Love of Lights

Love, romance, and sexuality are some of the most difficult things to navigate as a human being. I think they cause me the most confusion. I can't really think of anything that affects my well-being more. Love Love is the allocation of attention and your willingness for sacrifice. You love the things you pay special attention to. You love the things you'd sacrifice for. Sexuality Sexuality is the feeling of physical desire. It's that animal attraction that you don't control. It's the physical desire for union. It's biology's attempt to help us break free from the prisms of our own consciousness. Romance Romance is the bridge between love and sexuality. You feel romance for the people you want to pay special attention to, the people you would sacrifice for, but who you also feel that animal impulse to unify with. Obviously you can love someone without being sexually attracted to them, and you can be sexually attracted to someone without loving ...

Writing for my mental health I always begin these posts in the same way, but I do so because it's always true: I haven't written here in a long time. It's a problem. Adolescent and young-adult me were wise beyond their years. Writing down how I feel and trying to order my inner life is an invaluable task. When I don't do it, I tend to lose track of myself. The demands of daily life can easily occupy one's time so fully that you forget to check the pulse of your mental health. I certainly have. But I'm going to check in now. I want to talk about vulnerability. My fear of vulnerability and its negative consequences One of the hardest things about being human is navigating interpersonal relationships. It's no profound statement, but it's true. I think all of my deepest emotional wounds have been inflicted by something wrong happening in an interpersonal relationship. I can trace the biggest scars easily: I'm moved away from a group of friends I lo...

Another chapter of my life is coming to a close, so I figure it's worth writing about it and reflecting on what happened. I've lived here in the capital for roughly two years, which is something I have wanted to do for a while. The idea became nascent in my teenage years, and eventually I acted on it and made it reality. I will commend myself on that if not anything else. A desire that lived solely in the realm of ideas was made reality, and I lived it. That is something to be proud of -- something to look back on in the future when self-doubt is my predominate feeling and nothing feels attainable. Ideas can become reality. I decided to move to London not really sure how my finances were going to work out. I could take out a student loan to cover my tuition costs, but there was no further help for living costs. I basically had: my savings, my mother, and a chasm waiting for me to fall into somewhere down the line. Over time my savings dwindled, my mother helped with accommoda...

It's been quite a long time since I've written here. I've intended to myriad times over the past few months, but something has always held me back: either my belief that there will be antagonistic readers to what I have to write (as I've fallen out with close friends who I believe still have access to this blog -- I don't know if they would still bother to read it, though), or simply a kind of disconnect with myself that has plagued me over the past few months -- a disconnect that makes it difficult for me to sit and be introspective and touch upon anything useful or interesting. But the impulse has always been there: something within me that wants to express myself in prose, to gather my thoughts, to order my self. I'll try again now. Hold on; I'm gonna crack open a Guinness. I think I want to do an inventory on my life and internal affairs since having graduated from my masters in philosophy. Hey, that's a thing: I'm a master in philosophy now --...

I've just been tipped onto an idea by something my favourite poet said on his podcast recently. The idea is that whenever you are faced with the sense of being overwhelmed or whenever the Fear rises up in you, and threatens to make you and your life small, combat it in the following way: isolate the cause of the fear and describe how you can alleviate it. The key thing to remember, however, is that your natural instinct will be to simply get rid of the problem in the easiest way, which will probably mean avoiding rather than engaging with it. But you never improve at problem-solving by avoidance; you don't up your skill-level in that area. If anything, every time you get rid of a problem by avoiding it, you probably lose skill points in that area. You legitimise the fear, and you'll be even more scared of it the next time it comes around. This is why, as I've written on this blog before, it's important to embrace the fear, because fear is pointing you in the direc...

I wish I could be religious. Anybody that knows me knows I can't be religious -- I'm too philosophical, too invested in the truth to believe things on faith, to believe things without evidence. That sounds self-aggrandising, but really I just mean I withhold belief unless there're good reasons to believe. Religious people will argue that there are plenty of good reasons to have faith, and I don't deny them that, but in order for me to believe anything, the reason that "it is probably true" is a kind of necessary condition. I can't get myself to believe something if I simply think "it might be true" or "I can't prove otherwise". When I can only believe something to those latter degrees, I withhold belief until I have further reasons to strengthen my credulity. A lot of things in religious texts I don't believe because I think about them in relation to the work being done in the sciences, so I believe a mixture of, "it's ...