Change may occur, but progress never does.
Change may
occur, but progress never does.
―
Atrona Grizel
Ending suffering
is easy: switching to the autopilot mode.
― Atrona Grizel
Meeting people’s needs does
not bring peace; it breeds spoiled behavior. The ideal order is the one most
opposed to human nature—so much so that it reconfigures it, rather than
submitting to it. Because the majority of people are simply ordinary; this
means they habituate themselves to comfort and ease and chase whatever supplies
it. Liberal democracies serve only to stimulate this animality. Totalitarian
regimes, by contrast, at least generate a different species of “engineered
humans,” and even that alone is worth noting.
―
Atrona Grizel
If a creator
breaks away from what they have created, they can remain a creator, because
remaining bound to what is created means becoming static, and that does not
suit even the most fervent creator. They are always creating; they have no time
to worship their creations.
―
Atrona Grizel
My revulsion
toward psychiatry comes from personal experiences—but not from having lived a
life spent in wards. It comes from having witnessed how the field’s terminology
invades the mind and, in doing so, can even shape the sense of identity itself.
The phase in which I began withdrawing from the social world was, of course,
not easy, because I was not even withdrawing with determination; frankly, I did
not know what I was doing, and precisely for that reason, I was withdrawing.
There had never been anyone around me who thought differently, and so I did not
believe that solitude could mean anything other than negativity. No one told
me, “You are withdrawing because you see too much,” and thus my chaotic mind—at
that time half outside society, half within it—began producing negative thoughts
about myself. Yet these feelings did not truly originate from me, because they
were shaped solely by how I thought. I saw my extreme silence as a pathology
back then, because I believed that such a degree of silence could not be
“healthy.” Since I had never had any relationship with someone who lived such a
quiet and solitary life before, I had little to guide me. At that point I was
completely alone, and I had not yet built a fortress to protect me from the
outside; its stones were only just beginning to be laid. This process was, of
course, very painful, because under constant siege they kept collapsing and had
to be rebuilt again and again. But I was fortunate in one respect: I was
reading. Constantly. The reason I began applying psychiatric labels to myself
was my obsessive reading of texts about psychology. For instance, I knew the
symptoms of all “personality disorders”; I had even watched experiments and
documentaries about them, and I seriously began to think that I myself was a
“schizoid.” Not having stopped reading during this period contributed
immensely, because it led me to literature. I read socially subversive
aphorisms, poems, and quotations, and I noticed something in them: recognition.
It felt as if they had lived what I was living, and because they were adults,
they could articulate what I was not yet able to express. In this way, I built
a new world for myself and realized that I was not “problematic” at all. It was
simply the terms I used for myself that were wrong. In fact, even using any
term for myself was wrong, because I could not be reduced to language. This is
how I came to expose the decay of traditional psychiatry. From that point on, I
stopped naming myself with any “disfunction,” because I concluded that these
were merely the result of a narrowness of perspective arising from not having
witnessed alternate realities. A reclusive thinker might describe their
condition as “gaining clarity by staying away from noise,” but psychiatry would
call it “dismissive-avoidant attachment disorder,” because psychiatry is barren
when it comes to understanding the inner world; it does nothing beyond
classifying it, and those classifications are merely molds that facilitate
practicality and inhibit creativity. Because according to psychiatry, a “healthy”
person will want to socialize and “integrate.” Through this way of critical
thinking, I developed an acute awareness, because I understood that everything
was shaped by how I thought. In truth, no one was even rejecting me, because I
simply did not exist for them; for rejection to occur, my existence would first
have had to be acknowledged. Had I insisted that this was rejection and thought
along those lines, I might truly have come to feel rejected. But then I simply
stopped. In the silence, distancing myself from myself, I looked at the life I
was in from the outside and realized that I had been taking certain things
unnecessarily seriously. The moment I stopped thinking that I was being
rejected, I suddenly began to see people as non-rejecting—and indeed, they
could be so, because they could be whatever I wanted them to be, since there
was no relationship between us. As a result, self-hatred became nothing more
than a memory belonging to my early adolescence.
―
Atrona Grizel
In my childhood,
I would watch films about eccentric people, and when I saw such people on the
streets I would stare at them strangely, because I believed I belonged to
society—because there was a constant social environment around me that trapped
me to it, and so I could not think outside it. Even if I was not judgmental
toward them, I would still feel distant, as if by some primitive instinct they
belonged to a different group and I belonged to another. My parents would
always say they were “crazy,” and society already endorsed that verdict. I have
never seen anyone in my life say that they were “interesting,” and this caused
a kind of echo chamber to form. I never thought I would become like those
people. For example, I never believed I was someone who could commit suicide. Others
would commit suicide and I would read about it—but I would not do it. Suicide
felt very distant to me, like something purely theoretical. But as I grew up
and abandoned my friends one by one because of their dullness, I joined the
ranks of those deep souls I had previously thought were mad. Now I too silently
carry an entire universe within me, and I drag myself from place to place I do
not like. I simply accept such a life, because there is no other alternative.
Those so-called wise teachers who dispense “life advice” see their advice die
here, because they are social contracts: they endlessly repeat how an
individual should remain “functional” within society. But when one steps
outside society—when alienation occurs due to excessive originality—the abyss
swallows all of this nonsense. Now everyone seems insane to me. It is as if
every normative person has lost their mind. Because I have witnessed the
deepest face of the social game, and I know that this witnessing is a kind of
private burden that cannot be conveyed to those who are still playing that
game—those who remain within society.
―
Atrona Grizel
The therapeutic
language of society reveals its own essentially insidious face through certain
words. There is, for example, something called “work–life balance,” and most
people already accept this as natural: one goes to work for a salary, and with
that salary one lives. Yet the point that must be noted here is how work and
life can be separated from one another in this way. Work does not mean life, such
that work and life can be expressed as separate words. Thus this therapeutic
language openly characterizes work as a tedious obligation that everyone is
forced to perform, and in the end it exposes the truth it constantly tries to
conceal: everyone works because everyone is a slave.
―
Atrona Grizel
I was outdoors;
the air wasn’t stifling—on the contrary, it was fresh and spacious. But because
I was surrounded by humans on all sides, I couldn’t breathe. Within that
performative noise, I felt as though I were about to suffocate, as if my lungs
were on the verge of collapse. I needed to isolate myself as quickly as
possible to reach clean air, because the air at the surface had once again
become unbreathable. If I breathed this toxic air for too long, I would be
poisoned.
―
Atrona Grizel
Once someone sees
the system not as reality but as a system, participation becomes unbearable
under this isolating lucidity. Alienation is the cost of refusing to pretend
the machine is alive.
―
Atrona Grizel
The moment I wake up in the
morning, my symbolic and metaphorical world of imagination is seized by human
noise. In other words, when I wake up, it isn’t “good morning” that greets me,
but noise. From below comes the sound of engines revved by louts, making the
entire street roar. From inside come the sounds of chatter and housework. They
talk about what will be cooked for dinner, what will be worn to dinner
tomorrow. I have never seen them talk about anything else in my entire life,
yet they never get bored. Housework itself is, at its core, nothing but
automatism. If the house were filthy and thus uninhabitable, and we
consequently moved away from here, there would at least be some change in life.
And of course, as everywhere else in the country, there is the hollow
television program that is always on: an artificial zoo presented as the
“realities of life,” where a handful of dumbasses generate ratings by shouting
and screaming from morning till night. As a result, I wake up already
exhausted, having been pulled into this wasteland. That is why, in the
mornings, the only thing on my mind is to put on my headphones as soon as
possible, play some pleasant music, and forget this world. I know that when
everyone in the house goes out for some errand and I am left alone, I am seized
by an immense sense of relief and creativity. So much noise with no necessity
whatsoever. Humanity has forgotten the worth of silence. Because of this, many
times I have wanted, the instant I wake up, to bury myself in the pillow and
wish that sleep would somehow reclaim me. But if that were to happen, if I
continued sleeping, they would descend on my door, because socially it is
determined that there is a “getting-up time,” and if you are still not up, this
can only mean that something is wrong with you, not that you simply want to
rest a little. Accordingly, they would keep telling me to get up. They would
leave, then come back again within half an hour, and if I continued lying down
for hours, they might come and go dozens of times, because this action of mine
causes the algorithm to get stuck in its code and therefore produce the same
output every time. If I told them that I could not sleep last night, they would
see this only as a symptom of “depression,” and instead of letting me rest,
they would try to drown me in medication under the guise of concern. They
simply do not understand, because monkeys cannot understand; noise is their
habitat. And how painful it is that I cannot run away from the house, because
there is nowhere I can go. Because even if the existing structure of society
does not formally declare that a person must remain trapped in the family they
are born into, it makes this almost compulsory through its conditions.
― Atrona Grizel