#personal essay

Somebody left little plastic Jesus figures all over one of the woodland trails I like to walk. They have big, cartoonish grins, white robes, and brightly colored sashes in a variety of colors. I’ve been picking them out of knotholes and tree-forks for days, dropping them in the recycling bin by the parking lot.

At first, the whole thing just made me very angry. It wasn’t just litter; it was litter that felt like an invasion of my own sacred space with a cheap, mass-produced icon that felt like the sacredness-equivalent of empty calories.

Honestly, it made me furious, my rage directed at a kind of deeply American-feeling religiosity that is sold in packs of 72 for $29.99 (I checked). Religion as cheap, brightly-colored, disposable eyesores littered somewhere quiet and gentle and authentic. Religion that is colorful and easy and leaves a mess behind for somebody who actually gives a damn to clean up.

Perhaps worst of all, I suspected that somebody thought of scattering the little figures everywhere as a moral act.

I’m still not happy about it, but my anger has cooled through many walks and the imaginative empathy that always arises from my long contemplations. I reasoned that it was probably a child (encouraged by adults). I reasoned that I wasn’t always respectful of wild places when I was a kid. I reasoned that there is huge, institutional religious machinery at work that seems designed to shrink participants’ worldviews down to a pinhole.

So, my anger slowly resolved into sadness.

And I’m left hoping that whoever tucked trash all over one of my favorite woodlands meets with some moments of clarity and self-reflection. I hope they consider the real value of plastic sacredness sold in bulk. I hope they consider the usefulness of virtue expressed as litter. I hope they question who they expect to comfort or convert with mass-produced trash that smells of a chemical tang, trash abandoned to block sunlight from a tiny patch of moss or wedged in tree-bark like a pebble in a shoe.

I hope they awaken to the symbolism of dropping something inert and obstructive in a place that otherwise grows and breathes and provides.

On Anaïs Nin, literary self-mythologizing, and why personal writing should always be slightly dishonest. (from my substack)

If you’re not lying in your diary, you’re just journaling, and journaling is for people who don’t know how to edit.

A diary is not a record of events; it is an act of creation. The best diarists know this instinctively. Anaïs Nin knew it better than anyone. Her diaries were not mere confessions but performances, half-lit mirrors where the truth shimmered, distorted but no less real.

Nin understood that life is not lived in a single register. Her diaries are a study in contradiction—one moment, she is in love; the next, repulsed. She is independent yet wholly consumed by those around her. But contradiction isn’t falsehood; it’s literature. She rewrote and edited her diaries, sculpting herself into the character she wanted to be. And is that really so dishonest?

People love to be outraged by the idea of a diary that is not entirely factual. But fact is not the same as truth. Diaries, at their best, are emotional truths, shaped by mood, by desire, by the need to impose a narrative on the chaos of daily life. Nin was not interested in being objective—she was interested in being immortal. She once wrote, “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.” But why stop at tasting? Why not rewrite, reshape, embellish? If we can curate the lives we present to others, why should we not do the same for the versions of ourselves we leave behind?

Nin herself was a master of this. She edited her diaries before publication, removing, refining, turning herself into a protagonist. She blurred lines, shifted timelines, made herself more alluring. She called it shaping reality. Others call it lying. The truth, of course, is that all personal writing is selective. Even in confession, there is curation.

Memory has an extraordinary ability to sanctify itself. In it, half-hearted apologies become psalms, simple compromises become sacred offerings, and disappointments are recast as divine trials sent to test the endurance of our ever-present and unwavering love.

It will begin on the most unexpected of days— for me, a hot afternoon in mid-July. You will come to realize you have taken someone frighteningly ordinary, and enthroned them upon an altar of selective remembrance. One stitched together by a future that will never exist, children that will never be born, and a reality that lives on only in the most insecure corners of your mind. You will become uncomfortably aware of the times you knelt before them in worship. You will finally see yourself in pictures, picked apart and reconstructed to their liking. Your divinity, only ever affirmed by the call you waited all night for or the flowers sat on your doorstep.

But love should not be sacrificial; it should not demand you to offer up the parts of yourself that are truly sacred. You are not born of a rib; you are not an amalgamation of someone else’s adoration.

Relationships provided me with immediate clarity on who I was, so there was no urgency to search for it on my own :

I am pretty (because I wear short skirts for them)

I am kind (because I do things for them)

I can be funny (because I make them laugh)

I had never learned to believe any of those things independently, so romantic partners began to function as the evidence that I existed. I arranged myself around whoever stood at my altar, carefully positioning my soul so the light would fall on me in a way that resembled their desires. Their interests would become my own. I would disregard my love for art and replace it with my love for them. I would invest myself in their goals as they could one day become intertwined with mine. I would meticulously plan out a future with them built on traits they did not possess, romantic gestures they would never have any desire to make, and an image of myself in which I am loved, noticed, and never alone.

For twenty-two years I loved with an urgency that felt almost virtuous. I admired my capacity to love so completely, and respected my commitment to making my partners feel special. It felt kind, it felt romantic. Movies rewarded this kind of intense devotion and songs demanded this all-consuming romance. Lovers commended my thoughtfulness, and I began to learn that the most meaningful connections were the ones that asked me to disappear. I soon saw the catastrophic nature of that sentiment, as every breakup would strip me not only of companionship, but my entire sense of self.

Suddenly something new arrived. It came quietly and with beauty, like the soft flickering of light from the freshly lit candles or the bright colors that caressed my face from the stained glass. There was no altar to kneel before and no saint screaming for a confession. I saw no impossible gospel to uphold and no salvation to earn at the cost of my sanity. I saw friends that I could go weeks without seeing and not question my self-worth. I saw brothers that could sit in silence with me, and there be no sense of urgency to perform. I saw parents that loved even the parts I had long deemed unlovable. I saw myself, authentically, and loved regardless.

There is a particular holiness in becoming your own witness. You will come to find that the authenticity you spend years trying to repent for has been someone else’s prayer. It will begin on the most unexpected of nights.

before i went to bed on school nights, i would make sure to clear my search history of anything related to tickling. i would have been utterly mortified if anyone had ever seen those searches. i would literally pride myself on how long i’d lasted without indulging in tickle content, and i’d feel like i’d basically relapsed whenever i “gave in.”

Many Persona 5 Royal players, including fans of Akechi, are fooled by his mask in the Engine Room or in the Third Semester; they come to believe that this performance is his true self and thus that Akechi is a hash-slinging slasher of a man (see another post of mine for a more in-depth analysis of this mask).

But the truth, I believe, is the opposite. Akechi resigns himself to murdering, sure—believing that it is his key to killing Shido and being useful—but he doesn't particularly enjoy it (there are some caveats to this that I'll get to a little later, just bear with me please). More specifically, he wants to stop. This is the important distinction that I think most people don't make.

Akechi regrets where things are and the path he believes he's been forced to choose, asking "why couldn't [Joker and I] have met a few years earlier [so I could have a relationship like that to give me purpose]?" The game outright acknowledges this, actually, with Akechi's confidant ranking up to 9 through Joker thinking something along the lines of "it seems Akechi really regrets how things turned out." His motivation for killing is not (purely) out of an urge to harm or to feel powerful, but instead a pill he's forced himself to swallow in the name of revenge.

Now, let's compare this sentiment to another persona killer with a "o" sound in his two-syllable first name and a two-syllable last name that starts with "a" and ends in "chi"—Torhu Adachi. I should acknowledge now that I haven't actually played Persona 4. Any understanding of Adachi's character comes from hearing it described by other people and a little bit of research on the wiki. If I am wrong about anything, please correct me. Adachi's murders differ significantly from Akechi's because of the intent behind them. Adachi feels no remorse or regret for the situation; he kills because he is stricken with nihilism and boredom, drawn to the theft of life because it alleviates these things.

Akechi's sense of remorse is extremely dampened by his own dissociative tendencies—to the point where he actually very temporarily argues that his murders could be likened to the work of the Phantom Thieves and that he was "cleaning up trash"—but he does feel remorse. This is in direct contrast to Adachi's complete lack of empathy. Akechi's own justifications for why he kills are weak and he knows it. They are guards he puts up because they help him ignore exactly how fucked his situation is and how much he blames himself. He never brings that idea of being like the Phantom Thieves up again, even in the Third Semester. That could be because Atlus forgot about it (I wouldn't put it past them), but I prefer to think it's because he and Joker both simply know that it's not true.

So, that leaves us with the question of why Akechi kills. I think the answer to this is extremely obvious. He kills because he's being manipulated into killing. I have written so many essays on how Shido is actively manipulating and grooming Akechi into killing and I will likely write more. For now, though, all I will say is that Akechi was a child when he met Shido and offered himself as a weapon. He was then a child for multiple years after that point, always working under Shido. And while most fifteen year olds should probably know not to murder people, they are still fifteen year olds who can be manipulated into doing things they know they shouldn't do.

Akechi's relationship with Shido is similar to a child drug addict and their extremely corporate plug. Akechi knows the drugs are bad, but the reward he gets for doing them is so unignorably good (praise from Shido; feeling useful; feeling needed) that he cannot stop. Shido knows that Akechi is an addict in an extremely vulnerable position, and capitalizes on that for the purpose of extracting as much profit as possible.

It's here that I want to bring up those caveats that I mentioned before. When I say that "Akechi doesn't particularly enjoy murdering," you may hear alarm bells ring. Because, as I just described, he does get quite a lot out of this. I don't think it is fair to deny that; Akechi is rewarded for his murders. Not only is he praised by Shido and feels like he could be worth loving for the only time in his life, but he also gets a sense of control that the lacks elsewhere. Akechi's entire life, in fact, is defined by a lack of control and a lack of agency (see my essay on Akechi's agency and on my feelings about Maruki), and so the opportunity to exert his own control over people must be intoxicating. In my opinion, it is completely undeniable that Akechi is a sadist (and probably a masochist too but that doesn't matter right now).

That all being said, though, I think it's equally important to acknowledge how Akechi copes with having this need for control and praise. Because the truth is, the praise and control felt from murdering people is an unintended, likely unwanted side-effect. Unlike Adachi, Akechi doesn't kill for the rush or for the feeling it gives him. He kills for the sole purpose of proving himself invaluable to Shido and because he's being manipulated into doing it. I say "unwanted" because I imagine that feeling of pleasure must've actually clashed extremely powerfully against Akechi's own sense of remorse and his latent desire to be a hero (as seen in Proof of Justice and Akechi's confidant). But, as a child, he is unequipped to deal with the power and allure of these self-indulgent desires. They are likely literally altering his brain chemistry. Additionally, Akechi has and uses other coping mechanisms to feed his need for praise and control. He's already outright manipulative and often times mean. While these coping mechanisms aren't great and are still destructive, they are a hell of a lot better than murder. This is all to say that Akechi neither needs or enjoys the feelings of pleasure he gets from murder. He is not motivated by a selfish desire to see these needs met, but instead by a wicked adult playing with his underdeveloped mind.

new substack entry: the home is a house is a haunting is a motion. thinking about what home is and why it necessitates flight.

SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

Bear with me because this is a very long rambling.

I would love to read your opinions and inputs on the topic in the comments!

I believe Verso to be a dichotomy incarnated, the more I find myself thinking about him as a character.

He exists in a perpetual state of identity and agency crisis, as he was made aware at some point in his life that all of his memories are fabricated, that he has never actually experienced them, and that he was created with the sole intention of resembling and replacing a deceased son in order to alleviate the pain of a mother who has lost her child in a fire. 

He has never been at peace in his whole life, and because he was made immortal, he can't even die on his own terms.

He constantly doubts whether his feelings and relationships are a product of his own, or are instead simply built upon the personality and the experiences he has inherited from the original Verso. 

He doesn't know if he's loved for who he actually is or for who he's meant to represent. 

And yet, although he isn't sure if he deserves to exist, he loves his family unconditionally (even when he sometimes doesn't agree with their actions) despite knowing that the feelings and memories linked to them aren't completely his own. 

His love for his mother, who created him as a copy of her original son, is tainted by resentment: she, his creator, is the cause of his agonizing life as a replacement, and, at the same time, he must live eternally with the guilt of being a reminder to his mother of the son she lost, preventing her from finally overcoming her child's death and moving on with her life.