To be comforted is to be seduced.
To be comforted is to be seduced.
―
Atrona Grizel
When I am among
humans, I am forced to put on another “self,” separate from my one and eternal
friend—my true self. For if I were to be myself—that is, if I constantly talked
to myself, laughed to myself, and made gestures to myself—this would, of course,
be seen as “abnormal,” and if I persisted in this attitude, it would result in
“treatment” for “disturbing public order.” Everyone knows a lion like me as a
domesticated dog—and they have to know me this way, or else things could get
out of hand. Not only do society steals my time, but it also robs me of myself,
and this is unacceptable. That is why I wait all day as though I were in exile
in a desert, waiting to reunite with myself, the source of water. Meanwhile, my
inner world waits in patience just like me, as if its flags hang at half-mast
in mourning. The main feeling witnin me is not “I wish I had friends that cared
about me,” but “If only I could get rid of these noise-source primates and
return once again to my noble self I celebrate admiringly.” And when I finally
return to my internal, eternal empire, the grandest and most joyful
celebrations are held in my honor. Even a single minute of silence that emerges
in this reunion wipes away ten hours of noise endured during social rituals
altogether. Time doesn’t pass when I’m absent, and when I’m present, it’s never
enough.
―
Atrona Grizel
Maslow’s
“hierarchy of needs” is a convenient prop that suits societal propaganda. That
pyramid may be right if it speaks only to those within society—and it does. But
about those outside society—the free birds who have surpassed all “pyramids”—it
has neither insight nor authority to speak.
―
Atrona Grizel
I had to talk not
with my peers but with ghosts, because there was not a single living being
around me as solitary—that is, as thoughtful—as I was.
―
Atrona Grizel
The world is
worthy not of being known, but of being forgotten.
―
Atrona Grizel
There are
chatterboxes for whom moving a single foot equals ten sentences.
―
Atrona Grizel
No one asks about
the world; they only ask, “What’s wrong with you?”
―
Atrona Grizel
Placing a very
intelligent person in a degenerate and imagination-killing society dominated by
misery, superficiality, and boredom makes them stand out above all this
shallowness, rendering them quite comical. Perhaps they do not even know how to
greet others. Not out of incompetence, but due to an absolute “misuse” of them
by existence.
―
Atrona Grizel
I am comfortable
with the inevitability but intolerant of subjugation; I am not afraid of dying
but of being killed.
―
Atrona Grizel
This is what
modern psychology primarily does: if one is under the influence of intense
emotions, they are said to have “anxiety”; if one postpone things, they are
said to suffer from “procrastination”; if one is in a relationship, it will be
named and categorized based on its observable traits from outside, such as the
pop-culture term of “situationship.” All are forms of classification and
simplification—like locking the universe in a box and saying, “Look, this is
the universe.”
―
Atrona Grizel
While the
artistic, philosophical, and metaphysical emotion says, “The ocean is made of
sorrow,” the overly colonized, indoctrinated, and institutionalized emotion
says, “I am drowning in my post-traumatic stress disorder.”
―
Atrona Grizel
People may
intentionally exaggerate—and thus pathologize—their emotions, voluntarily
seeking a diagnosis and then embracing it in the hope of appearing to be an
“interesting person.” Their inner worlds are so barren that they must adopt
externally pre-shaped identities in order to feel “real.”
―
Atrona Grizel
People today
choose “traumas” as if picking fruits at a market. Yet what truly exists are
not “traumas,” but experiences that cannot be fit into any systemic mold.
―
Atrona Grizel
Even the feeling
of emptiness is an emotion, which means one has never ever felt “empty.”
―
Atrona Grizel
When speaking of
someone, I cannot bring myself to say “emotionally intelligent” instead of
“deeply understanding,” because the former compresses them into a bureaucratic
title.
―
Atrona Grizel
I can stay in
others’ homes, eat food cooked by others, wear clothes prepared by others, live
off others’ allowances, and still carry within me a powerful sense of
independence. And I do. Because my conception of being the emperor of myself is
too fundamental, too existential, to be concerned with such material necessities
or social burdens. The chains others call “responsibility,” the ones they see
as “taking life into their own hands,” mean nothing in my inner world, which is
too devoted to aesthetics and intellect to be impressed by such irrelevant
things. Nor are they reliable, for one day a person may find themselves fallen
into something inhuman and thus lose their sense of independence—because they
tied that feeling to an externality not of their own making, exalting the outer
over the inner, letting the outside design the inside instead of the other way
around. That is why “sovereignty” stemming from conditions rather than being
intrinsic is dangerous. What I am trying to say is this: circumstances and
places are mutable and thus cannot be clung to. But a person is always with
themselves, even in the times when they feel most “lost.”
―
Atrona Grizel
To be an
individual, one must be socially insignificant.
―
Atrona Grizel
Being with people
is possible only to the extent that one erases or changes oneself. The person
with the most relationships is the most hollow, while the most solitary person
is the most whole. This is what gives the alone mind’s thoughts their
relentless sharpness, for it makes no concessions of itself. To tell it that it
is “rigid” will only serve to sharpen it further, as this mind is designed to
cut through precisely such perspectives.
―
Atrona Grizel
DSM, “the
psychiatric bible,” updates itself regularly, revising what counts as a
“disorder” and what does not. But a truth that changes with each edition is not
truth—it is a trend. Homosexuality, for example, was once labeled a “disorder”;
now it has been erased from its pages. What of those still included? Aren’t
they simply awaiting the next societal shift? How can a diagnosis claim
scientific authority when it bends so easily to cultural winds? Today’s
pathology was yesterday’s eccentricity; tomorrow, it may be virtue. Then this
is not medicine—it is politics.
―
Atrona Grizel
I am not without
self-confidence; I simply do not believe I can have any validity in the
external world. In other words, I do not believe in what is not myself after I
find no reason—and have not sought one—to trust anything other than myself.
―
Atrona Grizel
There is filth
and rot at the core of everything that has been institutionalized,
professionalized, and transformed into a system or industry.
―
Atrona Grizel
Institutions lock
up individuals who “threaten society.” Since I am still outside, it means that
my inner fire does not meet their definitions of fire.
―
Atrona Grizel
I have always
seen those who have a profession that in any way forces them to go to a
workplace as “stuck to that place like snot.” Because they get up, go there on
their own feet, spend all their days there, and repeat the same thing the next
morning. There are billions of places and spaces in the world, yet they consume
their lives only in that narrow corner. On the way there I want to step in
front of them, say “you can’t go,” and shove them aside to “jam the machine’s
gears.” But I know they will wriggle out of my hands and go there again as if
pulled by a magnet. In the state of habituation, this is a choice; but when it
becomes a “responsibility,” it turns into entrapment, and that—if not ignored
but observed attentively—no matter what, is always comical. Even after I grew
up and reached their age and therefore witnessed up close the struggle to feed
oneself, my view stayed the same because I would not take seriously what is
laughable: “gluedness.”
― Atrona Grizel