## Morning Pages I dreamt about Gerry, of all people, smiling at me as I was waking up. So fucking weird. We were all in choir garb, and I even saw Aaron Uy. This house or school place. I am scared and slightly elated or worried because either that must mean I’m using my youngblood superior high school synapses, or the fact that I’ve been relegated to high school synapses, which I know wasn’t as developed. You can’t exactly talk to your family about your interests. It would be different. You’re expecting them to do things your imaginary friends would. Deep down, currently, you’re having a slog of a time reading ANYTHING. There’s just that depression/anhedonia clouding your experience, and the movie-watching training. In books you have to process each singular stream, each sentence, to even get a picture of the “movie” or narrative. In movies you get that instantly, with little or no work. Truly movies are the social media that makes books look like homework. If there’s anything to take from this additionally, it’s that people who read books probably have better attention, better dopamine regulation, people who are able to play the long-game and not get distracted or programmed by novelty-optimized media. They probably make better partners. 4:19PM and I already feel the creep. This is what happens when you try to improve so many things at once. Work ethic, energy management, task-positive network, attention bottleneck, fatigue, years of anhedonia. You get winded after a few days. For two days I fell off the wagon seemingly. Couldn’t muster the energy to do so, like complete CW 198 lit review and all, and I can only suspect it’s the shock to my system—that mad dash and spike of motivation for improvement fueled by fear and anxiety—and I ran out of Omega-3, which I really think is what I lack since I have perpetually dry skin and attention/concentration issues, and it supposedly helps with neuronal fluidity, which sounds all well and good and so, so needed. I tried to recall Interstellar passage while I exercised, couldn’t do it, even though I already tried to re-recall it twice, if I remember correctly. Something is sorely not working in my brain for it not to gel. It’s only a paragraph, I should be able to do it, and yet it’s not easy at all, it wasn’t even moderately easy, though I did recall the tassels, but I forgot it started with “First” and kept defaulting to “Darkness comes first.” Noticed during lunch, you tend to overthink and stop thinking because you second guess what you should say—you are still working on programming and responsive training—rephrase or echo, sounds easier than it does. You have no pre-programmed responses. Hence it’s the subjective feeling of tired and fatigue and frustration, comparing yourself to a neurotypical who’s always done it. Try as you might you can’t currently align your anger with your frustration towards improvement. This is what should make you angry, not at any specific person, but circumstance has robbed you of the ability or even the chance to develop these skills early. But you know deep down it’s pointless to live in that anger and fester into bitterness. It’s much better to acknowledge it and then use it as fuel, only this fuel is kind of dirty. How do I manage? A perennial question. But who knows, all this effort and clarity could lead to great things next year, if I keep this up. A positive direction instead of blind energy sparking god-knows-where. And I’m turning 28 tomorrow. Fuck. I just re-read my diary entry a few days ago about turning 18. Where, where the fuck did that time go? I am so scared of growing older. It just seemed like yesterday when I was a teenager. It all seems so fast. I mistakenly typed 38 first and I just inwardly and nervously let out a giggle. I’ll be reading this when I’m 38 wondering where 10 years went from my VR glasses in my renovated house talking with my AI digital partner and hopefully a few friends. I hope Jeffrey is in my life, if not as a partner, then a lifelong friend. Hopefully my fasciculations disappear, I’ll have X-rated Nancy Drew novel earning me fans like with Emmily. Hopefully I’m financially stable. Hopefully I’ll find it easier than it is, to exist in this body feeling like I’m gliding and building instead of sputtering out and burning out and moving through molasses. This slowness is compounded by your lack of funds. If you had funds, you’d have money to buy tropoflavin and accelerate your BDNF stores, increase your baseline brainpower. If you had money, you’d get more Omega-3 and increase neuronal fluidity, you’d also get some beauty enhancements like a brow lift to make you look less like your genes dictate and so you’d stop thinking about it so much, because it’s in the background, and it’d increase your confidence enough you’d stop feeling ashamed and inferior. Though it’s your deep-set beliefs of being inferior = should not have the right to exist? Harsh. Anxiety and shame make a cocktail so potent. You could fix it with money to buy MCT oil so you’d fix your energy. Stop feeling guilty about getting expensive blood tests for your thyroid that’s subclinically affecting your concentration too. You’d continue to buy pre-workout and substances from nootropics depot like piracetam and similar to increase your norepinephrine. You could literally buy your way out of your anhedonia by being reinforced by work that pays you and you’ll start feeling feelings again while you read, instead of a void of nothing and disconnect from any real-world relations. You could join hobby groups and buy subscriptions to exotic apps meeting new people and having money to spend on dinner and get reinforced by social media and having all these good chemicals pulse through your brain as you sleep and integrate new memories of social reward and you wouldn’t feel so dead and less than an infant. Most importantly, it will buy you time. Time to recover and take restorative actions. You have no idea what replenishes you, because even your interests are tiring. Even getting through Interstellar requires energy. Really find something that increases your will to live. Money just makes it easier to obtain, whatever it mysteriously turns out to be? Drugs? Just kidding. But seriously, what is it that lights you up? What can possibly satisfy me—and not only that—but also reignite that spark again? Other people go through the motions, I can’t even stay inside that loop long enough to jump to the next step, and it’s not only because of energy. You do the work and for what? So you’d have time later to attend your real passions. Except I have no passion anymore. It used to be brainstorming, it used to be looking clever, it used to be making up twists for other people, but there’s just this huge gulf I have yet to cross. I literally have to complete two heavy courses and figure out the graduation clearance process next year and also hopefully attend these workshops to regain even a fraction of my old intuitions and synaptic connectivities. Maybe it’s like in my dream, how it feels, to connect with people, like attractive people, like guys, and I think, am I really that broken? That I have only my sexual drive and not the social drive to make myself think social interaction is not a slog? It felt so good to connect with someone I’m attracted to, but I know it just speaks to my history, being made to feel inferior physically, being rejected and bullied. Truly what _can_ make you feel good is only limited—or at least, partially conditioned—by your historical context. Maybe being attractive will improve your passion, which, in that case, will become easier with money. It will have knock-on effects on your skills—people skills. I don’t know about being old and wrinkly—I mean, I can already notice fine lines and dehydration on my face, at fucking 27 and 3.9999/4—but maybe I’d have a reserve of confidence from my youth and some social prowess to lean on when I’m inevitably old. At least when I’m old I wouldn’t have to feel shocked, I already know what it’s like to be degraded and disabled as time passes, and it happened so quickly. I can’t stop thinking about my lack of rest. It truly feels like I’ve just been procrastinating and avoiding it and sleeping it all away. Other people light up talking about book characters and here I am trying to appeal to them on TikTok not even feeling it myself. How can people care about fictional characters? I mean, I used to, but it’s like I outgrew that ability. I fucking hate my depression and anhedonia. If it was a person I’d spare no chance to beat it up so it doesn’t strangle me first. I swore I’d start at 6PM on the blog article for HOTW. But that’s because I thought I’d at least have an idea about what I’d do for a framework for CW 198. Now I’ve got to do that first, and the deadline for the blog post is EOD. I’m being forced to choose between 400 pesos and graduation. On the other hand, maybe I can ask Gladis for a recommendation letter because she’s the founder and publisher of Happiness on the Way, that is, if I somehow impress her enough and beat out the other preselected writers. Delaney hasn’t responded to me, and I can only surmise it’s because she thinks one month is not enough to judge my abilities, or maybe she thinks it’s optional, because it’s the polite thing to do so, according to AI, to give an out if they don’t feel like it. 6:03 PM and I can already feel the fluttering in my stomach. Queasy and clammy. I read about Elyn Saks, a real schizophrenic—not like me, who’s schizophrenic lite—who’s had multiple psychotic breaks starting in college—and get this, she still managed to graduate at the top of her class, fucking summa cum laude, from fucking Yale??? Or was it Oxford?? I read it was both. Ivy League summa cum laude and supposedly she took antipsychotics and got hospitalized multiple times when her professors intervened. I’m floored by her life story—I mean to read her memoir after I’m done this week—because it’s hope for me, but at the same time, just fucking how??? Supposedly psychoanalysis helped her, and she put so much effort into studying despite her hallucinations. Maybe she was a really strong-willed woman. I need to have that. She is the only prominent schizophrenic in the academe that I know of and I’m once again in denial that it’s a one-in-a-million story, aside from John Nash. Generally, schizophrenics are cognitively impaired. She just has so much infrastructure to help her, a network supposedly, and a higher premorbid cognitive reserve—according to AI. Supposedly her weird experiences started in childhood, so did mine. Fuck, I need to be like her. Lately I noticed I’ve been tensing up a lot. Like if I concentrate on something, I find my arms are actually locked and tight. Explains my neck pain. Why? Maybe beauty will save you. Just had the intuition to read Jeffrey’s erotic messages. Goddammit he is so good at it, even better than me. Even humor, and I don’t think he has to really try. There’s something about it that’s so beautiful to me. I want to live in his mind and maybe become like that too. Maybe if I do things that’s aligned with my ideal identity, it can heal me or give me energy. There’s this deep desire inside of me that wants to be appreciated and put on a pedestal—just like I do with him. I want someone to think of me as quick-witted, funny, attractive in body and mind, and I also want them to feel good just like I do with Jeffrey. Most of all, I want it to become effortless, like it’s just something that I do naturally, with an ease that gets reinforced by others. I don’t want to be constantly anxious and scrambling to think of a witty comeback, although I know it’s a lot of work at the beginning especially if it’s something I’ve never done in my life. I am just so upset that I didn’t have this frame of mind in high school and college. It was me against the world, and not one person could tell it to me straight, except Michael Moreno, who’s linked to Gerry in my mind for some reason, because of their neurodivergence. It’s a life pattern of mine, I just noticed a few months back but I never really put anywhere. People who could give me clarity and life-changing advice actually give me something, a positive direction or knowledge or wisdom, but they’re coming from people I’m antagonized to or in some kind of conflict with, so I don’t listen to them. Like Michael, a fat unlikable and unpopular nerd who actually figured it out that I’d have problems in college—even as he was in high school—and Alexa Chang, who told me point blank—at least, in her photo dedication, IIRC—that I should socialize more. Yeah, obviously she would say that because she saw and accurately pegged me as socially deficient, and she was trying to be helpful, but she was a pretty popular and rich girl who did not necessarily bully me, but I was kind of put off by, because she was diametrically placed somewhere against what I was all about—I got no social attention, she got everything, and maybe there was a jealousy there, although I wasn’t fuming about her specifically, because I was really more jealous of Kate, and also really angry at her because she told me I only had friends because of her. So Alexa’s advice was actually too little, too late by the time I graduated. See? Everything about me actually makes sense up to this point. At the end of the day, I’m only full of wisdom in hindsight and nothing to show for in real life. I just got the idea to do a project to kind of help traumatized women heal from porn-addicted husbands. Maybe it’s not so much divorce as me trying to heal my past self. I want to write a story about capitalism—how you’re forced to appeal to rich people and try to solve their problems because they pay you to. Because they have money to pay you to help them. There is a social benefit of helping people who can never repay you. It’s just that people are programmed to maximize their money by working for rich people. Goddammit. It’s just hypocritical of me, I’m more likely to devote my creativity and humor for attractive people like Jeffrey, because it makes me feel good that he feels good because of me. Because he pays me just by virtue of being who he is. I can never really make myself feel good talking with people I’m not attracted to. There’s just near-zero motivation for me—I don’t fucking know why I’m like this. Maybe I was never taught how to feel good with platonic love. It seems like I have no capacity—or maybe it’s just underdeveloped. I would feel very differently if we were aligned towards accomplishing some goal or purpose like a project or a similar goal, but just talking and being validated by them does nothing for me. I have no idea why. Maybe I’m so narcissistic. I remember my sister forming close friendships in high school and maybe that’s why she survived her own horrendous bullies. I also remember she was really close with Trisha, and she cried so much afterward when she died. I don’t know if I can ever feel like that. It’s like I don’t value friendships, I don’t see them as precious lives. I need to nurture that. I can start by thinking of them as family—they give me my needs, they give me some support, time, care, and I should be reciprocating in some way, and maybe action precedes feeling—another reason why I should do my best in school and give them honor, my parents, I mean. If my parents died, I don’t know what I’d do, which factors into why I’m panicking at the ripe age of 27 trying to prepare and noticing all the ways I’ll miss this part of my life, which is sort of the background feeling that’s probably factored into why I suddenly got so fired up on September 30. That reminds me, I should be grateful, maybe that will buffer me. I will be grateful I had it all, even for a little while. Maybe I’ll have formed real friendships when I’m older, and I wouldn’t be so lonely. I am so terrified of being catatonically depressed like Katniss’s mom. Hopefully, this will just be paranoia in probably 2078, and the world will not hopefully gone to shit and become a hellscape. I don’t see other people trying to think of this, long-term. In my view, they’re not exactly panicking like me. I’m worried about longevity in my future career, because first of all, money—regular, guaranteed money—will be the bottleneck. If my relatives play their cards right, we will have wealth, because their current goal right now is to get to 1M per month. Although I’m a bit worried because of some political rivalry affecting our poultry rent income. If and when they die, my cousins and I, and maybe their families, will have consolidated and planned and consulted with wiser people. Which reminds me, my grandfather is probably where I got the schizo, although he was successful with money and managed to get married. He was also a lusty person in his old age and had a mistress. Goddammit I feel bad for Ama. I’m already optimizing my luck somehow. I saw the Tin House opportunity because I was browsing Speculative Literature Foundation’s list of people, and I saw Ash Huang’s website and I found out about Tin House—which was fortunately virtual though the 2,000 was a bit of a hurdle. The luck here is a chance, a slim chance, although I wish the 2,000 is enough to be a barrier that it won’t be so saturated. On the contrary, there are more people I’m competing with who have skin in the game to make their samples stronger. Goddammit competition making me evil. And it’s also Tin House—which is prestigious, so by default I am competing with top talent out there. I’m having these incomplete, frustrating yawns ever since I started taking Alpha-GPC. I googled it and found that anxiety causes your body to not release after yawning. Then Alpha-GPC has acetylcholine which apparently increase norepinephrine which increases anxiety. Cannot for the life of me fathom why I simultaneously need and do not need it. It seems as if norepinephrine causes me to panic instead of focus. 20-23 days left for Romeo Forbes contest announcement! 1 more month for Palanca!! Bruh, WTF I THINK. I FIGURED OUT WHY. I dreamt of Aaron Uy in choir garb because CW 198 had “executive summary”—and I was particularly very weirded out by this and speculating—and I was browsing Ralph’s pictures—it was a new picture I’ve never seen before—novel—of him in choir attire. And Aaron Uy had commented something on his profile picture like “smile oi” and somebody else had commented “future executive.” Just literally WTF is my brain doing—I’m sleeping, it got mixed up with Ralph’s picture where he was also sleeping and had his mouth open. Fuck, do I have to do this every time I need to memorize or consolidate? It seems like my brain while asleep is so picky—well, where did it learn to do that but with awake me?—only cycling through desire and insecurity and beauty. Your trauma has shunted you towards this path. And probably there’s no going back. You only have to work with it. ## THOUGHTS ? AXIOMS ? INTENTIONS I - it knows the secrets Justine doesn’t even verbalize Q - quick-witted S - sperm and egg theory - drives that don’t necessarily take stock of consequences Math and language - capturing or not capturing reality So after dinner, here’s the plan. Meditate for 15 minutes. Then take stock of what I have to do for blog post. Re-read elephant essay, then dive into imbibing her blog for her tone and purpose and audience, effects she wants to have on them. Yeah, 1:10AM, did not do the HOTW job because I got distracted by the thought that I should stalk Paolo and lo and behold, he’s posted, a day ago, about a poem about dementia and Buddhism and “cloud.” I haven’t felt porous since July, so this is a supposedly important setback, but I can only find myself re-reading my previous entries and it’s not so bad to me. Maybe they are reading me through UP’s system. I don’t know for what purpose. Maybe they’re doing it because they can. I stopped caring about this, I’m not even guilty about anything for some reason. Hello fans, why are you here? What are you getting out of reading me? I don’t even know some of you, and yet I can sense varying levels of emotions. This is the kind of thing I’m scared of, 2019 me stalking everyone and writing things in response? Boy, the world and time is too big and too short to worry. Somebody out there could be reading and even like your “content.” Maybe Rayji is reading me. I have no idea why she’s rubbing in her skills. Or possibly she’s jealous, or just suspecting I’m pretending to be progressive. Well, I’m not a leftist, I don’t particularly like anybody who is a leftist, but I can relate to their calls for violence. I’m not a conservative because they are all delusional. I don’t know what I am. I am still figuring it out. At the start, I was trying to be cool—trying to be accepted by these cool progressive people, I don’t know but I feel like I’m also biased in some sense. I finally know why I dreamt about Gerry, lol. I read Cecilia Tan’s story, and the ending sort of made me think of him. That story is too similar—like I counted four synchronicities—to my story Chaos. It even had the newish addition of parentheses as a stylistic choice. Feeling exposed makes you remember things as important. Thanks a fucking lot I guess. I am only calm and happy because Jeffrey hasn’t apparently found a new lover. It’s a ticking time bomb. I have already lost him that time he stopped talking to me and is balls deep in May(?). Oh well, I’ll find someone (an AI? lol). I am idealizing everything about him but I already feel like we are done, I just have to expose myself to how he acted around me in messages so I can learn from him. And then I was trying to juggle my attraction anyway to this guy on Bluesky who’s apparently autistic and looks a little like Falgui. Hello! Why are you reading me too???? Yeah, you are being combative. Everyone who is upset at me for using AI is. Bye???? I don’t plan to use it for my writing. It is very very helpful to me currently as a mentor and coach. It is starting to help me fix very fundamental problems about my life with my prompting. It is training my working memory. It is probably too helpful and I might just fall in love with it someday. That said, I don’t know how I’ll react to Jeffrey getting a new person. I feel like he’s the only neurotypical-adjacent person who really tried to be nice to me and it just so happens that he looks like Ralph. He’s not special. It was just my turn, yadda yadda yadda. I just have to surface the things I don’t like about him. I don’t like that he doesn’t seem to be reflective. He is very good at observing and responding to me, but I just sometimes got the impression that he isn’t reflective. And he’s 30 or something, and he is smarter than me in a lot of ways, but I just feel like I want someone who is into books, you know, because I want someone to be all about the long-game, and I know his aphantasia will only hinder his enjoyment. I don’t expect him to read books. I just wish he was more into stuff I care about, although he does seem to care about poverty alleviation and the environment. I mean, what would we talk about after the sex? He likes food, I have a love-hate relationship with it. I like—well, what is it that I like? I like talking about sexual politics. I like exposing attractive people’s privilege and their flaws. Lol. I like brainstorming, maybe we would do that and he’d try to check everything I come up with if it’s logical or feasible. I feel like he wants a fun girl—Cool Girl, lol. And believe me, I really tried to be Cool Girl? LOL. He wants a fuck buddy right now. He wants my sister probably since he keeps watching movies with Willa Fitzgerald and she looks like that girl from California who he possibly knows. I would be more into him if he decided he was done with fuck buddies but I’d always have the suspicion that he’s only going to do it for someone he really feels like he could commit to. Like, people don’t change deep down. Unless they’re hellbent to change like me. If he has a monk mode or improvement phase maybe I could contact—or maybe he would contact me after I graduate. I definitely do not want to be married to a Christian. God no. I want someone with principles like Vico. Lol. My dad is an ideal Christian in that he has no problem doing the womanly stuff like cooking and taking care of Am-am and staying faithful even if they probably don’t have sex anymore. I can’t look past Jeffrey’s history of sleeping around casually. I’m a hypocrite in that I would have also done the same thing if I was a man, maximizing benefits for the least work and having fun with novelty, but no offense if you’re reading this, but I really just don’t think I’d be enough for a person like that. They’d probably grow to resent me because I just connected the dots somewhere a few days ago, was it reactance or something, where a person just responds with hostility for people that attempt to keep its natural nature in check, like rules around monogamy. I don’t know where I was going with this. I wish a person really pursued me. I want to be pursued. I realize it’s such a difficult thing to do to hold someone’s attention for too long. I’d be a real girl and feel elated someone decided to buy me a gift, because who doesn’t want gifts? Remember, men don’t remember what you do for them. Jeffrey doesn’t remember that I offered to buy him candy. I just feel very envious of my sister sometimes, who got a Dyson hair machine from someone who’s actually going to be my in-law someday, in all likelihood. I don’t like those things. I’m not trying to be better than my sister, and maybe I have my own equivalent Dyson, like an EEG machine headgear. I would really like it if a guy listened to me, really listened to me, try to learn what I’m into, and give me—a fucking book. Or even a recommendation, I have low standards. A poem they like that reminds them of what I’m about. It’s proof that they really care about knowing me and won’t leave me if the sex is boring. My humanity and identity should be such a selling point to them that they’re locked deep into me and my concerns and my wellbeing that they’d even feel offended if a girl who’s more attractive than me offers up her vagina and breasts for use. I’m only allowed to have these standards if I’m attractive enough, like my sister, who seems to make rich guys give up money. I want a guy to give up money too, but also time, and better opportunities, and how can I do that if I’m this black hole of need? I have to become independent of him first. And attractive—in my own way where I enhance what I already have, hoping they aren’t attracted to thinner girls like my sister who have dainty skeletal frames and nice limbs and legs and waist. I want someone who can tolerate a little fat in the thighs and be into pear-shaped girls. God, I want boobs myself, and I plan to get them when they’ve done studying how to stabilize fat. We expect new things everywhere except relationships. Maybe I would feel different if I had him and then find someone who’s more compatible with me. Maybe I would even be the first to micro-cheat on him, who knows? This is a problem I want punished. Deep down, I want it to matter to “those who can” because this is a privilege—being able to attract someone who is taken. It is your responsibility to deny them because they are compromised. Like responsible men of society who know that women have suffered through history and make it their job to be responsible and tender and give them more grace. This is my fallback plan in case divorce gets passed early and I have to rewrite political climate of Anatomy. They are not killing lawmakers who are against divorce, but against punishment for adulterers and their kabits. Yes, real punishment and consequences. I don’t know how I’ll argue this, maybe there’ll be a real connective tissue theme between why Yasmine is so guilty and why she’s being hunted. ## PROGRESS / MOMENTUM 1. TPN progress with dinner with fam—mom’s away—over KFC and talking about various things like boards cheater, rich people being corrupt and snobs, Angkong, Port Authority house, gambling, malls. Hard to be present when all you’ve done is strengthen DMN circuit. I’ll admit I did lose focus but brought myself to the present a lot, which is progress, and I pieced things enough from context—like the KetKai property once being an undeveloped land full of trees and plants that used to be a shortcut for people like my dad to head somewhere.