realized:

- self-pity is extremely toxic, self-care is extremely necessary, and self-advocacy is the only path away from self-pity towards self-care

- the more productivity you squeeze out of the day, the more extreme the lengths your body and mind will take to make you engage in serious re-prioritization - when you don't take care of yourself, you will find that your subconsciousness and your own nervous system combined become the single most insidious-yet-well-intending nemesis

- it's ok for things to end, and it's not ok to try to make things that once used to be happy but no longer are, go on longer than necessary

- the most visceral and brutal nightmares are proportional in value to their fearsome-ness, and they are more valuable than the most pleasant dreams: 1, because they give the simple act of waking up and simply appreciating life all the more instinctual, and 2, because if you were constantly having dreams that were better than being awake, you would always long to stay asleep

- painful memories are dangerous objects because they are very powerful - they can either drive you to contend with the truth, or to avoid it completely - and with great power comes great responsibility - if you find yourself re-visiting old memories frequently, and you find that you use these old memories to explain away a lot of your present day behavior, that's kind of, how shall we say, a bad "code smell"

- it is entirely possible that you are within 20% of your maximum capacity of pain or maximum capacity for enjoyment at any given moment. life is brief.. focus on enjoying the little things with the ones closest to you. that IPO you're chasing won't matter on your deathbed if you are a stranger to your own children. unless you prefer it to. both are options. but be honest with yourself if you are on the path you want to be on.

- never repeat anything that you believe false, ever. as a consequence, never try to debate someone’s convictions, never accuse someone of masking their true feelings, never waste your own brain cycles on trying to refute something mentioned in conversation hours or months ago. this one is the one I struggle to live by..

- just ensorcel yourself in what you believe to be true, only seek out the truth, and always have enough self empathy to see why it is ok that you used to be wrong about something so that you may more easily allow yourself to adapt to a truer relationship with reality. to dig in your heels is to dig your own grave

- everything that happens is true in the most facetious sense: because if it happened, then it must be the truth - but you probably don’t understand the full context/model of the logic system at work- and sometimes what it is that happened in actuality is unknowable.

In other words, every anecdote is a real data point, but it probably does not map neatly into the ontological categories being used as little chess pieces on a board between two parties trying to determine whether x input causes y output. The territory is always true, the map is always palaver.

Every little thing in a person’s life builds up the statements a person makes. The foulest hatred, the most depraved lies, and the most cursed of vitriol, all them stem from truths, but probably truths that look a lot more like “this person learned that the world will leave you alone from even more suffering if you dish it out back in return no matter if it’s a different person altogether than the root aggressor” or “this person doesn’t have a better way to feel strong other than hurting those they feel are unthreatening” rather than “this person hates for no reason” or “their generation was simply raised like that” - and the quicker we gather greater data from all experience the quicker the world might lead to better realization of shared ideals

- there is always going to be a tension between universalism, idealism, and the linearity of resources, but it’s almost always less of an issue than the human systems by which we determine the claims of each individual to the complexity/growth classes of the kinds of productivity of their life’s work they are permitted/accredited