Pain

Pain is crucial to what makes me who I am. Getting along with people and meeting standards of performance in work or in studies are skills, compulsory diversions from the real thing. Approval and "accomplishments" are both equally arbitrary and hollow pursuits. Meaningfulness is achieved - you could almost say earned - only through pain. It doesn't have to exclusively consist of pain, but if it doesn't stop on the way to pick it up it is a futile journey.

This is probably true of everybody everywhere. If you don't recognise all that you feel, you proceed under false pretences and at an alienated distance. Still, I feel that pain specifically is more central to me than to other people, or in any case far more central to me than the life that I lead and the things I say in it suggest. I'm not sure there exists any meaningful thing I can do that doesn't involve a quite significant amount of pain.

I think it has to do with my relationship to the status quo. Not so much to any specific status quo as to the basic notion of a status quo, and the need to accept its authority in practice in order to be able to function in society. Before anything more dramatic happens - even if nothing else happens - this causes me pain. It saddens me and angers me, and does something else that can only really be described as a psychic equivalent of physical pain. It is difficult to conceive of it this barely. It is more difficult than usual to send this to be published. It feels like more than an emotional vulnerability. It's an admission of emotional weakness. I feel like a slow guy having trouble keeping up with things, and being told not to worry - just to try and be more intelligent. Try and grow a thicker skin.

I realise this is also a stereotype with positive connotations. I suppose that feeling too much pain is more relatable than feeling too little, but I suspect the rift would be too wide to sustain too many people's sympathy. People lose patience.

I have difficulty dealing with my private space being invaded. People come in without knocking and shit all over your stuff. People come in expecting and demanding things they have no reason or right to. They come and expect the impossible. They demand you pretend to be someone else.

Political and religious charlatans are after my intellectual independence. Predatorial lowlifes are after my emotional inclinations, mainly my capacity for love. Giggling idiots are after my entirely personal idiosyncrasies. This is not a schizophrenic paranoia. All of these people are actually out there, and in alarmingly high numbers. Prejudiced cowards of all shapes and sizes are eagerly awaiting their opportunity to assert their superiority by killing as much of what is not yet dead in the world as they can. They all have their own personal stories and journeys they had undertaken to get to where they are, but fuck it, I'm better than them, and I don't have to pretend to be on equal terms.

I want to keep my own stuff. That's more important than anything else. The only kind of "life" I can think of where keeping your own stuff is considered conducive is that of the creative artist, or possibly the philosopher, though probably not. What I probably need to do is make a living writing. Good luck with that, huh? Socially, it means embracing the pain. It's there for a reason.