Having breakfast today and, grateful for a brief respite from wearing surgical masks in the current pandemic context, someone truly eye-catching walked in to order coffee. Young, petite, pretty with clear skin and sparkling eyes that were as yet undulled by the disillusionment of time and age. She was quite naturally beautiful and everyone there […]
Depression is such a fickle thing. Some days everything seems fine, you build yourself up and seem so full of joy and purpose and then one look, one word or callous gesture just brings it all crashing back down. The seduction of emotional isolation, alienation and catastrophic disengagement with the world is at these times […]
Today’s brief reflection on the state of humanity is brought to you by a feeling of overwhelming futility and an acute awareness of the pointless, vacuous and utterly narcissistic bullshit that consumes us all. Finding ourselves inhabiting whichever time and place we transiently occupy, and encountering the limiting cognitive language and behavioural repertoire of a […]
Some days it all just gets away from me. I try to value and appreciate the words and worlds of those around me but they ring so hollow and haunted that I just seem to end up clutching my own similarly fictional, if ever so slightly better-informed, reality to my chest as a treasured possession […]
“My beauty was my curse, so to speak; it created an impenetrable shield between people and who I really was.” ~Hedy Lamarr There really does seem to be something of a deep and irremediable sorrow in all great beauty. We might say the same of a beautiful mind as much as of an attractive face […]
There seems to be something of a plausible inevitability to depression and psychological suffering. Being that our minds have been sculpted by long-term evolutionary biases towards survivability in a probabilistically uncertain and materially dangerous world, there is something of a hard-coded orientation towards pessimism (or at the very least – pragmatism) within us all. Culture […]
There is a deep and disconsolate desolation I feel at times, a profound and overwhelming sense of futility and pointlessness that is impermeable to light and is also and quite equally unassailable by any rationale of emotional transience, by appeals to the generally temporary nature of such a darkening and empty inundation. I doubt very […]
Everything begins as nothing and eventually returns there again. There is no real loss or sorrow, just the transience and self-inflected emptiness that pervades everything in life and to which we all must eventually return. A hollow, haunting experience of these facts can be overwhelming but it is worth remembering that if you are sensitive, […]
That moment you realise that not only is your dream truly and forever unattainable, but that all your hopes and aspirations to nurture and protect that precious soul and eternal flame of joy and living beauty or unbounded freedom were only ever bundled hollow, haunted and melancholy intuitions of your own failure. To become a […]
How else is it that we might spend our lives seeking a comfort, consolation and closure that always seems to dwell just out of reach, just beyond our grasp and ever-beckoning as a tantalisingly seductive certainty of reflexive self-definition or unambiguous security and psychological or existential safe harbour in the open arms and tender touch […]
My recent fixation on flowers is quite plausibly an instance of psychological transference, where feelings or emotions that might find themselves unattainably inhibited in one direction find new avenues, channels and vectors of (self) expression. We often enough observe the rapid and adaptive transmutation of emotional needs and impulses from one goal to another and, […]
There is in these delicate flowers such sweetness and unbounded longing for life. These cherry blossoms from my garden were full of life a few days ago and now they have faded, as though in accelerated decrepitude their moving frame of reference and colourful Spring joys are as short as they are glorious. Where pale […]
