“Integration” is assimilation made to look innocent.
“Integration” is assimilation made to look innocent.
―
Atrona Grizel
I was hurled, in
my adulthood, into the midst of those hulking brats whose “self-confidence”—the
very thing I had shrugged off and laughed at in childhood, the showing-off with
money and social status—comes from such hollow sources. I alone mocked the fact
that their crude and primitive happiness sprang from those things, because I
alone, though physically caged, was mentally in entirely different universes.
For this gift—usually defined as “cognitive dissonance” and generally condemned
by mainstream psychologists and conventional psychiatrists—I took into myself
as though it were a homeless, orphaned child on the street, and I raised it,
nurtured it, made it my own, until it became my very identity. I was at an
unattainable height, which is precisely why they could not swallow me like the
others. But I sacrificed relationships and communication for that; that is how
elevated I had become.
―
Atrona Grizel
Withdrawing into
a cabin in the forest, cut off from civilization, to live a self-sufficient
life would not liberate me; it would enslave me even further, because in that
situation my body would take over the entire stage—illness, hunger, cold, and
so on. Would I even be able to find time to think there? The monotony of
society helps my mind push my body into the background, but in the wild I am
not someone who could be happy merely because I have eaten, because my body
does not matter to me at all. If I were to go to such a cabin, I would not find
the will to go hunting, because frankly it makes no difference to me whether I
live or die. Yet maintaining such a primitive lifestyle reduces life precisely
to survival, to mere biological endurance. This is clearly not for me, because
instead of spending my days filling my stomach morning and night, I want to
think and write all day long without having to engage in any physical action—and
I can do this only in places like care facilities, that is, still within
society, not in a secluded cabin in the forest. This shows that, no matter how
much I may despise the noise of society, I have very few alternatives other
than remaining within it.
―
Atrona Grizel
Rejecting the
rejecter refuses to be rejected.
― Atrona Grizel
That which is
above me is what is below me.
―
Atrona Grizel
In short, I am nothing beyond this: I withdrew from the external world into my
inner world in order to endure it, and then, in order to endure my inner world,
I created a personal metaphysics.
―
Atrona Grizel
How could I not
be obsessed with society? It occupies the earth; humanity has overrun the
world. Because of this, I will never truly live—and so, for as long as I
survive, I will keep circling around it.
―
Atrona Grizel
I ask myself why
babies who are doomed to die within hours, born with irreversible
complications, even come into the world. This question usually arises only when
such extraordinary cases occur. Yet the difference between these babies and the
rest of humanity is very small. Regardless of who one is or how one is,
everyone should be asked the same question, with no aim for an answer: “Why
were you born at all?”
―
Atrona Grizel
In just a few
decades, billions have been born. The world now swarms with rabble. There is no
space left to breathe, and because humans are everywhere, their presence has
lost all value.
―
Atrona Grizel
There are those
who are “obliged” to be “happy.”
―
Atrona Grizel
Those obsessed
with the “ability to express oneself” have never actually experienced that deep
conviction: that one cannot truly be understood by anything outside oneself.
Their uniform sayings, copied worldviews, and bland inner lives make them
capable of and fluent in conventional communication.
―
Atrona Grizel
Those who attach
great importance to self-respect are only those who have no respect for
themselves.
―
Atrona Grizel
“Oppositional
defiant disorder” means a child who resists authority and prefers to be on
their own. “Avoidant personality disorder” means a person who fears humiliation
in a world built to humiliate. “Schizophrenia” means a mind fractured not by
madness alone, but by a world too hostile, too loud, too empty to endure.
Similarly, someone who writes deeply oppositional texts about institutions and
organizations within the system—including psychiatry—can be diagnosed as
“delusional” or “paranoid.” And if they insist on defending their thoughts,
they may be labeled “argumentative” or “treatment-resistant.” Because modern
life has conditioned the entire human experience into psychological
terminology, thereby dismissing the true genuineness and depth of emotion and
perception. There is no more melancholy; there is “depression.” There is no
more terror of existence; there is “generalized anxiety disorder.” There is no
more coexisting with the abyss; there is “existential obsessive compulsive
disorder.”
―
Atrona Grizel
People who,
instead of abandoning the thing that causes their loneliness, increasingly fuel
it even more in their solitude, should be celebrated. For a person’s duty is
only to become even more alone when they are alone.
―
Atrona Grizel
The most basic
way to be deemed “troubled” is simply to defy expectations.
―
Atrona Grizel
Critical,
independent, and original thinking is always more valuable than intelligence. A
person can be “smart” in the conventional sense, yet remain trapped in borrowed
ideas. Meanwhile, someone who dares to think differently, even without dazzling
“intelligence,” can dismantle systems, destroy ideologies, and ultimately shape
the reality.
―
Atrona Grizel
People love to
posture with depth, saying things like “there are some rules in life…” as if
life were their own creation and they knew everything about it. I remember, as
an adolescent, when I expressed myself, a teacher said to me, “you don’t
understand,” and when I persisted in my view, he raised his finger, lifted his
eyebrows, and stared straight into my eyes with that same condescending air.
Everyone around me—even the whole world—carried the same mind as his. So I felt
utterly alone that day. Misunderstanding by others was not “unpleasant” but
simply the default for me. I had to force myself into maturity quickly;
otherwise, in the early years of adolescence, I would have collapsed under such
countless hints and slights, or, more correctly, under my own sensitivity to
them. The result, much like the USSR’s desperate drive for survival that led to
irreversible, rapid industrialization despite its destructive side effects, was
that my intelligence became not “hired as genius” but “hired as blacksmith;” it
forged armor. And over time, my skin fused with it. Now, whether people cry,
laugh, rage, insult, or even directly attack me, there remains before them a
silence more stubborn than Sisyphus and prouder than Gilgamesh, giving nothing
away.
―
Atrona Grizel
The horizon is a
liar, always retreating once approached, forever promising something that will
never arrive.
―
Atrona Grizel
There was a
signal buried in the static of a forgotten station. Not a voice but just
rhythm, spaced too perfectly to be random. When recorded and played in reverse,
the silence became patterned. No one could agree on what it felt like, but most
said it wasn’t sound at all. Just “something close.”
―
Atrona Grizel
The phrase
“mental health” is nothing more than a benchmark for conformity to norms: as a
person’s “normality” increases, their “mental health” improves. If a person
exhibits certain behaviors, they are considered “healthy”; if they exhibit
other specific behaviors, they are deemed “wounded”; and if they exhibit yet
another set of behaviors, they are labeled “ill” and must be treated to return
to the “healthy” state. To be mentally “well” is to perform wellness, not to
actually be well. It is to wake, work, socialize, consume, repeat. It is smiling
when required, crying only when appropriate, never deviating from the script
without justification.
―
Atrona Grizel
In psychiatry,
they are scanning for three major things: “Are you a danger to yourself or
others?” “Are you losing contact with the normal version of reality?” and “Are
you resisting the social order openly?” If one masters how to deal with these
topics, they can silently preserve their inner life.
―
Atrona Grizel
Anything that
clashes with norms can easily be labeled as a “disorder requiring treatment,”
even if the individual feels no dissatisfaction with their condition—such as
finding fulfillment in extreme seclusion.
―
Atrona Grizel
The lucid’s
thoughts will always be medicalized by society. Their emotions will be
tranquilized. Their creativity will be domesticated into productivity. Their
rage will be labeled “irrational.” Their skepticism will be seen as
“hypercriticism.” Their questions will be ignored or reframed as “trauma.” And
all the while, they will be told: “This is for your well-being.”
―
Atrona Grizel
Modern capitalist
societies have turned introspection into a service industry; even the very word
“introspection” has become repugnant in this context, for it is the language of
this industry. It mimics corporate speech: “Optimize your emotional bandwidth,”
“Reframe your thoughts for peak performance,” “Battle with pessimistic
thoughts,” “Get rid of your dysfunctional environment,” “Explore new coping mechanisms,”
and so on. This is the only language normative minds know and speak.
― Atrona Grizel