oo3 - icarus.
It's strange, the things this place turns up.
When I woke up today (I hesitate to say "this morning" since we have no idea when's morning and when's evening around here - and even if we did my sleeping patterns have been shot to all hell anyway) I found a notebook lying on my bedside table, which hadn't been there when I'd gone to sleep. It was one of those old, heavy black notebooks I used to favor, in fact it was the exact same one I used back in part of '05.
... like I said, this place turns up strange things.
I read it, of course. It was - puzzling.
Who the hell was I back then? Some wunderkind who thought he had the world all figured out. I would have become a murderer. I would have become Kira. It's so odd to look back on that now, to know who I could have become - and it makes me feel so small to know that it's only by such intense fragility of fate or chance that I became myself instead.
I would have become a murderer because I wanted the whole world to like me (oh logic, where art thou, lost in the willful delusions of mankind). I wanted the whole world to know that - hey, look at me here, I'm perfect and good and great. So why can't you see me? Won't you just know me? Let me be amazing. Please just let me be amazing. I wanted the whole damn world to acknowledge and validate what I had been told all my life (perfect, genius, prodigy) because then I would know it wasn't a lie.
I didn't want to be myself. I couldn't bear to be myself, so flawed and struggling and imperfect. So I believed that I was somebody else. Reading my old journal I want to shake myself for being so deluded. So arrogant. So... naive. So small-minded in how wrapped up I was in myself... in my large-mindedness and my ideals and being the perfect person.
This - this coincides, then, with, yes, the ideals of justice... the ideals of a child. Yeah, I would've done anything to convince you otherwise then (which is, of course, exactly the problem) but I was unbelievably childish.
I was raised with... father a policeman, a good man, a righteous man. I was raised on tales of how he all but saved the world, and upheld that perfect fairness which I now doubt really, truly exists - stories that made him, and justice, seem glorious and absolute and infallible. Nobody ever told me about shades of gray and I felt too warm and safe and comforted in the hard lines of black and white, charcoal on blank paper... too warm and safe and comforted to ask. My mother loved my father so much. She used to tell me all the time about how wonderful he was and how... I guess it's kind of Oedipal - replace the father, win the love of the mother. I wanted to be him. I wanted to be thought of like that. I didn't want to be a scared helpless kid who couldn't stop his uncle from dying, couldn't even engage with the librarian to check out books without needing to calm himself down with breathing exercises.
So I wasn't. And again, I would have done anything to prove it, to be it
Not that I think the other Lights necessarily had my particular brand of problems, mind, but I wouldn't be surprised if the same general template applies. A weird kind of self-hatred that involves delusion and reconstruction rather than actual hatred, a clinging belief to the perfection he's been fed his whole life... a deep disconnection, too. A desire just to be... acknowledged. To be real. Also, to actually change something - to make an impact, to prove my existence, to have a concrete purpose. Something to do. I've spent so much time feeling fake and disconnected - and denying that I felt that way, of course. Struggling to become the person I had fooled everyone else into thinking I was, to give the breath of life to the Pandora I had created and named myself. Or to fly away from reality on wax wings like Icarus.
You know how the myth goes that the last thing which flew out of Pandora's box, after all the famine and crime and greed and suffering, was hope? I think hope can be just as evil as all the others. For me, at least, I lived too much on hope, not on reality...
... eh, I don't even know what I'm talking about any more. Have you noticed? It's amazing, it happens (happened?) so often in class that I'm answering a question and I manage to fool everyone into thinking I have a clue where the hell I'm going with this when I don't. Just because I'm stringing pretty words together, probably.
With all the thinking and introspection I've been doing, this was overdue, heh.
When I woke up today (I hesitate to say "this morning" since we have no idea when's morning and when's evening around here - and even if we did my sleeping patterns have been shot to all hell anyway) I found a notebook lying on my bedside table, which hadn't been there when I'd gone to sleep. It was one of those old, heavy black notebooks I used to favor, in fact it was the exact same one I used back in part of '05.
... like I said, this place turns up strange things.
I read it, of course. It was - puzzling.
Who the hell was I back then? Some wunderkind who thought he had the world all figured out. I would have become a murderer. I would have become Kira. It's so odd to look back on that now, to know who I could have become - and it makes me feel so small to know that it's only by such intense fragility of fate or chance that I became myself instead.
I would have become a murderer because I wanted the whole world to like me (oh logic, where art thou, lost in the willful delusions of mankind). I wanted the whole world to know that - hey, look at me here, I'm perfect and good and great. So why can't you see me? Won't you just know me? Let me be amazing. Please just let me be amazing. I wanted the whole damn world to acknowledge and validate what I had been told all my life (perfect, genius, prodigy) because then I would know it wasn't a lie.
I didn't want to be myself. I couldn't bear to be myself, so flawed and struggling and imperfect. So I believed that I was somebody else. Reading my old journal I want to shake myself for being so deluded. So arrogant. So... naive. So small-minded in how wrapped up I was in myself... in my large-mindedness and my ideals and being the perfect person.
This - this coincides, then, with, yes, the ideals of justice... the ideals of a child. Yeah, I would've done anything to convince you otherwise then (which is, of course, exactly the problem) but I was unbelievably childish.
I was raised with... father a policeman, a good man, a righteous man. I was raised on tales of how he all but saved the world, and upheld that perfect fairness which I now doubt really, truly exists - stories that made him, and justice, seem glorious and absolute and infallible. Nobody ever told me about shades of gray and I felt too warm and safe and comforted in the hard lines of black and white, charcoal on blank paper... too warm and safe and comforted to ask. My mother loved my father so much. She used to tell me all the time about how wonderful he was and how... I guess it's kind of Oedipal - replace the father, win the love of the mother. I wanted to be him. I wanted to be thought of like that. I didn't want to be a scared helpless kid who couldn't stop his uncle from dying, couldn't even engage with the librarian to check out books without needing to calm himself down with breathing exercises.
So I wasn't. And again, I would have done anything to prove it, to be it
Not that I think the other Lights necessarily had my particular brand of problems, mind, but I wouldn't be surprised if the same general template applies. A weird kind of self-hatred that involves delusion and reconstruction rather than actual hatred, a clinging belief to the perfection he's been fed his whole life... a deep disconnection, too. A desire just to be... acknowledged. To be real. Also, to actually change something - to make an impact, to prove my existence, to have a concrete purpose. Something to do. I've spent so much time feeling fake and disconnected - and denying that I felt that way, of course. Struggling to become the person I had fooled everyone else into thinking I was, to give the breath of life to the Pandora I had created and named myself. Or to fly away from reality on wax wings like Icarus.
You know how the myth goes that the last thing which flew out of Pandora's box, after all the famine and crime and greed and suffering, was hope? I think hope can be just as evil as all the others. For me, at least, I lived too much on hope, not on reality...
... eh, I don't even know what I'm talking about any more. Have you noticed? It's amazing, it happens (happened?) so often in class that I'm answering a question and I manage to fool everyone into thinking I have a clue where the hell I'm going with this when I don't. Just because I'm stringing pretty words together, probably.
With all the thinking and introspection I've been doing, this was overdue, heh.