I’m someone like many. There’s so much about me that is not special.
My job and career will benefit more from taking another course in advanced mathematics, or enroll in an E-MBA program. Whether I consider myself an artist, it is not my profession and I make no money from writing these words.
So, why bother? Why now? To what end? What’s in it for you to read my posts?
To answer those questions, I have to flashback to when I was 19. The pinnacle of my depression. I was half way between:
1) taking my David Hume’s doubtist attitude to all matters intellectually approachable to life and ended up with a “do I even fucking exist?” Descartes on one hand,
and
2) Diving deep into the darkest version of nihilism I could imagine.
How I ended up there is its own story for another post. But I was definitely committed. To be honest, I didn’t know who David Hume or Descartes were back then, but later I realized how much I admired the former and didn’t appreciate the latter. Those days, suicide was a real and not unpleasant thought to taste from time to time. There were hardly anything I could think of doing to myself that was objectionable from an absolute point of view. All had lost meanings, all were gone, I was almost reset, not totally blank since I was using language and I had memories, but not far from the experience of a gradual reset either.
Don’t get me wrong. I was energetic as fuck. Like, what I did not lack was energy. I was not sleep deprived at all, I was solidly going strong, into darkness, towards my free fall.
Then, something unexpected happened. My family, if you are generous enough to call it one, was not educated, artsy, particularly open minded. The kind of open mindedness that would allow me to be exposed to art. Despite a lack of background, for some reason that I speculate had something to do with the fact that I liked cartoons and movies when I was pre-teen, I started to write. If you are someone surrounded by art and artists and your profession is tied to arts, imagine one day out of nowhere you take a book on calculus and start reading it. That would be odd, right? It was the same for me to pick up a pen and paper and start to write – I’m a millennial, not an an identify, but as it’s my age range, so pen and paper was not obsolete yet when I was 19.
I wrote 7 books of hand written stuff. I write a 70 page long novel in which I end the life of parents in one of the most graphically visually descriptive ways and gave it to my friends. My friends were kinda weird. They were less terrified and more like “why this way?” Legitimate question, but let’s stay on the topic.
In retrospect, writing saved my life. It saved me from committing suicide. It allowed me keep on staying alive. By the time I was 23, I was in a different place and I stopped writing. That was over a decade ago. These days, I am not suicidal. But the need to write has been emerging to the surface for the last 3 years and I cannot help it anymore. I have to submit to it. I want to submit to it. I want to take over me and control me. I am writing for a few reasons these days:
1- I want to, no, I need to be naked in public. I want to scream the most embarrassing thoughts, feelings, stories so that everyone can hear it. I am not going to disclose my identity on this website. I want to be naked in public while no one knows who I am. Maybe one day that would change. For now, just like most of my friends, call me Raven – it’s a real nickname. Nice to connect with you, even if you do not exist. I’ll talk more as to what brought to the point of needing to be naked so badly in another post.
2- It has occurred to me that I am not tethered to humans like I yearn to be. Over years, due to being inwarded until I was 17, then moving to a university where I did tether, but left that city and university to another place, to another university, another country, another continent, then another city, then going through a social disconnect before I could out myself, then another country and another city, I have been too much for too long in transition. I lost a sense of permanence. I didn’t realize it then. Didn’t notice it for years. I ran and ran to survive, to didge poverty, to have a status, to overcome my financially and inferiority insecurities, and lost focus on losing the tethers. To feel tethered to humans, to the humans that are my type of humans to feel connected to, I need to, to some extent, understand them, or think I do, and I need them to understand me, or at least feel like they do. I write so that I can tell them who I am, what I have walked through, what I have ran through, where I have been trapped, where I have broken free, what I thought, what I carried inside, what I let go, and what became of me. So that maybe you and I would tether. Because if there’s one thing I learned in life, it is, for me, that there are very few things worth living it, and one is tether to your precious ones. If I achieve those few things, when I reach 80, if I ever do, I imagine I’d be happy that I lived a life I fucking wished for. I love to curse when I write. Fuck you. <3 – you know what? I write to curse!
3- As you may have noticed, I named the website “cluster of hope”. The reason is, having gone through a monumental body of introspective work, for the first time in my life, I feel like I can see the light at the end of tunnel. The tunnel is catching up with my past, the tunnel of trauma, the tunnel of internalized toxic beliefs, the tunnel of being full of shit, the tunnel of being scared, being fearful, not being able to relax, the tunnel of being a coward, the tunnel of regret and pain, the tunnel of not being able to fall into sleep, the tunnel of waking up too early, the tunnel of complexes, the tunnel of not understanding self, the tunnel of haunted memories, the tunnel of shame, the tunnel of holding back, the tunnel of feeling inferior, the tunnel of insecurities, the tunnel of FOMOs, the tunnel of knowing myself, the tunnel of being unreasonably cocky, the tunnel of being unjustifiably full of myself, the tunnel of anti-bravery, the tunnel of succumbing to societal pressure, the tunnel of not being able to be an individual, the tunnel of not being able to practice my individuality, the tunnel of disconnectedness, the tunnel of unescapable sadness, self-accused guilt, the tunnel of terror and feeling as the target of anger and unkindness. I didn’t know whether it was possible to get here. I was not sure. I never thought it was impossible either. I was agnostic either way. The writings of some people inspired me in my path towards the end of the tunnel. And as I felt relieved and freed, I become a cluster of hope. I am writing now so that, while I want to entertain you, I might also inspire you on your journey to relief and freedom. To serendipity.
Raven, Feb 2024