arylleth

[arylleth]

i hate to be this person because i used to roll my eyes at people who told me this but finally making myself go through uncomfortable situations for the possibility of joy has resulted in me being happier than i ever could have imagined being. i do think that you should always listen to yourself but i prevented my own happiness for a long time by not knowing how to tell intuition from overthinking and being too afraid and sticking to negative what if’s when i should have been sticking to positive what if’s. not every venture outside your comfort zone will result in some revelation that moves the earth under your feet but the probablilty of it is zero if you never venture out

[arylleth]

how lovely, the way lovers lean on each other. i've been thinking abut the physics of it, the grvaity of the hearts. the first human instinct: to find something to lean on. we all have it, the radar for warm solid things. i am good at being lonely, but loneliness makes you heavy. what do you do when you cannot lean? you fold. i fold on myself. there is warmth here, too. a center here, too. i wish i was enough.

ryebreadgf

[arylleth]

[arylleth]

- Antonin Artaud - from General Security: The Liquidation of Opium 

Destroy yourself, you who are desperate, and you who are tortured in body and soul, abandon all hope. There is no more solace for you in this world. The world lives off your rotting flesh. And you, lucid madmen, spastics, cancer patients, chronic meningitis cases, you are misunderstood. There is a point in you which no doctor will ever understand, and for me this is the point which saves you and makes you august, pure, wonderful: you are outside life, you are above life, you have miseries which the ordinary man does not know, you exceed the normal level, and it is for this that men refuse to forgive you, you poison their peace of mind, you undermine their stability. You have irrepressible pains whose essence is to be inadaptable to any known state, indescribable in words. You have repeated and shifting pains, incurable pains, pains beyond imagining, pains which are neither of the body nor of the soul, but which partake of both. And I share your suffering, and I ask you: who dares to ration our relief? In the name of what superior lucidity that usurps our very souls, we who are at the very root of knowledge and lucidity? And this because of our desire, because of our determination to suffer. We whom pain has sent traveling through our souls in search of a calm place to cling to, seeking stability in evil as others seek stability in good. We are not mad, we are wonderful doctors, we know the dosage of soul, of sensibility, of marrow, of thought. You must leave us alone, you must leave the sick alone, we ask nothing of mankind, we ask only for the relief of our suffering. We have evaluated our lives well, we know what restrictions they impose on others and above all on ourselves. We know what willed deterioration, what renunciation of ourselves, what paralyses of subtle functions our disease inflicts on us each day. We are not going to kill ourselves just yet. In the meantime, leave us the hell alone.

[arylleth]

“Don’t we touch each other just to prove we’re still here?”

Yes. Yes, I think we do. And yet, the truth is more elusive than our skin dares admit. Even in our most intimate collisions, the particles resist. Atoms—those stubborn sovereigns—never truly touch. They hover. They repel. They dance in electric tension, suspended by invisible laws that govern even our most desperate need for closeness. A fingertip against a wrist, a mouth to shoulder, a body curled into another’s warmth—none of it is contact, not really. Not in the language of physics. There is always a sliver of space, infinitesimal and insistent, that keeps us from becoming one.

And yet—we do not live at the scale of atoms. We do not measure our ache in nanometers. We live in the trembling of fingertips, in the warmth of a palm across a cheek, in the hush between two chests breathing close in the dark. We name that illusion touch because we must. Because something in us needs to believe that connection can be more than theory, more than ghost-light and probability. We insist on calling the space between us real. Because if we didn’t—what would anchor us?

I think of all the times I have reached—not to hold, but to be held in return. As if contact itself could stitch my outline back into place. As if your skin beneath mine might convince me I’m not just wind in a borrowed body, not just thought draped in flesh. I reach not to possess you, but to be reminded—gently, desperately—that I still weigh something in this world. That I exist where I am touched.

Isn’t that why we reach for each other in the night? Not out of lust, not always, but because we fear we’ve gone translucent in the silence between words. Because in the dark, when even our own voice feels distant, we need the echo of another’s hand to tell us we’re still here. We press our lips to another’s skin not to conquer it, but to echo within it: Can you feel me? Then I must be real.

Touch becomes our evidence. In grief, in joy, in the staggering ordinary. We clasp hands at funerals not only to console but to resist disappearing into sorrow. We kiss not always out of hunger but to etch ourselves into someone else’s memory, even if only for a moment. We brush hair behind ears, trace scars with reverent thumbs, wrap arms around torsos like lifelines—because the body, even with its limitations, offers a kind of truth the mind cannot. Because in a world where so much dissolves, the pressure of your hand becomes scripture.

We touch to tether ourselves to time, to one another, to something that answers back. We cling during grief not to heal but to anchor, because sorrow makes ghosts of us, and another’s touch calls us back from the edges of forgetting. There are days I wonder if we’re all just looking for proof—in the pressure of a hand, in the echo of a heartbeat against our own—that we haven’t vanished. That we haven’t become dreams walking through fog.

And even if our atoms never meet, something deeper does. Something wordless. Call it soul. Call it longing. Call it the gentle defiance of the human need to feel—and be felt in return. Because presence, at its core, is not a matter of physics but of faith. The faith that to be touched is to be seen. The faith that to be felt is to be remembered. The faith that if someone reaches for me, I must still be here.

So yes. We touch each other just to prove we’re still here. Because without that—what else could we hold on to?

— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (via letsbelonelytogetherr)

[arylleth]

you will change address, maybe you will return to yourself.

How do you heal when the damage feels like home?

[arylleth]

One day, I woke up and we no longer spoke the same language. I haven't heard from you since.

Not out of anger. Not even misunderstanding. Just—distance. A wordless shift. The kind that doesn’t slam doors, but leaves them quietly ajar, as if unsure whether to close or wait.

You stopped answering in ways I recognized. I stopped speaking in ways you could hold. Since then, I haven’t heard from you.

It’s unsettling, how language can dissolve between two people. How something once fluent—effortless—can become foreign overnight. I’ve thought about where the change began. Was it a misused word? A silence too long? Or was it the slow erosion of a shared code, something once sacred now left untranslated?

But translation has its limits, translations carry with them the ache of approximation. Something is always lost: the texture of a word, the warmth of a tone, the intention behind silence. What is said is never quite what is meant. What is heard is never quite what was given. And in love—especially in love—translation falters. The gestures, the glances, the unsaid things—they need no interpreter when the language is mutual. But when that language fades, what remains?

Maybe that silence wasn’t a wall but a pause. The one that follows the final attempt to translate what no longer finds its meaning. Maybe it was our way of realizing: we no longer understood the same dialect of care. The same inflections of need.

Because love is a language. It’s spoken not just with words, but in attention, in presence, in choosing someone again and again, especially when it’s inconvenient. And when love’s language is no longer shared, no amount of translation can save it.

Still, I don’t carry it as a failure. As Carl Jung wrote, “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” We were transformed—at least for a time. And that matters.

So now, I let the silence be. Not as punishment, but as truth. A quiet acknowledgment that we no longer speak what the other needs to hear. And yet, I hope—wherever you are—that your voice is understood again. That you’ve found someone fluent in the particular way your soul asks to be held.

As for me, I am learning to speak differently. To listen with fewer assumptions. To love in a language that doesn’t need to be translated to feel safe.

Because some connections end not in rupture, but in the moment you realize: the language of love must be spoken together. And when it no longer is, what’s left is not failure—but a final line, followed by silence.

─ Hisham Siddiqi

[arylleth]

Growth isn't a matter of age, nor of knowledge—it is measured in the space between impulse and response, in how we navigate discomfort without turning it into a weapon.

There comes a moment—quiet, often humbling—when you realize that emotional maturity is not about perfection, but about presence. It’s the courage to pause when all you want is to lash out. There's a quiet strength in emotional maturity. Not in knowing everything, but in being willing to unlearn, to listen, to say, “I was wrong,” without collapsing into shame or defensiveness. This is the work of becoming whole: knowing that being flawed doesn't make us unworthy, but refusing to take responsibility does damage the spaces we inhabit with others.

As Carl Rogers, one of the founders of humanistic psychology, wrote: “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” Growth begins with self-awareness, not self-reproach. And it deepens when we learn to offer that same gentle awareness to others—especially when they falter.

As Bell Hooks wrote in All About Love, “Love is an action, never simply a feeling.” And action requires effort. Not just in grand gestures, but in the daily work of listening better, judging less, asking instead of assuming. Real connection can only grow where accountability lives—where people are brave enough to confront themselves and kind enough to do it without shame.

We often long for others to be better. To understand us, forgive us, fight for us. But how often do we offer them the very grace we demand? We crave safe spaces, but are we safe people? We want honesty, but do we know how to hold it when it’s not flattering? not recoil when it's uncomfortable? Maturity begins when we recognize that relationships aren’t built on performance, but on mutual responsibility.

It’s easy to blame the other, to say they failed, they disappointed. But what about us? Are we willing to look inward, not to condemn, but to understand? Healing begins when blame ends. When we stop outsourcing our discomfort and start asking: What’s mine to repair?

In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke reminds us: “The only journey is the one within.” And from that inner journey, everything flows: empathy, clarity, strength. We grow not by avoiding our flaws, but by facing them with tenderness. Not by never failing, but by learning how to rise without stepping on others.

John Bowlby, in his attachment theory, showed us that emotional connection is a basic human need, not a weakness. But it is earned, sustained through trust, consistency, and repair. No bond survives without responsibility. Real love requires us to be better not just for ourselves, but for those who dare to be close to us.

We often believe that how we love will shape how others love us back. But that's only part of the truth. It's not enough to give love—we must give it where it can live. “Love is an act of will—both an intention and an action.” And part of that will is discernment: learning to invest in people who return love in kind, not just absorb it.

So yes, love generously, show up fully—but not blindly. Teach people how to love you by loving yourself enough to walk away when they can't meet you there. We don't always receive the love we give—but we can choose to give it to those who do. We grow not by avoiding conflict, but by staying present in it. By choosing repair over pride. By learning to say: "Here's what I feel. Here's what I need. And here's what I'm responsible for." That's not weakness—it's the foundation of every honest relationship.

We mirror the world we want to live in by how we choose to be, especially when no one is watching.

In the end, the version of ourselves we hope others will be with us—honest, kind, brave—we must first become for them. Not to earn love, but to make space for the kind of love that holds, honors, and reciprocates. Be the version of yourself you’d want others to become in your presence. Because deep down, we’re all just hoping someone will meet us in that space — willing, open, and real. And perhaps the most loving thing we can do is meet them there first.

May you find people who water the roots of your being, who don't run from your truth, who make the garden of your soul not just bloom—but feel safe to keep growing. May you become that person for others.

You're not grown until you know how to communicate, apologize, be truthful and accept accountability without blaming someone else.

[arylleth]

I don't think anyone who's ever truly meant something can just be erased—not really. But I understand why you'd feel that way. When someone walks away without explanation, it can make you question your worth, or the significance of what you shared. But their silence, their cutting off, speaks more of their limitations than of your value.

Maybe it was easier for them to close the door than to face the complexity of what you represented. Maybe they couldn't hold space for the depth, the light, or even the shadows you brought into their life. But that doesn't mean you were insignificant. It only means they weren't capable of holding you in the way you needed, in the way you deserved. You matter—even if someone else failed to show it.

And if you've given the best of yourself—if you've worked to soften your roughest edges, grown in self-awareness, acted with care, and done what you could to nurture the relationship — then no, you are not “easy to cut off.” You are someone who loved and tried and showed up. That is never small.

There comes a point when it's not about doing more, but about recognizing that your worth is not dependent on another's ability to see it. Sometimes, being cut off isn't a reflection of your lack (maybe theirs), but a painful form of redirection. Trees are pruned not because they are dying, but because they are growing.

As Carl Jung once said, “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” And sometimes, that becoming means letting go of those who cannot meet us where we are—or where we are going.

As you move forward, I hope you find people who recognize the quiet strength behind your efforts, who see your sincerity as richness, not vulnerability. May they water the garden of your soul, not trample it. You deserve connections that feel like spring — where what you offer doesn't go unnoticed, but is met, returned, and cherished.

Keep loving, yourself first, and bring love wherever you go. I speak to anyone who finds themselves in his question. May roses bloom on your paths, and become who you truly are, the best version of yourself.

Sometimes I ask myself if I am so easy to cut off as If I never meant something?

[arylleth]

This passage reflects a deeply psychoanalytic view of love, identity, and loss. It intertwines ideas from object relations theory (a branch of psychoanalysis that developed from and alongside Freud's work) and some Lacanian concepts. Let's break it down.

── .✦ Core Ideas in the Quote:

1. "Love is letting your identity fill in around the shape of the other person" 𓍯𓂃𓏧This suggests that love is a relational act of self-definition. Your sense of self shifts, adapts, and reshapes itself around the presence of the beloved. This reflects object relations theory, particularly the work of Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott, who emphasized how early relationships (with primary caregivers, but later extrapolated to all relationships) structure the psyche. Loving someone here means that they become a psychological object around which your internal world organizes itself. You’re not just affected by them—you are, in part, defined by them.

2. "You love someone by defining yourself against them" 𓍯𓂃𓏧 This echoes Lacan’s mirror stage and his notion that our sense of identity is always formed in relation to an other (the “big Other” in Lacanian terms). Love, then, is not about merging or union in a simplistic way, but rather a dialectic of difference: we come to know who we are by how we are not the other, by how we orient ourselves to their presence. There's also a Hegelian undertone: identity is formed through negation and contrast—we become us in relation to not-you.

3. "Loss hurts because there's nothing holding that part of you in place anymore" 𓍯𓂃𓏧 This is psychologically astute. The passage sees grief as a kind of psychic destabilization: the person you loved was anchoring part of your identity. Their absence dislodges something within you. This aligns with Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), where he writes that in mourning, a person must slowly decathect (detach) libido from the lost object, and in the process, feel a sort of inner dismemberment.

4. "Your outline still holds... the thing you shaped yourself into by loving them, you never stop being that" 𓍯𓂃𓏧 This suggests the irreversibility of love’s psychic impact. It's not a phase you grow out of; it's an internal restructuring. This could resonate with Jacques Lacan’s idea that love leaves a kind of “scar” on the unconscious—our subjectivity is permanently marked by our significant relationships. Alternatively, it echoes Bion's idea (from object relations) that the internalized object remains alive within the psyche. Even when someone dies or leaves, the version of them you internalized continues to affect how you feel, think, love.

── .✦ Summary of Psychoanalytic Ideas Present:

Concept Source Description Object Relations Klein, Winnicott, Bion Identity is shaped in relation to internalized objects (people); love is a structuring force. Lacan’s Mirror Stage & Big Other Lacan Identity forms through recognition and difference; the beloved becomes part of how we “see” ourselves. Mourning and Melancholia Freud Loss is painful because the loved object was part of the ego; grief is ego reorganization. The Permanence of the Inner Object Bion, Fairbairn Once internalized, the psychological trace of a person remains a part of the self.

── .✦

This quote captures the melancholic beauty of love as something that doesn't just "happen to us," but rewrites who we are. Psychoanalysis teaches us that relationships aren't just about affection or companionship—they are the crucible in which the self is formed. And when someone leaves, they don’t just go; they leave a shape, a hollow, a contour in our psyche that we keep living within.

It's that what we call "love" is actually letting your identify fill in around the shape of the other person - you love someone by defining yourself against them. It says loss hurts because there's nothing holding that parte of you in place anymore. But your outline still holds, and it keeps holding. The thing you shaped yourelf into by loving them, you never stop being that. The marks are permanent, so the idea of the person you loved is permanent too.

[arylleth]

I’ve recently received some hate messages—completely misleading and unrelated to the reflections I share on my blog (which are anything but political; have you ever heard me talk about politics?). These messages made me think deeply about hatred, about how it has become a persistent part of our social fabric, and I came to the conclusion that it is a symptom of fragility.

The hatred that spreads today is not new, but it has taken on new forms: more viral, more visible, more legitimized. It is “liquid” hatred, to borrow Bauman’s term, because it no longer needs deep roots—it only needs a screen, hearsay, a spark. It is a phenomenon that spreads rapidly not because people are more evil today, but because the conditions for hating have become structurally more favorable. Donskis would say we live in an era of “moral amnesia,” where the capacity for empathy has been eroded by speed, distraction, and oversimplification. Hatred thrives where complexity is perceived as a threat rather than a richness.

In times of widespread anxiety, hatred becomes an emotional shortcut, a form of existential simplification. Its proliferation does not necessarily indicate an increase in cruelty, but rather a crisis in the psychological and cultural resilience of democratic societies. Zygmunt Bauman, in his analysis of “liquid modernity,” explained that in postmodern society, relationships become precarious, horizons uncertain, identities fluid. In such a scenario, hatred offers the illusion of sharp boundaries—between “us” and “them,” between right and wrong, pure and impure.

Leonidas Donskis, in his Power and Imagination, reminds us that hatred is not only a destructive force but also a pathological substitute for hope. When we are no longer able to imagine credible political alternatives or supportive communities, we retreat into defining the other as guilty. In this sense, hatred is the emotional revenge of helplessness.

Where does the fire start?

1. Existential Uncertainty We live in what Alain Ehrenberg called a “society of the fatigue of being oneself” (La fatigue d’être soi). People, forced to endlessly construct themselves, suffer under the weight of self-sufficiency as a mandate. In this context, psychological instability is no longer marginal—it’s structural. When the individual fails in the task of self-legitimation, frustration turns into aggression. The crisis of collective narratives—religious, political, ideological—leaves individuals naked before the chaos of the world, without tools to process fear except through anger. Byung-Chul Han, in his The Burnout Society, speaks of a transition from “virus” to “neuron”: we are no longer oppressed by authoritarian power but by an excess of positivity, performance, and self-assessment. Violence thus explodes not as transgression but as a side effect of individualized psychological pressure. Simply put: people live in a chronic state of insecurity—economic, social, identity-based—and when fear takes over, scapegoats are sought. The "other" becomes the target: the immigrant, the different, the poor, the feminist, the queer, the educated, the “weird.” Hatred becomes a way to simplify the world and feel on the right side.

2. Cognitive Infantilization Yascha Mounk, in his The People vs. Democracy, emphasizes how the simplification of public debate—driven by algorithms, sensationalist media, and digital tribalism—contributes to the erosion of democratic competence. It’s not just ignorance, but a structural redefinition of the culture of discourse, where complexity is considered elitist and doubt a betrayal.

As Umberto Galimberti observes, we live in a society that has replaced paideia (the formation of the soul) with training for competition. School, politics, and media tend to produce consumers and fans—not critical citizens. And without the ability to argue, only impulse remains.

There is a cultural regression facilitated by the media and political system. Public opinion is often fed on slogans, memes, disposable outrage. Depth is boring—and thus discarded. Idiocracy, as imagined by Mike Judge in his film, isn’t so far off: it is a dystopia founded on progressive critical disempowerment.

Idiocracy is not an extreme phenomenon but a pervasive process: it is the transformation of public discourse into an arena of moods.

3. Incentivized Polarization “Divide and conquer” today happens not only through political manipulation but also through algorithmic consensus-building. Social media platforms reward outrage—it is immediate, contagious, gratifying. Anger generates clicks, shares, visibility. A calm and reflective citizen is of no interest to platforms.

Byung-Chul Han puts it bluntly in In the Swarm:

“Digital culture does not foster a public space of reason, but a storm of emotions.”

In this storm, the powerful no longer need to censor. They simply keep everyone busy fighting each other. Debates around minority rights, for example, become weapons of mass distraction: important issues, of course, but instrumentalized to draw attention away from systemic ones—economic inequality, concentration of power, the climate crisis. Anger sells. A furious, but divided, people cannot organize. A society arguing over gender-neutral bathrooms or vegan meat won’t question wealth redistribution, manipulation of consent, or data abuse. As Han wrote, power today doesn’t repress—it seduces and distracts.

The exasperated and confused citizen becomes an involuntary soldier in superficial battles.

Have we become intolerant—or merely fragile? Intolerance and fragility go hand in hand. When fragility is not acknowledged, processed, or cared for, it becomes aggression. Umberto Galimberti, in The Unsettling Guest, teaches us that youth nihilism does not arise from a lack of values but from an excess of empty values—imposed without internalization.

We talk a lot today about inclusion but rarely practice radical listening to difference. The society of hyper-identities (ethnic, sexual, religious, political) has ended up erecting emotional and cultural barriers that are harder and harder to cross. Anyone who doesn’t fully conform to the code of their “group” gets expelled. Tolerance has become a posture, not a practice of doubt. We are not absolutely more intolerant. But we are less willing to tolerate what questions the ego. The performative individualist society—the one that tells you “you are special,” that you must always be right, that every critique is an attack—has eroded our ability to tolerate dissent. Dialogue gives way to confrontation because difference is no longer an opportunity, but a narcissistic threat.

And so, as Donskis observed, empathy has thinned out. It’s not gone—but it’s intermittent, selective, performative. No longer a human duty, but a hashtag.

Conclusion: What is to be done? Hatred cannot be fought with common-sense rhetoric, but with a care for the polis that begins by recognizing psychological suffering as a political fact.

Donskis left us with this warning:

“Kindness is the most subtle form of dissent in an inhuman age.”

We need a counter-pedagogy of empathy, complexity, and slowness. A rehabilitation of thought as a form of resistance. If we want to resist idiocracy and polarization, we must foster a culture of complexity—one that can recognize pain without simplifying it.

In a world that screams, thinking is already an act of peace.

Or at least, this is the conclusion I’ve come to. So, to those who are behind these messages that don't give me a chance to reply ( accuse me and then block me from talking? mature), I don't hate you, I feel sorry for you and for how you are instruments in the hands of political hatred. For anyone interested, I can share PDFs of the essays I’ve referenced, for educational purposes — not to harm bookstores or anything like that, but to expand minds, spark curiosity, and spread knowledge even to those who can't afford to buy books to save money, especially to those who can't afford them. I believe, now more than ever, that we need it.

Don’t be haters—be human. (Also, hate gives you wrinkles. Do you want wrinkles before their time and waste your retinol creams?)

[arylleth]

"If your tooth hurts, your tongue keeps going there. You are always conscious of a wound." — Ingmar Bergman

And so it is with the soul.

We return, again and again, to the ache—not for pleasure, not even out of compulsion, but because pain demands attention. It is the sentinel of the self. As the tongue probes the hollow socket where something once was whole, the mind circles its absences, the heart fingers its fractures.

We are, as Virginia Woolf once wrote, “perpetually accompanied by an inner atmosphere, sometimes as thick as thunder, sometimes clear as air.” That atmosphere is our woundscape. We live inside it. Even joy is measured by the shadows that precede it.

Psychologist Bessel van der Kolk reminds us that trauma is not stored as narrative, but as sensation. The body keeps the score. And so, it is not memory that draws us back to the wound, but muscle, marrow, instinct. Something in us aches not merely to remember, but to resolve. Yet resolution is a rare language—we more often repeat, relive, re-injure.

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls our time “liquid modernity”: identities shifting, bonds evaporating, griefs without burial. In such a world, wounds fester not because they are deep, but because they are unseen. We are no longer given the rituals to mourn them, no space to speak of what is not successful, what is not clean.

Yet as Umberto Galimberti warns, "pain is not an illness to be cured, it is a condition of existence to be experienced." Suffering is not an anomaly. It is not an error in the system. It is the system's most honest moment—its unwelcome truth.

Brianna Wiest writes: “True transformation occurs not when we go in search of a different life, but when we find new eyes with which to see the one we already have.” Healing, then, is not about fleeing the wound, but letting it revise our gaze.

There is the possibility—tenuous, unglamorous, slow—of tending.

We do not cauterize the soul. We irrigate it.

Not with noise, not with performance, but with attention. Real, quiet, watchful attention. As Rilke urges, “Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help.”

The tongue may return to the tooth. Let it. But instead of prodding the nerve, perhaps we may listen to what it keeps whispering.

That something once hurt. That something was lost. That something still matters.

And that to suffer is not a failure of strength, but a call to presence.

So what can be done?

We name it. We breathe around it. We stop asking the wound to vanish and begin asking what it needs—not to disappear, but to be seen without recoil.

Healing does not mean erasure. It means integration.

As Wiest puts it, “You don't become whole by turning away from what is broken. You become whole by stepping into it.”

A life lived not in spite of the wound—but with it. With grace. With awareness. With the tongue at last learning not only to return, but to stay.

Ingmar Bergman

[arylleth]

Critical thinking, at its heart, is an act of engaged understanding, not of cynical dismantling. It's a discipline of curiosity, one that asks: What is this? Why was it made this way? What might it mean to others, and what does it say about the world? It's not about tearing things down to feel superior or morally clear—it’s about looking with open eyes and asking honest, layered questions.

When we reduce critical thinking to flaw-hunting, we not only strip joy from the things we engage with, but also flatten our own capacity to be moved, surprised, or transformed. As bell hooks once wrote, "To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality." That spirit—balanced, open, and imaginative—is what real critical thinking aspires to.

Too often, "critical thinking" is misused as a license to destroy—to pick apart a book, a film, a worldview, or a person until nothing remains but flaws. But this is not critical thinking. It’s performative detachment. True critical thinking is not about dissection for its own sake; it’s about engagement, curiosity, and the courage to hold complexity without needing to resolve it into easy judgments.

Real critical thinking doesn’t mean blind approval—it means looking closely, from different angles, in good faith. It is the pursuit of why, not just the tallying of what’s wrong.

Psychologist Carl Rogers wrote, "The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change." The same applies to ideas, art, culture, and each other. When we allow something to simply be what it is—imperfect, messy, human—we open space for growth and meaning. This doesn’t mean suspending judgment; it means postponing the impulse to judge long enough to really see.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt said that "thinking without a banister"—without preconceptions or ideological guardrails—is among the most human acts. It’s also one of the most difficult. But it's in this space of uncertain footing that understanding becomes possible, and even beautiful.

We live in a world that increasingly values reaction over reflection, critique over curiosity. But reclaiming critical thinking as an act of care—as a practice rooted in openness rather than superiority—is not just liberating. It's urgently needed.

Not every flawed thing needs to be devalued. Not every opinion we disagree with is evil. Not every imperfect creation is without worth. To think critically is not to love less, but to love more wisely, more attentively.

As writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch put it, "Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real." And isn't that, in the end, what thinking well is all about?

Acknowledging that “critical thinking” means “thinking about things in a thorough way from different perspectives” and not “finding every flaw in a thing and fixating on it until all the joy is gone” is so liberating.

It’s supposed to be about intellectual curiosity, not about finding ways to devalue things that aren’t perfect or that we personally dislike.

[arylleth]

Each moment blends into the next, in a perpetual flow where the clock no longer seems to count minutes, but fragments of life pushed beyond the boundaries of the imaginable. It’s not that time escapes us because we lack it, but because we lose it—almost without realizing.

Today’s digital clocks, devoid of the traditional ticking of hands, are silent guardians of a time that no longer makes itself heard, as if the rhythm of the days—the one that made us feel the steady advance of our lives—had dissolved. Without that regular sound marking our existence, time becomes elusive, a stream in which we delay again and again, losing in the silence of digits the vibrant awareness of the moment lived.

We postpone, we procrastinate, and in our indifference to the sound of time, we end up losing the very perception of our existence. In this digital silence, I can’t help but wonder whether we are slowly depriving ourselves of the chance to feel life in its authentic rhythm—to hear the breath of the universe that, through the ticking of hands, once reminded us how precious the present was. Every gesture, every heartbeat, every gaze lost on the horizon is a small eternity, a silent invitation to understand that our existence is a mad race between what is becoming and what has become. And once something has become, there’s no turning back.

"Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on."

And in that image I seem to glimpse the whole story of my broken aspirations, of dreams never nurtured, prematurely torn away, of stolen moments and endless delays. And yet, in that suspended instant, each second tastes different—an echo of life speaking of all the choices made, the roads taken, and those left behind.

So, as the train I longed to board disappears into the horizon, carrying with it the silence of missed steps, I realize that time is not merely an inexorable flow, but a fabric of emotions in which every thread woven tells a story.

Not all stories are told, and among them, those that seem insignificant dissolve in the wind of the everyday, fading among the pages of time. I have not amassed great triumphs, nor won prestigious prizes; I have no close friends, no family to call my own. And yet, in that apparent emptiness lies an extraordinary truth: the story that belongs to me, even if destined to become a faded memory or a forgotten name, has its own dignity and worth.

In this silence, where the epics of others seem to sing of myths and legends, I tell my story as an intimate echo, a secret dialogue with myself. I am, at once, the reader and the writer of my existence.

I do not seek the approval of passersby, nor the applause of a noble audience: it is enough for my pen—free and sincere—to trace my emotions, my memories, the fragile beauty of a life lived for myself.

Perhaps, one day, someone who briefly crosses my gaze may carry a fragment of me, a faint memory which—even if destined to vanish—will testify that I was here, that I loved, that I dreamed.

— Jonathan Safran Foer

[arylleth]

“Tomorrow will be better.” “But what if it’s not?” I asked. “Then you say it again tomorrow. Because it might be. You never know, right? At some point, tomorrow will be better.” ― Morgan Matson, Amy & Roger's Epic Detour

[arylleth]

They told us that memory was a shrine, a vessel for the sacred. They lied. Memory is a butcher. It chooses what to carve and what to abandon, and it loves to feast on grief.

There is a peculiar cruelty in the architecture of memory. It is not a repository of what dignifies us, but rather a mausoleum for what wounds us. As Proust knew, remembrance is a trembling — a fevered grasp toward that which we have lost, not what we possessed in plenitude.

Deprivation scars; joy evaporates. Freud named it the death drive. Freud taught that pain etches itself more deeply upon the psyche because it threatens the organism’s very survival. And thus, as Simone Weil wrote, "affliction has the power to introduce a person into the kingdom of necessity," while joy — fragile, incandescent — remains exiled to the realm of grace, visited only fleetingly, and never at our command.

Sociology too conspires against the permanence of happiness. Durkheim saw that in the collective life of society, rituals of mourning outweigh those of celebration; the wound binds us more surely than bliss. We become citizens of sorrow before we learn to speak. Society feeds this too.

Adorno, writing after the camps, said that to survive suffering is itself a form of guilt. What then of the joy do we betray by forgetting it? What of the laughter that dies before it can find a tomb?

I find it obscene, how the mind cradles its own violation, how we tenderly preserve the moments that undid us. Like Bataille said, "ecstasy is not a clean thing, but a wound, a filth." Deprivation is the first ecstasy, the primal law: to lack, to hunger, to bleed, to ache.

I do not distrust my memory for its cruelty. I distrust it for its fidelity to pain. Deprivation sears itself into the nervous system, a black script more enduring than any moment of tenderness. Like Camus's exile in The Myth of Sisyphus, we are condemned to roll the stone of absence uphill, again and again, while the soft instances of joy slide back into the dust, unmarked, ungrieved, unmourned.

And so I carry my deprivations like relics, each burn more vivid than a thousand vanished mornings. For memory, too, has its tyrannies — and we are all, in the end, its most willing accomplices.

“It’s easier to remember the deprivation than the joy. One burns. The other fades.”

“It’s easier to remember the deprivation than the joy. One burns. The other fades.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

[arylleth]

I hope you get someone who’s hungry to understand you. Not just the polished, curated Instagram self but the feral, stupid, neurotic creature you really are at 2:14 AM, shaking over nothing. I’m tired of people who only want to fix things. Who treat your grief like a malfunction. I don’t want to be optimized. I want to be held— —like Clarissa Dalloway holds the memory of a kiss with Sally, as if it were a whole life. Just one flash of it. Woolf wrote: “She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged.” Yeah. That’s what it is. That’s what being seen feels like. Time folding in on itself. I want someone to learn me like a language. Not just the vocabulary, but the dialects. The emotional grammar.

I don’t want love that flinches. I want the kind that leans in closer when I’m ugly, contradictory, loud in the wrong places.

Someone who doesn’t get bored of the way I overthink or how my past ghosts knock around the room some nights.

I’m not here to be fixed. Carl Rogers said when we’re accepted as we are, we change — and that’s the magic. Not control. Not correction. Understanding. The dangerous kind. The kind that memorizes my damage like a favorite book, that be by my side while I repair them, That reads me again and again. I’m sick of love that treats people like apps—Bauman’s liquid modernity. Swipe, sample, discard. Fuck that. Give me love that stays when it’s swamp-deep. That doesn’t ask “why are you like this?” in a bored manner, but says “tell me more.”

i hope you all get partners who want to understand every little detail about you and never get bored btw