A blank page is scary, but you can't let it stop you from writing what's next. However, you can never get over a page already filled with contradictons and irrational arguments people try to make you believe since birth, and attempting to grow out of them makes you an oddity to society. From religion, beliefs, culture, traditions and even your own personality. You are taught what to believe before you understand belief itself, what to fear before you understand the nature of fear, and who to become before you have the slightest idea about who you are. You begin to notice how easily people mistake obedience for morality, familiarity for truth, and conformity for goodness. And suddenly, the questions you ask become more offensive than the injustices you question. You are no longer simply someone who thinks differently; you become a threat to everything people have built their identities around. But what happens when you begin to question not only what you believe, but t...
I worry that I used to have more interesting thoughts. It is a strange thing to grieve, isn’t it? Not a person, not a place, not even a life I once had, but the quality of my own mind. The way I used to look at the world, the thoughts that kept me awake, taking me places I could never quite explain to anyone else. I worry that I am becoming stupid, boring, predictable, that somewhere between the things I have to do and the things I consume to forget about them, I have become a little less myself. I have become nothing more than the contents of my own consumption, a mind full of borrowed thoughts and recycled opinions, mistaken for the familiarity of depth. I wonder how many of my beliefs are truly mine, how much of my personality I have grown into and how much I have merely absorbed. Sometimes I notice a new opinion taking shape in me and cannot tell whether it came from somewhere deep within or from having heard it often enough to make it feel like my own. I wonder if I am discov...