📍Buenos Aires, Argentina, 7.30.25

Struggling with guilt eternal. I feel guilty for being safe, happy, warm, full, and then I feel guilty for feeling guilty, because what right do I have to feel anything bad? What right have I to feel or do anything when morgues are being filled up with children, bloated bellies, protruding ribcages, missing limbs, and an unquantifiable measure of loss that I will, god forbid, never experience. It is a contradiction in itself. But it’s not about me, not about me at all, so now I feel guilty for writing about it in the context of me. Again, I am becoming too physical and too self. I would like now to disappear. 

I feel my bones strain under the weight of all the lives I’m not living. I always liked this quote, but the meaning has changed. 

I read a post about the movie God’s Not Dead. You know, God is dead and we have killed him. Apparently the writers were ultra-Christian and couldn’t come up with any reason other than religion to explain morality. I’ve been thinking about the root of my own morality lately, because I have no belief in “religion”, yet I have pretty concrete value systems that seem to stem from somewhere inside of me, not from the outside world. I mean, I took what I liked and left the rest. But as it is, my values seem to have no root other than this is what feels right to me. I do believe that feelings are another form of thinking, one with words, the other more abstract. But I have a tendency to rely on emotional thinking rather than the intellectual—I trust it more because my mind has been filled with so many stories that I’ve no doubt lost sight of my true self in there, if one exists. But it’s easier to make that connection on the emotional level because it’s more intuitive. That doesn’t mean it’s always right, but rightness and wrongness are synthetic anyway. Emotions don’t think in terms of duality, not like the mind. You just do what feels right. Not that hard. Although for some people, their emotions are far more turbulent than the mind and take them places only their subconscious is aware of. Oh, free will. Cue Boethius quote.

“So it follows that those who have reason have freedom to will or not to will, although this freedom is not equal in all of them… human souls are more free when they persevere in the contemplation of the mind of God, less free when they descend to the corporeal, and even less free when they are entirely imprisoned in earthly flesh and blood.”

(It astounds me how many people know so much about the world and so little about themselves).

“No, I am not angry. I know your thoughts. Your heart is better than your head.”

That’s Dostoyevsky. Anyway. I know I take it too far, feeling guilty for things beyond my control. It’s a useless feeling, too. Guilt doesn’t trigger you into action. It’s self-interested, self-pitying, self-indulgent. I will try to let it go, or alchemize it into something more useful.