December 19, 2025
Some days are stressful. I think I've grown used to it; I've become indifferent to most of it. I don't even think about it.
But occasionally the stress returns, and it comes heavily. I think about my parents' divorce. I think about the strained relationships with my step-siblings. I think about whether I am the slave I don't want to be, working on things I don't want to work on.
There's an old line about how few people are held by slavery, but many hold fast to slavery. I read this and wonder which I am. Am I the captive or the captor?
I'm working because I'm learning things. But this is not really true; I could learn these things elsewhere.
I have a sense that I'm being exploited. But if the choice is mine, why do I stay? If it's not my choice, what exactly am I blaming?
There are only three kinds of things: things within my control, things outside my control, and things I convince myself are one when they're really the other.
I like writing. Pages. Clearing my mind and forgetting about things.
Just the act of putting thought into words, which is the act of discovering what I actually think beneath what I tell myself I think.
Life feels difficult at times. Family. Friends. Job.
But difficult is an adjective that means something is beyond what I can handle now. It doesn't mean impossible. It doesn't mean I won't endure it.
I can tolerate most things that happen. My parents' divorce. The lack of money when my mother was hospitalized. Sometimes I don't like my father because he seems to make his own life difficult, which makes mine difficult too. Sometimes I think he's stupid.
But he's doing what his nature compels him to do. I can be angry about this, or I can accept it and ask: what is within my control?
The pain is not due to the thing itself but to my estimate of it. And I have the power to revoke that estimate.
Sometimes I don't feel I have this quiet and comforting sense of direction. I don't know where I want to go or where I'm going. Uncertainty.
I want to learn new skills. But I tell myself: no time.
"No time" is more excuse than reality.
The truth I need to face: I have time. I spend it.
I have this sense of not wanting to share things because I don't want to do things for admiration. I want to be free of mimetic desire—free from wanting what others want me to want, from doing what earns applause rather than what matters.
But is this wisdom or is it pride? Am I avoiding the trap of external validation, or am I simply afraid to be seen?
I think we never had a close relationship, my family and I. I was like an orphan in a house with parents. The only reason I exist is because my mother wanted a house from my father and my father wanted sex and someone to do his chores.
I don't think I would be here, writing this, if not for some absurd reasons.
I think about suicide. It's an option. I've tried a few times. Apparently without success, since I'm writing this.
There is something about living that keeps me alive. I have ambitions. I have desires I want to satisfy. And I have something else; a thing I don't know, a thing hard to describe and put into language; that keeps me here.
Perhaps it's what the ancients called the divine spark, the rational principle, the fragment of the universal reason that lives in each of us. Perhaps it's stubbornness. Perhaps it's unfinished business.
Whatever it is, I'm still here.
That's enough for today.
"We suffer more in imagination than in reality."