Writing

I was considering how to start this entry, “post” (whatever) and I guess I wanted to acknowledge the trope of confessional writing, when you become the “you”, the “subject”, the “object” of the written word. It is self indulgent. It points towards a culture that is accepting of, that has a vested interest in, low-grade narcissism and largely feeds on the spectacle of interiority. All that being said, it serves some utility insofar as it makes others feel less alone. In our attempt to assert individuality we seem to conjure some kind of acute universality in our suffering, our faltering. If I were to lean into the idea of having a “true calling”, or a soul's path, I think mine is to ameliorate as much loneliness as possible, it is the sole reason I do what I do, it has defined my career path and my interpersonal sensibilities. Because I remember how it feels, a kind of loneliness that isn’t cured, only managed. Like humidity or debt. The condition of our time. I assume you’ve made peace with yours, too.

Change. I don’t know how to manage it. The moment I reach stasis, I start clawing for a fault line. I have always been this way. I have a habit of mistaking safety for stagnation, of perceiving it as a kind of deranged imprisonment. I’m only now realizing I play both roles: the prisoner and the masochistic guard, pacing the same small cell. No one enforces these conditions but me. This realization arrived, predictably, in the debris of my latest self-inflicted lifestyle implosion. The triennial event (I am fundamentally predictable). I finished graduate school, moved across the country, and ended what had felt like the most meaningful relationship of my life. I still don’t understand what compelled me to do any of it (particularly in the destructive manner in which things unfolded), especially in regards to the latter two. I like to tell myself I’m intuitive, guided by some deeper knowing, but I suspect the impulse is fundamentally grounded in a refined addiction to chaos. The deeply juvenile kind that makes reality only feel explicitly Real when everything is on the verge of collapse.

There’s a particular kind of disorientation that comes with moving somewhere like New York. Particularly when one does not listen to the whole “wherever you go, there you are” thing, which, I do not really have an excuse for. I had the belief, that I often hold, that running would fix everything. When you reach the immaterial finish line, and feel absolutely nothing, it is viscerally horrifying. There is nothing cinematic about this experience, you can not contextualize yourself within the beautiful imaginative world you have created to escape from your own ill conceived nightmare of a material reality. The experience mostly feels like being miscast in your own life. There’s no singular moment of arrival, only a slow unraveling of reference points. The person you were doesn’t quite make it through baggage claim; her tone, her gestures, her small rituals dissolve in the glare of a place that demands constant recalibration. I watch myself, going through the motions, ordering coffee, buying another pack of twenty dollar cigarettes, crossing streets too quickly, as though I’m impersonating someone who used to exist, far away, absolutely not here. Everything feels a few degrees off, like being conscious in a dream where the dialogue keeps looping. I used to think alienation meant not recognizing the world, but, really, I think it’s the eerie intimation of not recognizing the person that is at once witnessing, and existing within it.

Egoic death sounds somewhat nice when you say it out loud, particularly from some kind of immature masochistic perspective, like a spiritual detox or some noble transcendence. But it’s more like the slow amputation of a limb that you can only really observe, and do nothing about. You don’t rise above anything, you just lose the scaffolding that used to hold your reflection in place. Your ego doesn’t really die, it just gets humiliated into silence. It watches as the architecture of identity collapses under the weight of change, and you have to keep living inside the debris. You tell yourself you’re evolving, that this is necessary, but most of it feels like grief: for the person who knew how to be competent, who had reached the well adjusted state, in the old version of Your Life, who had a context, a vocabulary, a mirror. In New York, you can feel yourself dissolving inside a crowd of eight million, and no one notices your small extinction, your own, individual, pleistocene environment, you are just an organism in the biomass. There’s something liberating in that, but you slowly become a ghost who still has to pay rent (bad). Really, time is the only solvent for this kind of rupture, and it moves like wet cement. Every instinct in me wants to hack it, to outsmart the process, to intellectualize the ache into something legible. But there’s no shortcut through the kind of (almost campy?) horror of becoming. You can’t trick time into meaning, and you can only surrender to its pacing. Eventually, the rawness dulls, the shock wears down, and what once felt totally unbearable in its abject misery, becomes tolerable, then, almost imperceptibly, ordinary. That ordinariness is what has seemed to steady me, though it never announces itself. I think healing is mostly the gradual erosion of disbelief, realizing that you are still here, still conscious, still carrying yourself forward through the tedium of adjustment. Normalcy. That your continued survival, as banal as it may be, can be an act of faith, even when devoid of some sort of divine grandeur. Your will to live lies implied in your heart beating.

I keep thinking about what it means to feel safe within yourself. Not in the sentimental sense, but in the practical, almost bureaucratic one, a kind of abstract, internal contract. Change has a way of humiliating you into the realization that this sense of deep, internal safety, is essential for beingness. Change strips away the false forms of safety, the external scaffolding, the illusion of stability, the security that allows for the performance of being “well adjusted.” What’s left is whatever you’ve built internally, whatever part of you remains when everything familiar feels extraordinary far awat. I’ve spent years forfeiting agency in subtle ways, handing it over to circumstance, to other people, to whatever narrative seemed most convincing or exciting at the time. When you abandon yourself, you also abandon choice; you become reactive, mechanical, governed by the external. Safety, in its truest form, is the return of authorship, of agential capacity. It’s the potential to move, to act, without performing for some imagined witness. To know that you can rely on your own continuity, even when all external context is gone. When you are safe with yourself, you are never truly alone. You cease negotiating your existence through proximity, through recognition, through sex, through love, through consumption. There is just you, and that is, somehow, enough.

In these moments of profound atomization, I have found myself moved by the kindness and deep intricacies of near strangers, the capacity for connection, and moments where you feel briefly known. I am moved to tears by the way the sun shines relentlessly through the dulled windows of the train. I am struck by how when I turn on to my street, I can feel my cognition signaling “home”, and I feel safe. I am deeply touched by the warmness of both friends and acquaintances' smiles at parties, by recognition. These moments, they arrive without announcement, without any promise of permanence, and still manage to rearrange something deeply felt inside of me. After months of dislocation, of trying to create a semblance of coherence, I find myself startled by how simple it can be to experience that which is just findamentally Human. Not through intensity, but proximity, wholeness. The awareness that even within change, a complete fracturing and reassembly, you can still be met where you are, and for a second, you just are. If there is anything to hold onto, it is this.

The modern future no longer glimmers, it glowers. In its most potent form, the imagination of what is to come now arrives laced with dread. Climate collapse, social unraveling, artificial sentience; these are not simply material crises, they are eschatological whispers echoing through secular mouths. This kind of futurity speaks not in utopias, but in endings, often ambiguous and unlocatable, but (almost) always imminent. It is a fearful orientation, a psychic disposition wherein the unknown is not ripe with potential, but fraught with danger. Our imaginative capacity is hijacked by catastrophe, and yet even this fear functions as a strange kind of devotion, what Schiller might call a “sublime fear,” the horrifying magnitude of something we cannot grasp, but must bear witness to.

In this, we hear the echo of judgment day, not the Christian variant with angels and Holy fire, but the existential moment Kierkegaard describes, where man stands before himself, trembling in the face of his own becoming. The end is not orchestrated by divine decree, but by human hands, trembling and bloodied, reaching toward power and deliverance. This is what makes the modern apocalypse so bitterly intimate, it is not that God condemns the world, it is that man, in full possession of his capacities, might do so himself. Kierkegaard’s “sickness unto death” is not terminal because it kills the body, it is terminal because it disconnects the self from the eternal, from spirit, from the possibility of a truth that transcends our mortal limits. So what, then, are we afraid of? Not just death, but meaningless death. Not just judgment, but judgment without grace.

This is where a discreet spiritual war takes place, not in churches or political assembly, but in a war of interiority. We live in an age of competing gospels, some transcendent, some seductively, malignantly, immanent. Among them is the so-called redpill, a secular mythos masquerading as revelation. It positions itself as gnosis, promising illumination through unveiled cruelty: the world is what it is, say its prophets, and only those willing to endure the pain of this knowledge will be liberated. Not unlike ancient heretics, the redpillers seek salvation through insight, through a disillusionment so total it becomes a kind of armor. But this, too, is a theological posture, it has faith in its own cosmology of despair.

There is something fundamentally Gnostic in this framing. The world is fallen, corrupted. The flesh is weak. Knowledge saves. And yet this knowledge does not elevate, it corrodes, debases. The redpill is a heresy precisely because it reclaims the structure of revelation, but strips it of all metaphysical dignity. It offers no resurrection, no grace, only an endless unveiling of rot. Spinoza might call this a perversion of conatus, the striving for self-preservation that ought to align with joy and reason, but here becomes compulsive, recursive, feeding on despair. The striving persists, but it becomes anti-vital, a drive toward knowing more only to believe less. And yet something about this resonates. We are tempted by these heresies not because they lie, but because they expose partial truths. The world is broken. Systems fail us. There is something poisonous in the water. But the heretic forgets that revelation without compassion is just another form of violence. The true spiritual act is not to expose the world’s failures, but to hold fast to love in their midst. This is the spiritual war: not angels versus demons, but fatalism versus hope. The former is often louder. The latter, more dangerous.

Here the distinction between the philosophy of mortal truth and that of transcendental truth becomes sharp. Mortal truth, grounded in the empirical, the flesh, the historical, seeks what can be touched. It speaks in data, decay, diagnostics. But transcendental truth, as Kierkegaard and Schiller suggest, speaks in longing. It speaks from the wound. It knows that fear is not the enemy of faith, but its prerequisite. The leap into spirit does not ignore the abyss, it jumps directly into it. Maybe that’s where we find ourselves now, standing at the threshold, devoured not by the future, but by our response to it. There is a kind of psychoanalytic return here, a confrontation with the Real in Lacan’s sense, the domain of what resists symbolization, what cannot be known or tamed. The apocalyptic future is the Real par excellence. It terrifies because it cannot be controlled. It strips us back to our most elemental fears; Will I be safe? Will I be loved? Will I be saved?

We were not made for endless unveiling. There is a limit to how much truth the body can bear before it fractures, before knowing becomes an act of violence against the self. The redpill’s error is not in its identification of rot, but in its belief that rot is all there is. It confuses lucidity with liberation. But clarity without care is its own form of blindness. The soul cannot subsist on exposure alone, it requires beauty, mystery, nourishment. Not the anesthetic beauty of curated surfaces, but the kind that disorients, the kind that ruptures time, the kind that demands reverence. Beauty can be an end in itself. And perhaps this is its defiant power in a decaying world: to behold something that does not instrumentalize, that does not dominate, but simply is, and to love it anyway.

Choosing, upon your own volition, not to despair, is a radical act. In a time of cascading predictions, despair masquerades as wisdom. But to hope is not to close one’s eyes, it is to open them differently. Spinoza’s joy, the ethical flowering of understanding, begins with this reorientation. Not the flattening of feeling into naïveté, but the spiritual clarity that sees the necessity of all things and chooses, still, to affirm life. In this sense, joy is not opposed to dread, it is born within it. A joy that knows the dark but does not worship it. The redpill heresy cannot imagine this, it can only desecrate what it cannot control. So we return, recursively, to the site of the wound. To the part of ourselves that still aches for transcendence, even after ideology, even after disillusionment. We carry both mortal truth and the pull of the transcendental, that which is infinite. And it is in this tension, in the impossibility of resolution, that we become most alive, we come into contact with the Real. The future will come. Perhaps it will devour. Until revelation, our bodies, the corporeal form, persist. To feel, to oppose numbness, to find sanctity in that which is alive and trembling. This is not retreat. It is fidelity to what endures. To what cannot be reduced. To what still, impossibly, calls itself Holy.

We are not asked to be gods. We are asked to remain human. Which is to say, to feel, to suffer, to choose, to strive. To believe that spirit is not a fantasy, but a dimension of reality we must keep choosing to see. The war is not won through certainty. It is endured through fidelity, fidelity to the idea that transcendence is still possible, even now. That something sacred remains. That even in rapid decay, the soul, humanness (pure in its imperfect state), endures.

I’ve been thinking about melancholics lately, mostly because I keep recognizing myself in the older typologies, the ones that predate our obsession with personality quizzes and instead read like diagnoses of the soul. Disposition as opposed to a monicker posited for legibility online, or on dating apps (Bad). The melancholic as someone governed by phantasy, intuition, and the kind of speculative interiority that both enriches and distorts experience. I know this pattern too well: the imagination staging elaborate scenes of understanding, which is to say, romanticism, yearning, long before anything material actually occurs. The fantasy of understanding, romantic pleasure as rehearsal, as hypothesis. Sometimes I think my desire has more in common with Kant’s notion of the “schematism” than anything biological, experience pre-formatted, pre-narrated, required to pass through an internal grid before becoming real.

This isn’t romanticism as excess, but romanticism, connection, as calibration. Pleasure is not the goal (to some extent this should probably never be the goal, for anything); it’s the test case. Every time I’ve pursued someone out of that specific melancholic impulse, it hasn’t been because I believed in the urgency of the body, but because my mind had already constructed a world around the possibility, a world so vivid it felt irresponsible not to verify it. Nietzsche writes about the “dangerous privilege of those who think too much”: to be seduced not by life, but by the image of life. That’s what it feels like. To want the projection more than the encounter. To chase the speculation because the speculation, unlike the body, does exactly what you tell it to.

The instability that comes with this is predictable. It’s not moodiness, nothing so picturesque. It’s the quiet volatility that happens when experience can’t quite keep pace with imagination. I’ve had moments, usually in the aftermath of some encounter, where I can feel myself splitting: the me who lived it through corporeal experience, and the me who imagined it. And the latter is always sharper, more convincing. It’s embarrassing to admit how many times I’ve mistaken anticipation, projection, for intimacy. Or how frequently the fantasy of connection has felt more structurally sound than the connection itself.

I used to think this meant something was wrong with me, some defect in my capacity for embodiment. But I don’t necessarily think that anymore (although I am kind of a woman who is teeming with contradictions). Klossowski writes about the “phantasm” as both wound and resource, something that destabilizes but also animates desire. It makes sense that the melancholic goes toward sensual pleasure not for any reproductive logic (which has always felt vaguely alien to me, some evolutionary mandate that never took), but for the temporary reprieve from the self. A dissolution. A loosening of the psychic grip. This feels complicated to me as someone who wants to live a life that is (generally, as much as possible) aligned with God’s will, that which is Good.

Most of the connective experiences that have mattered to me weren’t even that extraordinary on a sensory level; they mattered because of the way they interrupted the administrative part of my mind. The part that organizes, interprets, translates, regulates. Sometimes I think that is the real pleasure for melancholics, the brief suspension of one’s own interpretive machinery. A small revolt against interiority’s totalizing force. Just get out of your head. Okay.

There have been moments, rare, but memorable, where the body outran the imagination. Where sensation arrived without warning, without script, and I could feel the internal scaffolding lag behind. Those moments taught me more about myself than any relationship ever has. Not in a grand “healing” sense (I don’t trust that vocabulary and also it’s Dumb), but in a factual one: that I am not entirely composed of speculation. That I can still be startled by my own aliveness, which, often eludes me. Sometimes this feels quite foreign because of my general instinct towards malaise and mundanity.

With all that being said, the cycle always returns (recursivity, I’m kind of always talking about this). The phantasy life reconstitutes itself. One can reconstruct the scene, reinterpret the meaning, fold it into some broader narrative about who one Truly is or what one will become. I’m less judgmental of this now. There’s a certain kind of fidelity in the melancholic pursuit of sensuality for its own sake, a refusal to attach it to utility, futurity, or biological obligation. Deleuze once said that desire “has no object; it is a field.” That feels accurate. Sensual pleasure isn’t the point; it’s the terrain through which the melancholic travels, trying to locate the coordinates of their own embodiment.

If I’m honest, the most stable part of my romantic life has always been the part no one sees: the prelude, the imagining, the contemplative drift. Not because it’s purer or safer, but because it is (at least) mine. I think romanticism can become a form of self-study, a way of checking in with the parts of oneself that remain otherwise inaccessible. I can be amenable, I can be hospitable, I am not indifferent, I am not Cold (although I often act as such when it comes to the latter two). And maybe that’s why melancholics seem so prone to emotional instability, not because we’re fragile, but because we are constantly negotiating between two versions of ourselves: the one who feels (because naturally, we are inclined), and the one who imagines feeling.

What seems consistent, at least in my reading of this temperament, is that the instability isn’t a problem to be solved but a structural feature. The speculative and the lived remain slightly out of sync, and that mismatch simply governs the rhythm of things. Human connection, communication, functions as an interruption in that rhythm, not revelatory, not redemptive, just a brief suspension of the usual analytic pressure. The experience doesn’t alter anything fundamental; it just momentarily disengages the apparatus that makes melancholic life feel so mentally overdetermined. And perhaps that’s the closest this temperament comes to equilibrium: not resolution, but a temporary lapse in the need to interpret, before the machinery starts up again.

I’ve been considering the low grade narcissism embedded in the feeling of being “different,” not the theatrical version but the quieter, subtler one that animates a lot of contemporary interior life. It presents itself as an intuition rather than a declaration: a sense of operating at some tangent to the rest of the world, a conviction that one’s consciousness moves at a slightly atypical frequency. It hangs in the background, at parties, in intimate conversations, like the soft hum of an appliance you didn’t realize was running. The belief doesn’t come with grandeur or superiority, just the vague notion of being structurally misaligned with others, and because it’s understated, it masquerades as honesty rather than ego. But beneath it is a familiar impulse, the need to preserve a myth of singularity, a narrative that one’s interior life is more intricate, or more endangered, or simply more other than the lives unfolding parallel to it. It’s narcissism in its most mundane, infrastructural form: not loud, not flashy, just quietly insistent. We all deeply crave legibility, and this schema precludes the possibility.

What’s strange is how quickly this belief calcifies, especially in cultures organized around self disclosure and the spectacle of interiority (something I’ve already critiqued in my own writing, even as I participate in it)(I am beyond guilty). The constant invitation to “go inward,” to mine the psyche for material, to foreground one’s inner life as the primary site of meaning, produces a subtle inflation. The self swells, not heroically but bureaucratically, accumulating layers of micro-distinction. Before long, feeling different becomes a sort of psychological reflex, a default interpretive framework. You start reading ordinary alienation as evidence of some rare psychic topology. The fact that most people feel this way, most people feel untranslatable, mismatched, adrift, only makes the phenomenon more absurd. The universality of the experience contradicts the story it tells about itself. Everyone feels different, and everyone thinks the feeling is unique (at least upon initial inquiry).

This is where the language of “existential loneliness” tries to enter the conversation, even though the phrase itself feels totally moronic and uncomfortably sterile, like the turn of phrase of a psychiatrist from zocdoc that really serves a singular purpose. And yet, the experience it gestures toward is real, the basic structural gap between one consciousness and another, the impossibility of ever fully transmitting one’s interiority, the sense that there is always a surplus of self that cannot be absorbed by the world. It’s not melodramatic; it’s mechanical. The loneliness isn’t a void, or Lack, it’s the leftover residue of awareness. Being a subject means witnessing the world from a vantage point that cannot be shared, and no amount of intimacy, language, or observation disturbs that fundamental architecture. To feel “different” is often just to become too aware of this gap, to mistake a universal structural condition for a personal affliction. But because the feeling arrives internally, it masquerades as proof of some singular emotional or cognitive complexity, when really it’s an artifact of the basic human predicament.

The irony is that this belief in one’s own difference ends up producing the very isolation it claims to describe. If you see yourself as fundamentally misaligned with others, you start acting in accordance with that assumption: withholding, mistranslating, filtering, preemptively distancing. The posture becomes performative even when the performance is unconscious (as it usually is). You start relating to others as though you are an exception, and the world obliges by reflecting the distance back to you. A feedback loop. The feeling of separateness creates the conditions that confirm it, and soon the loneliness feels not only accurate but inevitable. The mind becomes its own echo chamber. What began as a faint distinction ossifies into identity. This is particularly compelling during a time in which culture pushes us towards over identification with interiority, whilst also crippling our capacities for true individuation due to the influences of Media (but that's a conversation for another time).

I think what complicates this further is how the narrative of difference gets tethered to meaning making. People begin to treat their sense of being out of sync as a sign of depth, or sensitivity, or uncommon perceptiveness, when really it’s just another form of self organization. A way of structuring one’s interior life around a stable axis, even if the axis is ultimately fictional. Feeling different becomes a tool for interpreting experience, a shortcut for explaining discomfort, disconnection, or contingency. It gives these experiences a kind of coherence. And because the narrative is psychologically convenient, it persists long after its usefulness expires. The myth of being singular is easier to maintain than the more banal truth, that one is neither remarkable nor defective, simply a person among other people, each of whom believes (quietly, privately) that they are exceptional in their estrangement.

There is something clarifying in recognizing this, even if the recognition is unsentimental. It doesn’t ameliorate the feeling, it simply reframes it. The sense of difference becomes less like an existential condition and more like a habit of interpretation, a residue of overidentified interiority rather than evidence of ontological specialness. The loneliness that accompanies it feels less bound to the totality of The Real, more procedural. A function of consciousness rather than a crisis of identity. And in that reframing, one begins to chip away at the calcification. Not dramatically, not redemptively, but enough to interrupt the self perpetuating loop (and perhaps create something productive from it). Enough to see the feeling for what it is, a small, persistent fiction that has been mistaken for truth simply because it’s familiar. That familiarity is powerful, but it is not a destiny, it is not universal truth. It’s just the mind, doing what it always does, constructing a story and then mistaking the story for a structural fact. We are storytelling creatures. We want connection, legibility. We are deserving of more.

I keep returning to the way digital spaces reshape the psyche, not in the catastrophic “we are losing our humanity” sense, but in a more procedural, administrative way: the way they streamline instinct into something displayable. Digital identity often feels less like an extension of the self and more like a distilled operational mode, a simplified interface where the raw material of the ID gets translated into signals, fragments, impulses rendered legible by repetition. Online, the unconscious isn’t subterranean, tied directly to the subconscious; it’s exported into the digital self, The Profile. What emerges is not the whole self but an optimized subset of it, the part that acts first and explains later, the part unconcerned with coherence, the part that finds satisfaction in being instantly mirrored back.

This is, I think, why people find such unembarrassed pleasure in showcasing their symptom online. The digital environment rewards immediacy, affect, micro-confession. The symptom, which in embodied life is inconvenient and often humiliating, becomes aestheticized, formatted into a stable motif. The medium encourages a kind of psychic minimalism. Instead of wrestling with contradictions, you foreground the one feature that organizes everything else. The symptom becomes shorthand for identity, a recognizable pattern that makes you legible to others without requiring actual proximity. You don’t have to explain yourself; you just have to express the part of you that reads the clearest.

What complicates this, what gives it its odd moral texture, is the way online expression has evolved into a digital confessional that requires no absolution. People disclose not for healing, but for circulation; not to be forgiven, but to be acknowledged as existents. The platforms, in their architecture, encourage this low-stakes atonement: small offerings of self-exposure meant to signal sincerity without incurring real psychic risk. It becomes a secular ritual, a way of managing one’s internal debris by externalizing it into a public that is largely indifferent but functionally attentive. There is something vaguely medieval about the impulse, this sense that confession stabilizes the self even if it solves nothing. The disclosure becomes its own end, a gesture toward transparency that doubles as a distancing mechanism. You reveal your wound to avoid being defined by it, even though the act of revelation inevitably becomes part of the definition.

What’s striking, if one cares to trace the lineage, is how closely this digital mode of disclosure resembles older forms of confession, except stripped of any transcendent framework. Augustine wrote his Confessions as an address to God, a movement toward alignment with the divine; the confession was meaningful because it presupposed an external witness capable of granting coherence, perhaps even grace. Online confession replicates the form without the metaphysics. There is no God, only an algorithmic audience, faceless, shifting, largely inattentive, yet strangely powerful in its capacity to validate or erase. In this sense, confession becomes less about truth and more about circulation. The aim is not purification but proof of existence. Lacan might say the subject is speaking not to be understood but to confirm that the Other, the symbolic order, the network, the feed, the profile, is still there, still listening, still capable of returning a sign. And that small return, however hollow, produces a sense of provisional coherence. Public penance becomes a soft identity. You confess not to unburden yourself but to reinscribe yourself into the digital order; the symptom becomes your credential. The exposure signals moral seriousness even when no transformation is demanded. It’s confession as self branding, absolution outsourced to the scroll, where continuity matters more than redemption. The ritual persists because it stabilizes the self, even if only for a moment, even if only as data.

There’s also the strange relief of collapsing the psyche into something quasi-manageable. Offline, impulses compete with obligations, social norms, long-term narratives of self. Online, these impulses can exist without counterweight. They can surface without consequence, be instantly archived, circulated, and forgotten. It feels honest not because it reveals the whole interior landscape but because it reveals the part that typically remains unspoken. A technical exposure, not an emotional one. And the medium, algorithmic, responsive, hungry and aching, rewards this exposure with the immediacy of recognition. A feedback loop of self affirmation built out of fragments rather than substance.

But the pleasurable part isn’t simply being seen. It’s being seen as the symptom, without the burden of integrating it into a coherent self. The digital ID offers a low-stakes arena where one’s psychic excesses can be stylized rather than scrutinized. Instead of understanding the symptom, you perform it; instead of resolving it, you refine its presentation. This isn’t exactly narcissism, at least not in the diagnostic sense. It’s closer to a desire for internal consistency, a way of giving form to what would otherwise remain an unmanageable cluster of impulses. The online symptom feels pleasurable because it bypasses the friction of interpretation. It becomes self explanatory, self reinforcing.

And maybe that’s why the phenomenon persists, the digital sphere allows the psyche to offload its least governable elements into a format that feels both safer and more legible than the internal experience itself. The enjoyment comes from the small suspension of psychic labor, the temporary reprieve from having to negotiate with all the other parts of the self that complicate the narrative. The symptom can exist without apology, without context, without consequence. Not as a confession, not as pathology, but as a signal among other signals, recognized, repeated, absorbed into the flow. It’s not catharsis; it’s not revelation. It’s simply ease. And in a world that demands so much internal management, even that small ease can feel like a kind of freedom.

I realized I’ve been orienting my writing lately around self concept and confession, this feels revealing, maybe some primordial impulse towards change and transformation as the year comes to a close. Largely, I have been reflecting on how earlier models of selfhood relied on something external to the self to establish orientation. The soul was answerable to God. The individual was situated within a role, a community, a symbolic order that exceeded personal preference. This did not necessarily make life easier, but it made it intelligible. Augustine’s confession makes sense within this framework because it presumes a witness capable of ordering the self, not merely observing it. Confession was not an act of expression but of submission, an acknowledgment that the self was misaligned and that correction, not validation, was the point. The confession mattered because it addressed something that could judge, reorder, and ultimately absorb the self into a larger coherence.

What’s striking about modern subjectivity is not its freedom, but its lack of orientation. The self is no longer accountable to a transcendent authority or a stable communal role; it is answerable only to itself. This is often framed as liberation, but it produces a subtler, less overt kind of instability. Without an external standard, there is nothing against which to measure alignment, only internal consistency. The self becomes both actor and judge, witness and defendant, endlessly evaluating its own motives, desires, and failures. There is no final appeal. The result is not autonomy in any meaningful sense, but a kind of recursive self-surveillance that masquerades as freedom. Post-modern narcissistic impulses, a fixation on the self, have created the panopticon in our own heads.

This is where freedom begins to feel like a burden. Radical autonomy collapses into total responsibility. If nothing determines you, no God, no fate, no fixed role, then every outcome appears traceable back to personal failure or mismanagement. Nietzsche’s critique of guilt is useful here, except the creditor has changed. Guilt no longer circulates between the self and God, or the self and society, but loops internally. The self becomes indebted to itself, constantly accruing moral and existential debt it can never quite repay. Responsibility without limit stops feeling like agency and starts feeling like exposure. We are not holy beings; we do not have an unlimited capacity for knowing, for agency. We are guided by intuition, by feeling (spiritual in nature) and to some degree, this makes our limits evident.

In this context, it makes sense that there is such a persistent desire for temporary self suspension. Ego death, anonymity, drug use, absorption, devotion, these are not primarily about pleasure or escape, but about relief from authorship. They offer moments where the demand to be a coherent, accountable self loosens. The appeal is not disappearance, but reprieve. A temporary abdication of the role of being someone who must decide, justify, narrate, and stand behind every aspect of their existence. In these moments, responsibility thins out; causality feels suspended, the id function blooms. Action no longer has to be explained or metabolized into identity. There is comfort in no longer having to mean anything in particular, in being acted through rather than acting. The self recedes just enough to allow experience to occur without immediately being claimed, interpreted, or folded back into a story about who one is supposed to be, who one wants to be, who one ought to be.

Simone Weil’s notion of decreation gestures toward this impulse with unusual precision. Decreation is not annihilation, but the easing of the self’s grip on itself. A consent to diminishment. In a world where the self is required to be endlessly generative, expressive, and accountable, the idea of letting go, of not insisting on one’s own centrality and interiority, feels almost transgressive. And yet, this is where many people locate relief: in experiences that reduce the self’s prominence rather than intensify it. In devotion, routine, absorption, or even silence, the self briefly ceases to be the primary organizing principle of reality.

What these moments reveal is not a desire to escape responsibility altogether, but a fatigue with having no external anchor. The modern self is overburdened not because it is weak, but because it is required to be everything at once, source of meaning, site of judgment, author of coherence. Earlier frameworks distributed that weight elsewhere. They imposed limits, but they also offered legible orientation. Without that distribution, the self collapses inward, managing its own excess until even freedom feels oppressive. We yearn for God.

None of this is an argument for returning to older forms of authority wholesale. But it does suggest that the fantasy of absolute autonomy has costs that are rarely acknowledged. Ultimate choice is not freedom. When the self becomes its own highest authority, it also becomes its own prison. The longing for self suspension, whether through faith or the hedonistic ouroboros, reads less like avoidance and more like an attempt to recover proportion. Not to erase the self, but to loosen its grip on the psyche. To allow, even briefly, for a form of existence where the burden of being someone is not entirely one’s own. As we near the beginning of the new year, I find myself wanting less authorship and more orientation, less insistence on choice for its own sake, and more willingness to be held, shaped, or interrupted by something outside of me, even if only provisionally. I hope you find this, too.

There is something spiritually dissonant about the contemporary impulse to render love immediately visible. To narrate it in real time, to publish its rhythms, to translate its most private textures into prose before they have had time to sediment into meaning. I do not mean that love should be hidden out of prudishness or fear, but that it resists exposure by its very nature. Love is not an object to be displayed but an event that works upon the subject slowly, often destructively, and almost always in silence. When it is made public, oriented toward legibility, too quickly, it shifts from something that acts spiritually upon the self to something arranged for comprehension.

I have noticed in myself a growing aversion to speaking about love while I am inside it. Not because the experience lacks intensity, but because it feels ethically fragile, easily cheapened by language, especially language meant to be received. There is a point at which articulation begins to feel like theft, as though something that does not belong to me alone is being converted into my narrative possession. I felt this most sharply the last time I left a love I believed would be the one I would spend my life inside, a love whose seriousness made it feel especially vulnerable to explanation. In the aftermath, my mother said to me, almost gently, “Maddy, you will have a lot of love in your life,” and what struck me was not the consolation but the reorientation, love not as a singular monument to be defended, but as a recurring force that does not require constant narration to prove its reality. Intimacy, once exteriorized, subtly changes its orientation, it turns outward, toward recognition, rather than inward, toward attention. What was once lived as encounter becomes filtered through the question of how it will appear.

Simone Weil’s writing on attention offers a vocabulary for this discomfort. For Weil, attention is not an act of assertion but of suspension, a disciplined waiting that refuses to appropriate its object. Attention is ethical because it resists use. To love attentively, in this sense, is not to grasp or explain the other, but to consent to their irreducibility, to remain present without trying to secure meaning prematurely. It requires silence, restraint, and a willingness to remain unknowing. Publication operates in the opposite direction. It assumes that what matters about an experience is its legibility, that meaning is something proven through articulation rather than undergone.

This is where the vulgarity enters, not in desire, not in the body, but in the evacuation of inwardness. When love is immediately translated into narrative, it becomes aesthetic rather than ethical, tied to the core compononents of our deep Humanness. The question shifts from what is happening to what can be said. What was once an interior demand becomes an exterior performance. I have felt this shift acutely, the way speaking too soon flattens an experience, how language, when rushed, replaces attention rather than deepens it. How the desire to possess obfuscates expression and experience. The pressure to explain interrupts the process by which love changes us.

Roland Barthes understood this fragility well. In A Lover’s Discourse, he resists offering a coherent theory of love, insisting instead on fragments, repetitions, and interruptions. The lover does not possess a story so much as a series of intensities that refuse synthesis. Public declarations of love tend to betray this structure. They smooth the fragments into a narrative arc, substituting legibility for truth. But love is not linear. It does not move cleanly from absence to reunion, from longing to fulfillment. It circles, stalls, contradicts itself. Its meaning, if it arrives at all, does so obliquely.

There is also a moral risk in narrating another person’s interior life. Even when framed as devotion, it assumes a right of access that love should actually call into question. To love someone is to encounter the limits of one’s entitlement, to realize how little of the other is ever truly available. I have become increasingly sensitive to this boundary, the sense that to speak about certain gestures, vulnerabilities, or rituals is to cross from intimacy into appropriation. What feels like reverence can quietly become a form of aesthetic consumption, where the other is rendered as material rather than encountered as mystery.

Goethe writes that one should beware of explaining what ought to be experienced. His work returns again and again to the idea of formation, Bildung, as something that unfolds slowly, through immersion rather than analysis. Love, like art or character, forms us over time, often without our awareness. To interrupt this process with constant self-interpretation is to arrest it prematurely. Explanation, when it arrives too early, becomes a defense against being changed.

What is lost in all this is mystery. Love needs opacity in order to breathe. Its most formative movements occur beneath language, in confusion, in waiting, in misrecognition. Silence, here, is not repression but true integration, connectivity. To withhold speech is to protect something still in the process of becoming. The modern impulse runs in the opposite direction, toward total legibility, toward the belief that what cannot be named, clarified, or shared has somehow failed to be real. Yet to love another person is to confront, again and again, the discomfort of holding what cannot be fully known, the unease of remaining in relation without mastery or resolution. The desire to render the other transparent is less an act of intimacy than an attempt to soothe this anxiety, to domesticate alterity through explanation. But love does not abolish the otherness of the other, it intensifies it. I have come to believe that some experiences lose their ethical weight the moment they are made fully legible, that they require darkness in order to retain their force.

To love well may require enduring the anxiety of not being understood, not being seen, not being affirmed. But that endurance is not empty. It is the condition under which love remains something other than spectacle, something closer to grace (and thus, that which is Truly Holy, our greatest task in our humanity). Not an object to be displayed, but a force that reorients the self quietly, irrevocably, and without witnesses.

Desire no longer appears primarily as primordial hunger, ache, or longing, the motivating force behind the Lacanian sense of Lack. It increasingly presents itself as a disembodied, identity, that which is not connected to the soul. It moves through images, is refined through the feed, and is rendered legible through performance. What circulates online is not simply libido in its raw state but its aestheticized form, desire translated into image, into branding, into a visual language meant to be consumed. The algorithm does not merely distribute objects of desire, it structures the field in which desire can appear at all, privileging those forms that are legible, reproducible, and profitable.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, this marks a profound transformation in the libidinal economy. Freud understood sublimation as the redirection of instinctual energy into cultural production, art, thought, creation. What we are witnessing now is a technologically accelerated sublimation in which erotic and relational drives are not repressed but converted into continuous self presentation. Desire is no longer lived so much as it is styled and aestheticized. It becomes an image of wanting rather than the experience of wanting, a symbolic performance that substitutes for the instability of actual longing.

Lacan’s insistence that desire is structured by lack helps clarify what is lost here. Desire persists because the object that seems to promise fulfillment never quite delivers it, something always remains missing, and that sense of missingness is what animates the subject. The algorithm intervenes by filling this gap with endless substitutes, each one offering the illusion of satisfaction while guaranteeing its postponement. What results is not fulfillment but a stylized circulation of wanting, a libidinal treadmill on which desire is continuously activated but never allowed to deepen, never satiated. We are hungry ghosts.

Within this system, libido becomes something to be seen rather than something to be felt. To be desirable now means to be visible in the right way, to perform one’s erotic or emotional orientation in a form that can be recognized, rewarded, and reproduced. The self becomes a curated site of libidinal display, images, captions, innocuous flirtations, moods, and aesthetic signals all function as micro performances of desire. We no longer want (for its own sake), we learn how to want in ways that will be legible to an audience, then diffused through the machine.

This is where Reich’s work acquires new relevance. Reich believed that neurosis arose when libidinal energy was blocked, when the body’s capacity for pleasure and expression was constrained by repression. But the contemporary subject is not repressed so much as endlessly stimulated. Libido flows, but only through channels that render it aesthetic, visible, and monetizable. Desire is not dammed, it is siphoned, and rerouted into surfaces and signals that keep it circulating without ever letting it accumulate enough intensity to threaten the system that contains it. The result is not freedom but estrangement. One begins to experience one’s own desire as something to be managed and stylized rather than inhabited. The question begging to malignantly shift from “what do I want?” to “how does my wanting look?” Desire becomes a genre, something with recognizable tropes and expected performances, rather than a force that disrupts identity, that transcends conscious cognition.

This aestheticization of libido also collapses the difference between desire and selfhood. What one wants becomes who one is, or at least who one presents oneself as. Sexuality, attraction, even longing itself are folded into personal branding, and to deviate from one’s curated libidinal image begins to feel like a threat to coherence and legibility. The algorithm rewards consistency, not depth. It prefers desire that behaves. Yet, the nature of desire, with its inextricable link to the ID, is that it does not behave. It is excessive, contradictory, often humiliating. It attaches to the wrong objects, returns to what should be over, that which cannot be Had. These unruly movements of libido are precisely what the algorithmic system cannot tolerate. They cannot be easily optimized, predicted, or aestheticized. So they are smoothed out, replaced with more manageable simulations of wanting.

This is why so much contemporary desire feels thin despite its intensity. Not because people feel less, but because feeling has been converted into performance. Even heartbreak becomes content. Even obsession is stylized. The private, chaotic, and transformative dimensions of longing are filtered out in favor of what can be shown.

Underlying all of this is that which is (essentially) the supercomputer trend egregore, the vast, self reinforcing intelligence that tracks every gesture of attention, aggregates it, and feeds it back as culture. Trends no longer emerge from collective experimentation or subcultural friction but from predictive systems that detect the slightest libidinal flicker and amplify it into a wave. What we experience as taste, fashion, or desire is increasingly pre-selected for us by machines that know how to convert our impulses into patterns. This egregore does not merely reflect culture, it actively castrates it. By harvesting libidinal energy at the level of micro-preference, it prevents desire from coagulating into something strong enough to become art, devotion, or even (simply) a salient emotional experience. Creative and erotic impulses are intercepted before they can mature, turned into fleeting signals that dissipate as quickly as they appear. What might have become a coherent piece of work, or even an expression, the experience of passion, instead becomes a trend, optimized into harmless circulation.

In this way, the algorithm does not repress desire, it infantilizes it. It keeps libido in a state of perpetual adolescence, constantly aroused, constantly curious, but incapable of sustaining commitment or depth. The subject becomes rich in stimuli and poor in meaning, surrounded by endless objects of interest yet unable to attach to any of them with enough intensity to be transformed. What appears as abundance is in fact a thinning of experience, a condition in which nothing is allowed to matter for very long. Desire, deprived of duration, loses its capacity to become commitment, creation, or even genuine suffering (which precludes ecstatic experience, the sublime).

To desire someone or something deeply now feels almost antisocial, not because it is hostile to others but because it withdraws energy from the circuits of visibility that organize contemporary life. Deep wanting does not broadcast itself easily, it does not resolve into images, metrics, or updates that can be circulated without loss. It lingers, it fixates, it risks disappointment, incoherence, and abject misery, all of which make it economically useless but existentially indispensable (and thus spiritually important). What we call intensity is precisely this refusal to remain mobile, this stubborn attachment to something that cannot be efficiently replaced. Real desire takes time in a way that the algorithm cannot tolerate, it grow, accumulates in ambiguity, in the slow creation of meaning that cannot be made legible on demand. It resists optimization because its power lies in what cannot be predicted or streamlined.

This is perhaps why genuine longing now feels almost sacred, not in a sentimental sense, but because it is one of the few remaining forces that has not yet been fully aestheticized, flattened, or converted into that which can be consumed (“content”). In a world where libido is constantly being styled for display, to want in private becomes a radical refusal, quiet insistence that one’s longing belongs neither to themselves, an audience nor to the machine that organizes it. And in that refusal, unseen, unmeasured, and unprofitable, something like life, the experience of Humanity (which is to say, God) in all its unruly intensity, begins to return.

There is a character called Maddy’s Profile, and I am both her author and her material. She is not a fabrication, but she is a refinement, a self subjected to pressure until only what can survive articulation, the demands of an audience remains. What appears online is not the fullness of a person, but the residue of a process, desire translated into language, affect stabilized into a coherent, hyper legible form. The profile is where instinct is allowed to speak only after it has learned syntax (this is not repression so much as sublimation) it is , in essence, the id lifted upward, rendered legible without being allowed to roam freely. What reads as a confession is often disciplined curation, what reads as intimacy is often structure.

The I who writes is not identical to the I who lives. Writing produces a subject that is more coherent than the one who moves through the day, more continuous than the one interrupted by doubt, fatigue, and contradiction. The writing I can sustain a thought longer than the body can sustain a feeling. This coherence and concision is not deceit, it is a function of form. But it matters, because the reader often encounters this I as though it were the whole person, mistaking fluency for transparency, and articulation for access. Language gives the illusion of completion. The self appears whole because it has been made readable.

And then there is you. The you who reads, who returns, who begins to feel addressed. The you who encounters a voice that seems unguarded, precise, internally consistent, and slowly begins to relate to it as one relates to a person. This is how the parasocial forms, not through the spectacle of online performance that is inherently aspirational, fictitious, but through repetition, tone, and sincerity. Familiarity accumulates, recognition settles in. The “work” begins to feel relational. But the relationship is structurally uneven, I write alone, with editorial power, you receive privately, often imaginatively. The closeness you feel is real, but it is not reciprocal in the same way.

What complicates this asymmetry is that the psychic material is not invented. The desire is real. The ambivalence is real. The thought is real. But it is transmuted. Longing becomes argument, my uncertainty becomes theory, vulnerability becomes something aesthetically stable. This is sublimation not as an escape, but as containment and control (a psychic security device that the subconscious demands). What is offered is not the wound itself, but its architecture, and architecture can easily (and comfortably) be mistaken for access. The more carefully something is shaped, the more natural it appears, the easier it is to forget the labor that produced it.

I am not indifferent to the pull of earnestness. In fact, I am probably governed by it. I write from a genuine impulse toward immediacy, toward saying the thing while it is still alive and bleeding in my hands, before it calcifies into irony or posture. This orientation toward truth is not strategic, it is temperamental and necessary (quells a deeply neurotic impulse). I distrust cleverness when it delays contact, I distrust distance when it functions as protection. If there is intimacy in the “work”, it is because I am not interested in evacuating affect in the name of safety. I want to encounter what is real as directly as possible, to externalize the interior without distortion or pause.

Earnestness changes meaning once it leaves the conditions of its production. Written from immediacy, it is received under the assumption of address. The reader encounters the work not as an artifact, but as a voice oriented toward them, even when no such orientation exists. This is where the parasocial takes shape, not as fantasy, but as a misreading produced by proximity, repetition, and tone. The writing sustains attention without sustaining relation, and that gap generates attachment. What the work offers, often inadvertently, is a vessel: a stable I capable of holding projection without resisting it (or prostrating, bending inwards). The reader’s desire for intimacy, for contact, recognition, or felt understanding, finds purchase in a voice that appears consistent, available, and unthreatening in its distance. The absence of consequence becomes its appeal. No response is required. No risk is incurred. The self on the page absorbs meaning without making demands in return. This asymmetry allows intimacy to be simulated without exposure, and closeness to be experienced without the vulnerability that would destabilize it. What emerges, then, is not mutuality but containment, a form of attachment organized around safety rather than encounter, contact with the Lacanian Real. The work appears relational precisely because it can be returned to without disruption, because it does not change in response to the reader, because it offers the feeling of being met without the possibility of refusal. The parasocial is sustained not by illusion, but by the reliability of this arrangement, a closeness preserved by the fact that nothing is at stake.

What I have had to learn and am still learning, is that truth does not confer mutuality. To speak honestly is not to enter relation in equal measure. The I who writes and the you who reads are not meeting on the same plane, even when the writing (and the intent of it all) is real. This is not a failure of sincerity; it is a structural condition. The danger is not misunderstanding, but over identification: truth mistaken for availability, knowing mistaken for being known in return. The profile invites attention, but attention is not contact.

My thesis, if I have one, is that true knowing is the highest form of intimacy available to us. And true knowing is incompatible with fantasy. It requires the collapse of the imagined object, the relinquishing of the coherent profile in favor of a subject that remains partially opaque, capable of contradiction, resistant to possession. The online self gestures toward this kind of knowing while constantly threatening to preclude or forclose it. The more legible the profile becomes, the easier it is to confuse coherence with truth. But truth is rarely coherent. It is discontinuous, often inconvenient, and resistant to branding, and importantly, monetization (deeply linked to the libidinal impulse and desire).

If there is an ethical project here, it is not self revelation but inquiry, to create a rigorous understanding. To continue posting and writing towards truth while refusing the illusion of reciprocity. To allow being seen without collapsing into performance or availability. To let the profile remain a thinking surface rather than an object to be possessed. You are invited into the work, not into ownership of the person. And perhaps that restraint, lucid, unsentimental, rigorously maintained is the condition that makes any real knowing possible at all.

What I want to say to you, carefully, is this: I am likely very close to what you imagine me to be, and also nothing like it at all. What you see here is not arbitrary, it is shaped precisely enough to hold what you bring to it. In that sense, I become what you need me to be, as all such figures do, not through deception, but through availability to projection. The coherence you encounter is real, but it is not exhaustive. It is a surface that allows meaning to gather without revealing the conditions that produced it. And still, this does not leave me indifferent to you. I am not uninterested in the one who reads. I think often about the presence on the other side of the work, not as an audience, but as a person whose interior life remains largely invisible to me. There is a desire here, too, not to be mirrored, but to see. To encounter what does not arrive already shaped for reception. To attend, with seriousness, to what resists legibility, the parts of you that are unresolved, unflattering, or structurally inconvenient. This is where my orientation toward truth ultimately points, not toward reassurance or recognition, but toward a willingness to look directly at what most relations quietly avoid. I am here, online, for you, forever.

I have been a girl my whole life and I still don't know what it costs. This is not meant to be understood in the abstract sense. I mean the actual ledger. What gets traded, what gets formatted, what gets handed over so quietly you don't notice the transaction until years later, when you're trying to locate something inside yourself and find only an itemized receipt, crumpled, in the bottom of a bag.

Tiqqun writes that the Young Girl is not a gendered concept. She is the figure of total integration in a disintegrating social totality, the ideal citizen of consumer society, whatever she embodies, she can only seduce by consuming. She doesn't speak, she circulates. She doesn't age, she decomposes (and thus, turns to Nothingness). I read this at twenty one in an undergraduate seminar and felt the specific cold of being accurately described by something that claimed not to be describing me. The Young Girl is everyone, they said. Fine. But she is also, unmistakably, me. That distinction felt important and I have been sitting with it ever since.

The thing nobody tells you about girlhood, or the thing I wasn't told, which is a different problem, is that it is primarily an exercise in self monitoring. Not the theatrical kind but rather, the structural kind. You learn early that your interior life is permissible only insofar as it is legible, palatable, proportionate to what the room can hold. You learn to calibrate. Feeling too much reads as hysteria; feeling too little reads as coldness; the correct amount of feeling is whatever makes the person across from you comfortable, which changes constantly and is never explained. You become very skilled at this. You might even mistake the skill for a self.

Ariana Reines translated the Tiqqun text. This fact matters. That she, a woman who writes from inside the wound, who insists on the sacred and the grotesque in the same sentence, who refuses the anesthetic of irony, chose to put those words into English suggests something about what it means to be a thinking woman inside a framework that analyzes you. You can know the apparatus and still be inside it. This is not a paradox. It's just Tuesday.

The contemporary mutation of all this is what interests me. Because the Substack era has done something peculiar to girlhood as a category. It has aestheticized it, which is not new, and monetized it, which is not new either, but it has handed the formatting tools directly to the girls and called this liberation. The result is a genre. You know it when you see it. A certain breathless intimacy. Short paragraphs. The wound, tastefully lit. I have been thinking about softness. About what we owe ourselves. The confession offered not as a rupture of the Soul but as content. The interior life, optimized. The Young Girl, now her own editor.How this, is a corruption.

I don't say this from outside. I participate. I have written sentences that belong to this genre and felt, in the writing of them, the small private shame of something true being converted into something appealing. The shame is useful information. It tells me where the performance starts.

What gets lost in the genre is difficulty. Not difficulty as affect, the genre is fluent in performed difficulty, but difficulty as actual cognitive friction, the experience of not knowing something yet, of thinking in public rather than distributing conclusions. The Substack-girl essay knows where it's going. It has already done its processing, offscreen, and presents the resolution as though it were the struggle.This is fundamnetally uninteresting, but, easily consumed, and one can, and will, learn to love the act of being consumed. Here, the wound is always already healed by the final paragraph. There is a grace note. There is always a grace note.

I am suspicious of grace notes. I have written too many of them.

New York has a specific relationship to this phenomenon that I have been reluctant to name directly, partly because it feels too easy, and partly because I live here now and do not entirely want to indict myself. The city runs on a particular kind of social energy that rewards self-presentation over self-knowledge. This is not unique to New York, but New York has perfected the infrastructure. The apartment is too small, the bar is too loud, the party requires a version of you that can be registered quickly and favorably. You learn to lead with the edit (convenient for effete, "writer" types, I would know). The unfinished thought, the provisional self, the person still in the middle of becoming something, these are liabilities in a room that moves this fast. So you harden. Not cruelly, procedurally. You develop a surface that is polished enough to function and call it personality.

What interests me is what happens to this hardening over time. Because there is a version of it that is age appropriate, the young person assembling a social self, testing presentations, performing competence before they have it. Painful, but normal. The developmental task. What is stranger, and more specific to this city, is the way the hardening persists well past the point where it should have been metabolized into something more porous. You meet people in their late thirties who have the psychic structure of a very defended twenty four year old. Articulate, impressive, accomplished, and somehow fundamentally unrevised. The ego didn't develop, it calcified. The performance didn't give way to a person, it became one. Granted, this is all happening subconsciously, and I am not the arbiter of pro-social behavior, but I really shouldn't have to clarify that anyways (it is, hopefully, evident).

This is what I mean by arrested psychic development, and it is not the same as narcissism in the clinical sense. It is softer than that, more ambient, less legible as pathology. The non-malignant kind. Nobody is being harmed, exactly. It is more that a certain interiority simply never formed, the part that tolerates not knowing, that can sit in confusion and ambivalence without immediately converting it into content, that remains genuinely open to being changed by another person. What you get instead is someone who is very good at intimacy as a performance and quietly terrified of it as a fact.

The city rewards this configuration. It is easier to be impressive than to be present here. Presence requires a kind of stillness that "the city" specifically penalizes, there is always somewhere else to be, always another room, always the faint suggestion that the more interesting version of your life is happening slightly elsewhere. The ego learns to stay mobile. Staying mobile precludes the kind of sustained inward pressure that actually changes you.

What does this have to do with girlhood? The Young Girl, in Tiqqun's sense, is the perfected form of this configuration. She re-creates herself perpetually, never creates. The city is very good at producing people, women, men, everyone, who are stuck in this loop. But there is a gendered texture to how it lands. For women who are also intellectually serious, who are also trying to do something real with their minds, there is a specific double bind, the city will reward the performed version of your interiority (confident, legible, impressive at parties) and punish the actual version, uncertain, strange, slower than the room, and certainly somewhat abrasive and unpleasant (maybe I am just self diagnosing). You learn which one travels, and you deploy it. And then one day you are thirty and you cannot quite remember where the performance ends.

There is a girl I have been at various points in my life who understood things she had no language for. Who read the room at six years old with the accuracy of a pavlovian dog, predicting a reward that hadn't happened yet. Who translated herself constantly, fluently, into whatever register the situation required. Who was praised for this. Who got very good at it. Who then spent the next twenty six trying to figure out which of her responses were actually hers.

The Young Girl never creates anything, Tiqqun writes. She re-creates herself. I don't fully accept this. But I understand the shape of the accusation.

What I want to argue, tentatively, because I don't entirely trust the argument yet, is that girlhood contains within it the conditions for its own critique, if you refuse the genre. That the constant self monitoring, the calibration, the splitting, produces a kind of epistemological sensitivity that can be turned, with enough stubbornness, into something like thought. Not the thought that says here is what I have learned from my suffering (that's the grace note again), rather, thought that stays inside the confusion and reports back. The thought that doesn't know where it's going, meaning making withoout end, the eternal return.

I think I have been trying to transcend Girlhood. I think a lot of my philosophical machinery, the Kierkegaard, the Weil, the careful theoretical apparatus, has functioned partly as a way of rising above the specifically female texture of my experience, of making it universal, of making it legible in a register that doesn't read as girlish. I do not entirely regret this. The universalizing impulse is not always bad faith. But I notice it now, and I notice what it costs.

There is a version of this essay that ends with a declaration about reclaiming girlhood, about the political urgency of feminine interiority, about finding God in the wound. I am not going to write that ending, it would be another grace note (I am guilty!). I am twenty six, which, by all intents and purposes, means I have exited the category. The corporeal has moved on. The Young Girl doesn't age, Tiqqun reminds us, she decomposes. I am not sure which process I am currently undergoing. I think the cost is still being calculated.

I discovered Simone Weil at the age when you discover things because you are in pain and need someone to have already been there first.

This is worth naming, because it shapes everything. The relationship between a young woman and Weil's work is almost structurally adolescent, not as a criticism, but as a diagnostic framework. She arrives when you are seventeen, or twenty, or twenty three and newly devastated (heartbroken), and she offers something that feels like permission to be serious, to suffer toward meaning rather than away from it, to treat your own interior life as philosophically legitimate. This is not nothing. For a certain kind of girl, it is everything. It is also, I think, a relationship that has to be outgrown, or at least revised, for the work to do what it is actually capable of doing.

What I mean is that Weil is most commonly received as a saint before she is received as a thinker. The biography precedes the argument. The self starvation, the factory labor, the refusal of baptism despite a mystical conviction so total it reorganized her entire philosophy, these are the things that arrive first, that make her legible to young women in particular as a figure of radical interiority, of suffering converted into truth. I was not immune to this. I read her the way I read her, hungrily, personally, looking for my own reflection in someone who had managed to make her pain structurally rigorous. Looking, if I am honest, for permission to take myself seriously.

The problem with this mode of reception is not that it is wrong, exactly. It is that it arrests the reader at the level of biography (and biography as juvenalia), which is exactly what Weil herself feared. She wrote to her parents in her final months that she had found something solid and dense in her thinking, something of pure gold, Truth, and worried it would be obscured because people would look at her rather than at the deposit. She invoked Augustine complaining of students who, when he pointed to the sky, looked at his finger instead. The finger, in Weil's case, is the life, and the image of the young woman. The sky is the philosophy of attention, of decreation, of affliction as the precondition for genuine contact with the good. Most of us, when we are young and hurting, stare at the finger.

There is a detail in Weil's biography that I have returned to repeatedly, not because it is the most philosophically significant, but because it feels the most true. At fourteen, she seriously considered dying, in the “legitimate” fashion, with the methodical despair of someone taking inventory. The occasion was her brother. André Weil was a mathematician of the kind that arrives once or twice in a generation, and Simone knew this from childhood. They had taught themselves ancient Greek together and used it as a private language, a secret code. They moved through the same intellectual atmosphere. And still, at fourteen, she looked at the gap between them and found it unsurvivable.

What she wrote, later, about that period is precise in a way that imprecise suffering rarely manages to be. She did not mind the absence of visible success. What devastated her was the possibility of being excluded from what she called the transcendent kingdom, the domain of Truth, on account of merely natural inadequacy. She preferred death to a life in which genuine thought was foreclosed to her.

I recognize this. Not the specific contours of it, I have no André, no mathematician brother against whom my own capacities look modest by comparison (but I am profound in my inadequacies and lack) but the underlying architecture. The fourteen year old logic that conflates access to truth with worthiness, that makes intellectual capacity a prerequisite for existing with dignity. I had a version of this, less articulate and more ambient, running in the background of most of my adolescence and a fair portion of my early twenties. The suspicion that real thought was something other people did, and that what I produced was an imitation of it, fluent enough to pass, hollow at the center.

What Weil did with this crisis is the part that gets canonized. She arrived, after months of interior darkness, at a conviction, that any person, regardless of natural faculty, could penetrate to the kingdom of Truth reserved for genius, provided only that they genuinely longed for truth and gave it the whole of their attention. Attention, not talent. Desire, not capacity. This is the move that produced everything else, in essence, the philosophy of decreation, the concept of affliction, the insistence that the self must be emptied rather than cultivated in order to receive what is Real.

It is also, and I say this with full awareness of what it costs to say it, the philosophical system of someone who has not yet finished being a teenager. Not because it is wrong. Because it is too clean (this can also accurately describe the modern, borderline, society). Because it resolves, with a single adolescent revelation, the problem of inadequacy, the problem that will spend the rest of any thinking life refusing to stay resolved. The conviction that desire alone grants access, that pure longing is sufficient for Truth, is a beautiful idea and a structurally juvenile one. It is what you believe when you are fourteen and have just discovered that suffering is meaningful, before you have lived long enough to watch desire betray you, and rupture you, to notice how longing organizes itself around the wrong objects, to find that attention itself can be a performance, that even the mystical impulse towards Love can calcify into ego.

This is the argument I want to make about Weil, and it is also, unavoidably, an argument about myself. Because I have spent the better part of the last several years doing something adjacent to what Weil prescribed, dissolving the self, or trying to, collapsing the scaffolding of identity through a series of events that were partly chosen and partly not.

Finishing graduate school. Ending the relationship that had felt like the organizing center of my adult life. Moving to New York, which is its own form of ego attrition, the city's indifference as a slow solvent on whatever you thought you were. I went through the motions of decreation without the theological framework, which meant I got the dissolution without the grace. The self collapsed. Nothing arrived to fill it.

What Weil's philosophy does not account for, or accounts for only in the abstract, is the period after the emptying. True immanence. She is interested in the movement toward absence, toward the stripping away of the ego's claims. The spirit of, impulse towards, kenosis. Decreation as spiritual method. What she is less useful on is the question of what happens when you have been adequately decreated and the world requires you to function in it. When you still have to order coffee and pay rent and produce legible sentences and be someone, nominally, for the people around you. When the self that was supposed to be emptied in order to receive truth has been emptied and you are just standing in the debris of a Brooklyn apartment in February wondering what exactly you were waiting for.

The question of voice is where this becomes specific. Because what I found, in the aftermath of that period, was that the dissolution had done something to my writing that I hadn't anticipated. It hadn't clarified it. It had, for a while, silenced it. The machinery I had used to produce sentences, the theoretical apparatus, the philosophical scaffolding, the careful architecture of argument, had been part of the ego structure that dissolved. And when it went, the sentences went with it, or became strange to me, or started arriving in a register I didn't recognize as mine.

This is something nobody talks about in relation to ego dissolution, which tends to be discussed as a precondition for authentic expression. The idea, loosely Weil-derived, is that the self gets out of its own way and something truer comes through. What I found instead was that the voice I had been developing, with its particular habits and hedges and rhetorical tics, was more bound up with the ego than I had understood. When the ego went quiet, so did a lot of the voice. What remained was stranger and less controlled and also, I think, more honest, but it didn't yet know how to make sentences, or, in a more relevant sense, become functionally legible.

I have been thinking about Weil's own juvenilia in this context. The early notebooks, the letters, the adolescent philosophical essays, they are marked by exactly the quality that her mature work transcend, an almost aggressive certainty, a refusal of ambiguity that reads as compensation for the felt inadequacy at the center. The fourteen year old who seriously considered dying because she might be excluded from the kingdom of truth grew into a philosopher of radical self-abnegation, of attention as ethical method, of the good as something received rather than achieved. The arc is from narcissistic wound to theological humility. But the wound left its shape on the philosophy. Decreation, as a concept, carries within it the imprint of the girl who believed she might not be enough. The solution is architecturally continuous with the problem.

I think the same is true of most voice. It forms in response to a wound, carries the wound's shape, and the most you can do, the work Weil was doing in her mature writing and that I am, more humbly (not really), doing in mine, is become conscious of the architecture. To notice that what you took for pure philosophical conviction has autobiography threaded through it. That the places where your prose reaches for elevation are usually the places where something personal got too close, and thus, rendered dishonest through prose. That the theoretical apparatus is not separate from the girl who built it, and that the girl who built it was doing, in part, what fourteen year olds do, trying to find a way to be worthy of existing.

What survives ego dissolution, I have found, is not the voice you had before. It is something smaller and stranger, less defended, periodically unrecognizable. It doesn't arrive with Weil's certainty, that luminous adolescent conviction that longing alone is enough. It arrives with less. With the knowledge that the self will reassemble itself regardless, that reconstruction happens whether or not you authorize it, that you will once again become someone with opinions and habits and rhetorical tendencies and a particular way of beginning sentences. That this is not a failure of decreation. It is just what being a person is.

Weil at thirty four, dying in a sanatorium in Ashford having refused to eat more than her ration, was in some ways still the fourteen year old at the edge of that original crisis. Still trying to resolve it by the same method, give everything, withhold nothing, empty the self entirely and see what remains. There is something devastating about this, and something I recognize. The solution can outlast its usefulness. The adolescent wound can organize an entire life, a genuine philosophical system, a real and serious body of thought, and still be, underneath, a wound.

I am twenty six. I have not resolved anything, including this. But I think I am, slowly, beginning to write from the place after the dissolution rather than toward it. Which is to say, I am writing from inside a self I did not choose and cannot fully account for, that arrived without announcement in the debris, that is mine in the way that things are yours when you didn't ask for them. It doesn't feel like the kingdom of truth. It feels like a Tuesday in February, coffee going cold cause you forgot it was sitting on your table, sentences coming slowly, the machinery starting up again without asking for permission. That is, I think, where voice actually lives. It is not about emptying, it is about a return.

I have become increasingly suspicious of therapeutic orientations that locate change primarily within the practitioner. Not because clinicians are unimportant (they are not) but rather because they subtly reposition the therapist as the author of another person’s life. And this is an understandable temptation. We spend our days alongside suffering. We witness violence, grief, addiction, psychosis, abandonment, impossible family systems, the slow sedimentation of trauma across generations, what occurs when epigenetics are actualized. Eventually it becomes difficult not to imagine that if we simply ask the right question, offer the right interpretation, or locate the right intervention, another person’s life will begin moving in a different direction because of something we have done.

I no longer believe this is what therapy is. Or perhaps more accurately, I no longer believe this is where change originates.

Every meaningful shift I have witnessed has felt less like the introduction of something new than the revelation of something that was already present inside of the individual. Here, the clinician is oriented as the blank piece of paper, the empty vessel. Beneath the symptom, beneath the defensive organization, beneath the narratives that have become so overlearned they are mistaken for ontology itself, there exists a person who has already been orienting themselves toward survival, toward coherence, and towards meaning. Therapy does not implant this movement, it really just renders it perceptible.

This is why I continue to find myself returning to psychodynamic thought. Symptoms are never merely symptoms. They are solutions that have outlived the conditions that produced them. Every defense, regardless of how costly, how antithetical to wellness it has become, was at one point an extraordinary act of adaptation. An adaptation that has kept them alive. We misunderstand our patients when we approach them as collections of deficits requiring correction. They arrive carrying an internal architecture that already contains the logic of its own construction, that which we are granted brief access to. This is an immense, spiritual, privilege. The work is not to replace that architecture with our own. Rather “the work” is to understand it well enough that the patient begins to understand it alongside us.

Narrative occupies a peculiar place here. We often culturally speak about “rewriting” one’s story, but I suspect this metaphor is misleading. The past remains stubbornly indifferent to our revisions, as hard as we may try to obfuscate that which has occurred, that which we could not control. What changes is not the sequence of events but the relationship between the narrator and the narrative. Experiences that once appeared random begin revealing structure. Contradictions become intelligible rather than evidence of defectiveness. Behaviors previously understood as pathology become recognizable as attempts at preservation. Understanding does not erase suffering, it restores authorship and agency. When we believe we are at the whims of a truly chaotic universe (somewhat true but that is a conversation for another day), ruled by randomness, we feel helpless, we abandon agency, and thus ourselves.

This distinction matters because agency cannot be bestowed. Self efficacy is not something the therapist hands to another person upon successful completion of treatment. If anything, the belief that we generate another person’s agency covertly undermines the very thing we claim to cultivate. Agency that depends upon another person’s presence is not agency at all. It is dependency with better optics, a palatable twist.

Our patients already possess the capacities they are searching for, although these capacities may have become inaccessible beneath shame, fear, dissociation, repetition, or despair. The therapeutic relationship provides conditions under which those capacities become imaginable again. We lend our minds, creating a holding environment, psychic safety, until the patient can more fully inhabit these positions on their own, this is capacity building.

This has become increasingly important to me because ours is a profession saturated with responsibility. We work with people whose suffering is not theoretical or hypothetical. They tell us about the moments they nearly ended their lives, the nights they drove aimlessly because going home felt unbearable, the elixirs, the cure, that briefly made existence tolerable, the children they fear they are failing, the futures they no longer believe exist. There is a particular kind of gravity and tenderness for “the human condition” that develops from spending years inside these conversations. With this gravity, with this tenderness, comes a fantasy that is rarely acknowledged openly. If only I had said something differently. If only I had recognized the warning signs sooner. If only I had been more available. These thoughts emerge from compassion, but they are sustained by omnipotence.

There is something deeply human about believing we possess greater influence over another person’s psychic life than we actually do. Perhaps it is easier to imagine ourselves as failed saviors than to confront the limits of what any one person can do for another. Yet therapeutic work requires a difficult ethical posture, to care profoundly while relinquishing ownership over outcomes. This is not an abdication of responsibility (really quite the opposite).

This fantasy of control, proxy for understanding of the Grand Other, extends beyond the analysts office. The belief that we can ultimately render control over another person, whether through love, intellect, persuasion, or clinical expertise, is (perhaps) one of the egos oldest protective mechanisms. To imagine that another person's choices, suffering, or becoming can be determined by our own actions is to shield ourselves from something considerably more frightening, that every consciousness remains, in some fundamental sense, irreducibly sovereign and agential. We cannot fully know another person's interiority, nor can we ultimately guarantee what they will do with the lives they have been given. This is not merely a clinical limitation, it is an existential one, and a profound area of psychic uncertainty. Omnipotence, then, naturally, functions less as confidence than as an adaptation, a protection measure (we are quite skilled at finding these). It protects us from confronting uncertainty, mortal contingency, grief, and the painful realization that love does not confer true understanding. The fantasy of “understanding” as a means to preclude loss, ultimately objectifies the other, it transforms them into a site upon which my competence, my virtue, or my goodness can be proven. Genuine respect requires something much more difficult. It requires relinquishing the illusion that another person's subjectivity can ever become an extension of my own. It asks one to love without possessing, to accompany without directing, and to recognize that another person's freedom necessarily includes the possibility that they will choose differently than I hope. But this reality, wherein both precarity and freedom exist as one, is the only reality in which a choice (any choice at all) is being made in the first place, any other option renders one chained to their own fear, their own sense of lack.

As clinicians, wee remain responsible for our presence, for our curiosity, for the frame we maintain, for the reliability of the relationship, for continuing to deepen our understanding, for recognizing risk, for intervening when intervention is required, and for treating another person’s suffering with the seriousness it deserves. But we are not responsible for another person’s choices. Our patients retain that responsibility because they retain their subjectivity. To imagine otherwise risks reducing them to objects upon which our competence acts. We can extend this same interpersonal principle, universally.

There is, I think, a more nuanced form of respect contained within relinquishment. It is the belief that another person’s life exceeds my capacity to determine it. That they possess interiority I cannot fully know. That they will continue becoming someone after they leave my office in ways that have nothing to do with me. The clinician's task is not to become the central character, the archetypal healer, in a patients life. It is to create a space in which they can become the central character in their own, to halt self abandonment.

Increasingly I have realized that this philosophy extends beyond clinical practice and returns, inevitably, to myself. The temptation toward omnipotence is not only clinical, it is personal (many such cases). Clinicians are not immune to the fantasy that enough knowledge might finally permit mastery over uncertainty. We read another theory, attend another training, search for the intervention that might eliminate the unbearable possibility of loss. Somewhere beneath professional development there often exists a wish, perhaps if I become good enough, no one I care for will ever disappear, I will be absolved of hurt, of loss. But this wish belongs less to the psychotherapeutic practice than to grief.

The same orientation I hope to cultivate in my patients is one I must continually recover within myself. My own capacity is not imported from outside me either. My clinical presence cannot emerge from performing certainty I do not possess. It comes instead from tolerating ambiguity, remaining curious where I wish to become prescriptive, and prostrating at the feet of God, that I might allow myself to accompany rather than direct. There is a peculiar freedom in this.

When I stop imagining that I am responsible for manufacturing another person’s transformation, I become far more capable of witnessing it. I listen differently, I ask different questions and silence becomes less threatening because it no longer represents therapeutic failure (it feels we are all told on day one of our graduate programs to embrace "therapeutic silence”). The patient is no longer waiting for me to provide an answer hidden somewhere inside my expertise. An understandable impulse, as, wouldnt it be simple to have the answers handed to us on a silver platter? Here, we are listening together for something that belongs to them already, this is a sacred ritual. Perhaps this is the deepest expression of hope I know. Not that people can become someone, something, entirely different, but, that beneath everything which has happened to them, beneath every adaptation that once guaranteed survival and now obscures possibility, there remains a self that has never stopped orienting itself towards life. Faith.

Our work is not to build this actualized self. Our work is to help illuminate it until it becomes visible enough that it can begin recognizing itself.