"You're gonna catch a cold from the ice inside your soul" - I just love that line...

Apart from that, still feeling depressed. So many things I could be doing, but instead I can only sit here, feeling dead inside.

I'm tired of being made to feel like an outcast in life. I spent most of my existence so far trying to fit in somewhere, and it never worked. Whenever people complain they don't belong, people tell them that's just because they're different, or 'special' or whatever crap like that, and that they should be 'proud' of their difference. Yeah, that's one piece of useless advice when most of us are just regular people with nothing special or different about them... just bad luck meeting the wrong crowds all the time.

My only friend is my cat. Seriously, he's the only one, beside my mother, to show unconditional attachment and true loyalty to my person. Yet, as he acts more like a small dog around me, I wonder how different it would have been for him had he been free to roam the world. As I type this, there he is, sitting quietly on the bed, staring at me.

When I was little, I used to make 'pacts' with my pets because I hated reality so much that I wanted to die with them. I used to promise myself that as soon as my pets died, I'd kill myself. I started promising it with Johanna, the hamster I grew particularly attached to when I was 8. By the time she died a couple of years later, I had a black cat and so I easily found myself postponing my own death sentence, thinking I'd die when the cat died.

When I was 18 and lost my black cat, instead of killing myself as promised, I... I just carried on living.

I don't understand why I never wanted to grow up and live. These thoughts of wanting out have been with me for so long... Deep down, I was always a melancholic person, creating dramatic scenes inside my head endlessly.

I never understood why I lost the black cat. I still don't understand. When we moved countries overnight, we'd had to leave him behind because we had no idea where we were going. After our first three months in London, I started having nightmares of him being abused and starved. We'd left him with 'friends' until we could find a way to get him over to this forsaken island.

After that flurry of nightmares, I became convinced that the cat was being abused and about to die, so I convinced my mother to make a run for it - to just pick the cat up and smuggle him back on the island. She agreed.

When we returned, we sprung up on those 'friends' by surprise, and found that they'd been keeping the cat locked up inside a wardrobe. My once beautiful jet black cat with piercing green eyes was a shadow of his former self... skinny and terrified. They'd even broken one of his canines. As I opened the wardrobe, he first cowered further back inside, but as I called for him in whispers, he emerged slowly looking like... looking almost like a small child who couldn't believe his eyes.

We took him away with us and as we waited for a boat near Calais, reality suddenly dawned on my mother. She panicked, saying there was no way we'd be able to smuggle a cat across the border without people realising it. She said we had to leave him there, in the middle of nowhere in the night, promising that someone would surely find him and it would all end well.

I remember my 17 years old self sitting on the bench of some bus stop, pressing my cat harder against my chest as she spoke, heavy tears running down my face. No, no, no, I kept stuttering, looking around at the deep darkness of night... I could see my mother grow more panicked as she fought the urge to cry.

"If you leave him here, I'm staying with him... I'm not leaving him behind..." I kept weeping.

We remained there for a long time, in the cold of night, not knowing what to do, until suddenly a taxi stopped by. The man lowered the window and asked if he could be of any help, and my mother just told him exactly what the problem was. The man stepped out of his car, approached me as I clutched at my cat, and asked me if I had a bag. I nodded blankly, showing him my large, empty saddle bag.

"Just put the cat in there darling," he said matter-of-factly.

"What?" I gasped.

"Just put him in, look, let me show you," he insisted. And as he spoke, he grabbed my cat by the collar and shoved him inside the saddle bag. "There, you see, he's not moving. Cats stay quiet if you transport them in something dark. Just keep him in there and no one will know."

He was right, and we managed to smuggle him almost too easily. Of course this all happened pre-2001. A stranger in the night had helped us...

A mere year later, we lost the cat nonetheless. I was away to finish my studies, and my mother decided to let the cat out in the garden, which would have been fine if only the people who shared the house with her didn't start throwing stones at him for fun. That made him terrified of returning, because every time he tried, the people would scare him away with stones.

When I returned for a brief holiday and heard what had happened, I spent my days outside in that garden, waiting for him. Finally, he showed up, dirty and covered in wounds. I still remember the bleeding gash on the side of his head... I tried to approach him, but he wouldn't let me come close, yet I could see he still recognised me. The defiant look in his eyes... wild and suffering at the same time. At night, as I would retreat alone in the bedroom while mum was out working endless hours, I would watch him stand on the lower side of the house's roof, looking toward my window from a distance.

One night, I came out into the garden again. I knew it was my last chance to get him back because I was going away the next day, and wouldn't be back in months - and I knew we would have moved away again by then. It had just stopped raining and despite the cold darkness of night, there was a beautiful moon gleaming, giving us all the faint light we needed.

I saw him at once, sitting quietly on top of the high wall standing between the garden and that of the neighbours. I approached slowly, praying inside that he wouldn't run away, began to climb up on a pile of old stones and bricks to reach him... I reached out for him with one hand ever so slowly, letting him smell me first... he didn't move. I caught him by the collar and hugged him tight against my chest... but as I now held him, I couldn't go down without jumping, and as I jumped, he panicked and started to fight me off... and I had to let go.

I had to let go. And it was the last time I ever saw him.

It's been over 10 years now... I never dreamed of him again except for that one time, a couple of years after we lost him for good. That dream wasn't a nightmare this time. In that dream, I was back in our old home in Paris, which surprised me in the dream as I walked in, wondering how it was possible for me to be back 'home'. And as I wandered about, surprised to find everything still exactly as I remembered it, there he was. I gasped in surprised as he came to rub himself against my legs as if he'd never left. "You're home," I whispered, envying him.

And then I woke up, and it was the last ever time I dreamed of my old black cat.

My heart is too full of accumulated sadness, and I don't seem able to let go. I used to see a shrink, a few years back, and as she asked me to tell her about the things that affected me, I used to start giggling as I told her about these things. About the bad stuff in my life. At some point she asked me why I was always laughing whenever I was talking about sad things, and I shrugged. I hadn't realised. It was just an uncontrollable reaction, I said. I said I knew there were worse things happening to people out there, but she said others were irrelevant when it came to the pain experienced by a person.

26/10/2011

Still feeling depressed. That's about the only 'feeling' I can sense in me, apart from that there's just emptiness.

The price to pay for self-awareness is that we realise we are alone, each and everyone of us. Some manage to turn it into 'being alone', which is very different from being lonely. Accepting that we're always alone in life means that we can positively relate to that state, whereas feeling lonely only expresses the lack of acceptance of that inherent state of being that is attached to our ability to be self-aware.

We can socialise all we want, and build all the family units we like, it can never remove the fact that we're always all alone.

I feel so empty... I've never felt more beside the point, or perhaps I have, but it always feels worse and worse with time, never better.

I've been keeping myself busy with work, but even there things aren't great. It doesn't matter what I do, I seem to be the kind of person who always ends up drawing the short straw.

Just going through the motions, everyday repeating itself, weeks and months lost in a mist. The heroine inside my head is crying.

Broken thoughts, soul, spirit, words, everything...

I feel so much like a pariah in this life, even as I sit doing nothing, even as I sit saying nothing.

Weeks and months turn into years, and years turn into a coffin.

24/10/2011

I feel rather empty. I go to work, do my job the best I can feeling pretty much nothing. I go home, disappearing away in a crowd of early winter coats; faces are blurred as I walk past them without much of a glance, and as I find a seat on the train, I gaze vacantly ahead, my thoughts lost in a fog for the most part. I emerge into the cool breeze of night fallen too swiftly, feeling nothing. The sound of voices echoing in the near distance, from a pub nearby a light chatter and the knocking of glass... still, I feel nothing.

I look at people around me, and all I really see is giant envelops full of words. Just words, more words, like a deluge that never ends. My head doesn't listen anymore, it's learned too well to filter out the noise and skim through the garbage of mindless sounds called words.

I go home and sit at my desk, light up a cigarette while thinking I should quit, and stare at the computer screen for a moment or two as I wait for some music to numb the air around me.

And then the day rewinds to tomorrow.

23/10/2011

This year has been flying by so fast... How strange that time is experienced as going so fast once we're adults when childhood itself felt like an eternity...

I've been thinking about the notion of 'users', as in people who use others constantly for their own benefit often without even realising it, and how much a world's ethics based on greed and self-interest has been driving that trend.

It would be foolish to think that the way our world's ethics have developed isn't directly having an impact on the very way people turn out to be in life. More and more, life as a whole has become a race for consumption. A belief that each of us has a 'right' for almost everything has nurtured a society based on self-entitlement and expectations that ought to match our own, irrespective of the fact that our expectations may be wrong, deluded or contrary to the well-being of others.

We want what we want, and give no regard to anything else. We have a 'right' to want, and that's it. Everyone is out for themselves in a society that no longer exists in essence, but whose foundations are still there to give the illusion that it's still a society we live in.

Love has become this strange commodity that one can get and throw away at the slightest inconvenience. The notion that love is something deeply linked to responsibility and commitment has pretty much gone out of the window for a lot of people out there. People just want the easy part where it's all cuddly and nice, and as soon as the going gets tough, they can just throw it all away and move on.

It's particularly disturbing to me, I have to say. It's not even like I have a particularly strong sense of 'ethics' in life. I'm rather flexible, and tend to follow or dream about things that would make more sense than not. Things that would more likely bring a healthy balance than not.

Yesterday, I went to meet a friend of mine, thinking it was good timing that she'd called me to go to the movies with her since I had nothing planned and was feeling a bit down. I decided at once to go out and spend the afternoon with her and catch up on things. Just have a girls day out, you know, between old friends...

We met near the cinema where we used to work together, and went to have a burger and chips first. As we sat at a table in a corner, she started telling me how she was no longer talking to her other friends because they were so 'selfish' and always 'wanting things to be their way' without any regard as to whether it was good for her as well or not. I was listening, nodding my head as she said all this, and then she said something like: "Yeah, so I told them I wouldn't go out with them anymore. I said I didn't want to go to the movies with them this weekend anymore, and when they laughed and said I'd have to go on my own, I just told them I'd call you, so... in their face, right?"

I was struck for a second by the blatant fact that she'd just told me in my face that the only reason she'd called me was because she needed someone to go with her. She'd used me and told me in my face, and couldn't even see that she did, and yet there she was complaining about her friends doing that to her.

Talk about making you feel like the third wheel, here. But that's obviously the role I play with most people I know. Thinking back, they never call or text, or really want to be in my company unless there's a specific purpose that forces them to see me.

A few months ago, another of my 'friends' called me out of the blue. Her polite excuse was that she wanted to catch up, and then before I hung up the phone, she asked if I could lend her that pretty top I had because she was going salsa dancing. I said, sure, I'll bring it with me when we meet up, which I did.

Then I didn't hear from her for another 4 months or so... till she texts me again out of the blue and offers to go out for a drink and 'catch up'. I'm like, yeah, of course, that would be nice. So I go there to meet her, and we do have a nice time catching up, but the real reason for meeting up in the first place stares me in the face the whole evening: she needed to return the top.

This sort of situation where I'm reminded I'm always the third wheel or Billie no mates isn't new to me. It's the story of my life since high school, really. I've spent a good part of my last decade wondering what it is I do that alienates people so much from me, and I'm sure there are things I do or don't do that put me in that position. My lack of active social interaction doesn't help, in the sense that I don't actively seek to be in contact with anyone most of the time. But the reason I don't is because I just don't feel drawn to most people... they bore me, perhaps just as much as I bore them. There's this inherent incompatibility with the people I end up meeting, which is really at the core of why I can never fit in with them.

For a long time I used to think that perhaps I was just plain weird - but even the worst of weirdos make friends. Doesn't society love a so-called weirdo? Maybe I'm a mean person, but then again, don't people always feel more attracted to the bitch and the jerk of the village? Yes, they do. So... I ended up thinking that I was probably too boring, and it fitted with the fact that I just don't find what most people talk about 24/7 interesting that much. It's interesting, even fun at times, to gossip and make stupid jokes for a third of a conversation, but after that it just gets way too boring for words, I'm sorry.

So I've developed that inability to fit in with a lot of people because I don't really get what they talk about. I don't watch much TV, don't read the latest trends, don't follow sports, don't enjoy shopping, etc... so when people start mingling with each other and 'bond' I can never contribute, not only because I'm not interested, but because I really can't, since I don't follow what most of them do.

However, I recently started to make some effort just to have the basis of a mainstream conversation with people, you know. It's not really helping because now I've realised something else: people, for some reason, never wanted to listen to me at all. It's like whenever I open my mouth, people would rather ignore me or talk over me.

There I was thinking that my inability to make real friends, even to just 'fit in', was linked to my lack of conversation on trivial matters and gossip. But even as I found myself having things to gossip about, I realised that it didn't change the fact that whenever I interact with people, a chasm between me and them remains.

I've spent way too much time trying to close that chasm, and nothing worked. I just have to accept that there is something about me that makes it impossible to ever fit in. I have to accept that and start finding ways to cope and get used to standing alone in this life watching a world I don't belong to as though standing on the other side of a glass wall.

17/10/2011

This song seems to sum up pretty much how I'm feeling right now. I don't get it. I was never in love with that guy, yet it hurts. I'm guessing my ego took a bashing in the way he dismissed me so easily - he didn't even bother to bring back my stuff.

I think I'm shocked at what a heartless bastard I ended up dating. Why, oh why out of the billions of men out there did I have to meet a creep?

It was such a waste of time and especially emotions on a guy with the emotional depth of stone. We didn't even have an argument! I simply confronted him over the fact that he never seemed to care, and BAM! That gave him the convenient excuse to never want to see me again. Talk about some creep.

You can't win, can you? There is no way in hell to know if a person is being genuine or not. Every time we choose to get close to someone, it's the same as playing the lottery or gambling in general. I wouldn't be surprised most people end up staying together just because they happen not to mind too much the fact that they were never compatible in the first place.

If only work was better... but even there it's a nightmare now. It seems I can't do anything right as usual.

After wasting my time chasing love, I realise that men are often way too destructive for women. In my whole life, I was never lucky with them. For some reason I always end up surrounded by either utter morons or emotional monsters.

Men seem to have that power over women to send them crazy, quite literally, simply by playing with their heightened sense of emotions. And the more you stay with men like that, the more they destroy you - inside and out. Then you see all these bitter wives out there, aged too fast by worry and lack of care. They put up a front and like to brag that they have a man, but what's the price to pay?

It can be the same with men, I suppose. Some are just interested in having someone in their bed, then they get used to having a surrogate mother to look after them along with the kids.

I'm starting to understand why my own mother closed the door on romantic love a long time ago. It's kept her young at heart and she's happy in her own company.

I should have guessed that my life was always meant to be loveless, even my biological father never wanted anything to do with me.

Maybe I'm just attracting the same type without realising it... I keep attracting irresponsible assholes with no emotions and no feelings, like my father.

I used to have no real opinion or thought on dating in general as is known in our modern society. Being able to date anyone and have as many partners as we like has been heralded as part of the ultimate 'freedom'. Some would argue that it's at least better than being forced to marry at a young age with someone your family chooses for you. But I'm not so sure anymore...

The notion we have of romantic love is completely wrong and idealised. What we call love is nothing more than the reflection of our imaginative brain to place more meaning on something that is intrinsically very basic. 'Love' is nothing but nature's way of ensuring we keep reproducing. It's made up of hormones for the most part. Books and movies just serve to sugar coat what is really nothing but a primal instinct.

Women's biggest woe is to be brainwashed to chase after something that never existed: romantic love as depicted all around them through literature, television and films.

Mr Darcy is a fictional character in a book for a reason: he doesn't exist in reality. Even Jane Austen never got her love, which is why she ended up imagining such a striking romance among other love stories.

The reason why I'm starting to doubt the value of the freedom to date is simply because the more one dates, the more it involves being disappointed, betrayed or broken-hearted. And the more that happens, the more emotionally imbalanced we become, making the next stab at finding the so-called 'one' more and more unlikely to work out.

I have a feeling the more people accumulate so-called love experience, the less capable they are to remain healthy on an emotional level.

Having said that, the same holds true if you're stuck with a partner that makes you miserable or mistreats you.

13/10/2011

I'm fed up with mostly everything. I wish I could just let the tears trickle down my face, let them burst free from their prison - a mask smiling at the world just to keep up appearances all the fucking time.

I'm overworked, yet trying to cope with the sheer amount of work. I'm exhausted, yet I force myself out of bed in the morning, ignoring the pounding headaches.

When one thing goes wrong, it's not unusual to find that everything else starts to go to hell as well. They say we find out who our real friends are in moments of need... The same goes with love, and generally caring about people.

Most people ask you how you are, but they don't really want to know the detail if your reply is 'bad'. They might listen for a bit and give you a pat on the back, and that's if they even bother going as far as actually asking and sticking around long enough to hear your answer.

There is this phone call 'social code' of always starting a conversation over the phone with a 'how are you' or 'how's it going' before getting straight to business. Nobody expects you to reply: "Oh, everything is going to hell, I'm so depressed right now..." It makes sense when the phone call is work-related, because the truth is that you're only calling for business. So why the hell do we have to use these pointless questions nobody cares about in such a setting? No matter how pointless, it is nonetheless expected.

Expected. Fuck you expectation.

I'm so tired... I want to cry, but I can't, because I don't want people at home asking me why I'm crying.

No matter how hard I try, it's never good enough... ever heard of that one? It's the story of my life. Even when I stop trying it gets fucked up anyway.

I went to a work conference in the middle of intense work at the office. I ended up seeing mostly the airport and hotel, nothing else. I did everything I was told: speak for five minutes in front of a crowd of black suits as if you know what you're talking about, attend the whole conference, take notes, and then write a 2-page report for the next issue.

Exhausted from all the back-to-back interviews I had to do almost nonstop since last week, I flew out to attend that damned conference and did what I was told to do. I got back to the office and my boss said 'well done'. Then my boss's boss sends a mass email to everyone in the editorial department to 'remind' us that we're supposed to write news stories when away to attend conferences.

I know it was directed at me... I'm the only one who went anywhere this week. Suddenly I get that cold wave within wash over my insides... you know, the kind that tells you that you got it all wrong and actually fucked up.

It would never have happened if my boss had briefed me properly... never. I could easily have written a fucking story on the day, I even had my laptop with me.

But there you go... whatever 'good' job I did turns out to be illusory now. I missed the point, the boat, whatever.

But you know what really angers me to the point of pain and tears? It's that it always seems to happen to people like me. Not to my lazy as fuck colleague, oh no. But me? I slip up once and you can be sure that people will pick up on it and make me pay for it.

So... everything I thought was going good in the past 8 months or so was all an illusion once again.

That's why I became a negative person in general. Because I know the moment I relax and think it's all ok, something will come up to wreck my sense of peace.

I just want to tell the whole world to go to hell, quite literally. My, if you could see what I can see, what I understand from the patterns of this world... Everything is a lie, an illusion... the only thing that could be real is what we build in terms of relationships with others - love, friendship, caring... these feelings of attachment ARE real. Yet the way the world is going, even these are now cheapened and being destroyed, replaced by a habit of consumption.

I'm just a learning kid...

One other thing I realised during my trip back to Paris was that it is no longer my city... the memories I have of it keep it engraved within me as my city, but in the present reality that is no longer the case.

A French girl I met during my many meetings the other day asked me: "So, how do you feel - still French?" I replied: "More like a hybrid," and then I laughed along with her. By the way, that was my first ever 'inside joke'.

Hybrid... I like that term. In one word, you encapsulate the nature of something that could take a whole paragraph to explain. Well, not technically, but at least in a conversation.

I'm not sure you ever get used to the same questions people ask all the time, as if there is an innate need for most people to categorise you. This very need to categorise people all the time according to one's accent, nationality or skin colour is what makes it highly unlikely for the human race to ever stop being divisive.

I've been feeling down recently, but the sheer amount of work has kept the issues as to why I feel down slightly at bay.

So much to do... Having to prepare for my first 'business' trip in a foreign city I know nothing about, for instance, where I'll be expected to speak in fucking public about something I don't know in front of people who are expert in the subject.

Beyond that trip, which will really only give me time to check in and out of a hotel room, the workload has been piling up on my desk, and I just learned at the last minute that I'll be expected to write a two-page report on that trip. So, let's recap... I'm supposed to go off on my own to speak in public about something I don't know, and I'll have to write a report on this something I don't know as if I actually knew something about it. Great.

Well, if I can get out of this alive at least the silver lining is that I won't have to go anywhere else after that for a long time, so... It's more like a one-off, really.

In a way, I feel appreciated, in the sense that it's not often that someone who started so recently would be trusted to go to a formal event on behalf of the company... hence the stress, I suppose, because it puts extra pressure on me to do things right... but there is only so much I can do. I'm only human after all.

I realised something recently, just observing my mother. She's always been a practical person, a 'doer' in the sense that even her jobs were always physical rather than intellectual - although she was always ruthlessly logical in theory. There isn't much she couldn't do with her hands, for instance. More interestingly, there never seems to be a limit as to how much she can push herself physically, and she is even able to override physical pain to push herself further... almost like a machine at times.

I always thought that was one thing that I never got from her. I happen to be very clumsy in the physical world, with no physical strength and a complete inability to be practical in most things. But actually, we do share the same ability to push to the extreme... She always pushes herself physically and is able to do things no 'normal' or 'average' person would be able to, while I push myself mentally in exactly the same way.

How uncanny... We seem to have opposite characteristics yet the core is the same. She is the concrete, practical one, and I turned out to be the intellectual, abstract one. Perfect opposites, yet we both share the same trait of being able to push boundaries of our characteristics to the extreme.

If I look at how much she's been able to push herself, to the point of even overriding physical pain, it is as though I am in fact staring at an upside down reflection of my self. I do the same... pushing the boundaries of my mind. Looking at her is like the foretelling of things to come for me, in a way, except the effects will be different because she was always pushing her physical self, while I'm pushing my mind.

And I'm starting to realise why it is most people can't cope with our 'kind'... we simply can't be categorised. If anyone tries to compare themselves to us, they will be left behind panting and gasping for breath.

I ended up thinking at some point that I was quite slow at understanding things in general... but then a friend of mine laughed when I said that to her. She said: "Aliska... you think extremely fast compared to most people. You have no idea how much people are slow when they think."

Perhaps my mind is the equivalent of broadband internet while most remain on dial-up, I don't know. Anyway...

On a more personal level, it looks like I do have to get used to the fact that I'm riding solo in this life.

04/10/2011

Time, as always, flies us by faster than we even have time to blink. I'm sitting in my room typing these words in the rare quietude I get nowadays. Music is gently rocking my brain back and forth between the realm of dreams and that of more concrete thoughts... back and forth, back and forth.... slowly.

What a heavy week at work... No matter what I manage to get done, more seems to be piling up on my desk, so I just pay no attention to it and carry on with the next task. Back to back interviews are a real killer, I have to say. It gets worse when you have to transcribe most of it straight after - listening to the same things again. It's perfect for memory, but by the time you're done, you're closer to feeling like a dead-brained zombie than a human being. Yet I still find myself wondering and thinking about life, and meaning, and all the wondrous stuff that often leads to self-induced headaches.

Today, my brain seemed intent on multitasking when it came to thoughts. One part of it was dealing with the work at hand, the other wondering at length about my personal life. There is something good about being able to go through the experience of a relationship, regardless of its outcome, in the sense that it allows you to get to know your own self better, and also pinpoint more clearly what it is you're aspiring to, or waiting for.

I must by far be one of the most difficult people to handle in daily life. I'm extremely self-centered in the sense that I'll get lost in my own universe and forget about the world - a habit I developed from a young age and amplified perhaps by the fact that I'm an only child. What saves me, I think, is the fact that I've been facing my shortcomings for some time, questioning my behaviours and patterns all the time, intent on at least improving. I realised recently that it's a rare occurrence. You won't often find people intent on changing for the better by themselves, or even questioning their own limited perceptions. Usually, people just don't question and remain 'the way they are' and because they don't question themselves, they don't put themselves in others' shoes and therefore never learn to improve their own ways through various interactions and experiences. Instead, they simply believe they are ok and right.

As my job requires of me to be social and interact with people almost constantly - after all, I even spend a good part of 5 days a week sitting with people at a desk - I find myself becoming more and more fluent in the jargon of social interaction. I keep analysing my every word and move, especially in meetings, and then spend time calculating in my head what the best words or moves should have been so I'll do better next time. As far as I'm concerned, social interaction can be summed up easily in terms of percentages. Depending on situations you could have as much as:

90% chitchat

10% serious talk

The chitchat part is supposed to be the easiest one, but that's certainly not the case when you're the introverted, introspective type. One important thing is to be able to make others laugh as it allows you to easily bond with others. It's almost as though the very act of laughing creates a link with the other person, and of course I'm sure as we start laughing with one another we end up releasing certain hormones in the brain such as endorphins and the likes, which create an association of pleasure in the brain - linking that pleasure with the person that made you laugh, hence making it easier to bond with them.

People also love it when you pay attention to what they wear, especially women. Don't ask me why, I noticed that since I was in high school. They love to be asked about their personal life, too, and talking about hobbies as well as what they're planning to do the coming weekend is a sure bet. It doesn't matter whether you're interested or not, everyone is locked in a tacit agreement that we are supposed to care just because we asked, and anyway it's part of the illusion we give one another of actually giving people attention. People usually love attention. Attention is validating, the impression of being listened to draws you out of the crowd of billions even for a mere minute.

I differ in the sense that I hate drawing any attention on me - mostly because I tend to analyse everything about myself. I don't like people asking me things, and I never know what to do of compliments because I find them empty or pointless unless they come from someone close to me. I have no use of chitchat personally. I already know it's part of the social script.

Anyway, I've been spending time socialising with various circles, and I find myself slowly easing my way into the routine of the script. But inside, I can never forget how much of it is just part of an illusion. I just recite it, and every time I forget my words, I vow to do better next time.

02/10/2011

Memories are made of this... Crackling images

moving inside my head in a haze...

I feel mostly disappointed nowadays. Disappointed, dejected, disheartened. My line of job seems to remind me everyday how much my gut instinct about the world was right from the start.

Nothing can really be taken seriously in life. One moment we're here, the next there never was anything because everything that happens is forever rooted in the past. Why do we even have a present tense, eh?

My state of mind is hard to explain... I feel mostly as though I'm not where I ought to be, and I feel like I'm not doing what I ought to be doing, if that could ever make sense. I have failed to find myself the illusion of some personal purpose in life, and because I don't hold any particular purpose in mind, I end up drifting through life and it makes me wonder: isn't that just as bad and pointless as someone striving solely for some goal in life? At least they might get somewhere in the end, at least there's a destination in mind, and not just this endless drifting where nothing holds any importance anymore...

I just don't know.

Maybe if I just hang on and keep drifting without ever being pulled by all the illusions that make people settle for less than what is absolute in terms of meaning and truth... maybe if I can hang on hard enough as I drift across these dark waters of Nothing... maybe I, too, will reach some shores, ones that no one could ever find unless they had a mind free of any expectation or pre-defined destination in mind...

But isn't that all pointless rhetoric?...

Maybe I'll join the army and get shot at in Yemen, or something. Or maybe I need to leave the world as I know it and immerse myself in the opposite way of life I've grown into. Trigger something.

I feel like I need to shed the old skin to give way for the new... I feel so much like leaving everything and everyone I ever knew, and just live through an alias that no one in this world could ever link to my physical self... because my physical self is irreversibly attached to a social identity that keeps my mind in chains whether I like it or not, and I suspect every single human being remains a prisoner of that social identity that limits you and forces you to be someone other than your true self.

The true self may not necessarily be a good thing to unleash, and sometimes it may be that we couldn't actually let it loose, just because it could be destructive to the person or others... but what is the point of living if we can never even find out who we really are - instead living a lie according to social rules and expectations that dictate who we must be?

The only way to bypass that prison of social identity is to create an alias no one can ever link to your social identity... Kill the 'person' everyone thought they knew, make it disappear, and replace it with the true self. But for that to work one must be ready to leave everything and everyone they ever knew... and never look back.