Alignment distorts thought.
Alignment distorts thought.
―
Atrona Grizel
Every day, a
mental cleansing takes place inside my head to preserve my purity. The first
stage of forgetting occurs the moment I withdraw from the environment and
return to my solitude. When this happens, most of my experiences are turned
away at the threshold and never enter long-term memory, so there’s nothing left
to remember. But since this process demands monumental inner fuel, a part of my
mind’s attention lingers on the events of the day. The second stage of
forgetting happens when the day ends and I go to bed; by the time morning comes
and I rise from sleep, the reason I can begin a “new and fresh” day is
precisely because yesterday has been erased. The third process of forgetting is
not really “forgetting” at all, but a mechanism of emotional decay. That is: if
I’m in a particularly negative state, I express my feelings about it only when
conditions are “safe”—never while I’m still in it, always after it has passed.
I don’t suppress my emotions; I simply send them off to later dates, as if I
couldn’t deal with them now. But what if those dates never arrive? A lifelong
postponement…
―
Atrona Grizel
People prefer
“lighting candles” to battle “evilness.” But isn’t the phrase “instead of
cursing the darkness, light a candle” essentially an illusion—a superficial
belief that eliminating darkness will bring paradise, a refusal to accept it as
an intrinsic part of existence, and a rejection of allowing one’s eyes to
gradually adjust to it through time and experience?
―
Atrona Grizel
I am a hidden
continent that exists on no map.
―
Atrona Grizel
To survive a
harsh life, you must blur the world you see.
―
Atrona Grizel
I probably
haven’t had any conversations with my family other than about grades and meals.
I say, “What will I eat?” and then comes the answer. I say, “I didn’t like the
meal,” and they say, “That’s because you’re sick.” They ask, “Why didn’t you do
your homework?” and I tell them I don’t need teachers. They ask, “What job will
you do?” and I say I don’t want to be trapped in a job. They ask, “Have you
earned any degrees this year?” and in doing so, they only care that their
misleading external perception of “wise parents” continues. It goes on like
this. We don’t say or ask anything else. Instead, they even say things like “We
do everything for you, but you do nothing for us,” probably because they see
the mechanical act itself as some kind of display of affection. No one has ever
asked, “How are you feeling?” Even when I’m sick, the effort they show isn’t
really for me, but for my body. They don’t want me to feel better—they just
want me to be better. And the strange thing is, in their view, the only reason
for this is that I stopped responding to them, so they stopped asking. I
stopped responding to them because people like that never ask such a question
sincerely anyway, and even if they did, they wouldn’t have the inner depth to
handle a genuine answer other than “I am okay.” They are incapable of true
engagement with my inner life. This isn’t necessarily malicious, as they are
too robotic and stupid to be abusive; it is simply a complete lack of capacity.
Hence, my conversations with them have been reduced to simple necessities:
school and food. Sometimes I think they feed me only to keep my body alive so
that I can go to school, sit there all day, come back, and repeat the same
thing the next day. I go to school merely to “justify” my being fed; they feed
me merely to “justify” their role as parents. Simply put, aside from my
surviving and being obsessively forced to conform to “social expectations” that
I don’t even value slightly, there is no other care between us at all. No one’s
heart is in the exchange. A mutual automation.
―
Atrona Grizel
I imagine a scene
where, while everyone screams, jokes, clutches their phones, and has fun at the
concerts of those South Korean pop singers idolized by the world’s youth,
Soviet jets glide across the sky, spraying red smoke, and a military march
echoes at full volume toward the ground, so loud that it drowns out the noise
of the concert. In front of the crowd, a parade of swift and relentless
soldiers marches past, unfurling enormous North Korean flags to storm the
place—not necessarily out of political allegiance, but just to shout that
another kind of life is possible, even if it exists only as a memory beyond
time.
―
Atrona Grizel
To corrupt a
society, it is enough to instill in it the idea that those who think
differently are enemies, even demons, and that trust should only be placed in
people similar to them, in copies of themselves.
―
Atrona Grizel
Deepest
connection isnt about “matching,” but about being able to handle and embrace
the difference, and even feeding and cherishing it, for the differences owe
their existence to each other.
―
Atrona Grizel
The only
permanent source of peace is the acceptance of an endless war.
―
Atrona Grizel
When a shy person
observes society from a distance, disgust does not fall upon society itself but
upon themselves—bound by the very social values to which they remain
emotionally and intellectually tethered. This is the secret: without mental
liberation from these societal constructs, the distant gaze sees little beyond
the surface. Conversely, a mind in exile perceives the deepest intricacies,
wielding an almost supernatural clarity. Yet, shy individuals, having neither
purged these values nor perhaps attempted to, cannot attain such a vision.
Should they purge these values, the inevitable consequence is alienation—a
creative and independent mind severed from a dull and homogeneous society.
―
Atrona Grizel
The free and
daring person, while watching society from a distance, instead of saying “I
wish I could be a part of it,” thinks “I will not join this madness.” Shy
people, on the other hand, don’t reject society; they long to participate in
it, but feel “inadequate” to do so. In this context, alienation and shyness may
even be among the most opposing things.
―
Atrona Grizel
The reason I’m glad when
I’m ill—or even when I’ve broken a part of my body—is that it means I won’t
have to go to school. School steals and wastes not only my time but also my
life. Others skip that prison for the sake of fun; I do it to survive. That is
why when I am physically ill, I recover mentally, because thanks to this
illness I can suspend my slave life—even if only for a few days—and distance
myself from the unending caveman noise. These days, the world empties out, and
I finally find a chance to breathe. This feeling of relief appears as being at
home while everyone else is at work. The early hours of morning offer a taste
of it before the day begins, and the late hours of night after it ends—but only
at this time, in the middle of the day, can the city be seen so purged of
people. And because it’s experienced in daylight, it’s beyond price.
―
Atrona Grizel
The closing of
the weather also closes the outside’s grasp on me, and what opens is my
internal theater. Others wake up and see “bad” weather, but I wake up and exit
the simulation, thus entering a state as if within a lucid dream, in a
distinctly artistic sense. In this liminal aesthetic created by the threshold
the weather offers, my imagination soars, and I abandon physicality. I feel as
though the sky understands me. And within that understanding lies the sense
that, with the sky now closed, it is “finally my turn” to be understood.
―
Atrona Grizel
Their perception
of weather is entirely materialistic. But I have transcended meteorology.
― Atrona Grizel