E.S journal - age, introspection and the world

[celest axle]

This will serve as a space for me to keep track of, have others interact with and observe my internal process in order to work on myself and generally see how my thoughts are processed by others.

Im 20 now, when i was younger i felt i had a clear plan and had life figured out. This week i completed what is my most difficult physical achievment so far. On the 3 hour train ride home i had a lot of time to think. After 332km and 14 hours on my bike, the 3 hours felt oddly long. This past month i also attended my sisters wedding, i was the only one of the family to be invited due to my sister marrying a christian man and running away from home at 18. Seeing my sister happy, having built her life from the bottom up again woke a lot of emotions. I was able to keep it together during the ceremony where i got to be the ring bearer. Would i end up in her possition given enough time?

During the 3 hours on the train i also noticed my taste in music having changed. A couple years ago i listened to a lot of classical music, i thought myself mature, sophisticated beyond my years for being able to resonate with the nuance in the strokes of the violins. Now i feel more drawn to faster, desperete, less elegant music. I feel like my feelings have become more aggressive, my lows, lower and my anger more of a constant than before. I lash out at my younger brother more often, verbally berating him for not being like me at his age. I regret it every night.

Ive become more of a cynic than ever before and i dont know if i like it. I feel like all these feelings are rapidly approaching a limit.
I am stable, in so far as i dont harm myself physically, dont harm others physically or intentionally sabotage myself. I have however become passive, i feel like there are so many things to do over such a long time that i dont feel like starting any of it. Maybe another cycling marathon will help.

I rarely feel drawn to social situations anymore, tho i desperately crave company. Having to go through a long period of small talk, facades and trying to entertain people feels more draining than rewarding. I've sculpted myself to become a contradicting mess.

I am at once drawn to the company of others and hate the game for it to become meaningful. I at once, understand my feelings, their source and how i ought to handle them and yet cant bring myself to do so. I at once envy and dislike people who are able to connect with others intuitively.

[celest axle]

today is the day before i need to start studying for exams. I feel a strange disonance between the leisure and studying as efficiently as i can. It has been strange looking at statistics and how much people overall are moving their hopes and dreams away from academy and education. Becoming a farmer on some isolated countryside feels like a more relaxing alternative than toiling away for a barely livable wage. Even if doing so is something we are interested in, something about modern society seems so offputting.

I feel like i too would prefer a quiet life. The idea of being exceptional feels so empty now. Doctors, PHD holders and people dedicating their entire lives to nothing but a branch of an obscure subcategory of fossil. It feels pointless, id rather wake up to the sounds of birds, be stung a million times on a faraway farm than cars and trains, rushing faces.

Animals feel, in a strange way, more authenticly human than people themselves. No incentive to manipulate, lie or keep secrets. I miss knowing someone intimately, seeing the raw, unfiltered version of another person.

i wonder how often we truly feel seen by others or how often we even let ourselves be seen.

[celest axle]

as uni has started ive gotten to meet some friends again. Its been nice to talk to people so regularly again. My parents drove me to uni today and we talked about how dependant my siblings are on the affirmation of others. I also got a message from a previous aquiantance. I may have overshared a little bit on what i think about but its late and they kept asking follow questions hahaha. I think my view on the world has become a little cynical.
I feel like so much of it is trying to find a place where we are okay, good enough to live our lives. It is something ive been failing at recently with the world being how it is. I dont know if i enjoy being independant, its just kind of been this way forever. I talk to people at uni but when i get home i dont really feel a need to talk to anyone. I kind of wish that i did. The world is in such a bad way at the moment, being able to connect with someone feels like such a profound pirivilage these days. Its really been getting to me aswell, the death, manufactured suffering, hatred and spite. So many humans, suffering, afraid. Wether its death or social anxiety, i wish i could help people be less afraid of it all. One person at a time that we humans arent as bad as we come off to eachother

[celest axle]

I think ive developed an unhealthy addiction to exhaustion. I feel like everything i do as a physical endeaver needs to be done to the point of complete exhaustion. Im not entirely sure where that feeling comes from. I find the exhaustion liberating, i feel as though for the period after i have justified my continued existence.
There are such few things that i feel can redeem us as human beings. In a way i think i want to repent. Whenever i train or do something physically challanging i think a lot. Usually to the point of tearing up, sometimes its anger and othertimes its joy. I feel almost like my exertion is at once a declaration of who i am and a way for me to cope with my regrets, hopes, gripes and happiness.

For the past three days ive walked almost continuisly for 9 hours a day. Mapping out the earth and dirt in an area. My hands are bruised from pushing down the spade into the earth, my feet from the silicon boots, my shoulders feel heavy and my legs even heavier.

i got home and laid down, ive wanted to play games but i feel a need to cry a little. At the state of the world, at the state of myself.

[celest axle]

At its core i believe it is because i lack a witness to my suffering. I have been broken down. When man is on his knees he prays to god, at the feet of his mother or in the arms of his lover. I scream with my body, in to the shovel, the bike, the road. My exhaustion is my grief, my prayer and the testament to my existence. I dont scream, i persist.

[celest axle]

Live for the weekend, ive been thinking about that a little bit recently. I see a few of my friends out and about, partying, etc etc. I've lost a bit of that longing i feel. Atleast this weekend, it's been not much more than a cycle of thinking and stimulus to numb the feeling of isolation and cynicism i have towards the world. It has been growing the past year or so. I made a promise to myself quite a while ago that i would never harm myself. Since then ive had moments of reflection, where the idea of death didnt feel all that bad. Brief moments sat in my room, overburdened with the weight of it all, i felt it would be nice not having to deal with it all.
The weight of expectations, the present sense of lonliness, longing for a partner to confide in. I miss the intimacy of a relationship but recognize that i am unfit to be in one in a healthy way. I think im too self aware, every want, wish and longing comes with its caveats. Too unwell to love, too socially anxious to reach out and meet with friends regularly, too determined to harm myself, too disciplined to drink the sorrows away. For once i wish i could let it go, all of it, the thoughts to be silent.

i see the cycle repeat throughout most days, i run to my phone and computer to numb myself to these things. Sometimes i cry it out other times i just sit with it. I dont quite know what would lift this weight, it feels like such an integral part of the identity ive made for myself.

I think, like most people i want to be that exceptional case. A tragic figure in my own story, to the point where unless i know for certain something would work out, i just dont do it.

[celest axle]

ive been thinking about my sense of self, more specificly how identify with my anger recently. I realise that when i get upset around people, specificly family. I get rather unpleasant, specially towards my younger brother. He reminds me a lot of myself, who i used to be, how i used to be. Something about that is a gross reminder of all my inadequacies. I hold out hope, in secret that he will be a better man than i. That he wont fall into the habits, mistakes and patterns that i did at his age. My anger stems, i think, from a sense of grief at that life i could have had or the life i could build. If i chose to forsake my parents. I recognise that i live in more luxury than most, more comfort than most. Throughout most of my life however there has been one pervailing question. "is it okay to let them down?" ive wrestled with this question more than anything else. They have high hopes for me because of my maturity, that im not self destructive, i dont drink, smoke or party as most my age.
I think this has shaped how i view myself, in most of my older journals i frequently think about how nice a quiet normal life would be. Im tired of the weight of my own mind most days. I think what i want to escape most of all is myself, how i handle the weight of my parents expectations, how i almost never reach out to people, afraid of some arbitrary percieved desperation, afraid of having to be normal. To not be this deep introspective caricature ive made of myself.

[celest axle]

Today is day 2 after returning from my 6 day university excursion. Yesterday i slept a lot, i felt more tired than i thought i would be. The six days i spent, away from family, sorrounded by people i was mildly irritated by and at some points grew to dislike momentarily. I thought i would be a lot more exhausted than i am. Life has gone back to how it was prior for the most part, despite how long i felt i was away. I think my exhaustion, both physical and mental throughout the days of walking almost from sunrise to sunset took their toll. I had some quiet moments to reflect on my thoughts and life amongst some of the beautiful locations that we visited.
For a brief moment i felt myself relax and connect with the people around me but it didnt feel like it really worked out after that. All that people ever seem to seek is entertainment, no matter how momentary. Thats all my attempts att connecting amounted to by the end of it, i think i need to readjust my approach.
I got a moment to myself at a little cove at one of our study locations, i felt so much more at peace staring out into the horizon and the approaching waves. I realised i much prefer that kind of stillness over connecting superficially with people who make no effort in return. I still dont really know if the issue lies with me or not but i think i need to give it much more time before anything conclusive can be said.
For once the weight of my parents, future and hopes for a partner werent as heavy on my shoulders.

[celest axle]

ive been burning out recently, there is so much emotion in me that refuses to leave. So much love, sadness, grief, joy. I've been taking chances to skip lectures, exercises and training recently. I've been in a slump, nothing feels fufilling anymore, games, social interactions, education. It all feels so existentially shallow and ive been obsessed with trying to find some higher meaning in it all to no avail. Ive read about all the philosophies we have been able to dream up and none of it fees complete. Life, in its totality feels like the broadest and shallowest puddle to exist. We imagine ourselves exceptional, one in a billion human beings yet so many of us amount to nothing. I think there is a fundamental fear in me that i will not be great and i struggle to reconcile that reality with what i know to be true. To be exceptional is in itself not a defining measure of ones value as a human. So why do i feel this existential link to it? despite understanding on an intellectual level?
Its on days like this i miss having a muse, a lover, a kindered soul to understand me. In all its breadth, life really just comes down to the small stuff. Infinately broad and infinitesimally shallow.

[celest axle]

im flickering again, this life i live feels so painfully empty. Yet i feel almost totally incapable of finding joy in the things im supposed to. I look and i see halls, rooms and clubs full of people who love eachothers company, who fit in, who would love nothing more than to be in eachothers company. Yet i always feel excluded.
I feel like i did when i was a kid again, i never did get those invites, never had anyone swooning over me. I cant help but feel like this has become a deeply integrated part of my identity, as though this is simply what ive delegated myself to being. Never more.

[celest axle]

ive been burned out, i missed out on about a week of lectures. Some digital som in person. In that time ive been able to relax a little. My mind, as usual has been drifting of to the idea of love. More specificly our framing and belief about it.

We see love as a trancendental force, we hold love on to the same standard we hold divinity. There is, to us a cosmic importance to the idea of love. God, above all else is omniphilic. To love, for us, in our brief lives is, for most people the greatest achievement and greatest regret.

What troubles me is how rarely i see people burn for that love anymore. That all encompasing love that we so often rever in all our fictional characters. We live in such contradicting realities. One day we are sitting watching a movie, crying our eyes out to fictional characters. Only to turn around, be witness to multiple genocides and numb ourselves to it.

Had we embraced that sliver of divinity in all of us. The streets would be flooded with tears.

[celest axle]

Recently my glasses broke, it was the day before an assignment where i had to hold a presentation about minerals and their impact on our health, legal background and geological significance. I booked a time to buy a new pair the day of the presentation. I got top marks on it.
Since that presentation ive been in a rut of unproductivity thats extended for about 2-3 months now. I havent been training sufficiently like i used to and my body has grown weak and unused to effort. I stay still for too long during my days and i feel myself falling into a nihilistic depression. Not one of self destructive pessimism but a passivity to life.

Yesterday my father and i talked about investing in funds and developing a robust private economy. Ive looked into part of it and realised that i am far out of my depth in the finer details of investing.

Tonight however something came into my mind.

I want to make something of myself, i want to. For however brief of a blip in time, be known for something by someone. I think i will start this journey as i did a couple years ago. Im going to make my bed.

I, because of my lack of decent glasses have been spending a lot of time at home staring at the screen. I have thus had a lot of time to think.

mostly it has been a lot of anguish, dread about the current state of humanity. In there i have also found a glimmer of hope, a glint of something that could blossom.

I realised that i am in an enormously advantagous possition. At 20 years of age i have no debts, no destructive addictions, very little personal drama and the comfort of parents whos generosity knows no bounds.

In this desolate world i think i want to be a constant.

So many people have so many problems from so many sources

I have only one. All i need to do is act, stop thinking and act. I need to do instead of thinking. I will never be better than i am now if i dont start.

Everything is always changing, people change moods, opinions and ideals. The world imposes so many things upon us, wether we are willing or not.

I want to remain, i want to be me, for my self, for others.

Ive realised that my most beautiful attribute is my consistency.

I dont feel all that ugly anymore

[celest axle]

Today i watched Avatar fire and ash. For once i tried to watch a movie the way i always see my favourite youtubers do.

Halfway through the movie i had been paying attention and i started taking note out of sheer interest. I realised that there is a world of experience that i will probably never get to understand.

Womanhood and maternal feelings, i feel are so seperate from that of the paternal counterpart. I will never know the pain of pushing a child out of my body, will never know the relief of holding a life i pushed in to he world. That feeling fascinates me, how responsible one must feel in that moment.

What i struggle with in turn is the extent of cruelty parents expose and impose upon their children.

I come from a fundamentally broken home, a home of extremes, a home of perpetual self sacrifice justified by parental responsability. No woman has hurt me as deeply as my mother has and no woman has ever loved me as my mother has.

Ive lived, torn apart by the tragic depth of my mothers misguided love. So many nights have i spent trying to justify leaving and never contacting my parents. Starting anew, rebirth.

[celest axle]

2 mornings have past since i started thinking about my mother and her behaviour.

For the last two mornings she has been picking fights every single morning with my father.

I think she has a fundamental dislike of men.

Not that i can blame her, too many women have too many reasons to hate the men in their lives. Through no fault of their own.

My mother specificly, grew up in afghanistan where women are more often than not seen as and treated as lesser since birth. Fundamentally i believe this is something that has become an integral part of who she is. A coping mechanism based on a lifetime of trauma, of being lesser than.

She always points out specificly me and my father. She prods at whatever it may be we are doing, criticises the way we clean, cook, the way we sometimes leave things behind or forget about them. At times she comments even on the frequency, depth or shallowness of my breathing.

Sometimes, more often than i want to admit her criticisms get to me. Around her i feel as though i can do nothing correct. I think it stems, in part from wanting to prove to herself, or the world or god. That she is not lesser than, that she too is worthy of the respect so many men are granted by virtue of their sex.

I think this explains why she infantalises my brother, she does not want him to grow up, to become another on the long long list of men who have dissapointed or hurt her. It also explains why she gets along with my elder sister far better than even she wants to admit.

My younger, elder sister lives a frivalous life with a burning passion for everything she does. When she works, she makes sure to gather as much as possible, when she trains she makes sure to put it all out there. My mother, being what most would call a traditional housewife, strongly dissaproves of my sisters multiple boyfriends and partners. Yet never goes far enough to actually put a stop to it.

I think my mother is proud that my sister has broken the cycle she and so many of the women in her life are stuck in. To be put on a pedastal above the man. However she may feel about it, im certain she envies my sister in some far off part of her heart that still remembers when she wasnt tied down.

This brings me to me and my father.

Growing up my father was abusive, quick to anger, emotionally unstable. Ive since found out that he at one point cheated on my mother, not through admission but through my second and eldest sister.

As ive gotten older, with my father. He has matured and mellowed out a lot, that rage which so often laid just bellow the surface is now burried, deep inside.

As the argumments in our house have flowed, the target of their ire and subject has changed with time. My father, once quick to target one of us as the cause of familial collapse now points his finger firmly towards my mother. Who, much like him a couple years ago, angers quickly over the smallest of things. He yells and screams about how her constant pestering about the most minute of details has lead to these repeated arguments.

They dont happen as often as they used to, my father even on the now rare occasion that he screams. Always mentions his intention to hold his tongue.

Only today he didnt.

I respect my parents a great deal, as the incredibly flawed humans they have grown to become. Sometimes i wish i could speak to them as i do in this journal. To let them know that i am trying to understand them, to make sense of their minds.

Some day i want to be more than my blood.

[celest axle]

The year is rapidly coming to a close and i felt the need to reflect on what has happened to me, because of me and through me. I am going to meet up with a couple friends for the new year and i will complete this entry of the journal after i get home.
I think moving forward im going to include pictures that attempt to encompas the tone and feelings of each entry.
My camera has been collecting dust for too long. I once had a burning passion for photography, back when i only had my phone to use. Now i think i need to get back to it.

[celest axle]

as late as i am with summerising my thoughts about the new year. I feel as though i needed to reflect over last year, about what it meant to me. About how i feel about it now.

2025 was a year of deep self reflection for me. I spent a lot of it just thinking, about what i am, who i am and why i am the way i am. I've grown since i was a young boy, i am still not the man i want to be nor someone i would be proud of but i am working my way to that point.

The biggest thing i noticed while reading all my previous entries is that i spent a lot of 2025 thinking about the people around me. I feel as though things that umpact the people around me have a deeply resonant impact on how i see things and how i feel.

I want to enter the new year with new eyes.

I feel as though i spent too much time thinking, too deeply about things i have very little control of and i want to learn to let go of things and accept that i dont need to over analyze all of it. That i dont need to carry the weight of things that no one else knows or cares about.

more than that i want to have an actual possitive impact on the people around me. I want to form and build relationships with people. Ive spent so much of my life trapped inside my mind, thinking about how every word will impact someone and so little actually connecting.

[celest axle]

yesterday one of my friends confided in me how he had been feeling quite existentially anxious about the mortality of his family and parent.

He shared about his mothers death and the fact that around wintertime, when she died he starts to feel anxious and rather depressed. He added that he didnt want to be seen as different and othered because of it.

Ive has something similar to that happen before, that people are afraid of sharing their vulnerabilities because they dont want someone else to carry that weight and worry in their stead.

My usual reaction to recieving something so heavy has always been comedy. I find it conveys this idea of "it doesnt bother me to carry the weight of what you just shared, infact i can still feel joy and crack jokes".

I dont know if thats something that is recieved well or not but i hope so.

[celest axle]

i took this picture in the apartment we lived in for the better part of my life. We were renovating my room, my bed was in the middle of the empty room. I entered the room that afternoon and felt a plethora of emotions rush over me. I set up a shot with my phone that i thought was atmospheric enough.

To me lonliness has been a continous and constant part of my life in vastly differing degrees. Ive always felt isolated from others, ive felt a fundamental seperation between my internal and external world. I have always been able to function socialy, never really had difficulties per se.

Recently this feeling as begun resonating much louder than before, ive noticed myself chasing numbness much more than i used to. I dont feel that fire for training like i used to.

At its core i think it comes down to how ive started defining myself. As someone who thinks more than they act. I dont like this version of myself, despite how fufilling i find my personal musings to be.

Paradoxically i feel at most comfortable in my own company, the peace, the control, the predictability. I dont need to or want to worry about anyone or any thing else.

Like the bed, i sit alone in an empty room, resonating any and all warmth i have to cold walls.

[celest axle]

ive spent today on the verge of tears, i feel as though every day that passses. Every family crisis i have to tend to, every year that goes by the pressure increases.

In my mind ive lived a thousand lifetimes with a thousand partners in thousand futures.

To my family i am the prodigal son, to my father i am the heir of his will and lineage, to my mother i am the hope for the better man, the calmer man.

increasingly my siblings prove themselves inadequate in their life choices.

I am what remains of hope

i feel i have so thouroughly embodied the pillar, the stability, the hope that i dont see myself as anything other than.

[celest axle]

Im in germany over for the week, we went by a major building in hamburg

On a bridge slightly to the side there were an assembly of locks on the railings of the bridge, locks where couples at one point or other wrote down their hopes of eternal love. Of love that lasts

I spotted one that was cut, a heart shaped lock with a slender thread connecting to either side of the mechanism. Someone vandalised it, or the relationship never worked out. But it was still there, on the railing, rusting, deteriorating with every passing day.

My father spit in the display, we laughed it off as one of his cooky ways of hating on progressive cultures. It stuck with me tho, i felt like it was emblomatic of a larger sentiment in my culture and increasingly a pattern in the world at large.

”God is dead”, as i found out a little while ago isnt a cynical edgelord way of expressing existential angst. Its the death of sanctity. It is the commodafication of intimacy, of love, of sex.
God dies every day, millions of times, in the eyes of every homeless person, in the stomaches of every starving child.
Nothing is holy, nothing is beyond debate, nothing is so far beyond normalcy that its a topic better left un-debated.

Even our most private, most intimate moments are subject to display, comparison, advertisement.

A while ago i read about a korean chef who said that the sweeter the food of a culture or society gets, the more degenerate it becomes. I brought it up to my friends and we had a good laugh and discussion about how insane that comparison felt. But its stuck with me, food is how we survive, its how we necesarily live day to day. Sugar was at one point a rarity, the idea of sweetness was novel. Now, its readily available and the more we partake the more we strip of that novelty.

I feel like the same goes for most everything else nowadays, everything novel must be experienced until it has lost all novelty. It must be commodified, sold, compared, advertised, nothing is allowed to be sacred

[celest axle]

For our second day in hamburg we visited st. Nikolais church, or whats left of it. Built in the late 1190s it has been reconstructed 3 times since. In the cellar there was a museum about its history and its role during WW2 where after the allied powers carpet bombed hamburg, concentration camp prisoners were made to clear the roads and rubble in the area. In the museum there was a lot written in regards to death, that has stuck with me through the day. Seeing propaganda about death from above, the idea of air bombing raids being gamified so children could process the idea stirred something profoundly scary in me about what death fully entails.

I have found that media has been having a larger and larger impact on me as the years have passed. I found myself at multiple points today on the brink of tears. Some day all that will be left of me, my family and every faint memory of what my existenxe was like will be dust.

In this i feel a conflict in my agnostic worldview. I recognize on an intellectual level that there is no proof of any afterlife that can empirically be proven. At the same time i feel the weight of that assesment, it rings hollow where there could be so much beauty, so much hope for something more, something beyond just flesh, bone and suffering. The idea that at one point all there will ever be is a box, containing the summ total of everything i have ever been is scary.