Psychology

I don’t really find myself like everyone else. most times, I have no opinion on almost everything. I have no favorites. I don’t have a stance on almost anything that happens. I get asked, what’s your take on this? what’s your stance? and when I try to investigate myself within, I find none. there is no clear answer.

I’m not an expert in this, but I have a saying, when I surround myself with a certain kind of people, people who have very pure hearts, who don’t fear feeling, who aren’t guarded, who explore and live fully, they often end up being the ones who suffer the most in every situation. the one who love the most in every relationship. they carry the weight of every room they enter. and what makes this harder is that they rarely know how rare they are.

I want to skip the part where I tell you that phones are bad and social media is ruining attention spans. you already know that. you’ve read it, heard it, felt it. what I want to do instead is follow the actual chain, that starts with something as ordinary as picking up your phone in the morning and ends somewhere much further away.

Most conversations about overconsumption stop at focus. saying: too much content fragments your attention. and that’s true, but it’s also the least interesting consequence in my opinion. the more serious one happens later, mostly slowly, over months.

I discovered that wren was lost. he was living in his head. he carried fears and doubts that no one knew about. one of these fears was that he did not know how to look at god. not out of lack of faith, but because the way we learned religion did not include space for what a man can endure from the inside. the emphasis on this is either completely absent or very shallow. because of that, he struggled to understand what he was going through. is it good. is it punishment. the men of religion did not emphasize this enough.

I followed up with him again after that. this time, he told me the latest diagnosis. high red blood cell count. elevated sugar levels, though not urgent, at least for now. he said he was not planning to tell his family. they worry too much.

He sounded exhausted. too tired to sleep. he kept repeating something that stayed with me. that what he was suffering from was not the illness itself, but what his head was telling him. the collapse was not only physical, but mental too.