Change

Life is change; stasis is death. I say it again and again and again because people--perhaps myself most of all--need to hear it again and again and again. But how do we change? Or, more precisely and importantly, how do we choose to change? Because externally-induced change is omnipresent, unavoidable, and while not exactly irrelevant, at least not particularly useful as a measure of life success.

I ask this because the directive for change--real, personal, individual change--seems to exist in direct conflict with my other personal primary directive: honesty. I value honesty above all else; I think that without honesty, we cannot reach understanding (and thus faith, mercy, and the ideal/divinity that that trinity represents to me). Normally I come down unequivocally on the side of honesty in all questions of morality--I think "little white lies" are always harmful and malicious despite intentions because they represent an attempt to control another person, which no one has a right to do. But what about when you're trying to control yourself? To change yourself, you have to lie to yourself--you have to keep repeating a lie to yourself, over and over and over, until you believe it. I don't want to hurt people, I don't want to hurt people, I don't want to hurt people... We have to accept what we are, face our deepest, repressed desires and fuck-ups and reconcile with them in order to begin to fix ourselves, but what then? It seems like the only answer is this kind of fucked-up doublethink, lying to yourself and knowing that you're lying but doing it enough that eventually it's true because you believe it is.

One of the things I believe that hasn't really come up on this blog yet (because it became realized in words after I stopped writing big philosophical ramblings like this) is that "relation is existence", or that, contrary to symbolic/apophatic order, the only "real" things are what we traditionally see as the relationships between things. That is, according to symbolic order, there's I and there's you, and those are two discrete, individual things with discrete, individual identities that are separate and exist independently of each other. This leads to all the problems I've mentioned previously of apophatic philosophies--the asymptotic decline in identity/definition, slowly cutting away towards some null point of infinity... But if relation is existence, which is to say that I and you don't really exist, only the relationship between I and you (and so on for everything else), which is to say that all the "masks" we wear for different people aren't really masks at all but reality, because our actions define us and not our thoughts and in those moments we believe the masks we wear, then... what's the truth? When you're trying to change are you really lying to yourself or are you just putting on another mask, a mask for that special relationship between I and I, which I think must be some great undefinable infinite loop divide by zero even in this system of inherently undefinable entities?

I'm not really sure where I'm going with this. Usually I've got a whole thought process formulated going in and this is just the transcribing, creating a written record of something already occurred. But here I've thought this through to the end, I'm just grasping at straws and pulling them as fast as I can and hoping there's something at the end. I don't know if there is and this isn't organized well enough to really demonstrate what I'm talking about and it scares me. If I say "I don't want to want this anymore" that isn't a lie, it's truth. But how do you make that reality besides saying it and doing it, over and over and over? But if the way to change is by lying enough to make something true, isn't that giving in to consensual reality and all that bullshit fuck-uppery that entails? Isn't that giving license to suppression, denial, and the refusal to face reality that leads to so much trouble... Maybe it goes back to will. Maybe it's not to say "I don't want to hurt people" but that "I will not want to hurt people". It could be a lie, still, but I think rather it's a command to the self: "You will do this. You must do this. You can do this." Imperatives can't be lies because they're not declarations of reality. They're about what should be and not what is... maybe that's the way to go.

The funny thing is, I didn't start this post even looking to think about this. I was thinking about some more mundane issue of honesty that I can't even remember right now, resulting from a conversation with a friend who holds a more conventional view on the value of honesty (I literally got "if you can't say something nice..." quoted at me). It was a more nuanced question that simply insults and offensiveness, but I don't remember what it was because when I realized the contradiction with change that overpowered everything else. I'd honestly (hah) never realized before--or never been able to face before, at least--that what I was doing was lying to myself over and over and over in hopes of making it true. And the scary thing is is that it works, to some extent or another. There are old thoughts that come back, sure, but I am a different person that what I once was, and that's because I wanted to be. I told myself I would become something different and I have. That's the scariest and most beautiful part, I think: it works. You can change through sheer force of will. That's the truth.