the time of writing, i don’t have a job, nor do i have an end in sight, and sometimes i’m not sure if i know enough javascript. i can’t fall asleep at night because i am frenzied by the fear of what is coming next. i text my friends i am going to sleep but i am just on linkedin for hours on end trying to figure out where i’m heading. but the thing is that it feels different than all the other times i have been scared. this time, the fear doesn’t have that tinge of desperation that usually brings everything crumbling down in the end. instead, the fear is clotted with impatience. i am scared i won’t have a job soon, and i want one really bad, but at the same time i’m doing the work to get there, daily. i wish i could elaborate more on this, but right now it really does feel that straightforward. everything always used to be so complex that i haven’t figured out how to write about or explain straightforward things yet.

i think my newfound lightness just comes down to having realized that i don’t have to shoulder the weight of everything. this plain fact that crystallized from all my experiences, shines the light on my way forward now. as it stands, i really have no way of knowing what is best for me, and i will not find out until later, so there really is no point in being too particular about one outcome or another. and the things i used to try so hard to control almost always involved other people. controlling what other people do is also impossible, less so controlling how they feel or what they believe. of course, control is distinct from impact: we incontrovertibly shape each other in the course of knowing the other, but to lay claim to parts of the other is egoistic to say the least. the only answer then is to treat people with gentleness, because no one, at any given moment, can definitively say what is going on, and is thus not in a place to confer definitive judgements on anything. i am certain this resonates with everyone to some extent: some things i thought were good for me did not turn out to be good, and things i wasn’t that excited about turned out to be positively life changing. sure, you can be confident in your instincts, and i am not advocating for doing away with gut feelings. i just think that life feels great when you do away with desperation. and this translates to everything in life. when you accept how little you really know, you can tread with a beautiful lightness.

speaking of lightness, for a long time, i really wanted to be the best for the people around me. i wanted to be the best friend in the shape of a romantic partner. i wanted to be the most emotionally intelligent friend, the one solving all of my friend’s problems. but i realized that is not how things work, that even i don’t go to the same friend for everything. that’s the whole point of having more than one friend. so that you can talk to one about playboi carti and to another about susan sontag. i don’t have to be exactly what someone needs at all times, i think they account for that on their own. people really do love you as a whole, and in places where you think you fall short, their love comes in the form of patience and compassion — just the things you needed to grow. same goes for liking yourself. contentment doesn’t come from being well-rounded, it comes from taking your sharp edges as they are. etcetera. my philosophy of lightness, as i speak of it, is not entirely my original work, though. every good thing i talk about having now was once an act of love bequeathed, since transformed into beauty. just being able to sit in your room one day with two friends, and finding in their presence the courage to wheeze out “maybe im not that bad of a person”, and the response being “type shit” and a dap, does some insane heavy lifting for your mental health.

to answer the question, what do i write about now, i don’t really know. i think it will come to me, as naturally as it always has. mostly i just affix certain states of mind to a physical form with words, and i think i’ll be able to keep doing that. since i don’t have that many problems of my own right now, maybe i can start an advice column here. if you are reading this and you do have problems, i have created an anonymous google form for you to send them to me. if they are interesting enough maybe you will find a solution in my next blog post. either way, even if i don’t get any responses on the form, i’ll keep writing because writing will still have its merits, for it offers a unique space, where i can assert myself unlike anywhere else. on paper, i can let my voice ring out, and it is my own only, and i don’t have to make space for anything else. this alone is reason enough to keep writing. in 1976 joan didion gave a lecture at UC berkeley called why i write1.

“In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”

to borrow didion’s words, “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.” i don’t think i’ll ever stop thinking. that’s good news, which means i can keep writing.

i start from the self-evident truth that life goes on. but rarely is it enough to simply know something. i know when the sun sets and when it rises, but that doesn’t set the course of my day. i wake up in late afternoons and i am writing this at 5 am. i know i have two ears and one mouth, but sometimes i yap more than i listen. knowing that i was going to a four year college that was going to end in exactly four years was also never enough. now that i am at home, and i am aware that i am never to go back to that campus as an undergrad anymore, i can sense the dust of four lived up years settling in. to work through this well anticipated end would involve asking myself, “what would i have done with a little more time?” then, once i am done answering the question with one rectifying action or another, i land at the same place all over again. “what would i have done with a little more time?” if i kept doing this over and over again, i would just keep returning to the same place, much like how time travel movies always have a montage of the main character redoing one thing over and over again until they get it right. the scene is always a funny/ironic one that the writers never miss wedging in, perhaps as a reminder to the audience that “this is not how life works.”

i think senior spring was probably my favorite semester in all four years. my semester in new york comes a close second, and i say close maybe because it was new york after all, but this semester definitively had everything i wanted: good friends, good grades, good spring break trip to bangkok, and a good amount of personal growth. maybe the last one in that list is what sets it apart, because new york had almost all of those things too, but it was only good in an idyllic way, where i went in and came back pretty much the same person. i should say that i had record positive changes to my psyche since january this year, and sometimes i think that i might be saying this only to convince myself, but the fact that i can sit at home quite content and not in utter despair is actually evidence enough for me. now i walk around the house looking at my parents as regular people who possess an intact capacity for feelings and emotions, and i talk to them as i would talk to a loved one. a loved one that loves me in a way that is often strange and overbearing, but their behavioral quirks are not my crosses to bear. i can take that love to help myself (that involves eating the cut up mangoes every day), and then reciprocate with goodwill in interpreting their actions, a gentle tone in my speech, and with little hints that they are enough for me.

because home is going to be my life for the foreseeable future, i want to honor the good things that have happened to me in the past four years and pay it forward. the past semester, in particular, deserves extra credit, because i spent so much time doing what i liked doing, that at this point i am weary of breaking the streak of just having a good time. but then again, sure, a good time at home is nowhere near the good time at college, with free rein over everything in my life and a beach just ten minutes away. i didn’t do anything crazy, like i didn’t go to the beach every day, but just knowing that the beach was there only 10 minutes away made all the difference (like that line from dostoyevsky, "i see the sun, and if i don't see the sun, i know it's there. and there's a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there”). i might get a job and get to be even more independent again, but i’m definitely not going to be independent in the same way again. it is going to be different, but i am going to keep wishing, as i do in this moment, i could stay up with friends in my room until sunrise and go downstairs for a smoke, or to go to another dorm party that is going to be exactly the same as the one from the week before. maybe i will stay up again with friends again someday and go smoke outside at sunrise (that’s not really that hard of a thing to accomplish), but it’ll never happen exactly in the same way again. i can be happy again and again, but not in the same way twice. but in marta’s words, i guess that’s what makes life worth it. not knowing how good it can get, how bright the sun that i can’t see yet shines.

the post grad nostalgia comes from knowing that something good has happened, and if anything we should feel like walking out of the cinema after watching a feel good coming of age film, but i also understand the desire to revisit the good thing, or the temptation for a little more time. that, i suppose, comes from sidelining the prospect of more good things that are on the way. this oversight, and stubbornness over the ephemeral, is so human, and it is littered everywhere humans have set foot, including taylor swift songs. “help, i'm still at the restaurant / still sitting in a corner i haunt.” it is easy to point out to taylor that she will never find a better restaurant if she doesn’t leave dinner after it’s over, but at the core of this lyric is a tender human heart that is still full and warm from a lovely time at the table. but why does her heart have to deflate, or grow cold, as she gets up, looks up “nice restaurants near me” on her phone, and makes her way to the second restaurant of the night? sure, the second one is going to be different, but it could be just as good, or even better than the first restaurant. “but the first restaurant was good enough!” i am compelled to explain that this sort of retort innocently misses a critical understanding of what constitutes good.

something can be consistently good, but then the consistency makes us start perceiving the good thing as merely a healthy thing. like lotion is good, and moisturizing makes my skin healthy. life at home could have been good, but people just tend to say “i had a healthy childhood”. surely, there are permanent things that are good, but those good things belong in their own distinct category, and we don’t feel as viscerally about lotion or a healthy childhood as we do about life at college. for something to be good and enjoyable in the same way as life at college, it would categorically need to exist between a before and an after. otherwise, if it were to be permanent, as taylor writes in the same song, "matches burn after the other / pages turn and stick to each other”, it would kind of just become another thing, mushed together with kind of everything else. the good thing, life at college in this case, would cease to be on the same plane of enjoyment altogether. the thing that makes this time so special is probably its transience, and it is kind of ironic to mourn and sulk over the end of something we already knew was going to end, but which we chose to love regardless. did we lose anything just because something ended? everything was always going to end. but between the start and the end, if we have felt as much love as we did, and laughed as much as we did, then there is little that is lost, and littler left to mourn.

now, say, we could just teleport from one restaurant to another, from one good time to another, finish college and immediately land a million dollar job and live together with all our friends, then we would not have this whole ordeal of “processing post grad” to begin with. i wouldn’t even have to read a sad post from a friend and write my own out of spite. but here we are. in the end, it only remains for me to say that good things like this are not found in the wild. you don’t just breathe for good things to be laid out before you in silverware. the good times happened because you were there. the good friendships happened because you created them. it is different with things that you didn’t create, because once it’s over then it might just be over for good. but this? you had as much to do with making something so beautiful as everyone else involved. and there is enough solace in that, in knowing that you have the power to beget love and happiness, and there is even more strength to be found in knowing that you carry this power with you everywhere you go. i don’t think the friendships are going anywhere just because i got my degree — there would be no bigger crime than reducing my friends to contexts or boxes — i think my friends are mine to keep. while i walk to the second restaurant (employment), with my friends in my back pocket, i need to read all the susan sontag books i brought home, so that i don’t have to use taylor swift lyrics to explain my point next time.

i came home and told my parents what it was like to say goodbye to everyone. my mom started crying. my dad just looked at me and said, “the world is so small. you will see them again.” inside me there are two wolves: my mom and my dad. given, i am sad that a beautiful chapter of my life had to come to an end, but i am also content knowing that i get to keep the things that made the chapter beautiful, and and i left conscious of my unending ability to create beautiful things. i love you all!

maybe not everyone. but i hope i’ve made sure the real ones know who they are. i’ve been trying to do that all semester. i love all the real ones!

1.

i caught myself wondering what it’ll feel like to sleep in my own bed next week. i did not notice it at all, that these past few years my bed back home has slowly been releasing itself from my name. this is not something i am being a wuss about or struggling to wrap my head around, because i will get used to it by the first or second week back, but it is that vague anxiety that for the first few days i might feel like i am sleeping on someone else’s bed. even though sleeping on someone else’s bed ranks pretty high up on the list of disquieting things, it is also there on the adjacent list of normal, commonly done things, so this is still not quite the issue. what irks me is that something, my bed, was once mine, fully, but had stopped being mine at some point, and now i have to rekindle the possession. the bed is but only an allegory. i am almost a stranger to the person i was when i last slept on that bed and knew it to be fully mine, and so this is also about rekindling with some past version of myself — how strange it is to meet a smaller you.

2.

when you look back at your life, it is always rosy. bad things feel dumbed down and happy things shine brighter in memory. no one ever says “i wish that one thing didn’t make me so happy”, but everyone who has ever found happiness is bound to say something like “i was so silly for letting that one thing get me down”. i spent all of last semester dealing with this one thing, and i was so sad i thought i was going to die. i thought the world was unfair and i hated the sound of people outside my window and i started to get frightened every time someone came up to me. i can’t believe i thought that was it, because i am so grateful now for everything that followed. so for reasons pertaining to, just, human nature, i cannot promise being entirely factual as i go on to say, “this was a good run”. but in this moment, as i look back with my rose colored glasses and all, i am tempted to resolve that i did really like my time here! of course, i had to take mvc twice, and i am still graduating without a math minor, and that sucks. but i also spent countless hours yapping and making close friends story content, and all of that made me into a person i like so much now. the point is that i can still afford to wear these rose colored glasses only because i have some of you with me, and whether or not i am being delusional about the rest of my undergraduate experience is secondary. maybe the rose colored glasses are the friends we made along the way.

3.

there is this car seat headrest song that goes, “you can never tell the truth, but you can tell something that sounds like it.” it is a beautiful song, but what this line says is not all that original. it is essentially a one line summary of all postmodernist thought: language is a poor medium for conveying reality. i think we forget this sometimes, and narrow our focus on each other’s words too often. there will always be aberrations to what we mean when we talk about it, in the same way that when we see something nice and want to capture it, the photo is never quite as good as what we actually see. i think we should make peace with this, because the photo is the best we can have, and there really is nothing more to do than to roll with that. there will always be more things to say, more things to hide, and so many things we will never know. the worst thing to do would be to keep digging in one spot, and we should try to do a little better than that. as you grow older you also realize that other people are involved in writing your story too. even more so, when other people read your story, they can choose what pages to read, or in what order. however you look at it: all the guilt, shame, peace, and love that you hoard, other people have a claim to it as well, for better or for worse. (and i am glad to have some of you be a part of my peace and love.)

4.

it was so different when i first came here; saying yes or no rarely used to be my call. now i say yes when i want to and no i when i dgaf about the person asking. it also soaked up so much of the stress of being alive. this is a little harder to articulate than it is to feel it: the lightness of being able to just be. reading a bit of susan sontag probably helped me move in this direction (she dgaf). i can’t tell what exactly clicked but i realized you don’t always have to shoulder the weight of everything: most things are just being, and you too, like most things, can just be. but this is not to say that i am rejoicing in some sort of emotional bankruptcy, rather, i have learned to care in slightly more meaningful ways. like being less angry at the world, because the world is so large that my anger would do little to change anything. instead, i can be nice and have that make a world of difference to someone else, like people have often been to me. every time someone has been nice or kind to me in some capacity has in turn made me a kinder person. everything good about me, at least the parts that matter, is an accretion of all the good in the people around me. if i am going back to my bed back home as a kinder person, then that is as good a thing i can ask for out of these four odd years.

epilogue.

this is how joan didion ends her essay, Goodbye to All That:

“All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young any more. The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired. Many of the people I used to know there had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in New Hampshire.

We stayed ten days, and then we took an afternoon flight back to Los Angeles, and on the way home from the airport that night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell jasmine all around and we both knew that there was no longer any point in keeping the apartment we still kept in New York. There were years when I called Los Angeles “the Coast,” but they seem a long time ago.”

Foucault’s account of the history of mental illness, the birth of mental institutions, and psychoanalysis sheds light on how mental health care, as we have it today, came to be, and helps in questioning some of the empiricism attributed to psychiatry in contemporary culture. At least in the West, therapy has become increasingly accessible, and normalized. In public spheres — on social media, on university campuses, and in workplace environments — there is now a marked emphasis on mental health awareness. The internet has brought large portions of its users closer to mental health resources, and therapists or “mental health content creators” now seem to be crawling on social media sites. Many universities offer free counseling to students, and companies offer mental health days and provide resources such as Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs), which offer confidential counseling services. This shift towards acknowledging the importance of mental health reflects a broader cultural acceptance of mental health, and in turn, therapy, as conducive to overall well-being. While there are many forms of therapy available, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Psychodynamic Therapy, and Exposure Therapy, conventional talk therapy remains the most popular means of accessing mental health care.

This recent phenomenon of popularization and de-stigmatization of talk therapy invites a closer look at attitudes of therapy seekers towards therapy, particularly their ideas and expectations from the experience. For some, seeing a psychologist is a regular commitment, often weekly, and almost necessarily, a long term one. Since therapy happens to be the most generalized avenue for seeking help with feelings of depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsiveness, and many other common psychological complaints, and more often than not a therapy seeker’s first contact with the mental health care system is through a therapist, it is not entirely unfounded for some therapy seekers to see it as some sort of a panacea. This is a rather naive view, informed by an intuitive but still weak parallelism with seeking treatment for a physical condition. A psychiatrist’s work is unlike that of a physician in more than one way. With physical illnesses, diagnosis and prognosis are almost entirely within the physician’s purview. An underlying condition in the patient’s blood could be revealed to the physician through a blood test, and its treatment is likely to be administered without the patient’s intervention. To the sick person, this process is as simple as outsourcing the task of solving a problem with their body; they can overcome their sickness and recover while being entirely unaware of their red blood cell count, the efficacy of their white blood cells, or the condition of their platelets. A psychologist’s work, on the other hand, rests on the patient’s active involvement, and effort, as much as that of the psychologist. Then, therapy, unlike a pill prescribed by a physician, is better seen as a tool, rather than a fix.

Drawing further upon the disjoint between mental and physical illnesses, diagnostic methods further separate these two bodies of illnesses. Physical illnesses are diagnosed with near certitude before their treatments begin. Diagnosis almost always comprises of examination of the patient by the doctor, followed by standardized diagnostic procedures. For complications that are not immediately apparent, rigorous tests and examinations are performed with even more complicated machinery: radiography, endoscopy, cell culturing, and so on. On the other hand, when seeking treatment for mental illnesses, on the patient’s part, only a suspicion about one’s own abnormalities is prerequisite. The individual feels that their mood or emotions bar them from functioning regularly, or as expected: the student feels that he is unable to perform at school because he has trouble concentrating, or the office worker feels that the monotone of his desk job exhausts him. They wish to do better at home, at school, or at work, and they book their first therapy appointment. The therapist talks to them for an hour in a closed office, and decrees what is wrong with them: either they have depression, ADHD, anorexia, or any one or sometimes several of the medical terms that the patient has very little knowledge of. Diagnosis, in the case of mental illnesses, is rarely “biological”, inasmuch the patients are not hooked up to or inserted into some contraption to reveal underlying conditions. Instead, in the therapist’s office, an obscure label to categorize the abnormalities transpires from the talk, and then more talk sessions follow, in the name of correcting whatever the label implies.

Although diagnosis of mental illnesses generally does not involve wonders of engineering or inscrutable machinery, the task is by no means easier. In contrast to a physician, a therapist feels incredibly personal, at least emotionally. The patient duly welcomes their therapist into their psyche; their past experiences, childhood memories are shared not on whim but as essential components of effective counseling. Over the course of the talk sessions, the therapist gets to know their patient almost as much as, if not better than, their loved ones, and it is not an unsurprising development, in this vulnerable space, for the patient to begin to see their therapist in the light of some degree of friendship. However, in the therapist’s office, there is one person seeking help, and the other is a trained professional being paid by the hour; the premise of therapy detracts widely from that of friendship. This lends to the understanding that the work of a therapist, albeit very personal, is far from being simple, or could possibly be done as casually by a friend. In reality, understanding and classifying mental disorders remains to be a challenging task owing to multiple causality, comorbidity, discrete categorization of disorders, and their thresholds (Clark et al. 2017). Bipolar disorder, for example, is still difficult to distinguish from borderline personality disorder through clinical diagnostic practice (Saunders et al. 2015). Appropriate diagnosis of mental disorders, then, cannot follow from naive identification with symptoms of particular disorders. This level of nuance can be hard to grasp, and it is quite often that people fall into the trap of self-diagnosing when they are casually exposed to information about mental illnesses, in conversations with friends who are in therapy, through leaflets distributed on university campuses, or most often on social media.

The issue turns grave when identification is conflated with diagnosis. There certainly is neurological evidence of mental illness, but since talk therapy rarely involves complicated clinical procedures as in the case of diagnosing many physical illnesses, it gives way to an oversimplified view of the process of diagnosis in mainstream culture. In most instances, common symptoms of a wide range of mental disorders such as fatigue, inability to concentrate, mood swings, may be traced to circumstance, such as overly demanding workload at school or work, or social dynamics, but when erroneously attributed to biology, the individual essentially self-incapacitates. Insofar as they are of the opinion that their neurochemistry begets their fatigue, inattention, or mood, they are less likely to believe in their own agency, since they deem it more difficult to change the chemical composition in their brains than their immediate circumstances. Although there are circumstances that are naturally beyond the individual’s control — social structures, socioeconomic status, the capitalist system — broadly attributing their issues to biological makeup diminishes the will to actualize possible solutions to them. This is where therapy might come in, where a trained professional guides the patient through possible means to improve their circumstances, without immediately attaching labels pertaining to psychiatry. However, therapists rarely tend to do this, as it is easier for the patient to catalogue their issues with a common denominator, i.e. a disorder. Such a preemptive label might be detrimental when the individual begins to explain their psychological issues with terms such as “ADHD brain”, “OCD habits”, or “clinical depression”. In this state, the individual is left to shoulder the weight of the label itself and is set up for over-reliance on the therapist or medication such as anti-depressants, when positive change could have been made through much more granular and individualized action. In trying to treat their assumed mental illness, the patient might be, in certain cases, putting the cart before the horse.

A patient in the depths of the mental health care system is thus prone to what is defined under misattribution theory in psychology, which explains the processes through which a person misattributes their physiological responses. As a very rudimentary example, a person might feel flushed and notice a faster heart rate and label the bodily feelings as a result of chronic anxiety, when in reality could be due to the caffeine they had before bed (Kelley and Michela 1980). Attribution bias is largely defined and studied in psychology and may be able to delineate people’s tendency to come to wrong conclusions in explaining, or even over analyzing, their behavior. A person might make a causal statement along the lines of, “I am tired because I have depression”, i.e. an abnormal neurological makeup causing them to be fatigued. However, the causality does not hold, for even if they were clinically diagnosed with depression, depression would merely be the signifier of a collection of symptoms generally exhibited by people diagnosed with the condition. It cannot, on the other hand, be the cause and at the same time the signifier of these symptoms. In making overly simple statements such as these, the person inadvertently diminishes their scope of action, because, in this case, the statement is essentially this: “I am tired because I have depression, and I have depression because I had a bad childhood.” When a psychiatric condition becomes a way of explaining something rather than being a descriptor, the person is less likely to embrace agency over their circumstances that might partly be a product of their own doing, what in this case could just be poor sleeping habits. Labels, such as those discussed, thus give way to learned helplessness (Seligman 1972), which is what social science researchers call when a person is unable to find resolutions to difficult situations, even when a solution is accessible. People that struggle with learned helplessness are prone to feeling overwhelmed and incapable of making any positive difference in their circumstances.

Beliefs about what one is and isn’t capable of strongly tied to one’s own identity. Since identity is formed largely through experience, an older, more mature person with more experience and confirmation of their abilities is less likely to be deterred by the connotations of a psychiatric label than a younger person. According to Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development, identity formation is strongest during adolescent and teenage years, and “each issue of biological heritage, expressions of self, interactions with others, and cultural setting” can influence the personality of the developing person (Herman 2011). Thus, exposing a younger person to information about mental disorders is a delicate task, and must be treated with appropriate caution, since relatability of certain vague symptoms can turn into identification with mental disorders, which is in turn a precarious process. Casual use of psychiatric terms, in print or online, is also not risk-averse, for people are prone to identifying with this or that disorder very easily, through a process that is not so different from how people believe in astrology. Mental health infographics or short videos on social media may be shared in vague language, including statements such as “symptoms of depression include sadness, lack of motivation, and fatigue.” This language is reminiscent of astrological descriptions, which is often written in a way that is broad enough to apply to many people. People may identify with these descriptions because they are indeed written in a way that allows for a wide range of interpretations, and because they tend to accept vague and general descriptions as uniquely applicable to themselves (Fichten and Sunerton 1983). Additionally, identification with mental disorders (and astrology alike), may be influenced by confirmation bias, where people tend to seek out information that confirms their existing beliefs and ignore information that contradicts them (Oswald and Grosjean 2004). Although sadness, lack of motivation, and fatigue are common and part of the general human experience, once people believe them to be rooted in disorder, they may selectively interpret their experiences to fit that belief, thus reinforcing their conviction.

This is detrimental twofold, as solutions to mental health issues found online can be harder to assimilate into one’s life than a self-diagnosis. Solutions often involve behavioral changes, therapy, medication, or a combination of these, and understanding them can be more complex than simply accepting a diagnosis. Furthermore, implementing these solutions require individuals to take active steps to change their behavior or thought patterns, which is a long-term project, and one which does not provide immediate relief. All of this requires a greater level of effort and commitment than receiving the diagnosis, which may provide immediate explanations for symptoms. Considered together with the persisting stigma surrounding mental health treatment in many cultures, people may be more averse to venture out further than the diagnosis and to take agency in relieving themselves productively. If we take freedom to be constituted not of privileges but of responsibilities, then the diagnosis, in a way, mires down the self-diagnosed person, since their assumed mental disorder now bars them from their own agency.

All of this is not to say that therapy, or mental health care, is superficial, or should be done away with, but it is rather an exposé of sorts. It goes without saying that therapy can be useful, and even necessary in certain cases, for an extreme example, in helping veterans suffering from PTSD readjust into their lives after service. However, it would do us well to reevaluate the place of therapy in our lives, and what it can do for us, and that what it can do for us is inextricably tied to how we show up to therapy and assimilate its teachings into our lives. The structure of therapy, and the mental health care system, leaves room for misdirected effort, and both the patient and the therapist are prone to human error. In the case of airline pilots, although they are required to undergo regular mental health screenings, airline staff can easily bypass medical supervision and allow their poor mental health to lead them down the wrong path, as was seen in the tragic case of Germanwings Flight 9525 (“Germanwings Flight 9525” 2024).

Perhaps, there is opportunity for change earlier in the path, in the way we show up to the world and look at our experiences. In her essay Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag writes against the mimetic theory of art, the idea that art is meant to mime something else. The art critic’s view that the content of art is always a representation of something else (the curtains are blue because the author is melancholic, Kafka’s Joseph K. in The Trial "is being judged by the inexorable and mysterious justice of God” through the bureaucratic penal system), she writes, always directs an excessive focus on the content, at the expense of attention to form, when engaging with art. This divorce between form and content is essentially what alienates the critic from the work of art altogether, and if we look at life through this lens, we are alienated from our own lived experiences. For when we experience something, and we feel a particular way about it, we make sense of the feeling by categorizing and interpreting the experience overwhelming us with psychological terms that we have learned from the experts: our therapists, or mental health infographics we saw on social media. In saying “I am feeling anxious right now”, we might describe an intense feeling of anxiety about a significant other, and further down the line of analysis, we might trace this anxiety back to some way that we were treated in childhood that led us to this psychological reaction. Or, by saying, “I am feeling sad right now”, we might be tempted to explain it with our heavy workload at work or school. We essentially dig into our past to explain our present experiences. The path of interpretation and analysis goes as far as we wish to go down the path, and although the temptation to understand our emotions is quite human and natural, Susan Sontag invites us to adapt to a more immediate experiencing of our lives. She writes, “in a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world. (“This world”! As if there were any other.) The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.”

This temptation to interpret and categorize our experiences to this extent is quite a modernist act, and it is domination through analysis, the “revenge of intellect” upon something as abstract as human experience. We look for patterns, discern meanings, and see how things fit together, by projecting theories out onto the world in order to understand it. When we do this, and draw conclusions from our analysis, we achieve a sense of superiority over the feeling or the experience that we did not used to understand. This is, essentially, what a therapist trains their patient to do. The therapist learns about the experiences of the patient, and then gives them the language to categorize them with psychiatric language, as in, some normative, theoretical terms, almost as if human experience could be framed within some standard, a universal catalogue that is able to describe everyone’s experiences, as if their experiences are sociologically predictable occurrences, instead of just, their life. This argument could be used against any human language, and would thus be deemed a tautology; however, to clarify, for an individual with no formal training in psychiatry, when they are given a small set of psychiatric terms and ideas, by the therapist or social media, to describe their experiences, their limited knowledge makes them prone to mistranslation. Further grounds for mistranslation lie in the plain fact that the therapist has but only one inlet into their patient’s life; they have no way of knowing whether their patient’s account is indeed accurate, or free of biases. The patient in the therapist’s office could be painting a scene of immense deprivation suffered at the hands of others, while in reality, they themselves could just as well have been the problem all along. The final effect, then, is that with their translation, the individual places themselves at a measured distance from their lived experience. At this distance, it is also easier to dismiss the experience: “I had a weird interaction with my friend, but I understand they acted this way because they were anxious, and now that I have understood and analyzed the interaction, the interaction is no longer a problem.” The moderation of our experiences through normative, standardized language, could just as well be done to positive experiences — and what could potentially be a visceral, life-altering occurrence, can be neatly dissected, and put in the back of the memory shelf. If we live our lives with the understanding that everything begs analysis, everyone we cross paths with has ulterior motives, every experience has a hidden meaning, we would have relented so much of our individual agency over to the therapist, to the assumed expert of human experience, at the expense of all of life’s richness.

“What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.”

Certainly, and to reiterate, therapy is not to be done away with. However, Susan Sontag’s argument against interpreting art sheds some light on how we might go on to limit alienation and bring ourselves closer to our own experiences. What Sontag would probably say, is that first, we need to look at therapy a little differently. This could be achieved by concerting efforts into raising mental healthcare literacy, just as much as we are popularizing mental health. People would then be able to show up to therapy with not so absolute expectations, and it would cease to be the place to solve all problems. Instead of asking the therapist, say, “tell me how to feel”, we would go to therapy and ask the therapist to create a space for us where we can truly feel. For a lot of people, this space might not exist elsewhere in their lives, and it is one way therapy could be useful, and help us in not being alienated from our experiences. In art theory terms, we could try focusing more on the form of our experiences, as much as we do on their content. If we allow ourselves to feel shock, joy, or sadness in the moment, and delay trying to understand and categorize everything just by a little bit, we would have the capacity to experience more viscerally what is immediate, and more of it than we usually do. With this, we would allow our life to mold us into the person we become, and live life more fully, instead of being the one only taking stock of it. Perhaps only then we would come closer to the truth. We could feel pleasure as it is meant to be felt, to the bones, or allow our sadness to make us suffer for a little while. In Sontag’s words, “each of our truths must have a martyr” (Sontag 1963).

Bibliography

Clark, Lee Anna, Bruce Cuthbert, Roberto Lewis-Fernández, William E. Narrow, and Geoffrey M. Reed. 2017. “Three Approaches to Understanding and Classifying Mental Disorder: ICD-11, DSM-5, and the National Institute of Mental Health’s Research Domain Criteria (RDoC).” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 18 (2): 72–145. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100617727266.

Fichten, Catherine S., and Betty Sunerton. 1983. “Popular Horoscopes and the ‘Barnum Effect.’” The Journal of Psychology 114 (1): 123–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1983.9915405.

Foucault, Michel. 1973. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Vintage Books.

“Germanwings Flight 9525.” 2024. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Germanwings_Flight_9525&oldid=1222426743.

Herman, William E. 2011. “Identity Formation.” In Encyclopedia of Child Behavior and Development, edited by Sam Goldstein and Jack A. Naglieri, 779–81. Boston, MA: Springer US. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-79061-9_1443.

Kelley, Harold H., and John L. Michela. 1980. “Attribution Theory and Research.” Annual Review of Psychology 31 (1): 457–501. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.ps.31.020180.002325.

Oswald, Margit E., and Stefan Grosjean. 2004. “Confirmation Bias.” Cognitive Illusions: A Handbook on Fallacies and Biases in Thinking, Judgement and Memory 79: 83.

Saunders, K. E. A., A. C. Bilderbeck, J. Price, and G. M. Goodwin. 2015. “Distinguishing Bipolar Disorder from Borderline Personality Disorder: A Study of Current Clinical Practice.” European Psychiatry 30 (8): 965–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eurpsy.2015.09.007.

Seligman, M E P. 1972. “Learned Helplessness.” Annual Review of Medicine 23 (1): 407–12. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.me.23.020172.002203.

Sontag, Susan. 1963. Review of Simone Weil, by Simone Weil. The New York Review of Books, February 1, 1963. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1963/02/01/simone-weil/.

Sontag, Susan. 2001. Against Interpretation: And Other Essays. Macmillan.

I sit at my desk after one Xanax, three cups of karak, two cups of green tea, and three cigarettes, but my head still continues to hurt. All the substances at my disposal fail when confronted by this dull pain that rests like a thin film over my skull, and tugs inwards at my eye balls. Still, I sit adamant at my desk, for I have this compulsion to write something, and I know I have something to write about because I sense the heaviness in my head, and I can tell it apart from the heaviness of my headache. This heaviness comes from the mess of congealed thoughts and emotions somewhere in there, and they bounce around my mind with heavy thumps so that I can tell that they are present, but to tell them apart is an exercise in cognition of its own. Their ecstatic motion in my head resemble stray bats in an abandoned attic: I can still cook and clean in my house, entertain guests and myself, but the relentless thumping from the ceiling nevertheless makes me look up and grunt from time to time. The only thing left for me to do then is to brave the attic at a convenient time, and catch a bat, one after another, and set each of them free.

“Setting them free” is an expression that I just made up, and on second thought it doesn’t hold, since I am looking to translate the commotion in my head into writing, so as to affix a stable meaning (or meanings) to it. In a less digressive manner of speaking, I write my thoughts so that I can capture them, and in turn make them weigh less. “To say a feeling, an impression is to diminish it — expel it,”1 as Susan Sontag writes. One might object to the part about “diminishing” it, because it is so often that the translation of our thought into language mutates the thought, and in doing so, undermines it (picture the scene of a confession — how often does the other person wholly understand the one confiding?). But such is the premise of human language, that it exists in relation to three dimensional things, as opposed to human thoughts and emotions that occupy a different, metaphysical space. Thus, I sit at my desk with the somber understanding that my thoughts and my words are not mirror images of each other, but are rather like siblings. One sibling, the written word, exists in the same world that I myself occupy physically, and as such, I find easier to work with.

This presupposition of the ‘loss in translation’ is more widely and more easily accepted in other areas, such as art. An abstract painting poses less of a threat when the painter’s motives and intentions are set aside, given that I can never ask the painter what they intended to communicate with their work, and even if I could, I would never be sure whether they are being truthful. In this case, I take the painting as an object separate from the painter, and allow for exclusive dialectic engagement between the brushstrokes and myself, “experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.”2 Or think of a really sad song: rarely do you have to learn about the artist’s lived experiences before you let the song do it’s thing to you. In this sense, the painting, the song, or the words in my journal, may be separated from their source to be considered as being their own things in the world, not mere diluted images of something else. If my journal entry says, “I am upset, because of this,” I can go ahead from there and deal with this. On the other hand, to take on the metaphysical feeling in my head directly, while it remains nebulous and fidgety and ever-changing, would be an enterprise in vain.

Take, for example, how I used to think I had a problem with being alone. In reality, that is not the case at all, from what I understand after translating and re-translating this feeling. In my mind, it was just a desperation to always be in someone else’s company. But after several iterations of translation, my problem seems to be with solitude in freeform. I can do whatever I want when I am by myself, and this freedom is overwhelming. Being with someone else, I restrict myself to their conditions — they are here to study, so I study; they are here to sleep, so I sleep; so on and so forth. In hindsight, I can see how it was easy to let myself think I cannot be by myself because of some deep rooted emotional condition.

This fear of confronting a deep rooted emotional condition explains why it took me so long to dissect my solitude problem, and hints that my issue quite often originates earlier in the process, in that I shy away from according a shape to my thoughts. Either I am too scared, or embarrassed, or owing to whatever nefarious reason. I remain averse to going in the attic at all, let alone the catch one of the bats with my bare hands. I still allow the loud thumping from upstairs to get in my way — I am startled when I hear one of the animals crash against a wall, and I let a cup slip from my hands. I sweep up the shattered ceramic and go on with my day, and then another bat drops head first onto the attic floor, and I am taken aback once again. The havoc in my mind’s attic continues unabated while I let it get in my way. This can only go on for so long before my idling begins to annoy me, so recently I devised a clever plan: to go and check every time a bat crashes. Otherwise, I see no plausible explanation for lying awake at night listening to the loud thumping, and doing nothing about it. The courage to go in the attic must inductively follow from the nuisance that I am suffering, and I am old enough to hold myself accountable for my emotional dilly dallying. This is not to say the attic will one day be empty, and I am at peace knowing that I might never catch enough bats. But I can still keep them at bay, or under a certain population density, which, in any case, is the best I can do.

Then again, it is not uncommon for dead bats to resurrect. Say, when I feel like I am longing for something, then in attempting to give shape to this feeling on paper once again, I suffer from the risk of reusing the same words that I used before. But I have dealt with this one particular bat long enough, and I think we see eye to eye now. This longing, that sometimes creeps up on me in certain moments of weakness, I realize, could be outlined with some new words. Now, instead of plain old longing, I look at it more like when someone says they miss their bed: they don’t really miss their bed; rather, they miss being asleep, they long to be at rest. The bed, in their case, is merely the signifier of that which once brought contentment. It would be a mistake, then, to try to rebuild a bed, and tire myself out in that process, when instead I could lie down anywhere else, and get just what I want: rest. My bed was made of pinewood. I could spend weeks sourcing pinewood and building myself another bed from scratch. But this whole ordeal would have been in vain, for what I needed was not the bed at all. Maybe beds made of mahogany are more comfortable, but if I am in search of my old pinewood bed, I will never sleep, and I will never know.

At the same time, there are probably some caveats to this bats in my attic analogy, since no one is actually giving me a list of bats that I have to go suffocate — I made it all up. So even if there aren’t any bats, I have to believe that there are. Humans made up ghosts because we wanted to fear the night. Sometimes the problem is that we want to have a problem. In proposing I go and solve each of my problems, I assume a right and wrong way of being, and in doing so establish myself as the judge of a great deal of things. The truth is that I know very little, and instead of striving to make my existence comfortable, I have been enforcing some abstract moral code on myself. This moral code, which I try to look for in the works of everyone that I look up to probably does not exist in the shape or form that I had hoped for. I keep looking for the recipe for bat poison in The Myth of Sisyphus3, but all it talks about is Camus’s jolly walk around the attic. That’s probably the most I can learn from these people, and I’ll have to cook the bat poison myself, when I need to.

I sit at my desk before this big, bright, yellow IKEA lamp4. I turn it off, and my head stops hurting.

The following passage is an excerpt from The White Album by Joan Didion.

“I kept wishing that he would talk about himself, hoping to break through the wall of rhetoric, but he seemed to be one of those autodidacts for whom all things specific and personal present themselves as mine fields to be avoided even at the cost of coherence, for whom safety lies in generalization.”

The author is describing her and other journalists’ attempts at getting a condemned man to reveal something that they could work with. The man stumbles over his words, speaks slower than he thinks, and makes for a character unable to elicit the reader’s passion, for there is very little the reader can see in him. Certainly, there is reason for the author to dedicate words to this man, and he is central to the context of her essay, but if I explained all that and said that the man in question was the leader of the Black Panther party, the historical black power political organization, then what I am about to say next would make me sound a little less serious. I will skirt the question of naming him, and say that the aforementioned lines, outside of the context of the essay, reminded me of myself.

I do this quite often, I think — I speak in abstraction so as not to divulge information that makes plain any of my own troubles. I make fervent claims that the Sartrean thought and Kafkaesque dilemmas reveal irreducible truths about the human condition, yet at the same time I make a point of alluding that I am somehow exempt from the turmoil of being human. These highly intelligent philosophers have fleshed out the unifying agonies of being alive, but I have somehow surpassed their intelligence and coped better than anyone they might have observed. I can’t be sure how well I do this, however, since I am only self-evaluating here, but every time I take a minute too long to formulate a sentence, behind the scenes, I am doing the acrobatics to paint myself as some higher being.

“Everyone goes through the same things,” someone that I no longer talk to once told me, “but you act like you’re better than everyone.” Some time later, someone that I still talk to said, “but that’s what everyone does.” I have gone through stages of believing only one or the other, but now I take both statements to be equally true. Only one was the words of a friend, and the other was those of something else.

I have very little clue about what goes behind this abstraction compulsion, except that I think I operate, to a large extent, on shame. That is probably also why the kinder words of a friend is much harder to digest than those of others, because the other person speaks to me the same way I speak to myself — it is just so familiar. Shame, rational or otherwise, just seems to wield a greater power over me than anything else. Things I say or do are almost always misted with the same deprived feeling, as if even though me and the next person are in the same place, I somehow got there through much more deprivation, and owing to more egregious personal shortcomings. I know not how this works in my mind but only that it is just does, decidedly. I tweeted this the other day when it dawned on me:

How ironic it is then, despite all my concerted efforts to disguise myself, when I discover the joy in feeling seen, and can’t help but love it. The other day, I let my friend borrow my favorite book, and she got back to me, having read two thirds of it, to talk about how much she liked it. I cried alone in my room thinking about that. Maybe because it was the first time someone was reading something I liked. Or maybe from the relief of knowing that someone out there now knows me a little better, albeit through the words of someone else, but at least I didn’t have to cauterize my innards to let myself be known. Couldn’t it just always be like this? Could I just not talk, and be honest, without every shard of truth having to pierce through me?

There seems to be abounding pleasure in being known. When friends say things that feel strangely telling of my disguised and suffocated self, a thought they could not have conceived if they did not truly see past it all, I am overcome with an unrivaled sensation. Because their wish to know me had trumped my efforts to disguise, and because my efforts to disguise did not prepare me for a sudden awareness of our connection, my feelings of shame dissolve to give way for other, brighter emotions. Love, belonging, yada yada. I feel it and I like it. Also, maybe because at times I have talked to people (for so long), trying to be understood (oh, with so many words!), and eventually feigning acquiescence, that when such sharp perception does come my way uninvited, I am rightfully delighted.

I am reminded of the scene from Past Lives, where the American husband says, “you dream in a language I can't understand.” It is probably due to no fault of two people that they are never able to understand each other, but it feels somehow necessary to credit them when they do (a marvel of being alive!). So I live a language no one is obliged to know, and such is the greatest pleasure: to find people who do.

I have not worked through the burgeoning shame; I just know that not feeling it feels nice. Besides, the whole disguise act is just so much work. I have to think harder to lie better, and I just hate thinking.

To love is to rest!

Didion, Joan. The White Album. Simon and Schuster, 1979.

Lee, Greta, Teo Yoo, and John Magaro. Past Lives. Widescreen ed. United States: A24, 2023.

I may have spent a great deal of time in my head. Now I look around and everything is colored in the paint of my imagination. This is the third sentence in this essay and too early to appraise the habit, but I will claim absolution and say this isn’t my fault. There is simply, at all times, just too much that is unknown, and I cannot get behind the idea of living unknowingly. If something is out there, shy to the eyes, and elusive of reason, then I, a seeing, feeling, figure of reason, am not to be guilted for according it wholeness in my head, be the wholeness part real and part fiction. The world just makes more sense with more answers, and if I must be charged for the crime of appending reality in the imagination, then come for me only after all the thinkers and philosophers who came before me have been tried. Kill Galileo for imagining the Sun at the center of the solar system and all life as progeny of this ball of fire. Hang Newton for conjuring the imaginary hand of gravity that dropped the apple on his shoulders. Only then I might acquiesce, agree to be taken for imagining the littler things, for guessing feelings of love and hate.1

But here, as always, I have taken the defense before even judging what I stand to gain from it. How have my illusions rewarded me, inasmuch that I continue to argue for them? I know Galileo nearly faced torture and execution at the hands of the Catholic church for his sketch of the planets. I measure out the dramatic effect as I say this, but my own experience has been a parallel to his. I speak in hyperbole in hopes that as the cymbals of the metaphor begin to settle, the substance that remains at least alludes to the truth. My imagination is big, and it holds nothing smaller than the stars and planets in Galileo’s, for it has been the fabric of the explanations that I have authored for the thoughts and feelings of those that I cross paths with. This is how I have made sense of the life around me, and what is my life if not a reaction to all the beauty and ugly that I take my place amongst. But it is a heavy task, to try and account for all that there is, to trace and extrapolate, instead of taking them as they are. Because the permutations are endless, because a remark could’ve been thrown my way in jest or in earnest, or both, unless I am able to access the truth, which cannot come from my imagination, I have to hold all the versions that I conjure as equals.

Which eventually adds up to a lot, unfortunately. This is the imperial affliction: to have at once all the answers, but no answer at all, for they are only good for crowding the passages of my mind with their discordant meanings. What do you even do, then? My usual resort is the pen, so on most days I just write all of it down. I have this black Moleskine with lined pages where all my imaginations materialize. As it happens with observations, they are noticed among that which is daily looked at, I happened to observed the length my entries. They were all short, a page or two, maybe three when it’s really bad. The lines on the pages are really tight, and the handwriting is hurried, compact. So there are indeed enough words to fill up the pages, but the pages themselves on the grand scale seemed so small. Now, here I am, sitting with my journal, looking at my stories of despair, pity, and grief, and suddenly I am dumbfounded. Everything that weighs down on me like the sentence of a condemned man sits on his shoulders — all of it fits here? The little space they take up in the material world offers no reconnaissance of the universes they occupy when in my head.

Susan Sontag writes in one of my favorite essays, “to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world. (“This world”! As if there were any other.) The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.”2 In the essay, Sontag was arguing against interpreting artistic works. But the old adage goes, life imitates art (or its converse, art imitates life), and so I will take Sontag’s words to apply to life as well. Then, in her words, unburdening myself comes with doing away with all the possible renders of the world in my imagination, so that my experience of this world is more immediate, more grounded. Was I left behind because of this or that? I was just left behind, and that’s that. (And so what? I’ll carry myself.) In my words, I should get out of my head, for all the versions of things that exist in there at one time, there is only one of them in the real world, and the real world is always so much lighter on the shoulders. The absence of a truth, in an uninterpreted world, does less harm than a hurtful truth in an interpreted world. It is better to go on living without ever having tasted grapes than imagining grapes that are sour.

Thus begins the journey of looking outwards; and there’s a whole world out there — the real, the only one! Even without having explained all this, it would have sufficed to only say that after a certain point, you just have to be. After you’ve labored over the immovable object long enough, you have to step in and stop the unstoppable force of your mind. Give up trying to understand everything that doesn’t ask to be understood, then with the extra time you earned, you go and drink something warm by an open window, or talk to a small animal, or listen, really listen and be there, when a friend is talking. I enjoy all of these things now. Day before yesterday, someone pointed at the moon and said “people have been there!” That is true, and there was nothing for me to do in response, other than smile in contentment. A few weeks ago, the same person asked if I wanted to go see foxes, and I said yes. I knew nothing of wild foxes on Saadiyat. We walked over to the bridge outside campus, and waited. They’re the kind with long ears, apparently, and they hear human noises from miles away. So we smoked a few cigarettes, leaning on the railing, and spoke in hushed voices. And then I saw it first: something brown, the size of a dog, darting across the sand. It was so nimble, so precise with its limbs! I pointed at it. The fox was running not in our direction, so with every exclamation that we sighed, its hindquarters were getting smaller and smaller before our eyes, until it stood before the wall that demarcates the football field. Then it hopped over, without hesitation, and it was gone. I had not seen it from up close, but it was my first time seeing a fox. This particular animal was, and probably still is, out there, on the sand, on this island, in this world. With all the concerted efforts of my mind, the wild fox could not be experienced within the pages of my journal, for wild foxes belong to a place more immediate, somewhere it’s actually really easy to look, and it’s worth doing so.

“I began to talk. I talked about summer, and about time. The pleasures of eating, the terrors of the night. About this cup we call a life. About happiness. And how good it feels, the heat of the sun between the shoulder blades.”3

I spend a lot of time poring over my plans for growing up. Not just in the sense of aging, but I am more so in a daily, visceral race, against my own skin and bones, to grow. I feel that I am behind on meeting the mark, of making sure that my mind grows to fill the space left by my growing body, which ages self-assuredly. That I am being honest here should be clear from only a glance at anything I do: I write so I can remember what the world looked like to me once, when I was younger. I read so I can memorize what it looked like to an author, probably of higher moral standing than me. I take extended smoke breaks with friends so I can steal what it looks like to the people I like. This last one I undertake with the highest sincerity, in that I have no qualms postponing my other commitments or sharing my cigarettes if it means I can get a peek at the stand they take in life. I have done all of this long enough that I should expect myself to be no less than a behemoth of emotional intelligence. But I feel less than that — what I think I am now is a twenty something year old less good of a person than I would like to be. So it appears, that I still have to keep learning new things every day, and to my dismay, I have been told that this growth endeavor I am obsessed with is a lifelong one.

This is probably a needless thing to highlight. Indeed, I will have to concede that everyone grows — life is predicated on change. It should then be enough to know that there is barely anything that doesn’t change a person, at least to some extent, and everything that happens to other people and transforms them — experiences, achievements, loss — have happened to me too. (Some of these happen to me every day — I just stitch myself back before bed every night.) I also have a feeling that changes to the self is harder to pick through on a daily basis, and it is easier in hindsight than in the moment to see how parts of yourself react to times of joy or grief. Still, I carry this clawing urge within, to dissect everything that I cross paths with, to wrench out a life lesson then and there. So, there is then grounds for self-reprimand when I read a journal entry from, say, a year ago, and realize I still feel the same about some things, and some other things that I never really liked about myself are still somehow a part of me. This must mean I haven’t grown at all in the year past, that I felt joy and grief in vain if I must still carry the same weights with me that I did 12 months prior.

I should say that I have no ambitions to become the best person in the world of all time; I am fine being a good enough person to myself and the people around me. Still, my thoughts of self-rectification are unrelenting. It is ironic even, how I see and envy people who seem content with how they are, and in trying so desperately to emulate their inner peace, I have to wage a war with myself. A war for peace sounds incredibly dumb and is equally tiring. This mix of low ambition and intense passion for some sort of transformation must not be coming from the good of my heart, or I would have at least in my own eyes become the minimum viable good person by now. Instead, I have a feeling that it comes from, and I cringe saying this, a place of dire self-loathing. I am just sounding out this explanation at the moment, but it seems to fare well under my line of inquiry. Why doesn’t all my self-awareness convert to growth? How do I still find so much to loathe in myself, even though I have been at it for so long? Probably because this self-loathing part of me is content doing only and up to the self-loathing bit.

This is all so lame, and at this point I physically cringe. I can hear myself swearing, “I am a good person!” but also doing all this song and dance to prove the contrary. I can, however, just put myself in the reader’s shoes and tell myself to just grow up, but then I am back to square one — a deadlock. All that is left to ask is, what is all this resentment for? Why do I hate my past self so much, that I am willing to go such great lengths to widen the gap between? I have to stop and take stock of the situation, because I am otherwise out of ideas.

The basic premise is that I would simply like to be different. But then all this raging against the past feels unfair; having to hold my younger self at an arm’s length feels like I am depriving myself of something. But as it stands, the past is the only thing that truly belongs to me. It is not my future that I own; my life could branch out in all sorts of crazy directions, and neither do I own the present, which is just as capricious. The only thing I can really be sure of is the past. Nothing else is as concrete, or even as safe. How then can I then hate it, when it holds all the good that has ever happened to me? Did that really happen? Yes it did, and I know because I was there. I cannot speak of the future with half as much certitude, and I’d be indulging myself if I said I understand the present. My self-contempt aside, the parts of me that I do like are all a curation of all the good that has ever touched me. The love I was once shown lives on in me in the way I now savor my chilled drinks, letting the ice slowly melt, how I occasionally peel away from my laptop to stretch my arms and legs, or the way I change into clean clothes before bed.

To be fair, in small ways, I do like myself better now. I like how boba doesn’t give me a sugar rush anymore and my bedsheets don’t have all the germs from outside. The good from the past, just like the past itself, was ephemeral, but I am glad I can carry some of it in myself. This is not to say that I am all of a sudden glorifying the past, because we still have the question from square one: what about all the bad from back then? I honestly think I will soon just slowly forget all about it. I can only remember so much, and I’m already so busy not just tending to the nice parts of myself, but also foraging for more to love, that I just don’t think I’ll have the space for the sad and ugly parts. At some point, I will like, maybe not all, but most of myself, and that is good enough. Then I’ll be able to pass it on to the world better.

So I suppose it doesn’t have to be a race. The ‘minimum viable good person’ is a relative concept. I actually don’t know what ‘mark’ I was talking of meeting earlier; I literally made it up myself. The general idea is, and this is what I am starting to come to terms with, that all kinds of things happen, and when the past is past, I will like myself a little more, and it will show in the way I show up to the world. I suppose it’s alright that I wasn’t able to give back in the past, I just didn’t have it in me then. But I can make up for it later; I have the present and the future for that.

There’s this orange and black cat that kind of hangs out around the bookstore at night. When I go out there for a smoke and there’s no one else nearby, it runs up to me and keeps circling me, rubbing against my arms and legs, hopping on and off where I’m sitting. It keeps so quiet I barely ever notice there’s two of us sitting. Only the other day, a stranger pointed out the cat begging at my waist. “Is that your cat?” I broke out of my spell and noticed I wasn’t petting it, and I realized I hadn’t pet a cat in a while. So I rubbed the cat’s back, in the direction of its fur, and scratched under its chin, just like how cats like it.

what’s an appropriate and good enough way to speak of summer? a happy summer — because i now have new things that i really like having. a sad summer — because i spent many long days at home feeling so alone. a brief summer — because i somehow want a few more days. just a summer — because i’ll probably live through a bunch more. a summer — because i’ll never be 23 in august again.

the intensity of how i feel now about this summer will grow mild in my memory with time, so i need urgently to find some way to take stock of all of this and put it in the back for easy recollection months or years later. otherwise, the fear of doing a disservice to this period of time will remain, a time that is significant for what i think is the beginning of the final developmental stages of my prefrontal cortex. i say this with conviction because i can physically feel the great many neural pathways my brain has recently formed. there is no other way to explain the strange and new things that i find myself capable of feeling. except maybe the fact that, and i have to include this for honesty’s sake, i stopped taking happy pills. i now have tears when i think about the fall of beirut following the end of french colonialism in lebanon. this might be an indication of having suddenly grown more intelligent or empathetic, but it could very well just be my brain readjusting to its full emotional capacity.

regardless. i remember summer last year as only an awful window that can never happen again. all i can recall is i was in the pits of degeneracy just waiting the whole summer out. but i’m sure it was more than that, and i can’t remember anything else because all else is dim in the archives of my memory next to the towering image of me trying to off myself in my room. this summer was probably not as emotionally rife, but still complex in a good way, and deserves a fitting eulogy as such. i say “eulogy”, and not something like farewell or recap, because this is what this is, a loving and premature goodbye. i thought i was categorically devoted to running away from home, and every other time i came back i just wanted to leave, quick. but this time it feels different, and leaving feels like abandoning something unfinished. like being made to start somewhere else when in the middle of something else. here i was only starting to make sense of my own form and content, and the strange expressions of love that i was raised on at home. like how i just figured that every time i make a show of giving up too early, i betray an inane prayer for the other person to come back with an offer to mend things. never without the knowledge that this is unbecoming of an adult, and unfair to the other adult, to harbor such an expectation, i have gone on wishing to be indulged. i made the connection the other day when i walked away from a conversation in annoyance, but my mother followed me into the next room to ask me again what i wanted. this felt familiar and was what i needed — a lingering show of love, which i know to be unfair but learned to expect.

this is not to say that i spent the summer diagnosing and recuperating; i still have a long way to go on the path of the latter. but i made some breakthroughs in undiagnosing as well — i realized i don’t have any attention deficit issues at all. i spent so much time this summer working on and learning things that i genuinely enjoy and in places where i see a valid reason to let something occupy my time. but the whole time in university i thought i was just wired to evade responsibilities. take, for example, how i read 800 pages of the fifth harry potter book when i was younger and 600 pages of crime and punishment in freshman year without ever complaining, but never got to a data structures assignment until a day before it was due. i probably just didn’t see any real value in writing a thousand lines of code that didn’t do anything useful. this is worth writing about here because this knowledge is now dearer to me than life: i just have to show myself the bigger picture if i need to get anything done, and i am thankfully neurotypical enough to see it to the end on my own. had i known the value of taking data structures once, i would’ve finished the assignments in time and avoided having to take the class a second time.

listing my summer realizations this year i also find it necessary to ask whether anything i am saying or writing constitutes original thinking. i would like to draw attention to a james baldwin quote that falls very close to this sentiment, “you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” i am compelled to retaliate, “so what?” baldwin here exhibits a chickenpox mentality — that just because it was felt once it need not be felt again. but it almost goes against the nature of an emotion to be quelled simply by an awareness of its unoriginality, and i further assume serious doubts about any consolation this line of thinking may have ever offered anyone. the truth is that chickenpox is not a good metaphor for life. life perhaps bears closer resemblance to the principles of the penal code of 1800 BC babylonia, where full dental extraction was a form of capital punishment. if you were sentenced to have all your teeth pulled out, the pain of having the first teeth extracted would do very little to make the 31 other extractions any easier. humans assume existence on the condition that they will feel, and feel again.

this summer is then just one of many more dental extractions to come and for me to recount (metaphor intended not in the punishment sense). but also, on a parting note, what’s so special about summer? why must august be the month of reckoning? it could just be an entirely made up state of mind. like how most alien sightings are reported in north america or encounters with jinns are limited to south asia, probably explained by the space race amplifying interest in extra terrestrial life or religion cementing the existence of the paranormal. it might as well be taylor swift who started this whole narrative by writing a song like that and calling it “august”. but there's other things to consider. when the migrant birds come to bangladesh in the winter, they only gather in this one particular college campus in the outskirts of the capital. it has been this way for years. there are other places in the country just as warm and hospitable, but it's like someone arranged for the birds to rest there, and they oblige. it is as if nature has designs on certain times or places, and life unfolds around them in accordance.

so this is only a roundabout way of saying: some things just are. and there is so much comfort, and sweetness, in knowing that i will have another summer, and between now and then i can keep moving and i can change, then on another august day i can emerge from all the good and bad days to sit down and say things are better, just like i did today.

In 1919, Franz Kafka took a two week sojourn from the insurance company where he worked to pen a letter to his father, Hermann Kafka, in an attempt to address their taut relationship. He began his protests fully aware of the heavy undertaking of detailing the abuses of his domestic tyrant.

Dearest Father,

You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking. And if I now try to give you an answer in writing, it will still be very incomplete, because, even in writing, this fear and its consequences hamper me in relation to you and because the magnitude of the subject goes far beyond the scope of my memory and power of reasoning.

Over the next hundred pages, through glaring anecdotes and incisive psychological insight, Kafka unburdens himself of the injustices suffered at the hands of his father, whom the notion of paternal love, that which Kafka most longed for, had almost entirely escaped. Although the use of broad generalizations in personifying his father and for his black and white thinking, Kafka’s scholars take this giant of a letter to be a study of the author himself than a portrait of its subject, and believe the purpose of the letter to be self-therapy over rekindling the familiar bond, I, however, stand beside Kafka in support of his approach. During court proceedings, the defendant charged with a crime would not expect to hear a complete and unabridged sketch of his personality in favor of an account of the facts directly relevant to the crime of which he is accused and its effects on the injured parties. In his delicate and emotionally laden tone, Kafka is able to do justice to the frustration and resentment he has borne for so long, without undermining the love towards his father that he makes little effort to conceal. Moreover, he remains supremely deferential throughout the letter, making space for his own errors, and even somewhat loosely using this court analogy himself:

You are, admittedly, a chief subject of our conversations¹, as of our thoughts ever since we can remember, but truly, not in order to plot against you do we sit together, but in order to discuss—with all our might and main, jokingly and seriously, in affection, defiance, anger, revulsion, submission, consciousness of guilt, with all the resources of our heads and hearts—this terrible trial that is pending between us and you, to examine it in all its details, from “all sides, on all occasions, from far and near—a trial in which you keep on claiming to be the judge, whereas, at least in the main (here I leave a margin for all the mistakes I may naturally make) you are a party too, just as weak and deluded as we are.

In faulting Kafka for his (justified) emotional charges, his scholars are guilty of doing him the same injustice as his father did unto him: expecting him to bear the brunt of their relationship on the simple grounds of being the subject of a toiling guardian.

It looked to you more or less as follows: you have worked hard all your life, have sacrificed everything for your children, above all for me, consequently I have lived high and handsome, have been completely at liberty to learn whatever I wanted, and have had no cause for material worries, which means worries of any kind at all. You have not expected any gratitude for this, knowing what “children’s gratitude” is like, but have expected at least some sort of obligingness, some sign of sympathy.

After a childhood spent in his father’s shadow, Kafka wrote the letter to his father when he was at a considerable distance from him — as an adult, in a world apart from his family. Now, having defended Kafka’s position and with intimate knowledge of familial relationships that can elicit a letter of this magnitude, I now turn to an account of my own. 

I have been away from home for only a few years, but I daresay I had lived with the rift in my household dynamic for far longer. There is this really popular scene from Ladybird that goes viral every other week on social media, featuring Ladybird and her mother, and this much is probably enough for everyone to recognise the scene. “Of course, I love you,” her mother sighs. Ladybird pierces through the platitude, asking, “but do you even like me?” This piqued my interest, because Ladybird and every red-haired teenage girl sympathizer placed “liking” to be an act of higher merit and valor than “loving”. In the same breath, and I am certain Ladybird would’ve done the same had she been real, these people champion Bell Hooks for her aphorisms on love and the act of loving. I gave up reading the book, All About Love, about 100 pages in, because of Hooks’s insufferable patronizing and ridiculously conservative opinions, but I can say this much that what the Ladybird fanbase got wrong and Bell Hooks probably got right is that loving is an active and constant enterprise. I already knew this in middle school, when I wrote in an essay in English class, “my parents like me.” My teacher said this was wrong, and you can’t say that your parents like you because they actually love you. But I had made the conscious decision in choosing against the stronger verb, because I wasn’t sure if it could rise to the occasion. My parents like me enough to house and feed me, to let me take the English class in school. But did they love me, say, in the way that Bell Hooks says we should love one another, with agency and commitment? “Love is an action, a participatory emotion. Whether we are engaged in a process of self-love or of loving others we must move beyond the realm of feeling to actualize love.” Had my father been acting out love, when he cursed me out in profanities so ugly that I shut my ears when my friends in middle school learned to use the same ones, or when he traded his anger for my humiliation in public, or when he whipped me with prickly twigs on a random evening in the name of inspiring religious faith? I could’ve stopped reading Bell Hooks at page 1 and I would still say no.

I know I have grown up a little because the world around me looks familiar. I can recognise the name of an obscure village in France because I’ve been there. I can read the line “all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and know it to be the opening of a Tolstoy novel. I know not to guilt people for not knowing what they want because nobody really knows what they want. All this is to say that I feel that I have gathered a few experiences here and there, enough to make me confident enough to seek out more, but too few to make me feel small against the uncompromising pool of experiences yet to be experienced. I feel that I am still too young to reread books, despite how much I might like one, because there are just too many I haven’t even started. Sometimes, when I’m watching a movie by myself, I’ll skip ahead a few times to get to the end quicker, so I advance the time when I can watch the next one. It’s a strange tug of war, where I am constantly introduced to new things which open up even broader planes that I haven’t known before. This notion is perhaps altogether unknown to my father, because it seems he is already accustomed with everything, or at least he already knows everything he needs to know to confer judgements on everything. Some new discovery is not a discovery to him at all, but rather a mere confirmation. When we were kids, my father used to tell us this story of how as an adolescent he used to dream of working in the Gulf. For context, two days before the 1971 war ended, the Pakistani military had the brilliant idea of gathering hundreds of doctors, lawyers, engineers — almost everyone capable of critical thoughts — in a field and shooting them to death. So, when my father was born around that time, the war torn and now intellectually bankrupt country’s only resource was its masses of people. Those people flocked to the wealthier Gulf nations to work as migrant workers, while a few others here got awfully rich taking care of the logistics of all that. My father dreamt of the former. Lucky for him, he was able to get a master’s degree before he had the chance to actualize his adolescent aspirations. He is now probably the most well traveled person I know, and so it is not unreasonable of me to expect his worldview to have expanded proportionately. However, that has not been the case, and he remains as frugal in ideas as ever before. This argument could have just as well gone the other way, that he is from a different time, and I have been having communal experiences much more expansive and liberal than him, while he has been at the same place since at least when I was born. But the way I see it, even this point works against him, because while I have been making transitory acquaintances here and there, he has had the chance to see far and wide with the added benefit of being grounded by a home and family, which should’ve given him plenty of space to experiment and be more comfortable with the nature of human relationships. Instead, of the compassion and respect, appreciation of the immaterial, and emotional intelligence in those around me that I love, I find little resemblance in my father. Sometimes, when I hear the unfounded conceit in his voice, I wonder if his goal had at all shifted from that all those many years ago.

Kafka never posted the letter. He showed it to his lover, Milena, and his best friend and confidante, Max Brod, and it was published nearly 30 years after Kafka’s passing. The letter probably did more for Kafka’s later readers that it would’ve done for its addressee. While thinking of writing this post, I came across this filter online that shows you as an older person. I saw lighter hair, skin nowhere near as tight, and the wrinkles carved on my forehead as if in stone. If I say I saw my father, that would be too poetic even for me and thus annoying. I am not Ocean Vuong. Instead, I caught a glimpse of what I might look like in 40 or 50 years, which made me realize I should wear sunscreen more often. 

¹ Here, Kafka refers to his sister, Ottla, who was often the victim of their father’s abuses, due to her irreverent choices of suitor and profession.

Maybe if I didn’t write everything with the weight of consecrating mankind with some brand-new revelation, I wouldn’t have been staring at this blank page for so long. I’ve written thousands of words before and I’ll probably write thousands more, so this particular piece doesn’t even matter that much. Yet, sitting with a nebulous blob of ideas in my lap, trying to distill and condense it into a few pages comes as a heavy task every time. Some people are scared of big things like the ocean or the desert, but the grand scale of things is almost always easier to deal with than trying to figure out a smaller serving. Yesterday, I was walking with sandals on when a little pebble slipped inside. I had probably kicked it up and it landed there without me noticing, and when I put my foot down for the next step, it hurt like hell. I thought I was going to bleed out on the street, so I checked my sole, only to see that it was barely scathed. It was still crazy how much it hurt because at times I like going barefoot on gravel, and the spread of all the little stones under my feet feel like a foot massage. But it somehow took only one singular stone to take me down, which illustrates my suspicion about humans having a complicated relationship with smaller instances of big things — I think this is rarely ever talked about.

When someone is passionate about a particular social issue, suddenly everyone else has a problem with all the other issues the person hasn’t dignified with an action yet. You see someone using a reusable straw, and everyone around them has a whataboutism stroke: what about plastic bags killing sea turtles, fossil fuels running out, or billionaires not paying taxes? What’s one metal straw going to do for the planet, everyone yells, when you’re just trying to enjoy your milkshake with a shiny metal straw. Whatever happened to just being quiet and doing your part? This wouldn’t be a problem if people didn’t sweat the little things so much. However, I also can’t be certain if this can be considered a flaw of human nature, because without an eye for small things, there wouldn’t be any joy in taking a stroll and smelling the rain or in hearing water lapping by the lake or in the little things of your loved ones. Or worse, there also wouldn’t be that One Direction song. This is again very complicated, and I’m probably going in circles, but if anyone ever wrote “you never want to know how much you weight, you still have to squeeze into your jeans,” I wouldn’t know how to feel about that.

I was watching a movie a few weeks ago where the protagonist becomes obsessed with caring for an injured pigeon after she rescues it. Lizzy starts carrying the bandaged bird around with her in a shoe box, and her coworkers make fun of her for spending a hundred and fifty dollars at the vet to have it checked up. When she looks unhappy with the vet’s unenthusiastic diagnosis, even the doctor says, “it’s a pigeon.” I probably wouldn’t have noticed it if I wasn’t by myself in the theater, but there was a divide in the audience: evil people who were laughing at her for bending over backwards for a pigeon, which I can honestly understand because she was a struggling artist with deadlines, and this other mentally unstable group in the audience who championed Lizzy for sparing compassion for something that could’ve been easily overlooked, so insignificant. There is something very biblical about this story, because even the flightless pigeon that would’ve been crushed by a car if left outside, the screenwriters seem to argue, stands amongst God’s choir, and deserves the same care and compassion that we pray unto ourselves. On the other hand, I feel like overlooking the smaller and weaker beings is probably a sentiment born out of modern capitalism, which only works if we focus primarily on amassing our own infinite strength and vigor. 

Earlier I called the children of capitalism in the audience evil in reference to the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead’s understanding of the first sign of civilization, which she says is a healed human femur — the long bone that connects the hip to the knee. In the wild, anything with a broken femur would be abandoned and swallowed up by natural processes in due time. “In the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal.” But the ability to empathize is what probably sets humans apart from the savage arena. “Broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts.” So, it seems that the currently popular sentiment that “you don’t owe anyone anything” is the reductive enemy of humanity, and it makes sense that its being popularized now in tandem with rising neoliberal consciousness.

When I was younger, a child maybe, my mother was always sick. She was always in bed, and when she wasn’t, she was nagging everyone to let her go back to bed. When she was in bed, she wanted everyone to know that she was in bed and where it hurt. I had had enough of her before I was old enough to be able to feel a migraine myself, and I couldn’t have concealed my annoyance with her groaning even if I tried to. So, I grew up to be a man of unfathomable resilience: when I was 13 or 14, I wouldn’t tell anyone if I sprained my ankle. It’ll get better and I’ll spare everyone the burden of concern. I am still the same man, except I’m starting to wonder if I had been lying to myself this whole time by remembering a different inception of my personhood. I sprained my ankle two weeks ago and I tried not to tell anybody, but it just kept popping up in conversations. When I didn’t have a sprained ankle, I could have conversations with ease without ever bringing up my ankle. Suddenly, it seemed, my ankle wants to draw attention to itself, even though I knew the pain was barely anything and it’s best if I get over this without anybody knowing. But my ankle was making me talk, like a ventriloquist’s puppet with a mind of its own, as if there was an untapped reservoir of healing powers in the public consciousness. Every “how’s your ankle now?” was received like a video game health upgrade. But I have to reiterate that I was against all of this, and I would’ve been better off if nobody had found out about my ankle.

My Airbnb host in France is an old lady, a retired professor from Philadelphia, who lives with her son in this house in a middle of nowhere village. She’s great company, and I like staying up with her to watch movies in her living room. Her son is probably my father’s age or older, and he’s been married twice but is now divorced and lives here. The first time I met him, he told me in the first ten minutes that he was autistic, as a way of justifying himself. Sometime later, over lunch, he told me he takes medication that he doesn’t really find useful, but people around him tell him that it really makes a difference to his personality. One time when he was trying to make a Donald Trump joke in front of me, his mother told him to take his pills. She said his orangutan reference didn’t really make sense. “No one knows what you’re talking about.” Once when I asked if they were busy, they both said no, so I asked if they wanted to watch a movie with me. My host asked me to put it on the TV, and suddenly her son had the idea of offering her ice cream. While I’m trying to connect my laptop to the TV and she’s translating the French instructions for me, her son is holding out the tub of Ben and Jerry’s for her. “None for me,” she replies a minute too late. When I finally get the movie to play, he says he’s going to his room to make some art. When I had first walked in to the living room and asked to join them, however, he was really happy about it. “She enjoys your company more than mine.”

            The truth is, I think, everyone wants to be loved so bad, that old people wilt away before your eyes when their lifelong partner passes away. If someone has an accident and becomes wheelchair bound, and they can’t love like they used to, suddenly they start showing an affinity for the gravitational pull near the top of a staircase or stop eating or go to Switzerland for a legal lethal injection. The desire to love and be loved is so strong that people read letters exchanged by lovers hundreds of years ago, so they can learn to be better lovers themselves. “You are the knife I turn inside myself,” Franz Kafka had written to a married woman. In places where this quote appears, there’s usually no other context. But the picture of a knife, with its power to sustain or discard life, is for most people appropriate for carrying the charge of love. They read this and are assured of the love they are capable of giving. People don’t read anything other than declarations of love like this. No one reads Descartes out of context and feels the same pang: “I think, therefore I am.” Most people aren’t that stirred. Understandably, the study and exercise of love takes precedence. If civilization starts at love, it makes sense to have giving and receiving love hardwired in our brains. Some people might want love in secret, but whether they express that desire doesn’t change anything. They still want a place in someone’s heart in a way you own an armchair in a home you’ve spent your whole life. When you want to stop a nuclear reaction, you dip these control rods in the reactor, which absorb the neutrons needed for the reaction to go on. If life inspired science, and birds gave us the idea for planes, human hearts might have something to do with nuclear reactions.

People always say things like “man creates his own future” or “this or that person is a self-made billionaire,” and that’s a noble thing. Unless you’re of a contemptuous sort or just a downer, they work wonders in reaffirming your capacity and free will. Sentiments like these are so popular because they make people feel empowered, but also, I really can’t imagine a society so impotent because it doesn’t believe that its actions matter. Even though I can’t speak for the truth in them, their effect on the collective mind of society is undeniable: people protest, recycle, and go vegan because they know their individual actions add up to something. I, however, tend to litter because of my lack of faith. There’s a bunch of them here anyway, I take note every time I flick off another cigarette butt on the street.

The thing is that I would like to believe in myself, so much so that I have, for so long, been idolizing certain French thinkers who made their living preaching and defending their philosophies of self-sufficiency. Humans don’t come into the world to fit into a mold: anyone could be anything. They argued eloquently, I appreciated the cleverness in their novels, and they imbued their fictional characters with indubitable human qualities that I thought I was convinced. They were so easy to relate to, and their ideas were intellectually stimulating to convey their erudition, yet simple enough to resonate with just about anyone. I took their word as the truth and shaped my worldview through theirs. 

But it felt a little uncomfortable, almost as if I was forcing myself to believe what they were saying. It just so happens, I eventually figured, that cornering myself to agree with my revered heroes was in direct contradiction with their philosophy. They said there were no set rules, and had I let myself deliberate, I would naturally arrive at the same conclusions as them. Instead, what I did out of childish admiration was skip the deliberation and accept their conclusions as my ground rules. I forgot I was reading books meant to guide my thinking, not dictate it. “It’s just a giant rock floating in space,” I would read, “and all limitations are social constructs.” That must be so, I thought. I had mishandled the whole premise of existential philosophy.

“Sartre spent most of his life in Paris, where he often went to cafes on the Left Bank and sat on benches in the Jardin du Luxembourg,” reads an article on the French philosopher Jean-Paul Satre. Compare this to a slightly different landscape, where I grew up, where children clean sewage drains and women earn $37 a month working at garment factories. Two lives being so contrary to each other, it must, then, take an awful lot to impose the worldview of one upon the other. No wonder, it took so much effort on my end. I thought everyone that played by the rules did so because their conscience hadn’t matured, what Sartre called living in ‘bad faith’. That is, the way people make themselves act, work, or live a certain way because it is the convention, the right way, and I certainly wasn’t one of them, because I had committed to my free will.

There was something so odd about my stance. Did the 12 year old working at the brick factory also suffer from an immature conscience? Had they read Sartre, would they be liberated, and be free to pursue their authentic self? Where I’m coming from, it feels so utterly diabolical to say that the greatest and ultimate force is free will, that a 9 year old who’s forcibly married to a 50 year old in a village in Bangladesh is living in bad faith. The flaw that I now recognize in the philosophy of the French bourgeois is that there are, in fact, powers higher than the self.  [incomplete]

When I started writing this post, I thought I had an original thought. However, I just happened to Google something about Sartre and found out that he was criticized by his contemporaries, including Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus, and even Martin Heidegger, who inspired his philosophy. Sartre had his ass beat so hard that he somewhat abandoned his philosophy and embraced more Marxist ideas towards the end, and his writing on existentialism failed to remain popular in French discourse. This piece was going to be longer, and I was just starting to get to my point, but I have to abandon it now, because I feel satisfied with the work of Sartre’s critics, and I am happy that he died knowing better. I’m still going to post it because I need to announce that I also know better now.

the other day i took out a citibike to go get takeaway. maybe i got overly confident with my sense of direction, because i put my phone away and kept cycling for an hour before i it dawned on me that i was still nowhere near my destination, even though the kfc was only a mile away. i should’ve known something was wrong because i had come to a dead end, away from the high rise buildings and corner delis, and was blindly making my way through a random industrial zone with exhaust fumes making me squint in the hard light of a factory on night shift. when i did take my phone out of my pocket to check my location, i found myself on the east coast of manhattan, near brooklyn. i switched out my bike for an electric one so i wouldn’t have to pedal all the way back, since by then i was already a little tired. no one ever talks about how much horsepower is in these electric bikes because by the next time i was reaching for my phone, i was already on the west coast, past greenwich. back in high school i would zoom around my city on my 12 geared cycle — i was lighter and so was my vehicle, my lungs probably weren’t black from cigarette tar, and the wheels were always well oiled. but these citi bikes are heavy, and even to balance yourself on the electric powered ones you expend plenty energy. maybe i was just trying to believe that these almost 4 months here had made me a new yorker; because i know the way to soho by heart and i can tell the difference between the local and express trains so i must also not be a tourist enough to make my way back on my own without my phone. i didn’t beat the tourist industry that day — new york had hinted i should stay in my lane. the map took me home, eventually.

this city is just so big — i think it’s pretty normal to be a little taken aback when you see a 7 eleven right next to a gothic cathedral. but just because everything has made its way here (i want to know what life experiences led this man from a bangladeshi village to end up serving BLT sandwiches from a breakfast truck at the corner of broadway and prince street), i would argue, doesn’t mean nothing looks out of place here. when you look down from way up high, it’s undeniably new york. the empire state, central park, the gilmore girls train station and the diner from when harry met sally — it’s all there, along with all the people rushing on with their $2 deli coffee, looking left and right to check for cars before crossing a street during a green light because they’re in a hurry, jumping turnstiles. but there’s also the other lens if you care to look: each person here is an instance of their own being. its hard to make out whether they’re part of something bigger. even though it’s the city’s residents who make it, who are responsible for the state of new york culture, and they are the ones you want to remember when you’re buying hoodies and trinkets from those souvenir shops in chinatown or times square, it still really doesn’t feel like anyone’s in on it together. new york city culture is ethnographic turbulence, made up of infinite independent agents moving in utter disharmony, but their aggregate motion produces a perceptible resultant. it’s like lying on a field of grass and trying to make out cloud shapes. soon you’ll make out a rabbit, or a turtle. but the water molecules up in the atmosphere don’t have a secret agreement to coagulate into a duck on tuesdays and a bird on wednesdays. they’re just there, but you think they’ve arranged themselves into familiar shapes so you can have a convenient heuristic, so you can point at a cloud and tell the next person, “that’s a bunny.” it’s like if you put an infinite number of monkeys before an infinite number of typewriters in a room, and let them go at it. at some point, they’ll have produced the entire manuscript of hamlet. but that doesn’t mean the monkeys had a covenant. they just did their thing on their own, impelled by whatever, and eventually you were able to make something out of all the flurry. new yorkers are also just doing their own thing.

i’ve lived in a city my whole life but this state of things is still new to me. maybe someone else will say what ive described so far is just the big city life. but if it’s that’s the case, then i can’t help but ask, what is all this for, if everyone’s just on their own? somehow, by being so big and varied, new york seems to make it even harder to belong, when you can’t even figure out what you belong to. the phrase “trying to make it in the big apple” isn’t at all uncommon. and so it seems there’s only two kinds of entities in this city: either you’re a long standing bakery that’s been in business since the last world war where the walls are plastered with pictures of zendaya and jimmy fallon on location, or you’re franz kafka’s the hunger artist. it’s this persistent dichotomy of either having made it or not. the city doesn’t try to please you, it demands your respect for its very being. by being in new york, you’re automatically seeking its attention. the city is just too confident in its own standing. “oh you haven’t been to rockefeller center yet? boo hoo.” this espresso is $6? it’s just new york. you take new york as is. i saw a keith haring branded garbage truck and thought, oh well new york. i can’t seem to figure out who really gets the say here: the mayor? taxpayers? the weed dealers at washington square? or the city itself? if it’s the city moving along on its own accord, that’s probably too much power that the people have given up, i think, and consequences are far too many. all these performers going around those tiny comedy clubs all over the city making self deprecating jokes every night to make a living isn’t even one of the main ones.

i am not disillusioned, rather far from it. i don’t think i would’ve gotten to sit behind ed sheeran and his 6 lawyers in the courtroom and watch him getting sued for copyright infringement in any other city. (i still can’t believe they just let anyone in.) all i’m saying is that if i was the city planner, i would make some changes around here. like rearrange the streets and corner stores, manipulate the subway routes, or put some more stop signs to slow people down — anything to make the city dwellers form some sort of humane connection, to make them stand for something other than just themselves. maybe for each other. i’m thinking about my interactions with the homeless people, when they hold the mcdonalds door open for me and ask in the most polite way if they can have a cigarette. when i ask “do you need a lighter?” and they beam and say “i’ve got one, have a great day.” as the city planner or mayor i would simply orchestrate more real, hearty connections for the people of this city. i just don’t think people make enough time for that here. there’s still so much to love about this city though, maybe not the “i love you but i don’t know you yet” graffitis on the side of the pavement, but i believe the people here do have the potential be something bigger than just the city they live in. when i say they’re on the right track i mean new yorkers walking their yorkies and chihuahuas dressed up in puffer jackets. but maybe when the dogs need to sniff something on the side of the road, it wouldn’t hurt to stop and let them do their job — what’s the hurry? all i’m saying is that given the opportunity, i could really bring this city together. and then maybe i wouldn’t mind living here someday.

Nietzsche is famous for saying “if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back at you.” Although the message is cryptic, the quote has nevertheless made it into the public sphere and I doubt that this piece here marks someone’s first encounter with it. I’m also convinced that a relatively well-read person is capable of inferring their own meaning without further context. I’m curious to know how people understand it, but to stay close to home, I’ll list two possible interpretations of the full sentence, which goes, “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

First interpretation: If you spend enough time contemplating the void (immaterial), you will eventually grasp it.

Second interpretation: If you spend enough time contemplating the void (immaterial), you will eventually become one with the void (contribute no material to the real world).

There’s actually so much more to say about Nietzsche’s thinking here, but I haven’t looked much into it, and it's not really necessary here. I should also say that both these interpretations are just that, interpretations, and neither is right or wrong. What I’m trying to do is stage an attempt at something of a Rorschach test, also known as the inkblot test: you look at a blot of ink and your interpretation of the purely abstract image is meant to reveal something about your psyche. The quote here is my inkblot, and whether you’re a person who aligns more with one interpretation than the other, I think I can tell a few things about your worldview, which I’m pretty interested in. I know because both of them live within me. This must be obvious, since I made up these sentences myself anyway.

I think I’ve written about this before, but here’s the thing: it’s really hard for me to relate to the person I was a few years ago, say, my high school self. I used to be crazy focused, like a sharp shooter. I would set my mind to a long term goal and dissolve everything that’s not directly related to achieving that. For example, if I wanted a good grade on an exam that was a year from now, it would take a lot of convincing for me to take some time to do something else, like to go out for dinner. My rationale was that even though the ‘good time’ I was going to have socializing for a few hours wasn’t going to negatively impact my grade on that exam, it still wasn’t going to help it either. So the clear choice for me was to not go out. Even if I wasn’t doing anything productive while I stayed at home, I wouldn’t bother expending time or energy to go out of my way to casually enjoy something with no strings attached.

This was probably a very extreme mindset and I would often feel left out of things, but in theory it should make sense. Frivolity — that’s what a dinner was, and to me these didn’t have any real impact on the trajectory of my life. A dispensable activity. No doubt I developed this line of reasoning, because this really is how the world is structured. You are told that everything you do has to be productive. You have to contribute to the world somehow. You have to go through years of education and training so you can learn to efficiently contribute to the world and its economy. As long as you are young, you are capable, and in order to belong, you have to create value for the place where you belong. The way it’s set up is that being idle is the time spent you’re not creating economic value, and so you have to find ways to work around that. If a 9-5 isn’t your thing, and you want to spend your time playing video games, you should monetize your hobby — become a Twitch streamer. It literally costs you to just sit around. Whatever you do, just keep the wheels turning.

I don’t want to say I wasn’t built for this life, because, of course, as Sartre said, existence precedes essence, but I really wasn’t built for this life. Or I just didn’t want to live life like this. It makes life seem like an endless list of checkboxes. You run from one milestone to another, but to what extent? It’s not clear to me then, what this is all for. I’m not trying to make a case for the “it’s not the destination but the journey that matters” sentiment, rather all I’m doing is saying that I don’t see a point in expending on means without an end. “You just have to keep going,” but why? Everything’s always moving forward, and at quite a pace: fast fashion, fast food, fast media, and so on. Consider the art from the periods before the industrial revolution and compare them with contemporary media: there’s just barely any more TV shows or movies about people existing. The capitalistic fourth wall remains unbroken. There’s beauty in the painting by William Merritt Chase, literally titled Idle Hours. There’s just no such thing anymore. The TikTok algorithm works so well that if you don’t like the thirty second video you’re watching, you can keep scrolling to find another that is spliced together with a satisfying video — both clips running simultaneously to maintain their monopoly over your attention span.

But here’s the thing — if you don’t spend enough time sitting around, when do you think? I’m not interested in the constant inner monologue we all have running inside our head, but intentional deliberation. You need to spend time thinking about things, wondering what’s what, and try to come up with answers on your own. Otherwise, you’re just a consumer: not coming up with anything new, and taking everything you’re fed at face value. Don’t get me wrong, but sitting around is not just romanticizing your melancholic solitude. You could be around people and also be sitting around. Sure, you’re not making active contributions to the world’s economy, and you’re not even indirectly contributing to it by studying law so you can make the world a better place by charging people fortunes in legal fees to survive barriers set in place by the rich and powerful. But sitting around also means creating space to let things happen. Alright sure, nothing important happened today, or yesterday, or in the last year during the hours you spent just lounging around with friends. But I think that’s a little unfair: you can’t judge life in discrete amounts. For you to fairly evaluate anything, and that includes your life, it is necessarily preconditioned to first conclude its act.

It must understandably be very easy to misread what I’m writing, but the thing I’m not doing here is encouraging anything like whiling away your life. A few days ago I went to the Museum of Modern Art. I’ve always wanted to go to MoMA, and it really did live up to my expectations. It was like five floors of artworks and installations. They had everything from Monet to Basquiat. I wonder what the total value of all the artwork in the museum is. Is it in the millions? Or maybe billions? If you remove one piece of art from the museum, how much less special would it make the museum? Probably not much, or not at all. Now, remove another. Not much of a difference. Keep subtracting, until you’ve done away with a whole floor. Does the Museum of Modern Art become any less special? I would say no. So, when does it stop being a special museum? Maybe when it stops being special to anyone at all. What’s the line between intentionally sitting around versus whiling away your life? You’ll probably know it yourself when you’re a bum — or people will tell you.

Everything always goes on. The economy is perhaps the closest we’ll ever get to creating perpetual machines. I’ve never heard anyone complain about prices being too low. The overall trajectory is, by my guess, always up. Capitalism is doing so well in the world that the other day I saw a store selling a bag of urine marketed as an adult toy. You can buy literally anything these days.

It really is Milton Freidman’s world — don’t let him get to you.