The Year In Review, So Far

It feels like I have lived four years in this single year, so I reckon that reviewing what happened so far would be interesting and fun.

In January, I left a dangerous and scary relationship. I remember not having electricity setup in my apartment that I moved to while they were out of state, and it was so cold that I woke up shivering. I had multiple nightmares of people forcing their way into my apartment. It was a very painful, stressful time.

I went on nice walks to the store often, and it felt like I had hope after many years.

I started reading the stoics, particularly Seneca, deeply. This was my first introduction to philosophy.

In February, I mostly focused on exploring technical ideas. I remember ranting that both Object Orientated Programming and Functional Programming are more similar than disimilar. They both are tools that attempt to handle the asymetric complexity of state management, especially against mutable state (this pattern is in Rust borrow checker, CQRS, etc etc).

I was exploring building an orchestration framework built on a custom actor model, hot reloading of modules/components, and a centralized state ledger for time travel debugging of pipelines.

I wrote a note that "difficult interpersonal scenarios are chances to practice empathy and grace."

I tried to find material stability. The curation of a home, the idea that I was sowing roots somewhere. It was a comforting time.

Someone suggested to me that I would like Simone Weil, and I remember reading his Wikipedia page and thinking to myself, "She is a strange woman." I started to casually read her, and I would soon deeply study her.

I did a deep dive into the Erlang thesis and OTP internals.

I started to write. I thought that I had a responsibility (from where? Even I don't know) to write and think. I also thought this was infinitely more important than being another engineer optimizing for salary. It felt like to do anything else was rotting my life away.

I was being actively stalked by the same dangerous man, and in a fit of pure rage I channeled a final letter to him, telling him to leave me alone:

Knowing that our time on this planet is incredibly short (but I would say it is plenty long, we just don’t spend each day meaningfully), all I truly want for you is this:

I want you to dance in the sun.

I want you to find a partner who could love you with more openness than I ever could.

I want you to navigate this tumultuous life through sorrows and joy with a quiet, flaming, internal strength.

I want you to achieve your goals and dreams.

To find a sense of community.

To feel your soul rooted and feel seen and appreciated by those around you.

I want you to be physically, emotionally, and spiritually healthy, so that you can navigate anything life throws at you.

I want you to feel rooted to this world. I can’t imagine something more important than this for the soul: to be attuned to the earth beneath your feet, and to feel a sense of wonder in the simple things.

I want you to sleep in the arms of someone whose love is gentle, spacious, and more open than I ever knew how to give.

I want you to wake to gentle mornings with rain tapping on the windows and warm dogs at your feet.

I want you to cherish your time with family and the memories you create before they are gone.

That is only a fraction of what I ache for you to have.

There are many unwritten things I wish for you, but I know you will reach them, because you are internally strong.

Knowing all of this: why can’t you wish the same for me?

In May, I felt the seams of my being start to crack. I read many writings from Weil and other Christian mystics.

I felt an inexplicable torment inside my being, almost like my chest was splitting open repeatedly. I had no idea where to go, what to do, and I did not know if I belonged anywhere. Above all, I felt such despair that I couldn't reconcile what I know to be real love, in the ideal sense, and the reality of almost all love I would find:

The greatest desire of the human soul is to be fully witnessed.

To be known not in fragments, but in totality. In full fidelity.

Indeed, radically witnessing another soul is the most holy love one can give. To do so borders the divine.

A love without possession or illusion. To love someone without the self.

…

A 27 year old man lives in San Francisco. He survived desecration. He graduated early. Taught himself programming. Now he works at a large tech company.

He did everything right.

He rests beside his husband.

He decorates his home.

He sobs.

He finally has roots that nourish.

But no one, not even his husband, will ever fully hold him.

He will die happy. But he will die without being witnessed.

His soul erased.

About a week later, I took a trip to Portland during a hypomanic episode. I found the memorial of a child who died in the holocaust:

Once upon a time there was Elzunia

Dying all alone

Because her daddy is in Majdanek

And in Auschwitz her mommy.

It felt like I shattered, and I reflected on a park bench overlooking the city:

The burden of this world in clarity feels too much without a god. In these moments where my soul is flayed open, the grief often feels unimaginable. The soul yearns to whisper to a divine essence.

The soul under infinite pressure desires relief through the transfer of the weight, often to something infinite. Who would be more capable than someone or something unspeakably vast to carry this infinite pain?

Yet in this moment I look to the sky, peering past the trees, and I feel nothing but total surrender without condition or whisper.

…

I am what I cannot be.

I spent time in the city, and I wrote this down in a notebook of mine:

The most dangerous thing is not being broken, but staying bound in the feeling of it.

In anguish, the soul is endlessly reduced.

You refuse to let your roots grow, yet ache somberly and desperately to be human.

Go forth. Yield to the void. You will find that wholeness is not earned, but fixed. A property of the soul, not a state of repair.

Sow roots, yes: honor your humanity. But sever them daily, in love.

For only in the severing of those roots, in releasing even your nourishment, may you be capable of clean love.

It felt like I closed the month of May having lost something within me.

My pace of writing picked up in June. I was doing very good at my job, and essentially read almost all day after work. I started to feel some discordance between my material reality and what I perceived as the ideal reality.

I felt the coherence of myself start to buckle under the weight of doubt:

I am nothing more than a loose binding of chance, illusion, and distance.

The effect of the “I” is felt in retrospect. A flicker, an echo, a whisper.

To others I am nothing more than a snapshot.

To myself the “I” is my most gently held illusion. I do not exist in reality. I dance each day between the loose sewing of my “I” and the inevitable unravel.

I notice patterns in my actions, my thoughts, and my perspective of my world. If I had been born in the Middle East, my thoughts would be radically different. My actions would be radically different. My perspective would be radically different.

…

To what extent should I trust something haphazardly composed?

My writing in this period was notably loose, meditative, and from the perspective of a detached observer. It was clean and disembodied.

In July, I predicted that my progression forward as a human would be from a total collapse of irreconciable contradictions:

Human progression is not two dimensional.

Human progression is the collapse of movement inward, the collapse of space and dimension.

I understand it as a two dimensional black hole, a collapse so total that it defies shape, movement, and the illusion of escape.

Movement is a fracturing spiral rather than a line.

Is it even possible for us to climb out of this spiral?

It is possible that nourishment, home, is found in this collapse.

If this is true, then nourishment and exile collapse into one another. And then nourishment and exile are the same.

Progress is inward obliteration.

This was written on July 1st.

In late July, I fell into the deepest existential despair I have ever known (which is saying a lot). I was tormented, and it felt like I could never reconcile the contradictions of this world:

Feel the embrace of your girlfriend who loves you, her soft skin reminding you that you are undoubtedly alive.

And then witness the genocide of dreaming people, their girlfriends left abandoned in a world that wants them dead.

Can I ask you a question?

Do you want to be alive?

Sit on the soft sand at the beach, the air rushing past your neck, the waves crashing rhythmically against the shore.

And then witness the ocean being poisoned, animals suffocating on plastic, in the name of corporate interests.

Do you want to be alive?

…

Can I ask you a question?

Do you want to be alive?

What?

Can we find hope in a hopeless world? Where would it come from? Why do we always struggle upwards?

Some people do not.

For those who do, it is beyond reason.

Despair, hope.

Death, life.

Crush.

I remember writing that in the worst state of mind I have ever felt. My brain kept short circuiting to that statement: "Can I ask you a question?" No different than a metronome's clicks, it consumed my mind as I wrote it.

I also felt isolated from the world and completely abandoned by God, even unworthy (or maybe too prideful) to believe explicitly:

I feel too lucid to find home in political and religious communities.

I feel too intense for the vast majority of relationships, both platonically and romantically.

People are very kind to me, I don’t know why. It always seems that they respect me, even if they usually do not respect others.

I don’t know why.

…

Lately I’ve been writing while listening to Catholic choir music.

I reason that my inner life would be more comforting if I was religious. But in fidelity to truth I can’t allow myself to be of any religion. It is unknowable and beyond my finite being.

At least I would be like Simone Weil - religiously devoted to some god through rigorous mystical philosophy.

But all I have is myself and the void. Well acquainted friends, I would say.

My entire feeling of the self who I deconstructed just a month earlier completely came apart:

The world does not feel real, but I also do not feel real. That is strange.

Imagine a person dying and becoming a ghost, inhabiting his own world only to find out that the world itself is fake. I wonder how he would feel.

What a beautiful fractal.

My performance at work tanked, and I slept on a mat in my office throughout my work days.

At the end of a week of the most beautiful and consuming despair, I realized that the human will is indomitable, and that any man who persisted against the weight of his suffering had the capability to transfigure this dark fire into something generative, but often at a great cost:

Have you ever stood at the precipice of collapse, leaped over the edge, and survived?

Have you ever felt your soul tremor into ash, but somehow, somewhere beyond reason, transfigure into lightning?

To emerge from devastation trembling, your blood shivering, your skull crowned in fire, and to know it as power.

To dissolve into nothing, yet remain.

This is a fact: there exists no evil, no influence, no action in this world that can shackle you.

You are free.

The human spirit is indomitable.

I may only describe this as lightning in my veins. That impossible sensation of a finite being capable of withstanding the infinite.

In August, I was incredibly tired. This was not really a notable period, although in a hypomanic fever I did write a manifesto on ethical programming education. I started briefly reading other writers than Weil, notably Rilke and Merton. I thought of my own understanding of what constitutes morally correct writing, and my realization was that all creation is moral and we must not abandon our fellow humans under a mask of rigor:

The danger of contemplative writing is not futility but detachment: when negation ceases to be a mirror, it becomes only a mask. In our world that prioritizes fragmentation of attention to the self, to higher things like God or transcendence, literature that hides behind negation without the attempt to connect back to the human condition risks further fragmentation.

What we need is contemplative writing that dares to use negation but risks clarity, that risks the mirror, even when it seems futile.

Readers and lost souls don’t need another mask of rigor, but a companion in the struggle to see.

Ever since July, I immensely struggled with performing well at work. My emotions felt too intense and overwhelming, so in desperation I tried to provide some higher meaning to my meaningless job:

I am not what I produce, nor am I simply my job title. Work is not identity but patronage: I do X, so I may pursue Y.

Even in the most pointless and frustrating tasks, approach work with the most attentive focus.

Epictetus labored as a slave, but his philosophy was developed and tested within his laboring.

What appears to be meaningless and frustrating is an opportunity to practice unfiltered attention, the foundation of love.

In September, I was in a deep depressive episode. What is notable is that I seem to feel abandoned by God during those episodes:

Supposedly God loves people despite their flaws.

But why is His love so achingly silent and empty?

Is it not cruel to create this world and then leave them in silence? I feel like an abandoned dog, sitting at the same spot every day waiting for the one who loves me to return.

At midnight, Oregon streets are beautiful. Tall, towering trees stretch into the sky, painting rows of dark blue against the grey mix of clouds and outer space. The world is perfectly still, only the sound of the leaves bristling in the dead night. Stars pepper the sky, ghosts of celestial bodies that could be long gone.

Today I walked through the streets, the moon shining her light, and all I saw in the sky was empty magnificence.

This unbearable inner ache under the sky of a bearable world.

And I cried.

His absence is His love.

All I can do is wait.

Towards the end of September, I entered a hypomanic episode and traveled to the town where my family who I don't speak to used to live. I wanted to witness everything, from the buildings to the people, and see if I had any connection left.

Men walked to and from the bar, often in flannel and wearing baseball caps. Some wearing camo, others in plain colors. What was once normal to me was now strange.

The same signs hung on nails, the same art on the walls. The same bar layout, the same workers.

Something about the bar was inexplicably painful. All that I could think was that somewhere within each dying and material finite thing of this saloon is love.

I paid my bill and drove to my hotel.

…

My soul guiding my hand to create a new Facebook account, I searched the names of my family to see if I could sew roots again.

And, somehow, nothing.

I remember looking at their faces and the movements in their life, oh how incredible it was to see their growth! My brother engaged, his girlfriend a college graduate, both of them in a distant town.

I remember looking at my mom’s different profiles, and I struggled to see any connection I had to her.

Eventually my steady soul found its strength, and I closed the app.

Looking at my family, all I saw were utter strangers.

Day after day, month after month, year after year, the person I used to be had changed.

And I suddenly realized that I am no longer him, and I share nothing with him.

What am I to you?

In October, my work quality detoriated even further. For the first time, I was asked if everything was good in my personal life. For my own personal safety, I couldn't tell them, "I just got diagnosed with a lifelong disability that explains why I'm fucked in the head." I smiled and shrugged it off, for it is clear to me that I will leave this job soon anyways after I qualify for FMLA in December.

The disability is bipolar disorder.

I wrote my theory for how evil is even possible to be done by non-sociopaths:

This is the transcendent force of language: the transformation of verb into noun, the reduction of man into thing, the transmutation of action into essence.

The child is not being difficult; the child is difficult.

The person is not acting crazy; the person is crazy.

The human is not committing an abomination; the human is an abomination.

The distance becomes insurmountable because it is woven through the person’s very existence.

It was an exhausting time, and I spent most of October in a deep, debilitating depressive episode. I realized through thinking about the difference between base and shallow love this truth about the love of God:

Any love for God is only pure through the suffering of abandonment. To love Him is to love His absence.

The love of God, taken to its highest form, is no different than atheism.

My writing, especially in this later half of the year, became more systematic and rigorous.

And that brings us to where we are today. How exhausting. But I do feel more alive than ever before.

All I can do is hang on until December, and then I can take medical leave and probably quit. I plan on buying property and then working a menial labor job; I must experience the suffering of the average life to understand the struggle of my fellow man.

I'm so tired. But there is hope to be found:

Weeks into a debilitating depressive episode, I realized today that the chaos of my mind adheres to a crushing causal order, and I realized that chaos itself has laws.

A man with a mental disorder has some dysfunction in his brain: a cause. That dysfunction manifests into his external world: an effect.

The conflicts between the external world (morality of corporations, which is to say impossible; material precarity) and the internal world (pursuit of the forms of God; satiety of the need for stability) amplify his chaos.

In some ways, this is horrifying. Yet it is also beautiful.

I also look outside the window to the world and see some greater beauty, for somehow in this world there is perfect order in such an enormous scale of being.

All relations, like species in an ecosystem, perfectly respond to another. A chain of cause and effect. The world itself is beautiful, which is to say each part of the whole itself is beautiful, and the sum is perfect.

From this perfection I can hold onto some sliver of hope for the posibility of movement.