Personal Reflections

This is a very personal reflection where I write in truth only. Beware the contents below.

Lately, I keep thinking that to have consciousness is to be haunted.

How tragically beautiful is it that the one thing that creates wonder, joy, and love is also the container straining under infinite existential weight? It hurts to see this duality, and even the most peaceful and beautiful moments feel haunted.

I understand logically that the only thing I can control is my self, and knowing that I should strive to be indifferent to things beyond my control.

But even when watching a sunset with my ex, I remember, in response to him asking what I thought about it, replying, "It is nice." I think he expected me to say something like "it is so beautiful" or "I am so grateful to witness this with you."

But, I remember the recognition that this is only a brief moment of beauty dominating my thoughts. I could tell he was hurt by how detached I was. It hurts to imagine how lonely that must have been for him. Wouldn't it pain you to want to share joy with someone who could never sit in it? To be in a relationship with someone but feel lonely in their presence must be crushing for most.

There is a hospice care facility in South Carolina called "Embrace Hospice Care". The logo was an abstract outline depicting an embrace. I remarked to my boyfriend that "it is dark to label a hospice care after the idea of embracing death." He was shocked, and explained to me that it was supposed to be an embrace of love between two people.

I thought this was somewhat funny, but I often feel like there is something deeply wrong with me.

I try my best to empty my ego before I write. I wrote my work on "To Be Witnessed" in extreme grief over how exiled I felt. It was devastating. The figure I portrayed in San Francisco was what I could have if I chose it. At any moment, I could move to somewhere beautiful like San Francisco, San Diego, or Seattle and live a comfortable and docile life.

I don't know why, but to do so feels like it would be spiritual violence against myself. It feels deeply wrong. I found myself descending into becoming a permeable layer between the unknowable and the real as I wrote, and I felt greatly at peace at the end.

At times, I worry that I am trying to intellectualize exile and existential weight to justify my choices. Are my ideas violent to the self? I don't think so. Yet I am doomed to perceive from the self, which taints how objective I can be. What if I am being violent to my spiritual, mental, and emotional health in adorned illusion? I do not know. I come from a background of deep, visceral affliction from a very young age. But I know this for certain: I finally feel real. I feel human.

I feel like I suffocate at work as a data engineer. I am very privileged. I earn well into six figures, and I work remotely. I can afford my own two bedroom apartment (although I am greatly downsizing soon) in a beautiful state. Yet, I can't evade the feeling that nothing I do matters. I can't evade the feeling that my efforts to make data available for reporting, to create data platforms, to wire together systems is all for nothing.

Leaders often say they are data-driven, but that is mostly a lie. They proclaim to be data-driven, but at best it is the most detached workers using the data as a whisper in the wind to fuel their implicit biases. I question the levels of mental gymnastics some executives perform, and in good faith I must assume that their illusion, which permits reduction and extraction, survives in sincerity.

I feel angry that to afford a comfortable life by myself, I must reduce my soul while serving nothing of existential value. I dream of teaching philosophy and ethics, and I dream of once a unit taking my students to write outside in the bask of the sun and simply walking around and asking them "What weighs on your soul today?"

I wish to give them feedback on their essays that genuinenly witnesses their soul, their moral seriousness, and attention to their work. It is often the young adults who are the most vulnerable and starve for grace the most. I wish to give them what I never received, for grace is restorative in our society of extraction via reduction.

It is often the systems that desire "independent, critical thinkers" that reduce promising individuals under the whims of ego. How many structures genuinely reward what they value? I fear that ego taints everything it perceives. It is this fear, from love for the world around us, that demands grace.

I haven't talked to any family members for about 3 or 4 years now, I stopped counting.

In fidelity to truth, this world will be a better place when my father dissapears. There are some individuals who were offered clarity, who were offered the possibility to truly love, but rejected it in the name of continuing harm. These are the most dangerous individuals in our society. He has done horrible, disgusting things, including using my existence as a tool for spiritual violence against my mother. Robbery.

I reflect often that the finite soul is capable of withstanding infinite weight, and somehow also capable of emerging with more compassion and love after flayed open by affliction. I do not know why I am still here, but I must believe this to be true from experience. It is my deep love of the world and people around me that justifies my choice to keep going. I wonder if that is polluted and extractive under the veil of grace. Would it not be disgusting if the very thing that I write the most about with reverence is actually a tool for me to sustain my own life?

I only got to know my mother later in my life, so unfortunately she feels much like a stranger who is unknowingly kind to me. I lived with her for a brief moment, and I taught myself programming in one month and got a data engineering internship. I wrote her a heartfelt note describing my most difficult moments, including the time when suicidal thoughts become comforting, and let her know that I will want some space after I move. This was so I could finally breathe, find my own roots in this world, and become my own person rather than a bag of flesh surviving this existence.

She sent me a message saying "You win", and then blocked me on social media.

Perhaps it was foolish, but I believed that if I found genuine connection with the mother I never knew then it would be redemptive for the things I endured. To have something so personal and existential treated in the language of games severely pissed me off. I am ashamed that I am not greater than this. But I have had zero interest in contact after having my soul reduced by the one person I wanted the most connection with.

They have attempted to reach out to me. I have ignored them in my own weakness. I do not feel strong enough as a soul to not reduce myself to be palatable to them. I am still developing. Maybe in the future. It hurts to know that they probably hurt from my actions. Likewise, it is difficult to reconcile the fact that the people who claim to love me are likely only capable of loving parts of me.

So far, I have found most love to be reduction in the service of comfort and familiarity. Ironically, it is from the few kind and just acts of strangers that demonstrated the power of witnessing without ego, also known as grace.

Likewise, most members of her side of the family are homophobic. One family member randomly told me, not knowing about my preferences, that "to be gay is an abomination." I find great trouble in the idea of sola scriptura, the idea that the bible is the source of truth. If God is the infinite, the unknowable, the everywhere-but-nowhere entity that language can't even tangentially describe, who are we to describe what God believes? The texts and books are all written from humans, so to proclaim what God definitively wants is foolish. I believe we can only describe what God is not, and we must recognize language is an attempt to outline the borderless infinite.

I find comfort in negation. Only in describing by what I am not, what did not happen to me, what is not true, I feel most close to truth.

For what it is worth, I scroll through the words I typed, and I notice how many times I reference "I". This feels shameful.

I do not claim spiritual or moral authority. I recognize that my attempt to make meaning of this world around me is fleeting. I am not proud of my consciousness, my philosophy, or my ideas. My perspective is one of billions. I am actually quite content with my life, and I feel well integrated. In the moments where I have been truthful and honest about my thoughts and myself to the people around me, I feel like I am too much.

I am just trying to remain truthful to myself.