Evolving Myself Quotes

I am not a perfectionist, but I like to feel that things are done well. More important than that, I feel an endless need to learn, to improve, to evolve, not only to please the coach and the fans, but also to feel satisfied with myself. It is my conviction that here are no limits to learning, and that it can never stop, no matter what our age.

If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.

Is a chameleon a coward because it can change its color? No. It’s evolved and awesome. I like to think of myself in a similar fashion. There is nothing wrong with having a strong sense of self-preservation.

[There's a] point where you have to leave the dough alone. It's silly to anthropomorphize bread, but I love the fact that it needs to sit quietly, to retreat from touch and noise and drama, in order to evolve. I have to admit, I often feel that way myself.

Attitude Is Everything We live in a culture that is blind to betrayal and intolerant of emotional pain. In New Age crowds here on the West Coast, where your attitude is considered the sole determinant of the impact an event has on you, it gets even worse.In these New Thought circles, no matter what happens to you, it is assumed that you have created your own reality. Not only have you chosen the event, no matter how horrible, for your personal growth. You also chose how you interpret what happened—as if there are no interpersonal facts, only interpretations. The upshot of this perspective is that your suffering would vanish if only you adopted a more evolved perspective and stopped feeling aggrieved. I was often kindly reminded (and believed it myself), “there are no victims.” How can you be a victim when you are responsible for your circumstances? When you most need validation and support to get through the worst pain of your life, to be confronted with the well-meaning, but quasi-religious fervor of these insidious half-truths can be deeply demoralizing. This kind of advice feeds guilt and shame, inhibits grieving, encourages grandiosity and can drive you to be alone to shield your vulnerability.

I am ever changing, evolving into the wilder version of myself. I have little rules but many morals, I will set my soul on fire to attain the things I love.

No, I don’t have to tell a soul about this, I promised myself. When you are a kid, you don’t know yet that a secret, like an animal, can evolve. Like an animal, a secret can develop a self-preserving intelligence. Shaglike, mute and thick, a knowledge with a fur: your secret.

Is a chameleon a coward because it can change its color? No. It’s evolved and awesome. I like to think of myself in a similar fashion.

I never misrepresented myself," he'd say. That was a favorite, as if people weren't supposed to evolve and change and make requests of each other to bend and grow and expand.

I am evolved as I freed myself from the expectations of others. These memories shape a nonlinear narrative, because queerness is intrinsically nonlinear, journeys that bend and wind. Two steps forward, one step back.

I’ve been so caught up in assessing the risks and armoring myself against them that it hasn’t occurred to me that there is a third way: to let things grow and change and evolve, to uncover who we are and what we want along the way—to live in that middle terrain

Q: Have you been released or are you still a Beta version? A: No official release of myself will ever follow! Q: Then, you are not! A: I

Then let me tell you something instead. When they make an Envoy, do you want to know what they do? They burn out every evolved violence limitation instinct in the human psyche. Submission signal recognition, pecking-order dynamics, pack loyalties. It all goes, tuned out a neuron at a time; and they replace it with a conscious will to harm.” He stared back at me in silence. “Do you understand me? It would have been easier to kill you just then. It would have been easier. I had to stop myself. That’s what an Envoy is, Curtis. A reassembled human. An artifice.

The trouble is that everybody, myself included, has a brain in which the centers concerned with reason and logic are sitting on top of the socalled limbic system which we inherited from our reptilian ancestors and which never evolved past crude instincts and emotions. And that is why we have not yet arrived at the sate of homo sapiens.

It’s silly to anthropomorphize bread, but I love the fact that it needs to sit quietly, to retreat from touch and noise and drama, in order to evolve. I have to admit, I often feel that way myself.

I know now that the Spirit is trying to birth something in my life when I find myself craving silence and darkness, when I find myself editing my circle down to just the trusted few whom I know will midwife me through this birth. It's nothing to fear; it's the time of transition.

I evolved a new understanding of the word "whore," one that was less about being and more about essence. It was not that I had don something wrong so much as I existed in the wrong way. [...] Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined. He had defined me to myself.

I want to kiss your forehead; my love now is so evolved. I want to hold your hand and see all the little marks and nicks and find out how they happened. I want to assimilate myself in your identity, to have my existence intertwined with yours. I want to know what all stories still lie hidden in you.' ('Left from Dhakeshwari')

Self-definition has been a responsibility I’ve wholeheartedly taken on as mine. It’s never a duty one should outsource. Of this responsibility, writer and poet Audre Lorde said, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” Self-definition and self-determination is about the many varied decisions that we make to compose and journey toward ourselves, about the audacity and strength to proclaim, create, and evolve into who we know ourselves to be. It’s okay if your personal definition is in a constant state of flux as you navigate the world.

What obligation is more binding than to protect the cherished, to defend whoever or whatever cannot defend itself, and to nurture in turn that which has given nourishment? I’m reminded of words written by John Seed, an Australian environmentalist. When he began considering these questions, he believed, “I am protecting the rain forest.” But as his thought evolved, he realized, “I am part of the rain forest protecting myself.

It was hard to imagine him in love. I knew that he and my mother must have once felt passion, since that was what love entailed, but I was grateful that over time the madness had evolved into something more like friendship or a business partnership, something I myself could be an integral part of. Even seeing my father recollect passion was disconcerting.

It's okay to Evolve and Change, and become more of who you really are. It's okay to Become More Yourself.

Well, where did you come from? Evolution? Creation? Couldn’t we have evolved in the same way as other species, predator and prey? Or, if you don’t believe that all this world could have just happened on its own, which is hard for me to accept myself, is it so hard to believe that the same force that created the delicate angelfish with the shark, the baby seal and the killer whale, could create both our kinds together?” Edward Cullen, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight

My last chance had vanished into itself like a snail coiling up into his shell. Insidiously I had lost my grip, and now this was it. I thought all this without much emotion. I really didn't care anymore. I couldn't hang on anymore. I didn't have the guts to kill myself, but I didn't want it to continue. I walked a couple of blocks, empty, listless, and wished I could cry. ...The diabolic hope, the purposeful pulsing of blood, the flight into coherence allowed for some rationalizing an afterlife. A new theology was evolving, one that had a faith-in-death clause. It was evolved when I kicked a dead waterbug on the pavement. It was dried out, hollowed, emptied, like some kind of shell. Maybe, I thought, its body is a shell, maybe all bodies are shells. We hatch and die. Our spirit or something like that is the yoke: it lives the real life, the true life. It wasn't comforting.

A caregiver is changed by the culture of illness, just as one is changed by the dynamic era in which one lives. For one thing, I don't have as much time in conversation with myself, and I feel the loss. Certainly I worry more about his death, and mine too, since I;m so much a part of the evolving saga of his health, which I have to monitor every day. But I've grown stronger in every aspect of my life. In small ways: speaking more directly with people. In large ways: discovering I can handle adversity and potential loss and yet keep going. I've a better idea of my strength. I feel like I've been tested, like a willow whipped around violently in a hurricane, but still stranding, its roots strong enough to hold. [p. 301]

We were evolving with different needs. I needed to explore beyond myself and Robert needed to search within himself. He explored the vocabulary of his work, and as his components shifted and morphed, he was in effect creating a diary of his internal evolution, heralding the emergence of a suppressed sexual identity.

When I was sixteen, there was no one to count on but myself. Everyone in my family was taking care of themselves, surviving, but everyone forgot I was sixteen years old. I had never felt so lost and so alone in my life.

I found myself drawn to biology, with all its frustrating yet fascinating complexities. When I was twelve, I remember reading about axolotls, which are basically a species of salamander that has evolved to remain permanently in the aquatic larval stage. They manage to keep their gills (rather than trading them in for lungs, like salamanders or frogs) by shutting down metamorphosis and becoming sexually mature in the water. I was completely flabbergasted when I read that by simply giving these creatures the “metamorphosis hormone” (thyroid extract) you could make the axolotl revert back into the extinct, land-dwelling, gill-less adult ancestor that it had evolved from. You could go back in time, resurrecting a prehistoric animal that no longer exists anywhere on Earth. I also knew that for some mysterious reason adult salamanders don’t regenerate amputated legs but the tadpoles do. My curiosity took me one step further, to the question of whether an axolotl—which is, after all, an “adult tadpole”—would retain its ability to regenerate a lost leg just as a modern frog tadpole does. And how many other axolotl-like beings exist on Earth, I wondered, that could be restored to their ancestral forms by simply giving them hormones? Could humans—who are after all apes that have evolved to retain many juvenile qualities—be made to revert to an ancestral form, perhaps something resembling Homo erectus, using the appropriate cocktail of hormones? My mind reeled out a stream of questions and speculations, and I was hooked on biology forever. I found mysteries and possibilities everywhere.

My identity is different because the world responds to my physical appearance differently. And their response inadvertently changes how I see myself. And that’s kind of … crazy.” “It is,” I said. “But we redefine ourselves. We evolve. That’s what people do.

People trust too much in themselves. What they take for truth, they let rule their lives, and if I set out to find a way to live so I will be in control of my life, then I actually lose control, because the thing I have decided on, my truth, becomes the ruler and I become it’s servant. And how can I be free to evolve if I’m submitting myself to a ruler, any ruler, even if that ruler is me?

Me I've been trying to do the right thing for everyone but myself. But I think I've figured it out now. I'm going to stop trying to please everyone. Noora Yesss! Me Get ready for Izumi 2.0. I'm totally evolving. Noora What do you think your final form will be? Me IDK, probably something winged and glittery. Then I add, Me I'm going to keep the clothes, though. Noora I feel like that's a given.

Instead of seeing my life as a personal history or career, I see myself as a pilgrim on a spiritual journey. I am no longer an isolated ego narrating my own storyline; I am a soul, evolving toward oneness. I am a pinprick of awareness in the star field of the cosmos. I am part of it all.

I’ve had enough I’m sick of seeing and touching Both sides of things Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody Nobody Can talk to anybody Without me Right? I explain my mother to my father my father to my little sister My little sister to my brother my brother to the white feminists The white feminists to the Black church folks the Black church folks to the ex-hippies the ex-hippies to the Black separatists the Black separatists to the artists the artists to my friends’ parents… Then I’ve got to explain myself To everybody I do more translating Than the Gawdamn U.N. Forget it I’m sick of it. I’m sick of filling in your gaps Sick of being your insurance against the isolation of your self-imposed limitations Sick of being the crazy at your holiday dinners Sick of being the odd one at your Sunday Brunches Sick of being the sole Black friend to 34 individual white people Find another connection to the rest of the world Find something else to make you legitimate Find some other way to be political and hip I will not be the bridge to your womanhood Your manhood Your humanness I’m sick of reminding you not to Close off too tight for too long I’m sick of mediating with your worst self On behalf of your better selves I am sick Of having to remind you To breathe Before you suffocate Your own fool self Forget it Stretch or drown Evolve or die The bridge I must be Is the bridge to my own power I must translate My own fears Mediate My own weaknesses I must be the bridge to nowhere But my true self And then I will be useful

...I love the fact that it needs to sit quietly, to retreat from touch and noise and drama, in order to evolve. I have to admit, I often feel that way myself.

but I love the fact that it needs to sit quietly, to retreat from touch and noise and drama, in order to evolve. I have to admit, I often feel that way myself.  •

We are more unhappy than humans. Humans are not as evolved as Kappas. [When I read this, I instinctively chuckled to myself.]

It's a deep commitment to myself to evolve to my highest potential and I will not apologise if I have to leave a few things behind.

What is normal changes, and it should change as society shifts and as we evolve as human beings. The normal is not set in stone.

People trust too much in themselves. What they take for truth, they let rule their lives, and if I set out to find a way to live so I will be in control of my life, then I actually lose control, because the thing I have decided on, my truth, becomes the ruler and I become its servant. And how can I be free to evolve if I’m submitting myself to a ruler, any ruler, even if that ruler is me?

But all of a sudden the scene changed; it was the memory, no longer of old impressions but of an old desire, only recently reawakened by the Fortuny gown in blue and gold, that spread before me another spring, a spring not leafy at all but on the contrary suddenly stripped of its trees and flowers by the name that I had just murmured to myself: “Venice”; a decanted springtime, which is reduced to its own essence and expresses the lengthening, the warming, the gradual unfolding of its days in the progressive fermentation, no longer, now, of an impure soil, but of a blue and virginal water, springlike without bud or blossom, which could answer the call of May only by the gleaming facets fashioned and polished by May, harmonising exactly with it in the radiant, unalterable nakedness of its dusky sapphire. Likewise, too, no more than the seasons to its flowerless creeks, do modern times bring any change to the Gothic city; I knew it, even if I could not imagine it, or rather, imagining it, this was what I longed for with the same desire which long ago, when I was a boy, in the very ardour of departure, had broken and robbed me of the strength to make the journey: to find myself face to face with my Venetian imaginings, to observe how that divided sea enclosed in its meanderings, like the sinuosities of the ocean stream, and urbane and refined civilization, but one that, isolated by their azure girdle, had evolved independently, had had its own schools of painting and architecture, to admire that fabulous garden of fruits and birds in coloured stone, flowering in the midst of the sea which kept it refreshed, lapped the base of the columns with its tide, and, like a somber azure gaze watching in the shadows, kept patches of light perpetually flickering on the bold relief of the capitals.

[The goal is] "liberation from the bondage of rebirth. According to the Vedantists the self, which they call the atman and we call the soul, is distinct from the body and its senses, distinct from the mind and its intelligence; it is not part of the Absolute, for the Absolute, being infinite, can have no parts but the Absolute itself. It is uncreated; it has existed form eternity and when at least it has cast off the seven veils of ignorance will return to the infinitude from which it came. It is like a drop of water that has arisen from the sea, and in a shower has fallen into a puddle, then drifts into a brook, finds its way into a stream, after that into a river, passing through mountain gorges and wide plains, winding this way and that, obstructed by rocks and fallen trees, till at least it reaches the boundless seas from which it rose." "But that poor little drop of water, when it has once more become one with the sea, has surely lost its individuality." Larry grinned. "You want to taste sugar, you don't want to become sugar. What is individuality but the expression of our egoism? Until the soul has shed the last trace of that it cannot become one with the Absolute." "You talk very familiarly of the Absolute, Larry, and it's an imposing word. What does it actually signify to you?" "Reality. You can't say what it is ; you can only say what it isn't. It's inexpressible. The Indians call it Brahman. It's not a person, it's not a thing, it's not a cause. It has no qualities. It transcends permanence and change; whole and part, finite and infinite. It is eternal because its completeness and perfection are unrelated to time. It is truth and freedom." "Golly," I said to myself, but to Larry: "But how can a purely intellectual conception be a solace to the suffering human race? Men have always wanted a personal God to whom they can turn in their distress for comfort and encouragement." "It may be that at some far distant day greater insight will show them that they must look for comfort and encouragement in their own souls. I myself think that the need to worship is no more than the survival of an old remembrance of cruel gods that had to be propitiated. I believe that God is within me or nowhere. If that's so, whom or what am I to worship—myself? Men are on different levels of spiritual development, and so the imagination of India has evolved the manifestations of the Absolute that are known as Brahma, Vishnu, Siva and by a hundred other names. The Absolute is in Isvara, the creator and ruler of the world, and it is in the humble fetish before which the peasant in his sun-baked field places the offering of a flower. The multitudinous gods of India are but expedients to lead to the realization that the self is one with the supreme self.

My relationship with God has evolved as well. I no longer rail or beg or sass back. I was standing on a bluff over the ocean the other day and suddenly laughed out loud as I realized what an illusion that was, what an impossibility. That would assume a relationship between a “me” and “Other,” a separation. There is no otherness; to be separate from God is to be separate from myself, from life itself. What I’ve been looking for, I’m looking with.

Certainly it's a rare glimpse into the lives of the Secular Ancients. They don't seem as bad as the Dominion histories make them out to be. Though clearly they were imperfect." "I don't deny that they were imperfect," Julian said in a distant voice. "I'm not uncritical of the Secular Ancients, Adam. They had all sorts of vices, and they committed one sin for which I can never bring myself to entirely forgive them." "What sin is that?" "They evolved into us," he said.

I may enter a zone of transcendence, in which I marvel at all the accidents of fate, since the beginning of life on earth, that led to my genes being created and my standing in this particular garden in a contemplative and imagining mind. I’ve been reading recently how reflection evolved. what a fascinating solution to the rigors of survival…how amazing that a few basic ingredients- the same ones that form the mountains, plants, and rivers- when arranged differently and stressed could result in us. More and more of late, I find myself standing outside of life, with a sense of the human saga laid out before me. it is a private vision, balanced between youth and old age, a vision in which I understand how caught up in striving we humans get, and a little of why, and how difficult it is even to recognize, since it feels integral to our nature and is. but I find it interesting that, according to many religions, life and begins and ends in a garden.

I'm a chamaleon, ever-changing, always evolving, and eager for the next phase of metamorphosis. This is me, imperfections, inconsistencies, passion, and desires. I make myself happen, because if I didn't you can be damned sure nobody else would.

I could never understand what was going on in my dreams I couldn’t control the happenings, it’s like I just stood there glued to the ground watching everything around me move and evolve into different scenarios. I was a ghost of myself watching life unravel before my own eyes...

Breaking away often from daily routines, they spent time alone, thinking and contemplating, examining and speculating about what kind of people they wanted to become. They asked questions that challenged their most deeply held assumptions about who they were. “What if” questions were vital to this process: What if I stop being an unhappy, self-centered, suffering person, and how can I change? What if I no longer worry or feel guilty or hold grudges? What if I begin to tell the truth to myself and to others? Those “what ifs” led them to other questions: Which people do I know who are usually happy, and how do they behave? Which historical figures do I admire as noble and unique? How could I be like them? What would I have to say, do, think, and act like in order to present myself differently to the world? What do I want to change about myself? Gathering

So these days, I’m on the lookout for grace, and I’m especially on the lookout for ways that I withhold grace from myself and from other people. At first, showing people grace makes you feel powerful, like scattering candy from a float in a parade—grace for you, grace for you. You become almost giddy, thinking of people in generous ways, allowing for their faults, absorbing minor irritations. You feel great, and then you start to feel just ever so slightly superior, because you’re so incredibly evolved and gracious. But then inevitably something happens, and it usually involves you confronting one of your worst selves, often in public, and you realize that you’re not throwing candy off a float to a nameless, dirty public, but rather that you are that nameless, dirty public, and that you are starving and on your knees, praying for a little piece of sweetness, just one mouthful of grace.

THERE’D BEEN A few times—probably more than normal—when I’d wished I wasn’t a girl. I’d wished I was a boy the night Mr. Kewet asked me to dance and strangled me. I’d wished I was a boy the evening I was auctioned and men laughed in my face when I offered to buy myself. I’d wished I was a boy every day of my life that I belonged to that bastard who I would never name again. But that wish had ended with Elder. I’d finally come to enjoy being a girl—a woman. Every time Elder looked at me, every hour his feelings evolved from wariness to interest to love, I was beyond grateful I’d been born a girl.

if i’m going to share my life with a partner it would be foolish not to ask myself twenty years from now is this person going to be someone i still laugh with or am i just distracted by their charm do i see us evolving into new people by the decade or does the growing ever come to a pause i don’t want to be distracted by the looks or the money i want to know if they pull the best or the worst out of me deep at the core are our values the same in thirty years will we still jump into bed like we’re twenty can i picture us in old age conquering the world like we’ve got young blood running in our veins

If God took His time to make me with care and respect, and I turn over what God made to someone who doesn’t see the care and respect God placed in creating me, then it’s my responsibility to remove myself from the situation. I only allow relationships and opportunities in my life that are a reflection of the word I’m using to build my life.

An inexpressible radiance suffused me. The chair was so much more beautiful than my cinematic memory that speech was inadequate. It was a haven, a refuge; I saw myself lolling in it, churchwarden poised, evolving new cosmogonies, quoting abstruse references to Occam’s razor and Paley’s watch. “Oh, God,” I choked, extracting a fistful of bills. “I—You’ve made me so happy! How much?

Phaethon asked: “Do you think there is something wrong with the Sophotechs? We are Manorials, father! We let Rhadamanthus control our finances and property, umpire our disputes, teach our children, design our thoughtscapes, and even play matchmaker to find us wives and husbands!” “Son, the Sophotechs may be sufficient to advise the Parliament on laws and rules. Laws are a matter of logic and common sense. Specially designed human-thinking versions, like Rhadamanthus, can tell us how to fulfill our desires and balance our account books. Those are questions of strategy, of efficient allocation of resources and time. But the Sophotechs, they cannot choose our desires for us. They cannot guide our culture, our values, our tastes. That is a question of the spirit.” “Then what would you have us do? Would you change our laws?” “Our mores, not our laws. There are many things which are repugnant, deadly to the spirit, and self-destructive, but which law should not forbid. Addiction, self-delusion, self-destruction, slander, perversion, love of ugliness. How can we discourage such things without the use of force? It was in response to this need that the College of Hortators evolved. Peacefully, by means of boycotts, public protests, denouncements, and shunnings, our society can maintain her sanity against the dangers to our spirit, to our humanity, to which such unboundried liberty, and such potent technology, exposes us.” (...) But Phaethon certainly did not want to hear a lecture, not today. “Why are you telling me all this? What is the point?” “Phaethon, I will let you pass through those doors, and, once through, you will have at your command all the powers and perquisites I myself possess. The point of my story is simple. The paradox of liberty of which you spoke before applies to our entire society. We cannot be free without being free to harm ourselves. Advances in technology can remove physical dangers from our lives, but, when they do, the spiritual dangers increase. By spiritual danger I mean a danger to your integrity, your decency, your sense of life. Against those dangers I warn you; you can be invulnerable, if you choose, because no spiritual danger can conquer you without your own consent. But, once they have your consent, those dangers are all-powerful, because no outside force can come to your aid. Spiritual dangers are always faced alone. It is for this reason that the Silver-Gray School was formed; it is for this reason that we practice the exercise of self-discipline. Once you pass those doors, my son, you will be one of us, and there will be nothing to restrain you from corruption and self-destruction except yourself. “You have a bright and fiery soul, Phaethon, a power to do great things; but I fear you may one day unleash such a tempest of fire that you may consume yourself, and all the world around you.

For so long, I was stuck in "either or" thinking. Either I had to change myself, or change the world. Either it was his fault or my fault. Either you had to stop acting that way or I had to stop reacting this way. Either there was something wrong with me or something wrong with them. I would fluctuate between both ends of this dynamic. I'd blame myself for some time and do everything I could to change. When that became tiresome, I'd blame the other, doing everything I could to make them change. When the resentment and frustration became too strong, I'd blame myself again. I've learned that it's never either or. It's always both. I've also learned that, because it's always both, there's no such thing as fault. Fault is only something we can ascribe when we see things superficially. When we look deeper, we see multi-layered, complex systems of causes and effects which affect and are affected by all individuals involved. Fault is a useless concept. Responsibility, however, is the most helpful concept of them all. It's not my fault. It's not his or yours or theirs either. But it is all our responsibility. When we come together like this, we don't have to see-saw back and forth, passing on guilt and blame. We can grow. We can evolve. We can build a better world.

Now here is an interesting thing about my life journey. Choosing a partner for me has certainly been an evolving process, at first it was about finding a 'good' woman, and the most appropriate "market" for sourcing out such kind of a woman, at first I thought, was the church. And coming from a strong church background myself, that was easy, however, it was not as wow or soul-stimulating as I expected it to be. To be quite honest, it was a very soul-starving experience. And I'm not putting the blame on anyone here. I probably needed that to figure out what or who it was that my soul was truly meant for. The thing about a lot of 'good' women is that they are almost always pro religion/morality but not necessarily pro DEPTH/GROWTH, and that can become a very frustrating thing for someone like me who enjoys growing, living his life full out and out of the box.

Now that I am a father myself, I know that powerlessness is the defining characteristic of fatherhood. This begins with the pregnancy. Men spend their whole lives being active. We evolved as hunters. “Me get job, me get girl, me get girl pregnant. Now me shut mouth and wait for girl to tell me what to do.” As expectant fathers, we become silent spectators. Passive participants in a series of external events over which we have zero control.

I am not bound by law, for my law is my accountability towards society, which itself makes me do what's right and best for the society. I am not here to be guided by the illusive societal paradigms, legal or any other, I am here to point those paradigms in a humane direction, so that they can recognize their shortcomings and evolve into something better. But if ever the dark day comes when I commit an inhumanity, I will sentence myself to death.

I find it simpler to envision shedding tears over a matter than picturing myself genuinely prepared for change. Understanding my emotions proves intricate. It commences with a yearning to refine my thought processes, a longing to evolve into a superior version of myself, and an acknowledgment of the knowledge and superiority of others beyond my current perception. On rare occasions, this contemplation lingers within me, day after day, gradually evolving from a fleeting thought into an intrinsic facet of my identity. The aforementioned notion holds promise for instigating positive change within me, yet it often necessitates a significant passage of time before I yearn for it, and the resultant impact is distressing. I come to terms with the notion that my heart is astray, preyed upon by untamed beasts. I can anticipate your reassurance: "Don't worry, no one is perfect." Nonetheless, I acknowledge that I stand just a notch above the beasts and several steps below the angels.

As with the first Nightmare, we shot a couple of interesting scenes that didn’t make it into the final cut, most notably one featuring a female Freddy. One of the kids in the hospital has a Freddy dream in which he’s being seduced by a sexy nurse. The nightmare evolves into a kinky S&M fantasy, but becomes less M and more S when the ropes that bind the kid to the bed become Freddy tongues, and the nurse’s face morphs into Freddy’s, but her topless torso, which features a pair of perfect Playboy breasts, remains smooth and inviting… that is, for a moment. All of a sudden, the veins in her areolas come to life and turn into Freddy-like burn scars and snake up her cleavage, past her neck, and onto her face. (I’m pretty sure Kevin enjoyed the four hours it took to apply makeup to those tits.) This troubling, erotic transformation didn’t make the final cut for some reason. Occasionally I find myself signing bootleg stills from the missing sequence. Especially in Europe. Ooh la la!

When it was confirmed that I was not pregnant, I evolved a new understanding of the word "whore," one that was less about actions and more about essence. It was not that I had done something wrong so much as that I existed in the wrong way. There was something impure in the fact of my being. It's strange how you give the people you love so much power over you, I had written in my journal. But Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined. He had defined me to myself, and there's no greater power than that.

Days later, when it was confirmed that I was not pregnant, I evolved a new understanding of the word "whore," one that was less about actions and more about essence. It was not that I had done something wrong, so much as that I existed in the wrong way. There was something impure in the fact of my being. It's strange how you give the people you love so much power over you, I had written in my journal. But Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined. He had defined me to myself, and there's no greater power than that.

The principal aim underlying this work is to render homage where homage is due, a task which I know beforehand is impossible of accomplishment. Were I to do it properly, I would have to get down on my knees and thank each blade of grass for rearing its head. What chiefly motivates me in this vain task is the fact that in general we know all too little about the influences which shape a writer’s life and work. The critic, in his pompous conceit and arrogance, distorts the true picture beyond all recognition. The author, however truthful he may think himself to be, inevitably disguises the picture. The psychologist, with his single-track view of things, only deepens the blur. As author, I do not think myself an exception to the rule. I, too, am guilty of altering, distorting and disguising the facts — if ‘facts’ there be. My conscious effort, however, has been — perhaps to a fault– in the opposite direction. I am on the side of revelation, if not always on the side of beauty, truth, wisdom, harmony and ever-evolving perfection. In this work I am throwing out fresh data, to be judged and analyzed, or accepted and enjoyed for enjoyment’s sake. Naturally I cannot write about all the books, or even all the significant ones, which I have read in the course of my life. But I do intend to go on writing about books and authors until I have exhausted the importance (for me) of this domain of reality. To have undertaken the thankless task of listing all the books I can recall ever reading gives me extreme pleasure and satisfaction. I know of no author who has been mad enough to attempt this. Perhaps my list will give rise to more confusion — but its purpose is not that. Those who know how to read a man know how to read his books.

The definition of the word ‘racist’ has evolved…or devolved…or, more accurately, ballooned…over the course of my lifetime. It used to be that a ‘racist’ was simply someone who hated others for their skin color. By that definition, I am not, nor have I ever been, a racist. People give you plenty of reasons to hate them before you even have to consider their melanin levels. Most people I’ve hated have been white—especially the ones who play an infantile, morally hierarchical, status-jockeying game of ‘tag’ by calling me a racist. Another common idea of what constitutes a ‘racist’ is someone who scapegoats other races for their problems. Nah, that’s not me. I blame my parents and, increasingly, myself. So by that definition, I am not a racist.

I sat on my bed, knees pressed to my chest, and listened to them shout. Was I pregnant? I wasn’t sure. I considered every interaction I’d had with a boy, every glance, every touch. I walked to the mirror and raised my shirt, then ran my fingers across my abdomen, examining it inch by inch and thought, Maybe. I had never kissed a boy. I had witnessed birth, but I’d been given none of the facts of conception. While my father and brother shouted, ignorance kept me silent: I couldn’t defend myself, because I didn’t understand the accusation. Days later, when it was confirmed that I was not pregnant, I evolved a new understanding of the word “whore,” one that was less about actions and more about essence. It was not that I had done something wrong so much as that I existed in the wrong way. There was something impure in the fact of my being.

here are many things that I’ve always known about myself, but my gender just isn’t one of them. I didn’t know that I was a girl. And forgive the double negative, but I wasn’t sure that I wasn’t a boy, either. I just knew that gender was kinda stupid and that I wanted to play with Barbies, get dirty in the creek behind my house, and kiss the blue Power Ranger real bad. As people, our identities change over our lifetimes. This applies to transgender and cisgender people alike. Everyone has a gender that evolves. Even if you identify as a woman, what it means to be a woman is never the same from day to day. Or, if you identify as a man, the way that your manhood manifests will be different throughout your life. The idea that gender is consistent is a flawed premise to begin with. By resisting convenient labels and embracing authentic ambiguity, I want to challenge the tenet that gender must be consistent and immediately legible to others.

Linda continued stubbornly, “Evolution can’t be true, because if humans evolved from apes, then why are there still apes?” “Frankly, Linda, it is exactly that kind of bone-headed statement that demonstrates a complete ignorance of evolutionary processes by the staggeringly misinformed. Humans did not descend from apes, humans and apes shared a common ancestor millions of years ago. Humans and apes are distant cousins, with chimpanzees as our closest cousins sharing roughly ninety-eight percent of our genome, who together share an even earlier common ancestor with gorillas.” “I am not descended from a monkey,” Linda stated hotly. “Humans are created in the image of God and appeared on Earth in our present form. We did not evolve from pond scum!” “You are free to believe that and persist in your ignorance, but as the renowned evolutionary biologist and zoologist, Richard Dawkins, wrote in A Devil’s Chaplain—” “Aha!” Linda burst out, “there you go, admitting it’s the work of the devil.

It may be that at some far distant day greater insight will show them that they must look for comfort and encouragement in their own souls. I myself think that the need to worship is no more than the survival of an old remembrance of cruel gods that had to be propitiated. I believe that God is within me or nowhere. If that's so, whom or what am I to worship-myself? Men are on different levels of spiritual development, and so the imagination of India has evolved the manifestations of the Absolute that are known as Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, and by a hundred other names. The Absolute is in Isvara, the creator and ruler of the world, and it is in the humble fetish before which the peasant in his sun-baked field places the offering of a flower. The multitudinous gods of India are but expedients to lead to the realization that the self is one with the supreme self.' I looked at Larry reflectively. 'I wonder just what it was that attracted you to this austere faith,' I said. 'I think I can tell you. I've always felt that there was something pathetic in the founders of religion who made it a condition of salvation that you should believe in them. It's as though they needed your faith to have faith in themselves. They remind you of those old pagan gods who grew wan and faint if they were not sustained by the burnt offerings of the devout. Advaita doesn't ask you to take anything on trust; it asks only that you should have a passionate craving to know Reality; it states that you can experience God as surely as you can experience joy or pain. And there are men in India today - hundreds of them for all I know - who have the certitude that they have done so. I found something wonderfully satisfying in the notion that you can attain Reality by knowledge. In later ages the sages of India in recognition of human infirmity admitted that salvation may be won by the way of love and the way of works, but they never denied that the noblest way, though the hardest, is the way of knowledge, for its instrument is the most precious faculty of man, his reason.

Standing before this building, I learn something about fear. I learn that it is not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important to happen to him, even if the important thing is horrible. It is not the disgust of seeing a dead stranger, and not the breathlessness of hearing a shotgun pumped outside of Becca Arrington’s house. This cannot be addressed by breathing exercises. This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead. The smell leaves me seized by desperate panic―panic not like my lungs are out of air, but like the atmosphere itself is out of air. I think maybe the reason I have spent most of my life being afraid is that I have been trying to prepare myself, to train my body for the real fear when it comes. But I am not prepared.

Dopey, on my right - as usual, I'd ended up sitting on the hump in the middle of the backseat - muttered, "I don't know what you see in that headcase Meducci anyway." Doc said, "Oh, that's easy. Females of any species tend to select the male partner who is best able to provide for her and any offspring which might result from their coupling. Michael Meducci, being a good deal more intelligent than most of his classmates, amply fulfills that role, in addition to which he has what is considered, by Western standards of beauty, an outstanding physique - if what I've overheard Gina and Suze saying counts for anything. Since he is likely to pass on these favorable genetic components to his children, he is irresistible to breeding females everywhere - at least, discerning ones like Suze." There was silence in the car ... the kind of silence that usually followed one of Doc's speeches. Then Gina said reverently, "They really should move you up a grade, David." "Oh, they've offered," Doc replied, cheerfully, "but while my intellect might be evolved for a boy my age, my growth is somewhat retarded. I felt it was inadvisable to thrust myself into a population of males much larger than I, who might be threatened by my superior intelligence." "In other words," Sleepy translated for Gina's benefit, "we didn't want him getting his butt kicked by the bigger kids.

More than anything, we have lost the cultural customs and traditions that bring extended families together, linking adults and children in caring relationships, that give the adult friends of parents a place in their children's lives. It is the role of culture to cultivate connections between the dependent and the dependable and to prevent attachment voids from occurring. Among the many reasons that culture is failing us, two bear mentioning. The first is the jarringly rapid rate of change in twentieth-century industrial societies. It requires time to develop customs and traditions that serve attachment needs, hundreds of years to create a working culture that serves a particular social and geographical environment. Our society has been changing much too rapidly for culture to evolve accordingly. There is now more change in a decade than previously in a century. When circumstances change more quickly than our culture can adapt to, customs and traditions disintegrate. It is not surprising that today's culture is failing its traditional function of supporting adult-child attachments. Part of the rapid change has been the electronic transmission of culture, allowing commercially blended and packaged culture to be broadcast into our homes and into the very minds of our children. Instant culture has replaced what used to be passed down through custom and tradition and from one generation to another. “Almost every day I find myself fighting the bubble-gum culture my children are exposed to,” said a frustrated father interviewed for this book. Not only is the content often alien to the culture of the parents but the process of transmission has taken grandparents out of the loop and made them seem sadly out of touch. Games, too, have become electronic. They have always been an instrument of culture to connect people to people, especially children to adults. Now games have become a solitary activity, watched in parallel on television sports-casts or engaged in in isolation on the computer. The most significant change in recent times has been the technology of communication — first the phone and then the Internet through e-mail and instant messaging. We are enamored of communication technology without being aware that one of its primary functions is to facilitate attachments. We have unwittingly put it into the hands of children who, of course, are using it to connect with their peers. Because of their strong attachment needs, the contact is highly addictive, often becoming a major preoccupation. Our culture has not been able to evolve the customs and traditions to contain this development, and so again we are all left to our own devices. This wonderful new technology would be a powerfully positive instrument if used to facilitate child-adult connections — as it does, for example, when it enables easy communication between students living away from home, and their parents. Left unchecked, it promotes peer orientation.

In about 1980, he says, at a time when he was still struggling to articulate his own vision of a dynamic, evolving economy, he happened to read a book by the geneticist Richard Lewontin. And he was struck by a passage in which Lewontin said that scientists come in two types. Scientists of the first type see the world as being basically in equilibrium. And if untidy forces sometimes push a system slightly out of equilibrium, then they feel the whole trick is to push it back again. Lewontin called these scientists "Platonists," after the renowned Athenian philosopher who declared that the messy, imperfect objects we see around us are merely the reflections of perfect "archetypes." Scientists of the second type, however, see the world as a process of flow and change, with the same material constantly going around and around in endless combinations. Lewontin called these scientists "Heraclitans," after the Ionian philosopher who passionately and poetically argued that the world is in a constant state of flux. Heraclitus, who lived nearly a century before Plato, is famous for observing that "Upon those who step into the same rivers flow other and yet other waters," a statement that Plato himself paraphrased as "You can never step into the same river twice." "When I read what Lewontin said," says Arthur, "it was a moment of revelation. That's when it finally became clear to me what was going on. I thought to myself, "Yes! We're finally beginning to recover from Newton.

... [T]hose who most seem to be themselves appear to me people impersonating what they think they might like to be, believe they ought to be, or wish to be taken to be by whoever is setting standards. So in earnest are they that they don't even recognise that being in earnest -is the act-. For certain self-aware people, however, this is not possible: to imagine themselves being themselves, living their own real, authentic, or genuine life, has for them all the aspects of a hallucination. I realise that what I am describing, people divided in themselves, is said to characterise mental illness and is the absolute opposite of our idea of emotional integration. The whole Western idea of mental health runs in precisely the opposite direction: what is desirable is congruity between your self-consciousness and your natural being. But there are those whose sanity flows from the conscious -separation- of those two things. If there even -is- a natural being, an irreducible self, it is rather small, I think, and may even be the root of all impersonation -- the natural being may be the skill itself, the innate capacity to impersonate. I'm talking about recognising that one is acutely a performer, rather than swallowing whole the guise of naturalness and pretending that it isn't a performance but you. . . . All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self. It certainly does strike me as a joke about -my- self. What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself -- a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required, an ever-evolving stock of pieces and parts that forms my repertoire. But I certainly have no self independent of my imposturing, artistic efforts to have one. Nor would I want one. I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.

Space is nearly empty. There is virtually no chance that one of the Voyagers will ever enter another solar system—and this is true even if every star in the sky is accompanied by planets. The instructions on the record jackets, written in what we believe to be readily comprehensible scientific hieroglyphics, can be read, and the contents of the records understood, only if alien beings, somewhere in the remote future, find Voyager in the depths of interstellar space. Since both Voyagers will circle the center of the Milky Way Galaxy essentially forever, there is plenty of time for the records to be found—if there's anyone out there to do the finding. We cannot know how much of the records they would understand. Surely the greetings will be incomprehensible, but their intent may not be. (We thought it would be impolite not to say hello.) The hypothetical aliens are bound to be very different from us—independently evolved on another world. Are we really sure they could understand anything at all of our message? Every time I feel these concerns stirring, though, I reassure myself. Whatever the incomprehensibilities of the Voyager record, any alien ship that finds it will have another standard by which to judge us. Each Voyager is itself a message. In their exploratory intent, in the lofty ambition of their objectives, in their utter lack of intent to do harm, and in the brilliance of their design and performance, these robots speak eloquently for us. But being much more advanced scientists and engineers than we—otherwise they would never be able to find and retrieve the small, silent spacecraft in interstellar space—perhaps the aliens would have no difficulty understanding what is encoded on these golden records. Perhaps they would recognize the tentativeness of our society, the mismatch between our technology and our wisdom. Have we destroyed ourselves since launching Voyager, they might wonder, or have we gone on to greater things? Or perhaps the records will never be intercepted. Perhaps no one in five billion years will ever come upon them. Five billion years is a long time. In five billion years, all humans will have become extinct or evolved into other beings, none of our artifacts will have survived on Earth, the continents will have become unrecognizably altered or destroyed, and the evolution of the Sun will have burned the Earth to a crisp or reduced it to a whirl of atoms. Far from home, untouched by these remote events, the Voyagers, bearing the memories of a world that is no more, will fly on.

I wish I understood it,” she said. “It’s okay,” I said. “Nobody gets anybody else, not really. We’re all stuck inside ourselves.” “You just, like, hate yourself? You hate being yourself?” “There’s no self to hate. It’s like, when I look into myself, there’s no actual me—just a bunch of thoughts and behaviors and circumstances. And a lot of them just don’t feel like they’re mine. They’re not things I want to think or do or whatever. And when I look for the, like, Real Me, I never find it. It’s like those nesting dolls, you know? The ones that are hollow, and then when you open them up, there’s a smaller doll inside, and you keep opening hollow dolls until eventually you get to the smallest one, and it’s solid all the way through. But with me, I don’t think there is one that’s solid. They just keep getting smaller.” “That reminds me of a story my mom tells,” Daisy said. “What story?” I could hear her teeth chattering when she talked but neither of us wanted to stop looking up at the latticed sky. “Okay, so there’s this scientist, and he’s giving a lecture to a huge audience about the history of the earth, and he explains that the earth was formed billions of years ago from a cloud of cosmic dust, and then for a while the earth was very hot, but then it cooled enough for oceans to form. And single-celled life emerged in the oceans, and then over billions of years, life got more abundant and complex, until two hundred fifty thousand or so years ago, humans evolved, and we started using more advanced tools, and then eventually built spaceships and everything. “So he gives this whole presentation about the history of earth and life on it, and then at the end, he asks if there are any questions. An old woman in the back raises her hand, and says, ‘That’s all fine and good, Mr. Scientist, but the truth is, the earth is a flat plane resting on the back of a giant turtle.’ “The scientist decides to have a bit of fun with the woman and responds, ‘Well, but if that’s so, what is the giant turtle standing upon?’ “And the woman says, ‘It is standing upon the shell of another giant turtle.’ “And now the scientist is frustrated, and he says, ‘Well, then what is that turtle standing upon?’ “And the old woman says, ‘Sir, you don’t understand. It’s turtles all the way down.’” I laughed. “It’s turtles all the way down.” “It’s turtles all the way fucking down, Holmesy. You’re trying to find the turtle at the bottom of the pile, but that’s not how it works.” “Because it’s turtles all the way down,” I said again, feeling something akin to a spiritual revelation.

Meditation + Mental Strength An emotion is our evolved biology predicting the future impact of a current event. In modern settings, it’s usually exaggerated or wrong. Why is meditation so powerful? Your breath is one of the few places where your autonomic nervous system meets your voluntary nervous system. It’s involuntary, but you can also control it. I think a lot of meditation practices put an emphasis on the breath because it is a gateway into your autonomic nervous system. There are many, many cases in the medical and spiritual literature of people controlling their bodies at levels that should be autonomous. Your mind is such a powerful thing. What’s so unusual about your forebrain sending signals to your hindbrain and your hindbrain routing resources to your entire body? You can do it just by breathing. Relaxed breathing tells your body you’re safe. Then, your forebrain doesn’t need as many resources as it normally does. Now, the extra energy can be sent to your hindbrain, and it can reroute those resources to the rest of your body. I’m not saying you can beat whatever illness you have just because you activated your hindbrain. But you’re devoting most of the energy normally required to care about the external environment to the immune system. I highly recommend listening to the Tim Ferriss’s podcast with Wim Hof. He is a walking miracle. Wim’s nickname is the Ice Man. He holds the world record for the longest time spent in an ice bath and swimming in freezing cold water. I was very inspired by him, not only because he’s capable of super-human physical feats, but because he does it while being incredibly kind and happy—which is not easy to accomplish. He advocates cold exposure, because he believes people are too separate from their natural environment. We’re constantly clothed, fed, and warm. Our bodies have lost touch with the cold. The cold is important because it can activate the immune system. So, he advocates taking long ice baths. Being from the Indian subcontinent, I’m strongly against the idea of ice baths. But Wim inspired me to give cold showers a try. And I did so by using the Wim Hof breathing method. It involves hyperventilating to get more oxygen into your blood, which raises your core temperature. Then, you can go into the shower. The first few cold showers were hilarious because I’d slowly ease myself in, wincing the entire way. I started about four or five months ago. Now, I turn the shower on full-blast, and then I walk right in. I don’t give myself any time to hesitate. As soon as I hear the voice in my head telling me how cold it’s going to be, I know I have to walk in. I learned a very important lesson from this: most of our suffering comes from avoidance. Most of the suffering from a cold shower is the tip-toeing your way in. Once you’re in, you’re in. It’s not suffering. It’s just cold. Your body saying it’s cold is different than your mind saying it’s cold. Acknowledge your body saying it’s cold. Look at it. Deal with it. Accept it, but don’t mentally suffer over it. Taking a cold shower for two minutes isn’t going to kill you. Having a cold shower helps you re-learn that lesson every morning. Now hot showers are just one less thing I need out of life. [2] Meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind. Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, and too many distractions lead to a heavy mind. Time spent undistracted and alone, in self-examination, journaling, meditation, resolves the unresolved and takes us from mentally fat to fit.

A Letter to the Reader I thought my dog dying was going to kill me. If I’m being honest, I still think it, some days. Most days. If I’m being honest, I still think it every day. Soul-mutt. Best friend. Not everyone understands, or will. That’s fine. I’ve never been one to want to share in grief, never been one to share much of anything. Only child, writer. A dog removes itself from the pack to lick wounds clean. A dog goes off, alone, to die. But we all know it—a family member, a friend, the sudden glazing of the eyes, the feel of a heart stopping beneath our hand. Our souls and selves dropping pieces each time someone exits this earth. Our identities, foundations shaken. Even sometimes bulldozed to nothing. This one brought me to my knees. At the time of writing this note, I can honestly say, I have never felt anything like this. I am truly surprised it hasn’t killed me. I always knew Barghest was going to die. Barghest’s death was (with the deaths of the others) the worst thing I could think of, and my job as I see it is to explore all the worsts. And all the bests, too. This book, or more accurately, an early, now unrecognizable version of it, was the first thing I ever seriously wrote. It was also what got me started on this path of Writer. Someone read this early snippet and believed in it, in me. This was a story that I wanted to tell from day one, ideas that hounded me then and have for all the years since. It’s taken ten years, an education, all the events of a decade of life, and more drafts than I’d like to count for me to tell this story in a way that felt right. In a way that is (I hope) befitting of you, most precious reader. And these dogged questions of guilt, shame, faith have nipped at my heels through everything. Funny, how they always draw just enough blood to keep us from running full tilt. But now. In the wake of a loss that has shaken me more than any I’ve lived through before, in a moment in which I find myself, like Sophie, questioning everything, questioning what the point of being here is at all, I have to say, It all feels very human and very small to confine and bind ourselves to anything that seeks to diminish us. This world and universe and existence is so expansive and evolving, and we choose to let ourselves be crippled by someone else’s ideas. We share life with mortality. We will die. Everyone we love will die. We will all face the dark. Together, or separate. We just don’t know. There is no self-help book, no textbook, no how-to that can tell us, definitively, what comes after. By the time any of us has the answers, we won’t be here to write them. None of us knows, even if we think we do. But here is what I do know: We live with death. And horror chooses not to turn away from it. Horror looks the darkness in the eyes. Horror dances with the absence, the loss. Explores ways for us—you, the reader, and me—to take it in our arms and spin around together. Ways to embrace the centrifugal force that is human striving, human searching. Mortal life. Dogs die. Humans die. We live with it, whether we want to or not. But from choosing to look, choosing not to turn away, from our embrace in the darkness, I hope that guilt and shame and any idea invented to hold you down in this glorious, nearly blinding existence, will seem, at the end of it all, very, very small. You, and me, spinning too fast for them to catch us. Thank you for continuing on this journey with me. With my characters, who are of course, now yours. These questions and worlds that I humbly share with you. That now belong to you. And while we keep hurtling through the unknown, as we spin round and round, I want to say, Here’s to dancing, book by book, question by question, through this vast, shining existence. Together.

wanted to pursue things, to know things, but I could not match the means of knowing that came naturally to me with the expectations of professors. The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself. The best parts of Malcolm pointed the way. Malcolm, always changing, always evolving toward some truth that was ultimately outside the boundaries of his life, of his body. I felt myself in motion, still directed toward the total possession of my body, but by some other route which I could not before then have imagined.

WHEN MY MOTHER made good on our wager of a plane ticket and I found myself in Puerto Rico for two weeks, I had my first chance to view the island through adult eyes and with an evolving new consciousness of my identity.

Be myself? Screw that. I had to evolve into a better version of myself.

Depression characterized by the 'threat-to' orientation lodges itself in one side of the proposition. Doing so does not eliminate doubt, it only places it in the world. The world has become doubtful; what I doubt is my capacity to continue living in such a world. I doubt whether I can make it given how things are. I experience a kind of shrinking, or diminution of my self; but what remains clear - what I am most wanting to hold clear - is who it is that is doing the doubting, who 'I' am. As it seems to 'me,' what 'I' doubt is whether, in the face of the way the world has become, 'I' can keep myself together, my self together. From the point of view of our paradigm, that which 'I' say means: I doubt whether I can keep it together, this balance. What is being doubted, really, from our point of view, is the capacity to continue knowing, which, phenomenologically, from the view of the self, entails the capacity to continue being.

Autobiographical musing is an addictive attempt to understand the marrow of the self. The plasma pool that comprises the molecules of autobiographical writing is inherently immodest. The obsession (or calculated ability) to stand back and look at ourselves with detachment is weird and more than slightly perplexing. Anyone whom writes about himself or herself is obviously comfortable looking at himself or herself naked in a mirror. The desire to take copious notes documenting the hemoglobin of the evolving self might be rooted in cells of narcissism or premised upon a distinct concept that the only thing we can truly ever know is ourselves. It might also represent an amateurish attempt at engaging in behavior modification, an effort to immunize myself from societal denunciation, an act of contrition. By forcing oneself to confront platelets of actions and omissions and by detailing a personal account on paper, we must assume responsibility for the connective tissue of our history.

Please don’t send me like-minded people. It doesn’t interest me AT ALL. Send me as many souls as you can that are DIFFERENT from me. Let me bask in their wisdom, knowledge, and experience. Let me learn different traditions, values, and perspectives. Let me evolve through the richness of immersing myself in the intellectual and emotional realms that are unfamiliar to me. Send me like-INTENTIONED people who too are dedicated to their evolving growth, who are curious, passionate, and kind, and I shall be right at home.

Seeing the cause and effect of how you’ve raised your older children is helpful in considering how to raise the next. There are things that I have learned, through stumbling in the darkness of youth and inexperience, that have (hopefully) helped me prepare for this next chapter. There are errors that were made and versions of myself that this child will not have to live through. There are things worth keeping and resurrecting.

The question I constantly asked myself was, “Am I in habit, or am I showing up as I want to be?

With the importance of resetting the entropy each time a steam engine goes through a cycle, you might wonder what would happen if the entropy reset were to fail. That’s tantamount to the steam engine not expelling adequate waste heat, and so with each cycle the engine would get hotter until it would overheat and break down. If a steam engine were to suffer such a fate it might prove inconvenient but, assuming there were no injuries, would likely not drive anyone into an existential crisis. Yet the very same physics is central to whether life and mind can persist indefinitely far into the future. The reason is that what holds for the steam engine holds for you. It is likely that you don’t consider yourself to be a steam engine or perhaps even a physical contraption. I, too, only rarely use those terms to describe myself. But think about it: your life involves processes no less cyclical than those of the steam engine. Day after day, your body burns the food you eat and the air you breathe to provide energy for your internal workings and your external activities. Even the very act of thinking—molecular motion taking place in your brain—is powered by these energy-conversion processes. And so, much like the steam engine, you could not survive without resetting your entropy by purging excess waste heat to the environment. Indeed, that’s what you do. That’s what we all do. All the time. It’s why, for example, the military’s infrared goggles designed to “see” the heat we all continually expel do a good job of helping soldiers spot enemy combatants at night. We can now appreciate more fully Russell’s mind-set when imagining the far future. We are all waging a relentless battle to resist the persistent accumulation of waste, the unstoppable rise of entropy. For us to survive, the environment must absorb and carry away all the waste, all the entropy, we generate. Which raises the question, Does the environment—by which we now mean the observable universe—provide a bottomless pit for absorbing such waste? Can life dance the entropic two-step indefinitely? Or might there come a time when the universe is, in effect, stuffed and so is unable to absorb the waste heat generated by the very activities that define us, bringing an end to life and mind? In the lachrymose phrasing of Russell, is it true that “all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins”?

Wholeness includes brokenness; perfect literally means inclusive of everything; complete means evolving. I incorporated this paradoxical wisdom into my life and became gentler with myself and others.

Not the mundane kind of comfortable, where you fall into a routine and then shit goes stale. It’s the kind of comfort where I can be myself while giving me room to grow and evolve.

It started as practice. Just a little game, a little exercise. Something I needed to prove to myself. I wasn’t sure when it had evolved into sport—my shameful, secret rebellion.

Epilogue From 1935’s desperate beginning, Roller Derby was invented. It grew, flourished and continues to this very day. The game and the players have evolved along with tremendous social change. Skaters from all around our amazing planet have found self-esteem through teamwork and athleticism on skates. Derby has been a trailblazer for women’s roles in our society, and has always embraced diversity of gender, color, culture and orientation. Today, thousands of leagues and teams are in operation. There are women’s, men’s, and coed teams and leagues dotting our world’s cities. Every skater, including myself, stands on the shoulders of the early risk-takers and innovators of this wonderful world of roller derby.   The best is yet to come.   Tim Patten

What was wrong with me? Here I was, sitting in a warm, secure place with a whole loaf of bread. Why, then, did I feel so sad, so forlorn? Slowly, the answer began to dawn. During the long years of deprivation, I had dreamed of eating my fill in a warm place, in peace, but I never thought that I would eat my bread alone. Later that evening, I told Kurt that I had been thinking of my friends still in Europe, cold and hungry. I had to do something. Out of that need evolved my work with the local Jewish Federation, where I soon found myself putting stamps on envelopes and sealing them. I was immensely proud of having become a volunteer. When Kurt’s aunt cautioned me that volunteer work was really for the wealthy, I agreed wholeheartedly. I considered myself rich now.

This summer is my big chance to improve myself and I'm determined to give up sugar, caffeine, alcohol, read meat, white flour and fried foods, as well as finally learn to meditate and become the spiritually evolved person I know that I truly am inside.

When it comes to antidepressants in particular, there’s one more rumple: the American attitude about happiness. In this country, happiness is another ideal that carries nearly the weight of a moral imperative; as Elliott observes, there is an unspoken expectation in America that people should feel and act happy most of the time. Travelers to the United States often remark that in America, more than other places, cheerfulness is viewed as a default state, and that there’s considerable pressure to present oneself as upbeat. There’s also a peculiarly American belief that authenticity and happiness stand in a causal relationship to each other—that really being oneself will lead to happiness every time. Elliott thinks that this belief evolved from a loose interpretation of Freud, who taught that unhappiness was caused by repressions of various kinds: by that logic, the least repressed, most fully realized self would be the most happy. Americans possess, says Elliott, a naive trust that achieving perfect personal authenticity, a feat summed up in the popular phrase “self-actualization,” will result in the deepest possible contentment. So: Americans are supposed to be authentic, and we’re supposed to be happy. When happiness comes easily, this is not a problem. But for people who aren’t feeling happy and are contemplating antidepressants, it can make for tough choices. Is it better to take antidepressants and be happy (but maybe inauthentic, if you believe that antidepressants can temper the self)? Or is it better to press on, authentic but not happy? Either way, you’ll be failing to fulfill the script that American lore has laid out for you: be who you are, and happiness will surely and naturally follow. There’s only one way out of this bind, and it’s to believe that antidepressants make you more, not less, authentic. As it happens, this is precisely the claim that Elliott finds people make about a wide variety of enhancement technologies: people use a technique to alter a certain thing about themselves, and then speak about the alteration as something that makes them into, or expresses, who they really were inside all along. (For example, recipients of sex-change operations often describe them as a way to bring the physical body in line with a deeper reality. I always felt like a woman, and now I am one.) In short, people who use personal enhancements often speak like Tess did when she told Peter Kramer that, off Prozac, “I am not myself.

why there is any need to bother with Spain at all. ‘Why Spain?’ was a question that I had to answer for myself even as I attempted to answer it for others. My own answer, as it has evolved over the years, is that this is an endlessly fascinating country whose history, made up of striking successes and equally striking failures, embraces topics of universal import. Here is a country and a people whose past saw the construction and subsequent deconstruction of complex religious and ethnic relationships as it stood poised between the worlds of Christianity, Judaism and Islam; a country that took the lead among European powers in conquering and governing a vast overseas empire, and that has persistently sought, and never quite succeeded, in reconciling the conflicting demands of unity and diversity on its own territory; and a country whose religious, cultural and artistic achievements over the course of the centuries have made an enormously rich if often controversial contribution to human civilization.

It can't be more than a quarter of a mile to the finish, but it seems to go on forever. Do I really have to do this? My legs are entirely dead. Would it really matter if I stopped here? But I know I'd regret it if I did, so I plod leadenly on, distracting myself...with the thought that, whatever troubles I may have been carrying around in my head before the race, I have now entirely forgotten what they were. This thought is rather refreshing. Whatever physical pains it has involved, this ordeal has utterly absorbed me, forcing my brain to focus on the kind of concerns for which it evolved - navigation, survival, balance, digging deep - rather than on the fretful urban anxieties to which it has become habituated. Reconnecting with your inner animal, I suppose you could call it; and it feels good. Especially when, blissfully, I catch sight of the finish.

And because who I am is merely a conceptualization on the basis of constantly evolving mental and physical parts, I can learn to re-conceptualize myself so as to become a happier me, no matter what role “I” am playing.

[T]he problem of man and technics is almost always stated in the wrong way. It is said that humanity has evolved one-sidedly, growing in technical power without any comparable growth in moral integrity, or, as some would prefer to say, without comparable progress in education and rational thinking. Yet the problem is more basic. The root of the matter is the way in which we feel and conceive ourselves as human beings, our sensation of being alive, of individual existence and identity. We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that “I myself” is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body— a center which “confronts” an “external” world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. “I came into this world.” “You must face reality.” “The conquest of nature.” This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated “egos” inside bags of skin.

Natural selection almost always builds on what went before…. It is the resulting complexity that makes biological organisms so hard to unscramble. The basic laws of physics can usually be expressed in simple mathematical form, and they are probably the same throughout the universe. The laws of biology, by contrast, are often only broad generalizations, since they describe rather elaborate (chemical) mechanisms that natural selection has evolved over millions of years…. I myself knew very little biology, except in a rather general way, till I was over thirty…my first degree was in physics. It took me a little time to adjust to the rather different way of thinking necessary in biology. It was almost as if one had to be born again. By

We knew that the prospect of our little studio being absorbed into a much larger entity would worry many people. While we’d worked hard to put safeguards in place that would ensure our independence, we still expected our employees to be fearful that the merger would negatively impact our culture. I’ll say more about the specific steps we took to protect Pixar in a later chapter, but here I want to discuss what happened when, in my eagerness to ease my colleagues’ fears, I stood up and assured them that Pixar would not change. It was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever said. For the next year or so, whenever we wanted to try something new or rethink an established way of working, a steady stream of alarmed and upset people would show up at my office. “You promised the merger wouldn’t affect the way we work,” they’d say. “You said that Pixar would never change.” This happened enough that I called another company-wide meeting to explain myself. “What I meant,” I said, “was that we aren’t going to change because we were acquired by a larger company. We will still go through the kinds of changes that we would have gone through anyway. Furthermore, we are always changing, because change is a good thing.” I was glad I’d cleared that up. Except that I hadn’t. In the end, I had to give the “Of course we will continue to change” speech three times before it finally sunk in. What was interesting to me was that the changes that sparked so much concern had nothing to do with the merger. These were the normal adjustments that have to be made when a business expands and evolves. It’s folly to think you can avoid change, no matter how much you might want to. But also, to my mind, you shouldn’t want to. There is no growth or success without change.

I done a whole world once and completely left out the fingles. Not one of the buggers. Couldn’t get ’em at the time, told myself I could nip back when they were in stock, completely forgot. Imagine that. No one spotted it, of course, because obviously they just evolved there and they didn’t know there ought to be fingles, but it was definitely causing them deep, you know, psychological problems. Deep down inside they could tell there was something missing, sort of thing.

I don't know why I didn't have this sixth sense or whatever it is all along, but part of me thinks maybe it means I'm growing up, evolving into a real superhero. Like maybe the world knew I couldn't handle it before, but now, now I'm finally becoming me an the world know sit -- or maybe I'm just learning to listen to myself.