Thought Through
2026-04-14
I've decided to make my sprints here an hour long now, but even when they were at 45 minutes, I tended to go toward a certain word count instead of writing the whole way through the timer. Usually, I'd end up getting to that desired word count before the timer went up, so I'm hoping this time I can increase that word count target. When I first started this practice, the intention was to write as fast as I could, with little to no pause for the duration of the exercise. When the timer would go for 10 minutes, that's a fair expectation. But now that it's an hour, I think there would be a benefit in taking slight pauses between thoughts. There's a slight worry I have that it'll make me lose momentum, but I guess that's why I have the timer.
Today is day 5 of my fast. The hunger pains are still so hard to push through. It comes and goes in waves, but when the hunger waves hit at their strongest, I've felt the urge to give up so many times. I think the pain from the hunger is important to feel, though. Even with taking my supplements and medications, I still feel a general wave of depression. Thankfully, it's not as debilitating as it once was. I can still get through regular and routine tasks, but living the rest of my life has been difficult with it. It's always been so tough to describe—this feeling of total and immense dread that physically hurts, and I feel it all the time.
I moved a recliner into the office area of the house. No one really uses the room except for my sister when she's here on weekends since there's a laptop in there. I decided to move my prayer materials into the room as well, so I can have a space to pray and relax. I've found I retreat into this room a lot, and much of my day is spent either in that room running through the prayer rope or in my room pacing back and forth. My frustration feels so immense that I spend most of my day trying to decompress. Even the littlest of things can ruin my day, and it makes me feel useless and miserable.
People who fast for a prolonged time will say they feel closer to God or their mood generally improves, but I don't think that'll happen for me. Getting on the other side of all these vices makes me feel there's nothing good at the end of it, and maybe there shouldn't be. I don't think anyone deserves anything good that happens to them. I say this not out of malice or contempt, but as a plain opinionated statement. Love isn't given to others because it's deserved. Life is hard. Every day, it gets worse and worse; but somehow, it gets easier.
When I think of other writers, I have noticed they carry some kind of interest or niche that propels their work forward. I used to regularly read Cory Doctorow's blog, but stopped reading it regularly because he complains about stuff too much (rich coming from me, I know). I also just generally don't find his work with the EFF all that meaningful; it seems that they haven't made much progress over the last few decades. Despite my criticisms, I still look up to Cory. He writes just as much if not more than I do, and he was a pioneer of the Creative Commons, so stylistically and artistically, he's really got it going on. However, when I think of reasons why people read Cory's blog, it's because he has an interesting foothold in a particular domain (technology). When I think of my writing here, it makes me wonder what my domain would necessarily be.
There's a certain kind of reader out there who feels motivated to read this sort of daily confessional. But when I think of the question of "what is this project even about?" I want to say that it's about me, but what does that even mean? In most cases, people talk about themselves as a form of status-signaling. They define themselves by things they've done and who else they affiliate themselves with. Status-signaling is a tough thing for me, and I guess that's because as a low-status person, there's not really a lot I can write about regarding any kind of vocational or exclusive activity. I'm painfully average, below average in a lot of ways. I don't care to make this a point about self-esteem, but I've always found others in their attempts to perpetuate their status to be painfully dull and hard to be around.
So what is this project all about, really? It's a record of not just a life lived, but one thought through. I think when I ask myself what the project is about, what I'm really trying to figure out is the value in it. I keep circling back around this thought, and to my readers, I'm sorry if it's annoying. I want this to be a proof-of-concept so badly. I appreciate how certain bloggers have been able to prove it already, like how I mentioned with Cory. When I say a proof-of-concept, it's less about the mechanism (daily blogging) and more about my own sense of self-worth. It's the constant question of "are my thoughts worth being written down and shared?" And to a lot of people, they're probably not.
The whole idea of "I'm just doing it for me" is a load of bullshit. If I were just doing it for me, I wouldn't post it online. No, I want someone else to read what I'm thinking. I want people to care about my thoughts, even if they don't reach out or whatever. I've had such a desire to be noticed, to be seen. It makes me feel like a total asshole to want attention, and I think the stoic disposition I give off in my writing makes it difficult for me to say what I really want sometimes. I want to be seen, acknowledged, and respected. That's it.
I was reading through the Cogito entries I wrote before I started posting them online. Those entries were a lot more visceral than these, but there were still some bangers I wrote back then. Here's an excerpt from 2025/04/20:
I'm not after any kind of fame or monetary living with my writing. All I want out of this is respect. I want people to read my writing and say that I actually am an honest-to-God, fully-fledged writer. People will read my stuff and see the true pinnacle of skill and dedication to the craft. They'll see that there's so much more they can do than what they already do now, and hopefully that'll touch enough hearts to make the next generation of honest-to-God fully-fledged writers. I have to understand that if I want my work to have any kind of meaningful impact, it's got to have eyes on it that I will never meet. I'll never hear those people thank me. I'll never hear what my work did to impact them, and it won't matter to me at all. I'm not after adulation. I'm not after any kind of recognition or anything similar to it. All I want is respect. I want to be put up there with other great writers as an equal and in order to do that, I have to get over myself and keep going no matter what anyone says. I want it to kill me. I want it to ruin me. I want it to be my demise. No matter what happens, my words will come out onto the page with full force and decimate any doubts that I ever carried.
It's not enough to say that I want it. I have to suffer for it. I have to let it hurt me and hurt me over and over again until I can't take it anymore, and then let it hurt me again. There's nothing less I will give in order to make it happen. I will be dead and gone and that's when it will truly start to come together. Nothing less, nothing more.
Let it kill me.
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