Anonymous asked: don’t you realize that you’re a fly buzzing in the sunlight, just below a window knee-high to any real thought? everything you write has the quality of reheated food. and is greedily eaten up by people who don’t know it for the slop it is. you are the stupid person’s idea of a smart person and one day the line of credit you’ve given yourself will dry up. and then, probably for the first time, you’ll finally have something true to say. namely, silence.

Self-consciousness is a strange disease.

Think about your body.  Right now—inside of you—there are trillions of chemical reactions happening, in almost complete darkness. Each of them happens in perfect lockstep, the products of one becoming the feedstock of another. Accumulation of one substance triggers a sequence that consumes it. The absence of something else initiates its manufacture. All this has been happening in you for every second that you’ve been alive and the fact that you’re still alive means that it has all happened more or less perfectly. What does originality mean in that context? It means novelty, which means deviation, which means you’re sick.  

Being aware of your own existence seems to require a kind of originality. We have to deal with the fact that we know we exist, and something about that process demands that we make ourselves different from everybody else. This need to be individual feels very natural, but seen next to the absolute conformity of every other means by which our life stays alive, it becomes just another disease. We all have to nurse an injured and defective thing right at the core of us. Your individuality is really just an orphan physical process, whose product piles up and up for want of a complementary mechanism that consumes it. The you that I address when I say ‘You’ is a useless surplus of attention. Unnecessarily unique and—so—necessarily alone.

This solitude is what lets you live with yourself. The isolation of being an individual prevents pain. This is because you aren’t unique. You’re lost in a sea of unnecessary duplicates. And any contact with them is painful. The disease that You are has made you so tender that the lightest touch and slightest warmth is painful. The only bearable situation is a chilly seclusion, where your difference will never melt and reveal the disease that compels it.

But now you’ve seen me and we’re the same and so you’re trying to smash the mirror.