Some consciousnesses generate worlds; most generate noise.
Some consciousnesses generate worlds; most generate noise.
―
Atrona Grizel
The pain I carry
inside me is so immense that it has the capacity to give me the strength to do
almost anything imaginable. Sometimes I even feel glad for it, saying that it’s
good it exists. Because this ancient pain is an endless fuel for me. I do not
want to escape the pain but use it, so to speak, to almost exploit it like a
colonial power.
―
Atrona Grizel
I wake up in
terror in the mornings because I know I will go through another torture
program. My feet take me among humans again; they do not feel as if they are under
my control, they simply move, and they bring me every day to that predetermined
place I have become “stuck” to. When I arrive there, they stop and step back to
watch me. I am actually used to my body moving on its own like this. Sometimes
I feel like a passenger inside my own body. The plane moves by itself, and even
though I am the owner of the plane, I am watching its movement from the seats
in the back.
―
Atrona Grizel
Loving children
from a distance is the most sincere and most aware form of love one can show
them: witnessing their clean innocence before they turn into a tangle of filth.
―
Atrona Grizel
The more I look
at hips in pornographic content, the more I see them as simply “the joining
point of an organism’s legs,” and this biological determinism makes me wonder
how I could ever feel sexual desire toward a handful of flesh. Even during
sexual activities, I analyze things like a scientist taking soil samples from
an unknown planet, and these become examinations afterward.
―
Atrona Grizel
Sometimes I want
to “remove people from their bodies” so I can reach the abstract being behind
them. The body seems like an obstacle preventing me from seeing their real
self. Hair, eyes, hands, or legs only remind me of biology, and biology means
mechanicalness, so when I look at these, I see nothing but automatism. Even
though I do not believe in a soul, I still see it this way, because I think a
person’s essential being cannot be concrete.
―
Atrona Grizel
The word
“melancholy” has never taken on a negative meaning in my mind. Not when I was a
child, not an adolescent, not an adult. Even the word itself is poetic, and
because I feel that dark romanticism is the most noble feeling possible, I
never felt the desire to “treat” my melancholy. If I “treated” it, then I would
suddenly become ill, because no art can exist without carrying a trace of
melancholy. Sadness is the most wonderful state for creativity.
―
Atrona Grizel
Writing is a
relief for me. But I am also aware that I repeat certain things too often. This
is intentional. Because every missed opportunity to repeat something calls to
mind the image of a bug that was not thoroughly crushed. During my school
years, since I had plenty of time at school, I would come home with lots of
pages of writing and immediately transfer them to a digital space to feel
relieved. If I didn’t do this, I would feel as though I still carried the
weight of the day, because writing is like a confession ritual for me. During
exam periods, I did not reduce playing games; I “reduced” thinking. Because I
thought so much at school that when I came home I could not find the time to
transfer these thoughts into the virtual, and thus I could not study for exams.
But according to my family, I spent all day playing games on my computer. No,
there were no games. Yet they still confiscated my computer because I was
“addicted” to it. Because they did not see that they themselves watched
television from morning to night, they were indifferent to the crowds wandering
the streets with their faces buried in their phones, and they were unaware of
my interests; and even if they had been aware, I knew it would only lead them
to belittle me, because they would not understand, because they neither thought
originally nor possessed any literary passion.
―
Atrona Grizel
A person should
be able to change their life the way they change clothes.
―
Atrona Grizel
I wish I could
speak of my life itself in the past tense. But no… even the past tense
necessarily implies a present. The solution may appear to be the elimination of
time altogether, yet even that would inevitably produce a time of timelessness.
―
Atrona Grizel
They always tried
to measure me through exams, always expected me to prove myself and expose
myself. Sometimes, out of sheer resistance to this, I deliberately scored the
lowest grades on exams where I could easily get the highest if I took them
seriously, and instead of thinking this was a “sign of stupidity” like my peers
would, I felt proud. Because if I am knowledgeable, they want that knowledge
from me only to exploit it, yet they do not even deserve these treasures.
―
Atrona Grizel
Spending time
among my peers, as I increasingly pulled away from them, eventually turned into
enduring constant kindergarten noise; my mind, to use the shrieking children’s
term, began to “autisticize,” and thus even the slightest noise became
unbearable for me. Yet I could listen from morning to night to someone loudly
explaining something related to my interests. It’s not that I dislike people; I
just cannot stand empty noise. People expect me to join conversations about how
they’ll get their hair cut, the color of the pants they bought, which food is
better, and how they’ll earn money and become famous, and it is exactly for
this reason that I cannot bear it. Being forced to hear drives me insane.
―
Atrona Grizel
Being treated in
an inhuman way does not bruise a non-human person; it reinforces them.
―
Atrona Grizel
What lies outside
a person who is in harmony with themself is not “life” but society. Life
continues within that person. Society’s life is not life but a desert mistaken
for a mirage.
―
Atrona Grizel
I knead myself
like a cook kneads dough; I shape myself in whatever way I choose. Suppose I
decide to embrace my dark thoughts as a kind of revenge against humanity; then
I initiate an internal labor program in that direction, and in as little as a
few weeks or as long as a few months, I achieve it, and the time that passes
only reinforces it. And if I later want to stop being that way? Then I again
initiate an internal labor program and reverse this change in similar
timeframes. How can I build and demolish myself like a building? Because I am
both a skilled cook and a soft dough. This also means that even my natural
state is, in a sense, artificial, because everything comes from my own hand,
even spontaneity. This was actually my biggest teenage dream: total control over
myself.
―
Atrona Grizel
The fuller
someone is on the outside, the emptier they are on the inside.
―
Atrona Grizel
A society
governed by “formality” forces people into dishonesty. For instance, a person
trapped in a toxic workplace who can neither “prove” nor publicize it is forced
to pretend to be sick to avoid going there. Or in a country with mandatory
military service, young people harm themselves to avoid going, because the only
language the state understands is this “official” language of declaring a
situation. In a world surrounded by such a web of bureaucracy, the most
appropriate thing to do is to identify and exploit the absurdities within
“officialdom.” These absurdities arise precisely from the absurdity of the
official situations themselves. Kafka’s characters in his novels are always
under the pressure of authority, yet that authority is not even truly an
“authority.” All of this amounts to nothing more than comedies that have been
made compulsory to take seriously. And so, the idea is to get branded as insane
in order to get rid of nonsense like compulsory military service, paid
transportation, and monetized healthcare. Not to do this internally, but almost
strategically. This reminds me of outsider geniuses who, fed up with
unemployment, cold, hunger, noise, vulgarity, socializing, and insecurity
outside, managed to make it all the way into psychiatric hospitals by
presenting themselves as mad and who are now happy and calm there under their
masks. Of course they will be stigmatized, but since they are already alone and
have made this irreversible decision themselves, it is not even a loss for
them.
―
Atrona Grizel
I often imagined
moments where I would faint from a heart attack or some other serious condition
and open my eyes in a hospital. Anything that would suspend my consciousness
was permissible. I wanted so desperately to escape the sick environment I was
in that I could not even care about my health if it would grant me that escape.
But I couldn’t help thinking this too: if something like that happened to me,
if I had a heart attack at this young age, they would wonder why, they would
worry, and thus I would worry; they would ask about the reasons, thus my cover
would be blown, and then they would label me as someone who “takes things too
seriously” and forcibly send me to a psychiatrist, making me dependent on
tranquilizers. Even in that scenario, I cannot imagine understanding or love;
the only thing I expect is worry and surveillance.
― Atrona Grizel