This public-textual connotation:

Easier than lustrating my own shameful demons,
I’m dropping at least a little of the ego-tyranny.

Another 3–4 days without social media and self-therapy.

Looks like I’m timidly starting to get something.

And then Oxy went and cut open everything someone else would simply have kept quiet about (OXXXYMIRON — “КТО УБИЛ МАРКА?”).

I’ll try too — with that almost reverent awe I feel toward people who are ready to see the truth and say it — to tell the truth.

Courage is a gradual process…

You know, in early childhood, riding in a trailer, I breathed in the damp under the tarpaulin and warmed myself against milk cans — I remember it now. And to this day, when everything feels like shit, I run back there, where nobody sees me, nobody waits for me, while the tractor of time quietly keeps moving forward…

Life is long, and you can’t describe it in a single text. This is a retrospective through diaries going back to 2012 + following the example of the one I’d been listening to since 2008.

The fracture point

Autumn 2012. I’m going to Vyborg to study. By then I was already sick to death of my family’s prohibitions; I was on a careful, protective chain, but still a chain — that’s how it felt to me then. There were Yurets and Pasha, and the way we destroyed ourselves… amphetamine and gasoline — that was how I asserted myself then, a little boy trying to find himself.

I was ready to do anything if only my friends admired me. Grandma had instilled hard work in me, and I worked — only to work my way deeper into marginality, and then I met Tequila, and with them at the flat… instead of studying, I studied life, testing the edges of “you can’t.”

Now I understand that I was doing exactly everything that was “forbidden.” Restrictive care bred rebellion into my character. Everywhere and always I pushed against norms, and even now I’m still facing the same choice:

1. suppress it;
2. change it inside myself;
3. use the energy of protest.

I chose the third and went all in. Against the norms planted inside me, I got wasted — rebelled — and that role pulled itself over me like a skin. I was in my element, using the tied-up little boy inside me and feeding the flame of depressive states…

It seemed to me that I had become free in a way I could never even have dreamed of… expulsion… but then the same thing all over again at MTK, no way out of the foam of the day anymore… the army, the urge to train, a new crew, and even if there were no drugs, there was the football-hooligan scene and the gym…

The same maximalism and protest — I started training until nausea, until my head hurt…

Lesgaft — I began studying the body and reading psychology, but the demons still weren’t full. Dorm life was open country for them, though by then I could already see the low life for what it was…

Sanya. Friendship with him. Like some seasoned magician, I told him there was a dark side — he caught it, and sometimes it got pitch-black. We erased boundaries, but by then we were also studying where the “stairways to heaven” were and how to “get from the basement to the attic.”

What does not kill me makes me stronger.

I got hooked on science, believing in and studying the Shadow factor as a way to grow myself. How can destruction and unbridled energy be used — and do they need to be suppressed at all?

Now I see the same complex rebellion in it, just cut into a new facet. And right then, like in an ancient tragedy, Masha walks onto the stage… la… la… wrong turn: January 2 — I hit her, humiliated her as badly as I could. I almost killed another person, and afterward — myself…

The rebellion and all that boundary-erasing ended in a criminal conviction back then… quite the sharp turn. Guilt nearly crushed me. Two weeks of pain in my chest. At one point I was seeing everything from the outside; the people close to me gathered around, while other worlds seemed to flicker in front of me…

I read Machiavelli while smearing the pus that had come out across my face. Under the moon, I broke with the Shadow, throwing the gate keys off a cliff.

I had no idea how much that would change me…

A new chapter

I enter SPbSU, but the pressure is still too heavy. I understand there’s still hell inside… I go to narrative courses: they take me apart there; there is a position inside me — and it is the one controlling me.

And then the theory lands directly in the open wounds; there is no strength left to resist… my whole story is a narcissist’s narrative. I falsify facts as I take the text apart. Realizing that shook the thing that had been there since childhood and had always given me strength:

• I was radical in the party scene and went so hard that people around me thought — f*ck, this guy is insane.
• I trained at the limit, barely rested between sets, did supersets.
• I wrote a thesis “On the Shadow”; for its sake I brought my “beloved” to her knees.

It’s all a symptom. But that was the only way I knew how to live… And then they showed me that it was a fixation of consciousness — a life script.

I follow the trail through the psycho-bio-social sphere. Cognitive dissonance in the brain like poison — I betrayed myself. 🧠

Zhenya appears. By then I no longer believe I can get close to someone without destroying them. I think I’ll simply help her. But I get stuck, get attached, and once again I rebel against norms (this time not morality, but social norms) around dating and monogamy, looking for a rational form of protest and thinking sex could be with someone else…

Wrong again. I explain everything to her. A year later she answers with the same — and I understand everything.

Another year, and Zhenya is firmly inside my life. I change status. A violent jump upward; shed some fat. Massages, apartment — money starts flowing. We want to go to Sochi; I think I’ve finally sorted it all out — building a new life.

But here is the difficulty of a couple: if a woman doesn’t want something, you can be more forceful — after all, the man is the head of the family, the protector. I can’t do that… and the skeleton in the closet starts growing flesh again…

P.S. The story has no ending, and of course all coincidences are accidental. But if I’m being truthful — the main thing is to learn to look the demons straight in the eyes. 🔥 And my VK page is the public illumination of what must not be hidden.

If you want to take power over a problem — discuss it everywhere, and it will lose its power. 🗣️

I’m building my house out of transparent glass, even though I could have stayed under that tarpaulin like before. Society will finish building what I myself still can’t see. And I’m grateful to every person I’ve happened to meet in this world.

I don’t need much — only to see my weak spots in your reflected opinions.

Courage is a gradual process. I’m tasting a new position in life like some delicacy. I’ll keep thinking about how all these things can live together.

2021. Oxy, I’m fucking tired of running too +)

Life is worth accepting whole. Whoever is reading this — you have something to realize too. 🌱

Soon I’ll have read the hundredth book I’ve absorbed. From every great world of this world, I take one particle and submerge it into “my own.”

What helped me rebuild the meaning

Here is the latest thing I’ve taken in:

📝📝📝📝📝📝

Liminality (from Latin līmen — threshold) is a term for a “threshold” or transitional state between two stages of human development.

“The passage from lower to higher status is through a limbo of statuslessness.”

“They are persons or principles that (1) fall in the interstices of social structure…”

Social structure can be defined as a more or less distinct arrangement of organized positions (p. 196), a kind of life-scheme, whereas liminality is the stage of moving from one scheme, through chaos, to another.

It is a diffusion of polarities, it is dualism, it is the contrast effect.

Light gives way to Darkness, and during the transition (sleep) people are released from “Day” into “Night” only to return to “Day,” revived by the experiences and sensations of “Night.”

It seems that no system can function adequately without this dialectic.

The variability and many-sidedness of human life demand some classification and structure, yet inside that structure a new variability is already being born.

At the very center of the sphere of order there is a sphere of chaos. Like ripples spreading across water from falling drops, they expand carrying another sphere inside them, from which the next one already emerges. A supernova.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

Too much of one pole:

For example, social foundations and norms dominate and don’t let the new grow. There is no chaos inside the structure, or it gets suppressed — and that limits the development of the personality.

❗But there is another extreme:

Social norms get unscrewed by the rebellious character; norms and boundaries are erased, and no new ones are accepted.

In this chaos, new chaos will be born. Debunking and “violation,” having no object left to act upon, will begin acting upon themselves. That is how rebellion against rebellion appears. Overcoming will start overcoming the urge to overcome. The “natural talent ran out of steam, now come the self-repeats,” because the system has closed in on itself.

A system of values and a Self, however great, must not remain closed within itself if it does not want to stagnate.

That is how a child leaves for an unfamiliar environment; that is how the human line continues by excluding incest; that is how human development continues without interruption until the final breath — taking something new from outside and adding it to the unique chemical composition of the soul. That new particle can change the entire alloy of the personality.

A human being is always reaching toward the unknown: never completely satisfied. Knowledge and the drive toward the unknown are humanity’s greatest gift and burden.

“Wisdom is always to find the appropriate relationship between structure and communitas under the given circumstances of time and place, to accept each modality when it is paramount without rejecting the other, and not to cling to one when its present impetus is spent.”

And the right relationship is the relationship between built structures (perhaps taken from society’s experience) and the interaction of two whole persons outside rules and structures…

You have to know under what circumstances, at what time and in what place to accept each mode of life…

To immerse yourself fully in one without rejecting the other…