“the truth of my being dies when i do, but the lie of my actions will ripple onward” is a phrase which i used to justify my involvement in a recent (specific) suicide prevention project. the project itself is rather boring, and i’d rather not elaborate beyond its nature as it is ongoing (as usual, there are no short-range solutions). i’m not particularly interested in its success, but choose act as though i am.
“you are what you do” is a phrase i used in 202? to justify my involvement in ??????_????, best described as “wannabe discord panopticon”. and for keeping RLMH running as it did. actually, no, it’s a phrase i used to justify myself in general. like, being there at all. it’s very reductive for a very simple reason. the reason was elaborated on before (mostly in recontext and family), but a tl;dr:
if i am what i do that means i’m real, right?
i don’t like how close the two are. it’s been a long time, and they are more or less convergently evolved, rising from very different soils. i’ve not gone in a circle, that’s for sure. but circles aren’t prerequisites to futility. neither are spirals. a hyperbola trailing off into noise is just as bad as an elliptic orbit.
maybe this reduction could have worked, had i not done so much heinous shit to the people near and far. i don’t have blood on my hands, i believe. not yet anyways. but plenty of other unpleasant substances, that’s for sure. i’ve sent a river of hurt into the world, geological tonnage of pass-down cruelty and ableism and prejudice and malicious preemptive compliance. some effects i can’t even hope to quantify. a river of all else, too. i’m good to my friends. i could keep a good tally of suicide preventions, crisis management, whatever you call it. kind of been an on-site technician in the sputtering ducts of hope for the last four and a half years. i try to keep it up, though it’s been getting hard to care lately. is the result net positive? ask that question and you’re sliding down the stairs. go back to watching rational animations and exurb1a, shithuffer.
it’s definitely possible to build your life around negation of guilt. hell, some mormons turn out kinda alright. but it’s also not something i will do. i do not care about the framework. i will not live in apology. i will not reduce myself to an amendment. even if i ruined you, i will not apologize for existing.
but the thing that pisses me off is that it’s just fucking true, no matter what i choose about myself. the truth of my being does die when i do. no one will get to crack open my mind and ruffle around for explanations, though maybe a few would wish they could. bullet to the eye, vomit in my lungs, cardiac arrest, serotonin syndrome - whatever, whenever, whoever will have to discard the protein and sort out what’s left, and what’s left will be the aggregate vector of my actions. whatever i am, beautiful or horrid, has an expiration date.
so are they the same? maybe not. similar cuts at different rock, perhaps. the old one is delegating definition to a supposed authority of written record, the new one is delegating the referee’s seat to the natural priority of decay. and, i suppose, the new one’s loopback component is less reductive. i’m still here, regardless of the purported verdict. i’ll always have been here. there is no undoing me, just like there is no undoing my actions. there’s only tomorrow, and all the ways it eats today.