Personal

Hello Again, Another Valley

I find myself three days into another valley, having fallen far from another peak not long ago. Only four days ago, I wrote this as if from another world:

I am closing this writing while listening to incredible music, feeling like I am more alive than ever, that I am embodied and transcendent. It is euphoria.

But what remains for me at the end of this bridge is an all-consuming despair.

I Don't Think I Belong In Corporate Software Development

Have you ever been in a room, looked at the people around you, and thought to yourself, "In no way do I belong here"?

I was in a remote meeting with executive-adjacent managers and a few high level individual contributors. All I could notice were polished, curated backgrounds: plants that perfectly hung in view of the camera; haircuts and beards trimmed to the perfect length, not too long nor too short; grand bookshelves panning across the background; cameras positioned at the perfect height.

My General Reflections On Software Development And The Development Of AI

It would be dishonest for me to say that, as a software developer, I do not enjoy economic privilege and benefits that surpass most workers. On the contrary, I had a conversation with a friend recently who remarked that "software developers get paid too much."

I understand where he comes from. His job is relatively lowly paid, at least it is after the inflation of the pandemic, and affording to live in a place of his own, even if just renting, is out of the question. I am paid extraordinary well compared to him, and I can afford to live in a two bedroom apartment alone. What I find here is not that I am paid too much, but he is both not paid enough and cost of living is divorced from reality.

The Internals Of My Hypomania

I am currently in a hypomanic state, so I figure it would be interesting to outline how that manifests, how it feels in the body, and how it influences my output.

I am diagnosed bipolar, specifically bipolar type 2. This means that I cycle through extremes of existential despair and transcendent hope, short of full mania. This diagnosis is recent, only just a week ago I believe. But I have been under the grip of bipolar disorder for countless years now.

How To Write Palatable, Praise-Worthy Trash For MFA Programs

Have you ever wanted to write prose worthy of being accepted into a MFA program? Do you lack the skill to engage in meaningful reflection, but want to write a book perfect for Apple users and Target shoppers?

Then congratulations! You are spiritually aligned with an entire subgenre of contemporary literature where trauma is stylized, philosophy is truncated to an Instagram caption, and suffering is praised for its aesthetics (be vulnerable, but not too vulnerable! we can't expect much from our readers).

To Admit "I Am Suffering"

Grace: love without possession.

To say to a stranger, "You are human, just as I. And from that you have dignity."

To say to yourself, "You are but a stranger; a human."

A miracle: the descent of your self-love to nothing more than a stranger.

Love ascends by falling.

Where does this stranger-love come from when we look inward? Complete strife.

I am no stranger to tormenting myself. When I spend time with friends and those I cherish, but I feel unrooted and unmoored, my brain crucifies itself for such a blatant failure.

Infinite Ghosts

These infinite ghosts of my mind terrify me.

I see what could be, and those possibilities are horrifying.

It's the feeling of standing at the precipice of a cliff, looking into the deep abyss below. Stars dash across the sky, a smattering of light in an otherwise calm and dark night.

But all you see are incadescent streaks of men falling into the abyss, much like meteors darting across the sky, no different than how children draw with white chalk. One after another, man after man, the dark cavern is briefly illuminated by the screams of delusional, deranged, and aching spirits. Beautiful, horrifying despair.

I Want To Live!

I shall never be able to understand it, but there must be someone who can. And I shall have to create that someone who can inside myself.

― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

Can we really say that breathing, eating, and sleeping each day is life, even if it never feels enough for the heart?

What is this magnet within my heart, and where does it pull me towards? If an ancient butterfly were to flap its wings in front of me, I would know that wherever it goes both my body and soul must follow, even if it brings me no further than where I started.

I Miss The Person I Fell In Love With

Marcus, I miss this version of you. The Marcus that I fell in love with. What happened?

These are the words my boyfriend said while he drove us around town at 2 AM, tears sliding down his face. My breath reeked of alcohol, his voice nearly drowned out by the loud, manic music.

In that moment, I was elated. The music reflected what I felt in my heart, the electric high of being alive. I often drank and danced to music, and there was nothing more freeing than driving around with him and letting him share this moment with me.

Our Brain, The Ghost

The greatest ghost in this life of mine is the source of my humanity: the brain.

This mass of nerves, this elaborate thing orchestrating all thoughts of mine enables equal parts wonder and frustration.

On one hand, consciousness is a marvel of divine power. It very easily could have been that our species evolved into a brain capable only of primal thoughts. For example, the pursuit of shelter, food, water, and reproduction. The divinity is precisely in how sophisticated the human consciousness is. We seek primal needs, yes, but we also search for existential meaning, grace, and transcendence. In a world that is by all measures characterized by these primal needs, we find ourselves with the search for something higher.

Ion

And as the Corybantian revellers when they dance are not in their right mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of music and metre they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind.

Mercy?

If there exists God, do you think He is capable of loving someone as wretched and wicked as me?

I am an incredibly flawed person, and I reckon that I am difficult to love.

I believe my programming knowledge is greater than it is; I withhold the expression of my true feelings in conflict; I choose isolation over flawed but human love; I struggle to let other people in, although I have yet to meet someone who did understand me when I did; I pursue a few things with fervor and rigor yet abandon the rest, including relationships; I ignore the physical in favor of the metaphysical; I am somewhat lazy when I speak; I feel prideful at times of my work; I still use the word "I".

The Burden of Agency

The cold air pricking my skin, the distant and faded croaks of frogs singing to my ears, the spirit of freedom with each breath illuminating my soul, I finally built a life where I am safe. I have an apartment where I can control the heat, I never worry about my bank account, I can travel wherever I want, and I can set a flexible work schedule. Could you imagine any other base needs that the soul could sing for? I am undoubtedly secure.

Oh, Who Knows?

Some people are shattered from a young age, internalizing the idea that they are grotesque and unlovable.

And so they carry their own whip, reminding themselves of those 'truths' while retreating from society.

Aching, lonely, tender hearts.

They remain in their cave, sealed from the outside world. Damned to a life of deafening solitude.

In their darkness, the whip’s crack echoes louder than any voice outside.

Yet there are thousands of people they can meet who would love them as a person and their company, who would gladly clasp their hand and walk outside with them to show them light still exists.

My Religious Hubris

I used to criticize people who searched for God in this world. "How misguided they are", I thought. I believed that the search for God, something fundamentally unknowable, was foolish. I mistook their affirmations that God did exist as hubris, when in reality I was the blind man pretending to see clearly.

My mistake, the scaffolding of my hubris, was that I believed I saw the full picture but in reality I only saw snapshots. I saw a woman with a rational mind worshiping something irrational, not the widow searching for something infinite to hold her endless pain. The hubris was believing that we are something more than just humans.

The Consolation of Meaningless Work

Say to yourself in the morning:

I shall today go to work not as a person fractured into a laborer and a human but rather simply as a full, expansive human.

Today I will encounter draining meetings, pointless encounters, and political theatre. But with the human and laborer as one, I may bring dignity, justice, and care into my own creations at work, both technical and personal.

Some people, although unintentional, may be rude, busy, distracting, misinformed, or frustrating. What we see in others and what other see in us are just small snapshots, and we often make incomplete judgements. Therefore provide generous grace, even if difficult.

Roots and Thought

Some people are corpses. They walk, breathe, and love, yet they remain dead.

Hiding in plain sight.

Inward force, affliction, depression. All render death.

The severing of roots at the base. Destruction.

Reconstructing worlds from thoughts and writing heals such roots.

The slowing of time, decades condensed into months.

Like a young child whose months moved so slowly, unlike the adult whose years slip from his or her fingers.

Proof of life.

Am I A Slave?

I read these stunning sentences from Seneca just now:

'I haven't got a master,' you say. You're young yet; there's always the chance that you'll have one.

Have you forgotten the age at which Hecuba became a slave, or Croesus, or the mother of Darius, or Plato, or Diogenes?

…

Show me a man who isn't a slave; one is a slave to sex, another money, another to ambition; all are slaves to hope or fear.

Surrender, Oh, Surrender

How beautiful a thing our humanity is, that glassy essence within the human spirit that refuses to die. If I could walk up the staircase of my own internal being, I would see a million gorgeous fractures that somehow illuminate even in the most deafening darkness. The illumination not from the pieces that remain whole, but through the fractures themselves. The child who survives abuse, the man who survives abandonment, the mother surviving the death of her only son, this is the humanity and the capability of love within us all.

Repair and Grace

Inward force: the reduction of your spirit to a thing, the disfigurement of your relation to yourself; often manifested, but not always, as trauma. For context, read Weil's The Iliad, or the Poem of Force.

I once believed inward force to be totalizing - the complete, and utter disfigurement of what made me feel human. The inward force of affliction - the extremes of life slowly putting pressure onto my spirit until the inevitable fracture - seemed to be omnipresent across all aspects of my life: the way I spoke to others; the way I spoke to myself; the way I thought of others; the way I thought of myself. It was perhaps the most beautiful thing, in its own sick way, for the capability of man to systematically destroy another soul and to teach them to enslave themselves is a testament of both human capability and the fragility of the human condition. I held my own whip, and I never put it down as I walked across this realm. This felt encompassing.

To Whatever

If I write to nothing, but I do indeed publish this, then what, or who, am I writing to? It feels somewhat inbetween. And so I will write to whatever.

I think a miracle of this world is the way that even the most passionate become tired, worn-down, and depleted.

The miracle of exhaustion is that it makes no exceptions. Even those at the edge of human possibility collapse. And in that collapse we glimpse the truth of justice: it is carried not by gods, but by breakable flesh.

Refining My Thoughts

Over the past 100 days or so, I started writing for the first time. I bled onto the page and it illuminated the metaphysics of my internal essence to date, across many disparate writings.

It has come to my senses that the things I write begin to buckle underneath the fragmented format that I have employed thus far. Many of my writings are difficult to read, not because the syntax itself is difficult to parse but rather that coherence requires familiarity with other fragments. It is only logical to then believe that I must create a longer, systematic writing.

Connection And Love

Our hands locked together, and despite this finite moment, despite the realization that eventually our hands must pull away, I knew this to be a fact: this finite moment is infinite.

I could see in your eyes a deep well, the most beautiful illusion of stable sustenance in the cracked desert of this pulsing existence. And many people have come to appreciate this beauty and craftsmanship.

Yet the only thing I could notice were the most beautiful fractures. The most subtle lines, often the indicator of collapse soon to come.

Duty

My life and breath are enslaved under the most mysterious debt. The gravity of this loan may be called duty.

And somehow the creditor is beyond cognition. Only in my essence do I feel the undercurrents of its demands.

The terms of this master can not be resolved by answering the question, "Why do I exist? What do I exist to do?"

Rather, the appropriate question is, "What absence would ripple in my departure?"

Obligation

Worn out, like a tire that has traveled tens of thousands of miles.

Exhaustion.

How do people survive? I don't know.

There exists within me the energy to survive - to eat enough food, to drink water, to sleep. It exists. It is real.

But why can I keep my body alive and still fail to live?

It is incredibly funny and revealing that I have the energy to reflect and write this, but I still have not handled my obligations.

Reflecting on Reflecting

Inside my essence exists a ghastly chasm between my rational mind and the void.

There are truths that I can logically recognize: I enjoy writing, I enjoy thinking, I enjoy petting my cat.

There are phenomena that I can not logically recognize: why I feel compelled to write, why I enjoy thinking even though it seems futile, why I feel such connection, adoration, and love for a temporary being.

In early July, I wrote Progress and Collapse where I theorizied and reasoned onto the page that human progression is inwards obliteration, an implosion of… everything.