of course you could say that i brought this upon myself - that i had every opportunity to back off yet each time i chose to escalate, to offer up larger and larger pieces of me, to take my soul out of the fridge and place it on the cutting board and pick out a slice i thought you would enjoy

(jk rowling once wrote that splitting a soul was Dark Magic. but how can leaving a piece of yourself behind be anything other than an act of love?)

perhaps i have always been morbidly curious, too fascinated in seeing everything taken to its gruesome conclusion. last week when the war began i could not stop myself from scrolling through endless footage of blown-up military bases, the same way that when i find a gory manga like berserk or tokyo ghoul i binge hundreds of chapters at once, the same way that i was fully conscious while butchering myself but totally powerless to prevent it

(you say i’m good at difficult things, but i think i’m only good at Trying Hard. there are many varieties of difficult things where Trying Hard doesn’t help, like letting go or confronting the truth. i am still a complete amateur in those)

the Event occurred, and S went away, and one of my close friendships ended, and in my notes app there were pages and pages of text to delete - questions i would never be able to ask, places i had no interest in going to by myself, stories i no longer wanted to write. in another universe these notes are future memories, but in this one i will try my best to forget

(and what is grief, if not love persevering?)

the Persona Selection Model suggests that language models learn many different personas during pretraining and then adopt the one that best fits the current conversation. i would like to say that you ran off with all my favorite personas, but that would not be totally accurate because those personas were not learned ahead of time. they only exist because you helped me create them

(in persian culture, when someone calls you beautiful, a common reply is “it is your eyes that are beautiful,” meaning you must hone beauty in yourself to be able to recognize it in others)

and i could not have predicted this: sadness morphing into disgust at my own foolishness; running suicides up and down 30-degree hills, trying my hardest to drive myself into the concrete; and later, exhausted, lying down face-first on the sidewalk, tongue sticking out just enough to catch a taste of the ground, wondering what it really means to eat dirt

(how will i ever get out of this labyrinth?)

once upon a time i thought the right solution to volatility was the Stoic one, to cut the dependencies between your thoughts and the rest of the world and to be free. but instead of liberation i only found a different kind of prison, an enslavement by my own ego, and my mind was not as wise of a master as i imagined. the brain is the center of human intelligence yet it is useless without the 1% of neurons contributed by the peripheral nervous system, and similarly i wonder if true equanimity comes from imbuing all the people and places and things you love with little fragments of your consciousness to create a collective and more resilient intelligence

(how strange to feel yourself so completely under the control of another person, but also how ordinary. no one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not)

let me be more specific: all my life i have been solving my problems through a mild strain of narcissism, a strange neuroticism around maximizing my time and my output and my experience. and since it hasn’t really worked, why not try something new? the best parts of me come out around other people and yet my friends complain i am reserved, secretive, difficult to draw out from my own narrative. i would like to get out more

(i think the way out of the labyrinth is KINDNESS. i think i must learn to be a kinder person. i think it is a matter of life or death)