### Dreams 🧫 1. A boat that’s tilted dangerously at an angle where the people inside could feel the slope. That’s all I remember. And a gestalt of my baby sister and changing her diaper inside the boat. ### Morning Pages ⚜️ I love Saturdays. My parents and I just watched One Piece earlier, although I lost interest somewhere in the middle. What I don’t love about being alive? Being tired and visually challenged! I just have to make it a goal to get off antipsychotics again and survive this period of my life where I’m trying to complete a degree and maintain my work ethic. Slow days are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s relaxing, on the other, you just want to do everything fast again because you’re actually losing time by relaxing. I now see why I’m kind of sad. Just the possibility that there’s nobody actually reading me at all—it’s a lot to take in. Because for the past three months I’ve been in this mind state where apparently everything I do has weight and that I actually matter to some people in-the-know, and what if none of that is true? What if everything has been a fairytale after all? That is scary to me. I seem to have a bottomless need to be reassured and I don’t currently know how to handle it. Maybe if Audrey posts again or if Mike posts something on Facebook…but I can’t force them to do anything. Everything seems to be at a standstill these days, and I’m constantly rapt for any shred of acknowledgement or recognition. It’s incredibly important to your mental health right now to start and sustain a hobby—one that is challenging. Like starting dense books on physics and epistemology. It will probably do wonders to your learned helplessness when it comes to knowledge. You can even dress up and pretend to be a teacher and talk to a camera like Vico (and pretend Vico is watching these videos LOL) to explain how they all work in a simplified way so you’re actually synthesizing knowledge and simplifying them for your future self. This is it, the solution to your ennui and anxiety about being useless. And you know what else? You only really formalize it now, but discovery is a huge part of your core drive. You like to tinker and discover and reach somewhere new and uncharted—whether that’s because you like closing uncertainty in a creative way, or because you like having the last word (or appears to be) because of pride. Any way you dice it, you like being the center no matter how much you deny it. You like being the first to reach something, and being recognized for it, because what use is there to discover something no one else would appreciate? I don’t exactly know where this drive formed from, or why it has to be this one. Surely other children don’t have this in the same surfeit that I do. I thought I was a rule follower for the longest time, but it turns out, I like setting new rules, I like to be the one in charge, if only as a CTO and not a CEO. The only thing that’s stopping you right now—your biggest resistance and fears—is looking or feeling incompetent. But incompetence is the starting stage of so many endeavors it’s practically a rite of passage. You just have to power through feeling breathlessly lost at first. Isn’t this worth it, in the end? Worth the pain and embarrassment and anxiety? Everything will be worth it when you finish—but that’s not the whole story after all. It’s the journey towards this mastery that you will live in for the majority of your life, this sowing stage that you only really reap sometimes (and the highs don’t last quite as long as you’d like them to anyway). It’s learning to enjoy the process of struggle, that cursed word that’s also going to be your saving grace. Struggle. Losing the ability to tell reality from waking nightmare is so scary. I don’t know, just recalling from my March 9 Scarlet Letter Day of Terrifying Visions. I finally felt what Virginia Woolf must have felt in that movie with Vita, where she saw birds circling her that existed only in her mind. Your body knows that it’s all virtual, yet it’s all real anyway, and the experience is only survivable because you forget the visceral quality of it—come to think of it, I only have a trace of what it’s like, and not the full memory, because the full memory would probably send me into a tailspin again. ^48da37 The problem with me is that nobody ever taught me how to study—it’s like I don’t even know what I’m looking for or even try to do as I read a text. I haphazardly try a method I’ve been meaning to left up to chance only, and sometimes it works to keep things fresh in my memory, sometimes it doesn’t. I have to formalize my methods before I’m edged out of learning new things again. You are supremely lucky to exist right now with unbounded time to study your passions. You are at an ideal junction of your life right now. Use it well and to the best you can, actually. You only live once, indeed. It’s time to use your iPad to its fullest potential—use mental models like how they were meant to be used—not as toys, but as actual tools for thinking and linking information in your head so it all stays together whenever you need to surface them. In order to tap into your high school strengths—delayed gratification sitting your ass through hours of drawing a relatively useless portrait—you need to realize why you did those things in the first place despite their apparent uselessness. You had a core motive to power through the tedium—it was pride. You had a goal to show off your drawings on Facebook and in real life, so naturally, you were accountable to whoever recognized you. These rewards were so important to your system that doing the work was almost automatic. Now you need to tap into core motivations that will make you persist through boredom. What is it that you really want long-term despite the absence of recognition right now (and let’s just say, without the virtual reality of the Vico Team or the DECL Team recognizing your efforts)? You want impact? Get ready to put in the hours. Long hours of frustration (drawing never really had frustration because it was relatively easy to get started, so in some sense, your method wasn’t even that difficult). It is incredibly important to be self-sustaining despite the absence of apparent progress. I mean, looking long-term from December 2025, you’ve come so far you cannot believe it even! Look back and genuinely appreciate all the things that led to the boon of your medium successes right now. These will help you power through frustrating bottlenecks as you try to bust through ceilings of your previously unknown limits. You need to get rid of the feeling that you are somehow starting from scratch every single time—you are veritably not—because you always start with some background knowledge no matter how buried it is, or how blank your mind may seem at the moment of intake. You are never starting from zero—you have a memory, and you can trust that you can understand what you’re doing to retain it, even, and you may even synthesize better than the average person who just mimics retention and understanding without doing anything new to the data. Generativity is one of your core strengths that you have identified, simply because your brain is loose on purpose, and does not lock onto a path permanently. ## DOPAMINE LOADING 5-DAY CHALLENGE STARTING NOW! (with minor addition of exercise for 5 minutes after every 1 hour of studying) For once, I’m patting myself on the back for connecting the dark matter, dark energy, and ordinary matter to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I’m so proud of that one and I’m never gonna live it down!!! So my dad has given me our family’s life verses and I’d just like to add a personal one (my Top 3 favorite Bible verses): ## Psalm 16:6 The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance. ## Proverbs 16:6: By mercy and truth iniquity is purged: and by the fear of the LORD men depart from evil. ## Matthew 6:28-33 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. — Well, you could always think of your situation (I suppose you frame your entire Sir I’m So Fond of You context like this) as a really immersive alternate reality game. That’s how you’ll explain your entire role in this, because not only does it keep you accountable and sane throughout these past few months, it also provides a plausible-sounding context instead of just “I kind of fell into it by noticing Vico posting about Emo Remix a little too obviously one day.” Vico, if you’re indeed reading me, please signal something about emo remix or anything about emo (or that volume emoji you inserted into the nativity scene with the emo remix audio)—so you don’t have to do it immediately hehe. Objectively, how can anybody believe me? That I must magically accept that people really hacked my Notion to get to the bottom of what happened to me in 2019 and even roped Vico Sotto into it? Sounds a little farfetched, no? I guess so, but I must remember that I’m basically delusional as well as skeptical at the same time, hence, in order to stay virtually sane enough, I must accept wholeheartedly that I am living with a productive delusion that has somehow included my website visits too (because they magically know that I also assiduously check those because I’m paranoid and curious at the same time). ^ccb35d ![[March 14, 2026-1784705613860.webp]] I have a plan to record my family’s dinner conversations once I master some dinner topics to start with during mealtime. I feel like it’ll come really handy when I’m old and feeling nostalgic for this period of my late twenties when my parents were still relatively younger. Older me, you’ll thank me someday! I can always use my phone discreetly. I had Jollibee hotdog thanks to my mom who braved CDO streets late at night! Thanks Mom! I’ll thank her tomorrow in real life too. I’m writing BOBOBEE as if Vico is going to read it someday. I wonder what he thinks of hypothetical theocracies. Would love to pick his brain right now.