Preface

Imagine you attain self-awareness.

You are not your thoughts. You are not your feelings. You can consciously perceive yourself in your surroundings and within yourself.

There is the you that is the personal narrative—objective facts, subjective details, social roles, gender roles.

There is the you that is the inner monologue—actively assessing, questioning, judging, reasoning, and rationalizing any given moment, situation or behavior.

There is the you that is the observational self—hearing your inner voice, seeing in your mind's eye, perceiving emotions within their situational context, maintaining mental flexibility, committing to value congruent action.

Paradigm Shift

Imagine.

You are not a product of your environment, a dissociated husk of a human, maladapted to life since birth.

You are not the choices you made, an anxiety-laden survival-mode zombie on autopilot, unable to stick to your ideals when it really mattered.

You are not the delusions you lived, a fool—convinced that whatever you were feeling, your interpretations of those feelings, your mental gymnastics justifying your intended solution to those interpretations, and your subsequent actions, were absolute and grounded in reason & rationality—narcissistic enough to prioritize your own needs wants over your child's needs, unable to change despite wallowing in guilt over seeing your parents' worst qualities in yourself.

You are not the pain you caused yourself and others, a prisoner in an eternal recurrence of sabotage and self-sabotage, unable to learn, grow, and exit the loop.

You are not the labels you assigned yourself in order to try and understand yourself better, a relatively inflexible mélange, unable to grant yourself the liberty to do things differently.

You are not the violent, belligerent, sexually aggressive, manipulative, sinister, oppressive monster you've always thought you were, a repressed neutron star of what-ifs, a shadow, manifested from the fear of possibilities, unable to experience true happiness.

You are not the victim you always thought you were, a poor soul, misunderstood and mistreated, debilitated and traumatized, miserable and worthless, unable to encourage yourself to try harder.

Imagine.

Reify

Imagine you are given a cosmic choice. You could return to your 6 year old self (the brain is 90% developed by then) with this newly attained self-awareness, or you could return to your 25 year old self (the prefrontal cortex is fully developed by then) instead. If you return to your 6 year old self, your brain will only be able to tap into as much self-awareness as it can from the available neurons at any given point in time, so your skill will grow with time until you have enough grey matter to tap into it completely. If, however, you return to your 25 year old self, your brain is already fully developed and equipped to utilize your temporally acquired skill-set. You will lose all your memories from after the point in time that you choose.

Imagine you aren't allowed to live your life any further than this point. It is considered a cosmic mercy—a reward for attaining self-awareness. You've been given the chance to live differently, able to cope with life adaptively. Which would you choose? Would you go 6 to live a longer fuller life? Or would you go 25 because you cherish the serendipitous connections you made, and you'd rather not live a life that is possibly devoid of them.

Timeline

Imagine you are 6. It is your first day of Grade 2. Your school has injudiciously transferred only you to a different section in your grade. Your day is spent navigating a dissonant plasma of betrayal, sadness, abandonment, loneliness, and pain. You go home and tell your parents. Your dad heroically shows up at school next day and intimidates the headmistress with his imposing demeanor. You are transferred back to your original section, reunited with your friends. Yet, amid the return to normalcy, your parents fail to address a single one of your feelings or teach you how to deal with them.

Imagine you are 9. You have to move to a different country because of your dad's work. You enjoy the idea—the excitement around new uncertainties, the new children you will get to meet, the change in environment. But your parents involve you in their worries about being able to get you into a school that's at least as good enough as your current one. Not a single word is said about how to deal with these unnecessarily imparted anxious thoughts.

Imagine you are 11. You are being terrorized by a new uncompromisingly stringent catholic nun, an English teacher. She punishes you in front of the entire class for your frightened defensive behavior. You run a stress fever for the first time in your life. But your parents do not show you how to navigate this agony, choosing instead to go with your suggestion of transferring you to a boarding school, which they have repeatedly used as a threat growing up.

Imagine you are 14. Your hormones wreak havoc on your body.
Boner? Harder than tungsten-carbide and perpetual.
Face? You mean there's a face under all that acne?
Thoughts? 20% schoolwork. 80% mental gymnastics justifying sexual thoughts in a catholic context and then surfing them.
Coping strategies? Cognitive dissonance and possibly unhealthy amounts of fapping.
You like this girl at school. It's a boys' boarding school. She's the daughter of a teacher who lives on campus. She's cute as fuck and you can't stop thinking about her. You bravely approach her one day on the way to her school bus and tell her you like her. You don't look at her during this conversation. You look at the ground. You've never had any self-esteem and you don't know what it is. You don't even remember what she says. You develop a stutter shortly after. You experience psychogenic hemifacial spasms—smiles that turn into uncontrollable rapid twitches—at the slightest signs of stress. Your undiagnosed sleep apnea has gotten so bad, your classmates tell you they insert a mentholated topical ointment right up your nostrils at night to make you stop snoring so they can attempt to sleep. You tell your parents nothing, because in the 14 years you've been alive, they've vehemently disagreed with everything you've said that didn't align with their worldview, taught you nothing of value, mocked you for not knowing what they should've taught you in the first place, denied the possibility of any alternative thought, and made you want to run away and kill yourself with their oppressive parenting styles.

Imagine you are 16. Your relationship with your parents up to this point has just been one of emotional bankruptcy. The altercations are frequent. The beating isn't uncommon. You've been hit with leather belts, switches, plastic rulers, wooden rulers, steel rulers, mom hands, ginormous dad hands, slippers, a cricket bat. You've had packs of frozen french fries thrown at you. You've had molten wax poured onto the backs of your hands. Your mom called you a bastard once, which you laughed off saying "pffft the joke's on you" but the words did hurt more than sticks and stones ever could. You thought you could take your dad on this one time, but you were sent —instead— flying across the room and over a chair. There is no hope. There is only rage, anguish, and misery from the biological jailers that you live with.

Imagine you are 21. You are a year away from completing the 5^th year of your 4-year undergrad program. You've cruised through most of your classes because you learned most of it in high school, and regurgitating all of that was mostly easy. You cheated to get through the rest of your classes because how the flying fuck does anyone even discern methods to solve the problems provided to you on your exams? You've been failing several classes and it doesn't look like a hurdle that can be crossed. You decide you will delete yourself from Earth after a few months of treating yourself to a good time that you've never had before in your life. Skyrim releases and you play the everloving shit out of it every single minute of every single day that you aren't asleep. You're devastated that you will never get to know how One Piece ends. But the time is near and you must now rage-quit life. You travel across the country and gut yourself à la harakiri. 30 minutes later you're still sitting there like a numskull, wondering why you haven't died from blood loss yet and end up calling 911 to come get you because you failed at the one thing that was supposed to liberate you from all your woes.

Imagine you are 22. You've been back in your parents' prison since you couldn't make it through university (read failed at life). Your dad can't get over the fact that you wasted his money and won't hesitate to tell you so. Your mom gaslights you telling you that's not what he said.

Imagine you are 23. You mention you intend to attend the local Pride Parade next week. Your mom asks you in the most loathsome tone, "Are you LGBT‽". The lack of understanding and associated distaste immediately makes your gut wrench. One expects their parents to at least be understanding of differing peoples, differing lifestyles, and the oppression faced by people for merely being different. But what you get instead is revulsion and disdain, agglomerated on top of the pitiful life you've lived so far.
There's a catholic priest from the parish doing house visits, as is common in catholic societies. Your mom tells you to stay hidden in your room with the lights out and pretend you don't exist, so she doesn't have to have a conversation with the priest about her son being an atheist. You go along with it because it was painful enough when she spewed "Where did we go wrong?" the first time you told her about your deconversion and atheism, about rational thought and curiosity, about nonconformity and heterodoxy, about secularism and cults, about the scientific method as a way of life and critical thinking. There are no words to be had at this point. You've spent two entire decades expecting unconditional love. In vain. You realize your parents' image in their own regressive backwater society matters more than your authenticity and mental health ever could.

Imagine you are 24. You've isolated yourself in your room because not one single person in your vicinity and extended family has anything of value to talk about. It's always vehicles, abodes, wealth, and marriages, tainted with catholicism. Your parents —in their infinite wisdom— deceptively decide to stick you in a slum of a rehab to make you snap out of your depression and asociality. You spend 3 entire months of your life, including your birthday, living with addicts and half-murderers (colloquial for felons charged with assault and battery) taking refuge in there. To this day, your parents think it was an excellent decision and regret absolutely nothing.

Imagine. It gets progressively worse from here. Sure, there are good times, and perhaps even great times. All shadowed by ever being unable to remember the good times, by unceasing anxiety, by never feeling the joy you once felt doing the things you love, by the limited comprehension and expression of your emotions, by protective hypervigilance, by never being able to trust anyone because the kind of people you tend to attract in your life tend to be deceptive as shit, by being a jigsaw piece that fits other broken people perfectly. Imagine.

Excogitate

Imagine.

Imagine all of it. Pepper in your own traumas.
Make it wackier, weirder, wickeder, wilder, whatever.

Submerge yourself in it.

Think the thoughts. Feel the feelings.
Sit with thoughts. Sit with the feelings.

Let them brew.
Let them crescendo.
Let them erupt.

6 or 25?

Imagine.

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