I am an observer. A conscious observer, a relevant, engaged observer, but just an observer nonetheless. I observe life; I observe my emotions; I observe the world in which I live and breath and communicate. I’m a staunch atheist, but if I had to give an answer to the question, “What were you put on this Earth to do?” I would say, “To observe. To understand. To see.”
I used to have two names for myself. I’d imagine them as titles, like what might be listed on my emotional resume.
Black Nix: Emotion Collector. Black Nix: Master Escapist.
I am an Emotion Collector. I blogged once about emotional masochism — the tendency to put myself through pain and suffering. Purposefully. And I never understood exactly why I would do such a thing. But I understand it now. See, I have a desire to search down deep, to find the blackest dark, the heaviest weight. I want to understand it all, I do. I don’t know why. But I do. There are two emotions that I feel the most:
1- Heaviness. Waking up in the morning and having the full pressure of life weighing down on you. Heart falling through your chest like a rock pulled down by gravity. The sense of dread at having to live, constrained by an ephemeral organic shell. The foreignness of the world.
2- The spark of joy and hope when I witness beauty. Dreaming transhumanist dreams. Listening to Mothertongue. Discovering a connection between ideas, which itself is an idea, and the sense of creation and accomplishment. And the beauty of finding patterns, of seeing the world exactly as it is but from a perspective that’s colorful, brilliant, warm.
I’m also a Master Escapist. I have a tendency to separate myself from the world. I think there are many reasons for this. For one, I don’t fit most places, among most people: a gay computer scientist whose brain is constantly hooked on contemporary classical music, philosophy and video games is probably neither going to be the life of the party nor a warm and compassionate friend. But there’s more than just this, I think. It’s harder to see the bigger picture when you’re in the middle of it. It’s harder to observe life from the inside. I’m not alone because I can’t interact with people, I’m alone because I don’t want to.
So it seems that my life so far has been really a patchwork composition of the emotions I’ve collected. Heaviness is the texture, the background, the dark, the brooding. But every now and then, a spark of beauty and hope lights it up with color and fantastic brilliance before dying again, into the blackness. The unbearable weight.
I’ve never understood how people live without seeing, or without trying to see, or without wanting to see. But it seems now that I’ve spent my whole life doing nothing but seeing. Is this merely a 76-year-long film I’ve gotten front-row seats to? No, I create too. I write, I play cello, I draw, I talk to people. I combine and manipulate ideas. I create beautiful things. But is that enough? Is that all there is to living?
Sometimes I feel like I’m just funneling the world putting it all into myself. I have the world inside of me. But then what am I good for, to others? What place do I have among people? Who befriends the telescope?
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