—— on identity

• your self-awareness is not proof of growth. there’s a subtle cowardice in burying yourself in self-analysis: if you’re always studying yourself, you never have to act. you never have to risk real failure in the world. you don’t need to wait for some great narrative shift to be someone new. you just have to act.
• you are not obligated to be exceptional to justify existing. you use intelligence as a shield. you’re terrified that without it, there’ll be nothing left worth seeing, nothing worth loving. you can have a happy life even if no one ever calls you exceptional again.
• you don’t need to examine every emotion before you’re allowed to feel it. half your suffering isn’t from pain itself, it’s from the way you interrogate the pain, trying to wring meaning out of it like blood from a cloth. not everything needs a thesis.
• you need to let yourself be boring sometimes. you don’t develop a life by chasing intensity, you develop it by showing up even when nothing interesting is happening.
• you’re not as fragile as you think, you’re just unused to living. you’ve lived a lot in your head and not enough in your body or the world. that makes experience feel sharper than it is.

—— on self-punishment

• you punish yourself for control. subconsciously, you think if you’re already hurting yourself — physically, emotionally, mentally, through deprivation or harsh self-talk — then no one else can “get there first.” it’s preemptive damage control, a way to stay one step ahead of imagined disappointment, failure, or rejection.
• you use self-punishment to avoid uncertainty. if you “deserve” your difficulties, then the world becomes predictable: you fail because you’re flawed. you struggle because you’re not good enough. it’s a brutal narrative, but it’s stable.
• self-punishment gives you a false sense of virtue. you treat suffering like it morally elevates you, like enduring pain earns you legitimacy. there is nothing inherently noble about pain.

—— on relationships

• you are desperate to be understood, but terrified of being known. you want someone to see the architecture of your interior life, but the idea of someone touching it — really touching it — scares the hell out of you.
• you confuse harshness with honesty. your inner voice thinks cruelty = truth. you’ve inherited a family culture that worships asceticism, and you treat softness like corruption. you don’t need to punish yourself to stay awake.
• you’re not as unknowable as you think. you act like your interior is some labyrinth only the initiated can navigate. there are people who could understand you, if you gave them the chance.