Bloody eyes and midnight skies

step two: contort absolutely all stimuli in my environment to relate to the my wound in some manner, ideally one which justifies random acts of unbridled aggression and vengeance

Right now you might be thinking things like "I need to change myself, I need to change how I think, I need to change who I am".

And the solutions you reach for (that you have been taught to reach for) will be things like "try harder, lock in, focus more, think better, do things better".

That shit doesn't work.

If a problem exists "inside your head", sometimes you can solve it in house, but a lot of the time you cannot and such attempts are wasting energy.

Instead, you need to change what's "outside your head".

Change what clothes you're wearing, take a shower, eat food, dress up nice, change who you're talking to, change what you're eating, put posters on your walls, change your phone wallpaper, change what name people call you, change how you talk about yourself, change how you sleep.

It feels like because it's indirect it'll be less effective, that's not true. That's not how this works.

A lot of the time you'll try to justify like "I need to change what's inside so that I can change what's outside", but this causality is wrong. Changing what's outside will change what's inside much more effectively.

In fact, your "mind" is not this magical special thing, and all that shit around you is part of you. The people around you shape your environment, your environment shapes your behaviors, your behaviors shape your body, your body shapes your mind. It's all continuous.

Aim up the stream of causality and shoot right and you'll minimize the effort needed to achieve the desired result. Practice and you'll get better at doing that. Do it right now and you'll get results fastest.

In middle school biology, we did an experiment. We were given yams, which we would sprout in cups of water. We then had to make hypotheses about how the yams would grow, based on descriptions of yam plants in our books, and make notes of our observations as they grew.

Here’s what was supposed to happen: we were supposed to see that the actual growth of the plant did not resemble our hypotheses. We were then supposed to figure out that these were, in fact, sweet potatoes.

What actually happened was that every single student in every single class lied in their notes so that their observations perfectly matched their hypotheses. See, everyone assumed the mismatch meant they had done something wrong in the process of growing the plant or that they had misunderstood the dichotomous key or the plant identification terminology. And, thanks to the wonders of a public school education, everyone assumed the wrong results would get us a failing grade. We were trying to pass. We didn’t want to get bitched out by the teacher. Curiosity, learning, science - that had nothing to do with why we were sitting in that classroom. So we all lied.

The teacher was furious. She tried to fail every student, but the administration stepped in and told her she wasn’t allowed to because a 100% fail rate is recognized as a failure of the teacher, not the class. It wasn’t even her fault, really, though her being a notorious hard-ass didn’t help. It was a failure of the entire educational system.

between friends has become a

cultural icon.