Pursuit of Something

Duality

When I look to the mental images of my identity,

It appalls me that there are multiple, nevertheless ranging in a duality

A spectrum of positive and negative as society shaped in us

Morality bringing forward a judgement of the images and giving it impetus

When these scions of public perceptions emerge in a young adult,

There is a search for the solution to all of one’s “faults”.

But ascertaining whether something is a fault or not is a challenge in itself,

Bringing out the critic and the resentment one aims at oneself

Focusing these aspects to discriminate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’

I soon start to question the scale of measurement that I have had

Borrowed from the social world with limitless personalities

Differing cultures and diverse nationalities

They speak of the duality but differ in their classifications

Of morality, goodness, evil and moral actions.

These thoughts bring me to a daze

Confusion erupting and driving me to a craze

Madness of analysis, dissection of thoughts,

Raising the dead to scrutinize and birthing that which is yet not.

Intellectual violence ensues, self-doubt on a killing spree

Stabbing and wounding every single aspect of my identity

Fighting a defenseless thing, I revel in my victory

but soon come to realize, that which I hurt was nothing else but me

The real me in this present moment, while the past and future images are nothing but apparitions,

Creations of public perception that have become my inhibitions

While my real self takes the blows that I deliver unhinged

hurting as if its skin was flayed and singed

When the stupidity of my act becomes apparent to me

It is too late, as I have already done the deed.

The illusions fade away, but as days and nights pass

They soon return, with a renewed battle pass

Luring the blade of my intellect once again

Sharper than a sword, mightier than a pen

I repeat the hacking process

chopping the self to bits with finesse

Then once again I realize the mistake I made

Moving on to a better start and sheathing the blade

The resentment and hate subside, but they don’t die

Because as long as the illusions resurface, herein will my regenerated yet dead self lie

The solution? I search for it every single time

But my inability to distinguish truth from lies debilitates me each time

The madness returns from time to time

Because sanity is an elusive goal for now, and has been for a while.

Pain, Misery and Suffocation

Waves of unpleasantness resounding throughout the body

Clueless about the escape from such profound misery

When the feeling of misery expands into eternality

Makes you question the existence of joy and glee

A fog of helplessness sets into the mind, dulling the senses

What’s real doesn’t seem so, just white noise buzzing in the backdrop of helplessness

Thoughts storming in circles through the imaginary place called the mind

Wherefore does it exist? Still a mystery to define

Pain of loss, and fear of gain

Of losing touch, and gaining more pain

Contraction of muscles, becoming taut in response to danger

Danger of losing sanity, and loss echoes through the mental chamber

Responsibility slips away while facing these mental demons

The power of humanity weakens in the face of such heathens

They exist in the “mind”, brewing a recipe for disaster

The intellect their blade, such a traitorous bastard

Cutting and slashing the self to ribbons, then throwing it in a mixer

Grinding it into paste and juice, a drink so addictive yet so bitter

They call this drink misery, an unpleasant necessity

Adding melancholic meaning to life despite its brevity

But the cost for this beverage is oh so expensive

Debilitating emotion, and suffocation depressive

Depressing the usually crystal clear reality

And choking the gleeful energy of humanity

When the effect wears off, reality is once more clear

Joyous nature and bliss of life as is dear

The cries of laughter and the synergy of friends

Destroying assumptions and making mends

But once in a while, the heathens return

To squeeze the mind and make feelings burn

When productivity dies temporarily

To rise like a phoenix the next day warily

As emerging victorious from a battlefield of intense violence

Breaking through the noise, and calming in the silence

And so consistency takes a hit in this cycle of madness

Damping down the spirits and rendering the self a mess

Power through the mundane to find these extremities of emotion

Power through the mundane, and find a cycle of variable organization

Sometimes it takes days and months and years

While sometimes, a few fleeting moments is all to realize those fears,

Repetitive feelings of loss and gain,

And of misery, suffocation and pain.

Fear, And what it means to me.

A sunday night, after travel and mundane work the entire week and in the daytime, I thought to myself about what I am truly doing in my life. I always do this every day but this time I paid greater attention and emotion to it so I could actually think and process this properly, because something was off. I feel fleeting moments of joy in a day, when we have twenty four hours a day. I know what some people might say; “all emotions are equally important, one should experience them wholly” and I agree; but I WANT joy to be greater because I like that feeling. I feel that if happiness is not my predominant state, what the hell does my life even mean?

I have been on this journey of looking for passion, so I have tried two methods: searching and creating. Now, creating is a damn artificial way of being passionate and it does NOT work with me because I just can’t make this feeling up that I love something, just the way unrequited love is rejected by the focus of it, simply because he/she does not feel that love and cannot make it up on the spot. So searching remained, and searching entails an intricate and arduous process of, you guessed it, searching. Trying new things and not just trying, going deeper into them but if it is not your thing, move on. To go deeper into them means exploration and attachment, with which come the pains of failure. I know I sound like a prickly (not to mention lazy) arse, but I don’t like it when life doesn’t go my way. But that also means I do not make it a point to engineer it my way, thanks to something called fear.

Fear, for me, is a limitation. A prison. A boundary. A self preservation mechanism built in us by nature for survival purposes so we overuse it and cage ourselves in a “comfort zone”. To be honest, this confort zone might even cause more inconvenience than comfort because majority times what lies beyond our fear is something greater than comfort. I like to call that ecstasy; the thrill of breaking limitations and this is what I think I am looking for. I may even be entirely wrong and either I may not know what I am looking for or it is something different altogether but for now, I will stick with the ecstasy construct. The thrill of going beyond routine and entering novelty might just be what makes life worth living for.

So there is routine, fear being the wall in between and novelty being the other side. The question is, do we have the courage to jump over that wall? (or break, your preference) What has been the case up until now is that I have never worked up a feeling, the adrenaline in our analogy, to jump over the wall. It may be courage but I think it is just strong, intense desire. More often than not, the success stories of our world have this but with so much more intensity that it burns. When it burns hot, so hot that it consumes the bearer, that is when the deed is done. Because that is what flow science is about.

Mihály Csíkszentmihályi coined the term flow in (I am not a research article) A.D. when he started exploring how high performance occurs in miaculous cases of high risk events. It most often happens with adventure sports players because it is literally a ‘do or die’ situation where the player either accomplishes the feat or gets splattered by falling from the height of a peak to the mountainside. Turns out that it is not just adrenaline in such cases but anandamine, norepinephrine and two other chemicals that I have forgotten (pardon me, my ardent readers…) which enable the possibility of such feats. Let me tell you, that dose of five chemicals definitely gives you a greater kick than most chemicals, which makes the flow state highly addictive. Besides that, I am pretty sure if not flow, some regular anandamine (happy hormone) and endorphins would be pretty useful for someone looking for happiness.

We have two places, a wall, adrenaline, oh wait…. I forgot a crucial detail. In most cases with me, the fear is purely psychological. That is what bothers me the most. I create the hurdle and I try to cross it, but wouldn’t it be helpful just to remove it? Fear is psychological, so forgetting it would, simplistically (like a fool), be the solution, giving us a hint that fear has the base of memory to it. Unfortunately, we are stuck to memory quite rigidly, so fear feeds off of us. For once, if we just set our past aside, completely centre our awareness and attention to the moment in which we exist (zen schtick), then we can surpass fear and move to greater heights!

That, is where I am stuck. Theory is clear, application needs work; and it is driving me crazy. I want to go beyond, but I let the fear get the better of me. The mindscape also presents physical manifestations in certain situations like anxiety. The worse part is that the longer I stay in the pit of routine and old, the more meaningless my life feels. Just expressing these thoughts was blocked by a great fear of mine so I restricted myself from relating any live experiences, so I took a very small step. This brinngs to my attention that I have a long way to go. (rant over: sadboi hours completed)

Joe Goldberg: A complex amalgamation of reality and imagination

So I watched YOU season 2 yesterday, and I wanted to talk about my boy Joe. He has a reputation of crazy, but I still see him as a complex character; even in fiction there is this terrifying glimpse of reality in him. Major spoiler alert for the entire post. (You have been WARNED!)

Obsessive lover (Or is he?)

I totally agree that he is a paranoid, obsessive stalker plus murderer who has a pattern of feeling intense infatuation or love (your pick) for a girl that he comes across on a random day. But strangely, he cannot sustain these feelings with the fantasy he creates about his victim or lover (your pick) because he starts closing the distance between him and her and when he slowly sees all the sides of this person, he cannot accept the gap between reality and his projection of her. This is evident when Love tells him this same thing, that he didn’t ‘see’ her for what she was, in episode 10 of season 2. He played that card with Beck as well, but he never realized with her. Up until the end, he tried to make her conform to his standards of Beck and when she turned on him, he killed her. If we try to track the roots of this controlling behavior, we can find the cause to be his dad and Mooney by the way they treated Joe’s mom and Joe respectively.

Changed man?

After Joe hears Love out and reciprocates her love because of her pregnancy with his baby, it seems that Joe has changed as a person. Just before the entire ordeal of Candace’s death, Joe repented all the harm he had caused, admitting that it did not come from a ‘place of love’. He also claims that Love was the first person he had truly loved as he allegedly accepts her the way she is at this point. Skip to the scene after Forty dies and Joe and family moves out to a sunny neighbourhood, the ending scene shows Joe creeping and stalking his neighbour through the gaps in his fence. So what I think about this (my opinion) is that Joe did not really change and he is still deluded himself. In fact, this might continue as he has his child and the supposed girl (Love’s instinct) also turns out twisted like her parents. Completely unrelated, I don’t like Candace even though she ain’t crazy.

My point

So what I think about a person like Joe is…. no one is born like that. I believe that circumstances and events in the course of one’s life create their personalities, traits and obsessions. A big reason why Joe might have been so into books was because he wanted to escape to an imaginary world due to the harsh reality of his parents’ relationship, and later of course as Mooney took him in and trained him to take care of the bookstore. That might be why Joe trusted books more than people, because books were there for him when his own family wasn’t. But as a result of Mooney’s brainwashing and his mother’s encouragement that he was a ‘good boy’, Joe may have started his compulsive habit of lying and putting up a fake persona of himself as he repressed his negative emotions and fashioned his personality to befit his lover. Consequently, his shadow of repressed emotions and desires grew stronger and took him over whenever volatile situations arose.

My uneducated opinion on dealing with psychopaths

There may be people like this in real life. What we should learn from this show is how to prevent them from becoming like this. First things first, utter honesty and raw acknowledgement of emotions people face would help resolve these emotions rather than repressing them till they resurface as a wave of rage. Secondly, foster care should give extra love and help recondition them to heal the damage these kids have suffered because of their parents or immediate surroundings. Lastly, as Penn Badgely hinted, let’s not glorify these characters to the extent of romanticising their actions. It gives a wrong message.