I don’t care what exciting plans you have for me as you find commercial uses for my gifts… because I am not your tool, I am not here to serve as an implement for capitalization. My life, my purpose, is not ruled by the market, by offer and demand. I am a complex human being with the power to decide how to define my productivity through my own ontological journey, my quest for significance and transcendence. My purpose is spiritual, of cosmic proportions. Way too infinite to fit small minds. Stop wanting from me, stop asking for what you need and start receiving what is, what I have to give. For you will get something imperfect, but at least it will be real.
Here lays my consciousness. Prisoner of my own mind, I am eager to let others in, to share myself, to free myself from separateness and merge into my brothers and sisters. I was born an artist. I do not think of myself as a writer. I see writing as a tool. It is not an end but rather a means to an end: to expand my horizons through this technology that enables different levels of connection. Writing allows universal understanding, and it is ontologically designed to serve my purpose, to help me pursue my desires of interconnectivity and intersubjective cohesion.
I am rendering others, mirroring and discovering myself through others. This is an act of love. The symbiotic relationships with my environment and everything in it make it imperative for me to connect, to turn myself inside out. These are not mere words, this is my flesh, my bones, my most inner, private self-being made public. We are taught from an early age to be so private. But I was cursed with this passion. Conformity as a noble act is the fallacy of accommodation: self-editing and dissolution of the real self. Conformity is a counter-intuitive defense mechanism that can birth anxiety, disconnection, and isolation.
Erich Fromm, in his book the Art of Loving, talks about love as an artistic expression, as a form of art. Just like the artist, the lover surrenders, he fills himself up just so he has something to give back. The real pleasure, the realization we all seek for, is in the ability to selflessly sacrifice ourselves for others. It is in the fulfillment of productivity, – of production as the ethical, moral and responsible consequence of consumption – that we fill ourselves so we can give ourselves.
So this is me, doing the hard work, and trying to master the art of loving, as Fromm calls it. My writing is an attempt to give my trips into my own rabbit holes a useful output. It is the recognition of an inevitable loss, but yet inspiring and transcendent. It is a calling to participate in the overall cultural process of re-engineering perception and subjectivity and giving birth to new attainable realities in which I – and anyone else who feels compelled to follow – can get lost and, for a moment, merge as one with humanity. It is the recognition of universality in the specific. A sense of connectedness that is both, millennial, and at the core of the expansion of the conscious nature of minds, leading to – I can only hope – broader interconnectedness, and ultimately, towards utter empathy and compassion.
My work is a sacrifice done for the greater good, a risk taken for the sake of humanity. It is exposure and potential loss. It is not a selfish act, as many have said. I am not driven by a need to save myself (at least most of the time). I have been given this hypersensitivity to feel the pain of others just as strong as my own, and while presumably trying to save myself, I am actually driven by the slightest possibility of turning my sorrow into an artistic outcome, to see my work as ecstatic tools that, when consumed by others, they enlighten them and cure them, if only for a moment, of their human condition. Separateness being obliterated and creating a sense of merger.
This is my goal. Am I achieving it? I don’t know. Am I afraid? Of course. But I have to try. I can’t just not try.
Utterly Disclosed 