Sometimes I want to tear people’s tongues out and throw them to the birds so that at least they would serve a more useful form of uselessness.
Sometimes I want to tear people’s tongues out and throw them to the birds so that at least they would serve a more useful form of uselessness.
―
Atrona Grizel
Once, a stranger
I had been messaging with online for a few days told me, after I spoke to him
about my non-normative thoughts and especially the purge of societal values,
only this: “I don’t think I have the capacity to build my own world.” He
probably said it out of self-hatred, meaning he didn’t even care what I was
saying, but unlike so many others, instead of mocking, pathologizing, or taking
it personally and getting defensive, he simply said that. Honesty? Perhaps. And
that is why it felt worth writing down.
― Atrona Grizel
Preventing the impact of cyberbullying
lies in the ability to refuse the belief that words—formed by a handful of
pixels of light on a screen—originate from a real, embodied being. I cannot
comprehend how people are driven to tears by sentences composed of such
flickering signals. The computer world has never felt like a real world to me,
and this distance has prevented me from becoming a socially inept computer
addict—because even when I sought refuge there, alienation lay at the very core
of that refuge. I logged in to construct a world of my own, independent of the
mainstream one, not to dissolve myself into a preexisting digital environment.
For this reason, I never adopted any worldview derived from internet culture as
a whole. On most of my social media accounts, comments are completely disabled,
because in this age of noise I am among the last who do not disappear within
it. If it were up to me, I would also turn off likes entirely and leave only
the theme being addressed. But this is, unfortunately, not permitted—because
that heart icon functions like a currency of the virtual world. And to regard
this currency as real money, to treat it as valuable, inevitably means allowing
oneself to be purchased by hearts. But these hearts do not even express love.
Most of them are fake, because no one truly cares about anyone more than they
care about themselves. This situation leads me to be completely alone in a
virtual realm inhabited by millions of people. Even when someone interacts with
me, I still feel alone, because I know they come from the same sick world. None
of them feel real. Even when a profile picture clearly depicts a human being
and is accompanied by galleries of photographs and videos, it still evokes the
possibility of being a bot—manufactured by corporations to animate otherwise
hollow platforms. And even when its humanity is conclusively established, I
remain incapable of treating it as human, because everything that enters the
virtual realm undergoes dehumanization.
―
Atrona Grizel
Logical love is
mercantile.
―
Atrona Grizel
Existentialism is
not my area of expertise, but I know very well that it is not a kind of “style”
meant to be conveyed to societies through public interviews or spread through
cheerful conversations over coffee in French cafés. It is not Sartre. It is not
Beauvoir. These are public figures known for their fame, like actors or
singers. That is, they had wide social circles, reputations to protect, and
careers to cultivate. Consequently, they placed humanity at the center of their
thinking. Yet anyone who directs their thoughts toward humanity is condemned to
speak nonsense, doomed to flee from the void even while speaking of the void
itself. Existentialism, once socialized, becomes a mere fashion in the hands of
these celebrity mascots.
―
Atrona Grizel
I don’t want to
manage people; I want to manage the very concept of management itself. What I
mean is this: creating kings and handing all the power to them, but the person
who transfers that power is me. In other words, I create the stage and hand it
over to them, and it’s not out of fear or incompetence; it’s because I know
that everything there—both the actors and the audience—is my creation, and
therefore I alone control the context. They are playing my own game.
―
Atrona Grizel
Despite all its
authenticity, my thoughts still resemble the views of many thinkers throughout
history. Nietzsche said that conventional morality ties up the hands of the
individual, and that a person must create their own unique values. Cioran said
that the most appropriate posture is not collision but surrender, and that
there is no such thing as enlightenment. Schopenhauer said that the external
world exists only as representation in the mind, and that the masses act
according to instinct rather than thought. Kierkegaard said that the crowd is
untruth, and that authenticity begins only when one stands alone without
mediation. Stirner said that the ego is superior to God, and that social values
are illusions that imprison the self. Buddha said that yielding to desire is a
form of diminishment, and that existence is not annihilation but a cycle to
which the unawakened mind remains bound. Heraclitus said that most people live
as if asleep, and that only the solitary mind perceives the hidden order
beneath appearances. Diogenes said that the rich are often the poorest, and
that the most independent person is the one who needs the least. They said
these things in their own time, and I arrived at these conclusions through my
own thinking before even reading them; when I did read them, they mostly
reinforced or reshaped my pre-existing views, but I did not borrow these ideas
from them. My thoughts are not copies of theirs; we simply arrived at similar
conclusions through different paths.
―
Atrona Grizel
If I were a
political regime, I would be federal rather than unitary, despite the entire
hierarchical and dictatorial structure. Because there are many small universes
within me. But what binds this plurality to unity is that these universes must
be connected to a single superior universe, that is, be its extensions. Like
the satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. Or like the republics of the Soviet
Union, internally autonomous yet externally bound to a central authority in
Moscow.
―
Atrona Grizel
If a
“mind-controlling” parasite were to enter my brain, it would have to fight not
only my flesh but also my very sense of self, because I possess such a strong
sense of autonomy that independence is a biological necessity for me, like food
and water. Having it taken away from me, even by a parasite, would almost
automatically trigger a backlash in me, a form of defiance. If my mind were
brought under control, my subconscious would still be alive, and this would
drive me to exhibit physiological reactions stemming from this sense of being
invaded. The symptoms could range from nausea to headaches and even reach the
level of a migraine attack, and these would be produced not by the parasite but
by my own body, generating them psychologically on its own because it cannot
submit to being occupied by a foreign entity.
―
Atrona Grizel
There was a day
when school was cancelled due to excessive rain while everyone was already at
school, and so everyone suddenly started heading home. I, however… was still
there. I was waiting for the school bus. And because the bus was late, I
witnessed that immense silence that formed when everyone disappeared. The
corridors were completely empty. The noise had stopped. There were no eyes left
that followed my every step and turned it into gossip. There were only the
cameras recording me, but I could not bring myself to care about them. The
school was mine now. This felt like such a magical experience to me that it was
then I understood: the person I am in daily life is not me.
―
Atrona Grizel
For a person who
is resilient to pain, the greatest “glitch” is to expose them to deep
suffering, because no matter how much they hurt, they will not collapse; they
will live inside the pain.
―
Atrona Grizel
I’ve become so
used to experiencing the world entirely on my own that being in a close relationship
with a person disrupts my thoughts. Because when that happens, I start thinking
that others also eat, talk, or sleep like me, meaning I realize I share
something with them, and that feels very strange to me. With every movement I
make, I think of the person I am close to: if I sit, that means they sit too;
if I walk, they walk like me. This makes me feel exposed, as if these were
private things that should remain secrets, and it makes me uncomfortable.
Because I carry not a plural mind but a monolithic one: reality is my reality
alone, and others’ realities are either illusions or performances.
―
Atrona Grizel
People assume I’m
“arrogant” because they think I believe I am “chosen.” But no, no one “chose”
me. Then why is the answer me? Why is it that among so many people, only I see?
I don’t know. The only answer is simply that the person who is me is me, but
there is no explanation for it. This feels more like an anomaly than
chosenness, because I am also condemned to be unable to show what I see. Those
who think I am “full of myself” don’t know how hard it is to be this
out-of-dimension. When I tell them, “I am very lonely,” they do not believe me,
because my loneliness appears as philosophy and as art, which in fact it is. I
can get out of bed, I do not spend my days crying in my room, and I write
obsessively. People see this and, just because of it, say they do not believe
me, that it cannot be this serious, because the only thing they look for is
practical proof. For them to understand that I am lonely, I would have to
collapse. And if I collapse, it will already be too late, because after
collapsing, whether they understand it or not will no longer concern me.
―
Atrona Grizel
When I place an
order in a shop, thoughts attack my mind: what is this worker’s life like? Is
he happy? What does he do when he goes home? How long has he been working? What
does he think about society? And why this specific shop? Why is it designed
this way? Why are walls painted this colour? Why is the lamp there and not somewhere
else? While I get lost in these thoughts, someone else walks in, says a few
things to the seller, and leaves within a minute with the thing he bought
without even looking back. But my mind is too deep for such surface-level
movements. To be fast, I have to numb myself, because I cannot move on to the
next thing without first assessing everything I experience. I cannot simply
live in a straight line. To think and take it seriously is to abandon living,
at least in its physical form.
― Atrona Grizel