An existential crisis is not the moment when meaning collapses, but the moment when borrowed meaning expires.
An existential crisis is not the moment when meaning collapses, but the moment when borrowed meaning expires.
―
Atrona Grizel
I don’t ask
myself, “What am I feeling?”—I ask, “What is happening inside me right now, and
what does it mean?” This is because I see myself not as a subject to be
inhabited, but as a system to be maintained. I don’t really care about myself
as a human being. I am aware of myself, but this awareness is a third-person
awareness adapted to the inner world. That is, I know the pattern behind my own
thoughts; I can analyze my reactions, explain my motivations, or expose my
defenses—but this is because I am under constant self-surveillance, not because
I experience myself in real time. The last time I truly rested was when I was a
child. After that, every time I put my head on a pillow, dozens of ideas began
to surface, and I developed a compulsive need to put them into writing, because
I found them too valuable to allow them to slip away—diamonds I had personally
mined from my feelings and experiences. In other words, I can no longer be
myself without watching myself; my eyes are always open. Am I strong? Maybe.
But this strength is compulsory, and this state means carrying a constant
background fatigue caused by excessive performance—one with no switch to turn
it off.
―
Atrona Grizel
The stage of
separating from society is difficult, but once it happens and settles, people
will accept it. If a person becomes increasingly silent and insists on
maintaining that silence, people will eventually leave them alone. The wretched
creature called “human” gets used to everything. Consequently, they don’t care
about anything, especially someone they can easily replace with another. But I
cannot even blame them for this, because the society they were born into does
not allow room for thought and forces a person to focus only on their own
troubles.
―
Atrona Grizel
The “existential
crisis,” which psychiatry often defines through symptoms such as
“hopelessness,” “lack of motivation,” “pessimism,” and “suicidal tendencies,”
does not in fact signify the loss of meaning itself. Rather, it symbolizes the
loss of society’s false meanings and the individual who, having seen no source
of meaning other than society, falls into a void when those meanings collapse.
The panic people feel is not because existence is empty, but because they were
never taught to stand without props. And most of them never even experience a
true “crisis,” because they never lose faith in social narratives. Even
existential despair is aristocratic. For those who possess a source of meaning
independent of society, this “existential crisis” is not a moment but a
structure. They live within it. Because for them, it is not even a crisis. It
is simply the default.
―
Atrona Grizel
The misunderstood
person must consciously try not to internalize the distorted portrait others
hold of them, even while enduring that pain.
―
Atrona Grizel
By nature I like
being religious in a structural sense, and indeed I am like this myself. But I
cannot manage the belief part of religion. And the beauty lies here: a divine
atheism.
―
Atrona Grizel
I had the chance
to closely observe people who, while a person was there, smiled at them, but
the moment they left the room and closed the door, immediately began speaking
badly about them; and I found that what is called “gossip” wasn’t even gossip
for them, but the sole form of conversation that monopolized everything they
talked about.
―
Atrona Grizel
Since I have no
one I interact with, I find self-care unnecessary, because what is called
“self-care” is actually “other-care,” done to please others on their behalf. If
all humans suddenly disappeared, would anyone still put on makeup? A solitary
person has no need for such cosmetics or even hygiene in that sense, not in the
sense of wallowing in filth, but in the sense that there is no one to present
their cleanliness to.
―
Atrona Grizel
Suicide strips
away the social fog surrounding a person. This is why those whose worth was
ignored during their lifetime suddenly become longed for and respected after
their death. Yet people still refuse to learn; they will never learn.
―
Atrona Grizel
The way to
communicate with people who understand nothing from words is by slamming doors.
―
Atrona Grizel
At school, I
would often see “white spots” or “sparkling lines” appear before my eyes,
likely because my senses were overwhelmed and I had nowhere to escape. The
noise and light were constant, and while others merely lived through them, they
tortured me. The fact that I was extremely alone and exhausted had a huge
effect, because the others were not like this and therefore did not experience
what I did. I sat in the classroom all day, seeing nothing but walls, and I
couldn’t stare at one point and zone out through daydreaming because I would be
seen as “mad” and my family would be notified, so I constantly displayed a fake
identity to the outside world. I played this role for so long that people
thought it was my personality. But it wasn’t. It was a difficult concealment
lasting years. Why didn’t I ever go outside then? Because my brain practically
“locked” me. When faced with a predator, the typical reactions are fight,
flight, or freeze, and my reaction was freeze. That’s why I couldn’t make the
slightest movement, because I believed that if I did, I would do something
wrong and get caught. This wasn’t shyness but a constant defensive mode
developed because my mind was relentlessly assaulted. Besides, even if I had
gone outside, it wouldn’t have helped me relax, because I would still be within
the boundaries of that prison. I didn’t want to escape to somewhere in the
school; I wanted to escape from the school itself, and no place in the school
could ever be appealing to me.
―
Atrona Grizel
Having a sense of
negation and detachment as radical as mine is rarely a purely philosophical
stance; at its root lies unimaginable levels of pain, and that is why my brain
has become something that, as a survival mechanism, destroys everything that
threatens its existence almost as if it has gone paranoid. In other words, my
philosophy is my armor. And destroying it would release my soul, though perhaps
no soul would remain to be freed, because I am not someone who merely has a
philosophy but someone who directly is his philosophy.
―
Atrona Grizel
I wish the state
would offer a “right to withdrawal into seclusion” as a social assistance
program for alienated intellectuals, like paid leave.
―
Atrona Grizel
In my mind,
humans have ceased to be human; I go among them like a fanatic soldier heading
to war: I will block the mechanical screams of children with my shield, keep
the primitive words people speak during conversations from invading my mind
with my sword, and “shoot arrows” at the buzzing engines passing by to disable
them, so I can finally have some peace. What I mean to emphasize here is not
some simple anger but the existence of an “outside” that feels as if it exists
solely to disturb me with its noise. People are like objects built to make
noise, and this makes them resemble drums. And drums neither feel nor think;
they only have loud sounds.
―
Atrona Grizel
Any person who
lives by empty talk and finds pleasure in gossip will go into defense when confronted
with deep conversations, claiming the other person is “too much,” acting as if
trying to discourage them by saying “you can’t be happy like this,” but
internally holding a secret grudge because their own lack of depth has been
exposed.
―
Atrona Grizel
Once in school, I
went to the bathroom when I was overwhelmed by shallow human noise and used a
sharp object to leave scratches across my stomach. I chose my stomach because
no one would see it. I also bit my arms, but my family noticed the marks, so during
summers I always walked turned slightly to one side so they wouldn’t notice.
Biting my legs was safer because nothing really showed there due to my body
hair. But then I reached such a level of helplessness that my mind simply
classified self-harm as “useless” and dropped it. Because as my outsider
identity spread deep into my bones, my body became largely irrelevant. A ghost
whose existence is unseen by anyone harming itself out of despair because it is
unseen would be strange and maybe even funny anyway, because even that harm
remains invisible. You cannot stab a ghost, because this is such a radical
non-recognition that it does not even exist.
― Atrona Grizel