And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in.

i’ve been quite happy for the past six weeks and i don’t really understand why. i recall being vaguely miserable throughout most of 2025 (and most of 2024, and most of 2023, and…) but i cannot for the life of me figure out what caused the misery to stop. for the most part i’m the same person i’ve always been. maybe the only change is that i stopped making things hard for myself?

almost all of my life has been experienced through a mild strain of narcissism - the kind where you go to a party your friend is hosting, and it’s a genuinely great event, but instead of enjoying it you feel incompetent because you realize your friend is better than you at throwing parties; or two of your acquaintances start hanging out a lot, and instead of being happy for them you feel unloved because you think they like each other more than they like you; or you introduce someone to a new field of research, and they enjoy it so much that they pivot their entire career, and instead of encouraging them you respond with jealousy because they’ve figured out what they want and you haven’t yet. or, to put it in other words, an inability to perceive the world as anything other than a reflection of yourself

recent events made me realize that feelings are actually quite simple. identify a problem; decide whether or not you care about fixing it; if yes then set a goal and try your best to enjoy the process; if no then move on; don’t bother trying to figure out what having the problem says about what kind of person you are because it’s probably not saying anything at all. procrastination is not laziness; it’s just avoidance and uncertainty, both of which you can resolve. rejection (platonic or romantic) doesn’t make you uninteresting; it just means there were real incompatibilities with what they wanted; and besides you’re only attracted to beauty because the beauty was in you all along, i finally understand that now. a housemate questioning all your life decisions doesn’t mean you’re doing badly; it just means they genuinely can’t make sense of your choices because they don’t understand your values and that’s okay. the situation is really, truly, almost never about you (or specifically, almost never an indictment of your character)

how wonderful, to finally be able to process existence without judgement. it’s difficult to pinpoint how i learned to do this. there are the obvious hypotheses: general aging / becoming more secure and stable / spending time around less neurotic people. maybe i just started noticing all the ways in which having a large ego was making me unhappy and eventually became so fed-up that i decided to stop? or maybe it was the years of people i liked telling me just how much they appreciated me; i remember being distrustful at first, convinced everything was a white lie, confused about why anyone would ever choose to compliment another person except as a formality or social obligation; but eventually, through repetition after repetition, starting to believe it all, as if all my friends had secretly conspired to perform one massive cognitive-behavioral therapy routine

in 2022 i came across the following passage: “I think there’s something so terrible about believing that you’re special. Not terrible morally—terrible for you. Because if you think you’re special, you separate yourself from others. And in so many ways I think that psychological separation is the source of all our suffering.”

and my immediate reaction was that’s bullshit, i actually AM special! i have lots of unique thoughts and feelings and this is why i write a blog. i was so obsessed with this notion that being different was what made life meaningful and also what enabled me to produce good work. of course this is just another distortion caused by ego - the assumption that, because you created something good, it must mean you yourself are special in some way

it took many years for me to realize that people enjoy art because of relatedness rather than separateness. for instance, people don’t read this blog because i have extraordinary experiences; they read it because i have ordinary experiences and an ability to distill those experiences in helpful ways. and when i started writing fiction i discovered that separateness was actually holding me back pretty severely, eg. because barriers in deeply understanding other people made it harder to develop good characters

(i think something similar can be true in technical work as well - for instance, figuring out the right product to build or the right problem to solve is often less about unique insight and more about extraordinary empathy. seeing yourself as a genius distinct from the people you’re trying to help is rarely useful)

here’s what i believe now: being special is irrelevant to producing good work. a strong sense of self-worth is important because when you stop tying your value to external things you have less weird insecurities / distortions and can perceive the world more clearly. furthermore, you are condemned to be special whether you like it or not; and while it’s not healthy to conceal the fact that you are different from other people (that amounts to a kind of self-betrayal), glamorizing it only results in alienation

ego, narcissism, solipsism, the idea of being the protagonist - life really has gotten much easier as i’ve learned to let go