Why Me and Why the Blog?

Audio Version

In my teens, I suffered from a depression that sprouted the seeds of an individual. My beliefs are who I am, but since my beliefs were mostly composed of the platitudes of others and nothing of my own creation, I saw myself as nonexistent and without articulate value. I was a human mirror with a dark and empty core. Using the blunt end of a budding rationale, I couldn’t help from shattering myself down to the very core hoping to rebuild someone with incomparable value. However, if I wish to become a valuable person, I must learn what one is.

If there is anything I’ve learned from the countless hero stories told through the ages, heroes only become such at the end of their journey. Before that is naivety, exile, and lonesome strife. I progressively got the notion that the greatest villains are always those who first believed themselves to be a hero. I found it to be a rather terrifying notion because—like many others—I fantasized my place on this Earth to be something everyone looked up to. We are built to desire social value, but like all desires, they are most quickly attained at the expense of someone else. Still with hopes to be socially valuable, I had to find a way to do so at a minimal expense of others. In deciding my path, I should first articulate the setting someone my age finds himself in.

It is scientifically concurrent the minimal role parents play on adolescent development compared to extraneous variables. While blessed with exceptional parents, I still had a world to step foot into. As adolescents, we begin to take advantage of our rationale and choose from who and what we learn our wisdom. Contrary to what some may think, rationality isn’t our strong suit and a forthright understanding of the world isn’t something an individual should consider psychologically plausible. We are not built to introduce ourselves to the world. The world introduces itself to us, like a job fair at a high school. Unlike those before us, we now have the internet. It is without question that internet access is a privilege like none other and us youth have free access to it all during our ideological development. With the internet, the entire world and its introductions are on the shelf. As any marketer knows, it is not us who grabs the product off the shelf, it is the product that grabs us. We as privileged youth find ourselves first in the world’s ideological market, naively susceptible to grabbing that which first grabs our attention. Too often—and extremely so for us privileged by internet access—we end up swearing loyalty to ideologies that capitalize on our impulsivity to be a hero, and our biological proclivities have no problem leading the impulsive hero into becoming the destructive villain. I am, without question, susceptible to that. Becoming such is my greatest fear. After all, such destruction would first manifest to those closest to me, and I do not wish for that to happen. 

I knew one thing for sure: avoid being adopted by an ideology. Ideological adoption is advantageous in that it supplies its person with quick but superficial wisdom in hopes of it influencing their behavior and path in life. It is unearned wisdom for the sake of expediency (which to clarify, is often necessary early in life). Some wisdom is better than none. But as I’ve painfully learned, attaining unearned wisdom is terrifyingly easy. Earning wisdom is moderately difficult. But having that wisdom manifest in behavior is incomparably more difficult. My fear is that if wisdom is not the root of my behavior, then what is? As much as I’d like to praise humans for their sophisticated and intellectually matchless cerebrum, it is still a flowering bud on a tree of archaic and animalistic neurophysiology. If I don’t understand myself as an individual, then the unsophisticated and animalistic of me will reign supreme. To decide what to do with myself, I must first decide who I am. If my intentions were truly good, I wouldn’t use tools I can’t understand to build a structure meant for others. Similarly, I shouldn’t use myself to manipulate the course of a world inhabited by others. I’m held grounded by a simple question we may not ask ourselves enough: What the hell do I know? With the strength of the human intellect, we should be just as capable of rationalizing our incompetence as we are rationalizing our expertise.

It is customary of nature to destroy that which it has painstakingly created, only to create something anew. To be harmonious with nature, to brave its chaotic weathers, or to walk with God, I must be someone who can destroy and recreate. However, like nature, I can only destroy that which I have painstakingly created, for I am still confined as a single individual and am only best fit to understand the individual. To speak of the collective’s course, I, as any other, am no more qualified or cognitively able than a single cell deciding the course of the liver. That would be referred to, by us, as cancerous. Our psychological literature is plagued by individual variance and idiosyncrasy, so forthrightly articulating the proclivities of an entire social unit is and always will be a fool’s game writhe with dogmatism and drastic unintended consequences. Again, this would implicate others if I so happen to wonder ignorantly into my own demise, so I have primarily focused on changing myself. However, the more I focus on myself, the more I change, as if the process has no end in sight.

I have taken great efforts to understand myself as a person, some of which have left me utterly broken. But given life’s proclivity to break us all, I find it most valuable to be one who is no stranger to repair. However, I continue to find myself within a cognitive landscape that seems foreign. As I twine the planks meant to bridge me over my own chasms, the landscape continually shifts beneath me. There are progressively new cognitive propensities, new sensations, stronger emotions, incomprehensible abstractions, and more vibrant images, all of which seem increasingly destructive when left untamed or misunderstood. Because of this, I have found over the past few years that I have been increasingly unable to translate my thoughts into words. I can not, however, forthrightly attribute this to my unreliable vocabulary, despite it being a fundamental weakness of mine. I’m inclined to believe it is mostly cognitive development to blame, but only time will tell. Nonetheless, being unable to translate thoughts into words distinctly separates me from the rest of the world. In line with Pennebaker and his influenced literature, I believe that the best fix comes in writing.

Writing takes work, but conscientiousness comes in waves with me, ranging from a useless bag of rocks to a productive powerhouse. However, those I’ve worked under and with would refer to me as the latter. It seems that when someone depends on me to accomplish something, I follow through rather exceptionally. Given that, I plan to aid in developing my writing, thinking, beliefs, and verbal ability through publication of my occasional writings. This will hopefully checkmate myself for the following reasons. If I end up deserving it, having people expect and hope to see my writings will mimic dependence while retaining freedom of writing content. Publicizing my writings will also necessitate training verbal caution and accuracy. After all, words meant for the world are words meant to be cautious and precise. It would be gravely irresponsible not to treat it as such. This makes writing unbelievably more difficult but equally just as beneficial. My writing being publicly available and valued incentivizes me to guarantee quality and retain a steady quantity. As expected, I’ll get all the benefits that writing has on vocabulary. If this blog serves this purpose as intended, then great. But after all, it is still an experiment in aiding my cognitive development and may prove ineffective.

For now, I am certain I will be posting content in the following categories: awake dreams, difficult writings, psychology, and introspection. For about 2-3 years now, I have begun more and more able to dream while awake. Unlike the typical daydream, I sometimes have little control over the content as if I’m watching a movie. The best way I can describe it is that I momentarily become transported to a completely different universe. Do note that I fortunately still retain low resolution awareness of my surroundings, so I don’t become catatonic. I can sometimes start the dream if I am under rigorous emotional distress. Otherwise, it comes unexpectedly and I can decide whether or not I fall into it. I can mostly see and hear in these dreams, but not literally. As far as I can tell, it is perception without sensation. During these dreams, I feel all the accompanying emotion one would expect given the dream event, such as fear, sorrow, comfort, joy, shame, or regret. Although not to the same extent if the event really happened, it is still considerable. Some have had a lasting effect on me and some have been rather perplexing. I hope to recall some of these lasting dreams as they happen and give a self-analysis on each. 

I do not write often. Partly because I find it too difficult. I always end up with one paragraph every several hours—that is, if I’m truly lost in what I’m writing. However, I found that I can write efficiently while retaining eloquence if I am under extreme mental distress. My difficult writings will be those that either took an extremely long time due to the difficult concepts or were written under mental unrest. I have hopes of eventually becoming a Clinical Psychologist, so my psychology writings will be those heavy with the relevant scientific literature. As for introspection, those will primarily focus on laying out my belief structure and who I am, all in hopes of better understanding myself.

Given the person I am and the world I found myself in, I can only hope that this blog will help point me in the right direction. If over the course of my writings someone considers my input somewhat valuable, I would encourage them to send questions or addressable topics to my email in the about me section. If the comments work as intended, I also encourage usage of them at a reasonable discretion. I always value input of any kind and will appreciate anything that the world provides me on my quest of a more competent and reliable self.