To be different is to suffer in things that others live through automatically, which signifies not mere misery but also aliveness.
To be different is to suffer in things that others live through automatically, which signifies not mere misery but also aliveness.
―
Atrona Grizel
Do not try to
change people if you are going to change anything—change the conditions
instead. There is a condition suitable for every person, but there is not a
person suitable for every condition.
―
Atrona Grizel
I remember that
after a vacation that lasted about a month, when I realized I would have to go
back to school the next day, I went into shock. Cold sweat poured down my
forehead; my body trembled; I felt dizzy; my breathing tightened; I felt as if
I were about to have a heart attack. I lay down on the bathroom floor while
getting ready for school, thinking it might pass, yet I could still hear voices
telling me I was going to be late, which only intensified the overwhelm. Why
was this? Because school had become synonymous with torture in my mind. Going
there meant being eroded: hair dyeing, makeup, magazine, “relationship-fixing”
conversations; career and “success” fetishism; constant smiling and laughter;
monkeys screaming and repeating the same things, then videos of other
chimpanzee-like figures on the smartboard doing similar shouting, prompting the
entire class to laugh with mouths wide open; stomping around the classroom;
struggles to “gain social power”; a hollow youth culture of “winning” and
“losing”; and a constant noise that did not allow even the slightest silence
throughout the entire day. This is inhuman. How can a truly intelligent person
breathe in a place like that? If they can, then they are not intelligent. Yet I
was trapped in that airless place—I spent my entire youth there, and still no
word came from my mouth. My mind was always in a defensive position, to such an
extent that there were nights when I stayed awake for hours because it could
not shut that defense off to prepare for the next day, yet I did not feel
sleepy, since my brain suppressed everything it deemed unnecessary except
survival, and as a result I did not feel exhaustion. That is why I did not feel
tired on school days—not because I was rested, but purely because of this
pressure. I swear that there, perhaps thousands of times, I imagined acts of
extreme retaliation against everyone around me, or—during nearly every minute I
spent there—I replayed scenarios of my own disappearance in my mind: falling
from a great height, being found afterward, and lingering on the shock it would
cause, along with countless other dark imaginings, all just to calm myself even
slightly. Whenever I pictured harming others in my thoughts, or imagined my own
death, I could find at least a minimal capacity to endure; the anger and
frustration inside me had nowhere to go because expressing them was socially
forbidden, so they transformed into these kinds of fantasies, and I did not try
to stop it, because my inner world was the only thing I had left.
―
Atrona Grizel
The fact that
people I have parted ways with never engage with me again—never asking how I
am, even after years—has always struck me as hypocritical, because the true
face underlying every relationship that once felt happy then reveals itself:
silent agreements, and indifference are part of it as well. How can someone who
laughed with me throughout a relationship suddenly begin to sulk and ignore me
as if nothing ever happened once it ends? This can only stem from the fact
that, thanks to my trust and affection, I consciously or unconsciously blinded
myself to the reality that even the person I once spent time laughing with was
actually being governed by social scripts—because such extreme predictability
can only indicate that they act according to certain social mechanisms. As the
last remnant of my dried-up kind, I am ready to reject all social relationships
in advance for this very reason.
―
Atrona Grizel
My intelligence
has never been valued, and if that is so, then I can use my intelligence in my
writing as a tool of aggression; after all, even if I were to shout, no one
would care, and thus I have the right to openly belittle everyone I see as
stupid.
―
Atrona Grizel
My greatest
achievement is taking the flowers given to me “for my outstanding achievements”
and throwing them straight into the trash—if I even accept them at all, which
in most cases, if I have the choice, I do not. Because beauty can never come
from institutions; institutions are merely circuses that pluck flowers and then
call that beauty.
―
Atrona Grizel
A woman cannot be
a recluse, because she is outward-oriented, because she depends on attention
from the outside, because she can reproduce only when she succeeds in
attracting a man to herself—and her entire biological sex is reduced to this,
since it is the woman who gives birth and therefore is supposed to be the focal
point. For this reason, the woman is self-centered and exhibitionistic, because
she is the one who invites, not the one who is invited. Accordingly, her
thoughts are also directed toward the outside world, because she constantly
thinks about men, trying to decipher their inner nature in order to exploit it
and thus seduce them more effectively. Even if she has the capacity for
introspection, this too serves first to be expressed outwardly, because a woman
lives externally: she always wants to be heard, always wants to be seen, because
she is spoiled, because she believes she is entitled to everything simply by
possessing a womb. Consequently, when she feels an emotion, she exaggerates it;
when she has an idea, she immediately announces it to others, because she
cannot be alone. To be alone means to lose external attention, and that is the
last thing a woman would want. For a man, however, being a recluse is easy:
ignoring women.
―
Atrona Grizel
The reason
intelligent people think foolishly and write foolish things is that they still
try to remain social—that is, they try to reconcile intelligence, which is by
nature post-societal, with society. The intelligent person has only one task:
to become solitary. But one point is important here—not to fall into
loneliness, but to become solitary; that is, to deliberately exile oneself
socially and thereby turn entirely toward one’s inner world, nurturing and
developing it, until it replaces civilization’s noise. Those who fail to do
this, even if they possess an intelligence quotient of 200, end up as people
adapted to the world who cannot produce ideas that interest me, which shows
that, apart from its bureaucratic meaning, that number does not signify much on
its own.
―
Atrona Grizel
I must have a name: one that some will fear, some will hate, some will ignore, some will defend, some will quietly admire—but one about which no consensus will ever be reached. Let no one be able to tell me plainly “good” or “bad,” let no one see me along sharp lines as simply “trustworthy” or “untrustworthy.” May the mind of everyone who gets lost in my depth—the depth that swallows molds and labels—be thrown into disarray.
― Atrona Grizel
I accept all scientifically defined biological diseases and neurological disorders, but never emotional, mental, or social “dysfunctions,” because science has no right to intrude into the inner life, which is abstract and therefore radically non-scientific. The inner world is not a toy to be broken into pieces, then classified and defined, and finally sent into a test tube so that civilization can digest it. To scientificate it is to commit blasphemy.
―
Atrona Grizel
I want to go
north. Or east. Most accurately, northeast—because everyone is fleeing from
there.
―
Atrona Grizel
Female writers
admired especially by young girls share common traits, namely that all their
works are built around two themes: sexuality and gender. All other subjects are
merely satellites orbiting thes two massive planets. Why do they have to be
this way? Men can forget their sexuality, and precisely for that reason they
can form friendships; women, on the other hand, are conscious every second of
being women, and precisely for that reason they do not know what friendship is.
Gossip, love games, “emotional advances,” “sexual cunning,” jealousy, and power
plays… none of this is even necessary nor noble. To deal with such things is
not humanity; it is simply exposing the primitiveness of one’s own soul. But
because they are all the same, these themes become normalized and are presented
as if they were a part of life—or rather, as if they should be accepted as
natural. The moment I began reading Plath’s diary, a suffocating heaviness
settled over me within the very first pages. My breath began to tighten. It
could not be this superficial. Even the way the topics are handled resembles
that of a child. Flirtations… flirtations… flirtations… what am I supposed to
read here? What else do they even live? I forced myself to read dozens more
pages in disgust, because I had started reading it at school, had no other book
with me, and nothing better to do. When I finally reached around the hundredth
page, I stopped, feeling that I had read enough to fully expose what kind of
person she is; I was no longer surprised by why young girls like writers of
this kind, and I found it unnecessary to think any further about that name.
―
Atrona Grizel
Love reveals its
true face in the presence of money, because most love is conditional and rests
on money, not on the soul. Most people are simply not deep enough, nor can they
ever be deep enough, to form an existential companionship. That is why what they
dream of is not an artistic or intellectual encounter, but primal fantasies:
pleasure and comfort. An existential relationship requires confrontation and
courage, and the herd does not possess these. Therefore, the only thing that
seems capable of fulfilling their desires is money, because money provides both
pleasure and comfort while keeping them away from confrontation and courage.
Accordingly, their love is determined by the amount of money—it is measurable,
because it is largely a materialistic love. The fact that the economically poor
are so difficult to love exposes the true nature of society’s understanding of
love: the capitalist’s love—and capitalists cannot love.
―
Atrona Grizel
An individual who
does not accept society has no place within it, because such people are either
locked away in mental institutions or prisons, thereby ensuring society’s
conformism and homogeneity—and this is what the state declares as a “safe
condition,” because if people are the same, they can be easily conditioned into
obedience by the same methods. But if such individuals continue to remain
within society, what occurs is what is called “alienation” and “social death,”
which is not very different from being locked in cells. This situation
corresponds exactly to what is called a “prisoner of conscience,” but it is not
acknowledged because it cannot be certified—since, in fact, the very thing that
determines this label’s officiality is society itself.
―
Atrona Grizel
I don’t love
myself; I love being myself.
―
Atrona Grizel
Why does
sexuality play such an important role in people’s lives? Because a person
becomes sexually aroused and wants to soothe that feeling. Then they become
aroused again and want to soothe it again. And thus they enter a cycle, because
there is no final relief—this is a deliberate evolutionary mechanism designed
to keep the individual constantly driven toward sexuality. If biology made a
single sexual encounter fully satisfying, reproduction would not occur, and
living species would therefore go extinct. For this reason, biology has
designed the brain to always feel sexual desire and always feel sexual
dissatisfaction as well—that is, the two are structured to continuously fuel
each other. Why is it that after having sex dozens, hundreds, even thousands of
times, a person never once stops and thinks, “This isn’t working; this is
pointless”? Because as animality increases, the perception of sexuality as a
cycle diminishes; and since the majority are animal-like, this cycle becomes
normalized—and that is what is called “eroticism.”