Normal

Let me begin by expressing remorse for past indecorous behaviour. I don't seem to have much of a choice when it comes to being who I am, none of us do. I feel like trying to enumerate and sort the immense list of formative events in ones life by their significance, is one of those tasks where if you tried to write an algorithm to do it, you'd expect a stupidly large number to drop out of the equations at some point, so it really isn't so shameful that I can't seem to draw the most useful conclusions from mine. Sapolsky talked of this, and he's clearly right. I haven't believed in free will for a single moment of my adult life, therefore I have no choice but to apologize for my past and sustained disorder, and to learn from it.

It's strange, this sort of weird accountability I feel towards the space of expressed sentiments. I know that scarcely anyone is reading what I write, therefore there isn't really anybody to apologize to, and yet I still think I have to atone for the things I say, even if it's only to myself. Not much more than a bizarre little ritual I guess - one which feels rather strange now, having withdrawn from it for so long, but still rife with meaning, and that has to count for something.

I am seeing my past entries here with new eyes. So much anger, frustration, and unmitigated snobbery - properties of my writing I was unable to pick up on previously. In the moment, it felt good to sneeze all over the page with all this phlegm of accumulated incoherence so that it might leave my body and not return, but that's quite simply not how depression works. Luckily, I possess the faculty to ditch an ineffective approach, and the privilege to adopt a new one with more promise. And there's no way to change your cognition without some measured doses of reflection, not this maximalist 'examine-every-little-cranny-of-all-your-thoughts-indiscriminately-and-to-their-logical-extremes' type of reflection, but bounded, sensible introspection, with a beginning, middle, and end. A more honest dialectic. Now, don't mistake this for a reversal of my position on free will; this is but a fork in the river (do rivers ever do that...?).

These blog posts were an expression of my past feelings of being special, superior, gifted, and destined for some abstract greatness. This self-concept was at odds with reality. The truth is that I am normal. I'm no smarter than anyone else my age, no better disposed to attack life's problems, let alone those of our times. What arrogance to think otherwise, and I can't point to anyone who put those ideas about me into my head. Letting go of them isn't quite as hard as I feared, it's just taken far too long. I got into trying to enunciate my own 'theories', but I let this go too far. I forgot the original reason for inquiry and began to identify with my own confusion. This has been a source of pain and humiliation, and very expensive. The neat thing about being normal, though, is that it perfectly explains everything. It's normal to eat your own tail sometimes, and it's also normal to stop. 

I hope that thinking of myself as normal will simplify my life, free me from hipsterhood, and finally enable me to stand myself. I also hope that I never feel the need to write anything here ever again.