Exercise 2 - into my writer's soul

Exercise 2:

What do you care about most in life?
Everything and everyone, although I have already given up on myself. Come to think about it, I gave up on everyone and everything. Life is full of those little paradoxes… In the world as it is I do not really care about anything. In a world which I optimize and rid it of everyone who makes me want to die I would care about dialogue between people and their understanding of who they are and their spatial position. I care about morality the most, which the reality lacks, about flourishing of a human being who understands their position in space and time, who deserves to be given life, as pointless as life is. I would care to make sure we are not blinded but some dreams of invincible man and take out life in our hands, and think for ourselves.


If you were to write your own arbitrary, how would it read?
I don’t think I would ever get one, I really never cared. I think others would be justified to write on my behalf: in the pursuit of death forgot how to live, but that is a little miserable. I would probably leave it blank or just say something more in my nature, like: here lies an atheist. Problem? In a world where dialogue failed us and all we have is cold silence, the only solution is to shock and provoke within the boundaries of social conducts.
Being a tad more serious, there was a quote which truly struck me but I cannot remember it at all, it went like this: something something, am I still right here or am I dead at last? This would suit me the most. I believe that as long as people will believe in hell, they will be creating one on earth. Life seems like a hellish place to me and all the ideas from Dante are just allegories to what is already here. The world is a wonderfully neutral, balanced place. Wherever there are or were no humans, the earth shows incredible unity. I already know that the environment in my novel would be hostile, unfertile and malevolent, so maybe my readers could see how lovely their world is.


What is your physical appearance? How do you feel about it? How does it affect you?
Affects me a lot, actually.
I am apparently really small, though I see myself as huge and fat. I’m about 5”3 or less and size 8, but mind you I used to be size 00, I used to be anorexic and I try to return to that state.
I miss being skinny. I don’t care if I was ill, I felt good about myself, I liked myself. I am still bulimic, though.
I have a lovely aristocratic face, fabulous features everyone is jealous of, though I think my nose is too big. And my hair, I hate it so much I treat it as canvas. Right now undercuts and ultra-violet.
Generally I am apparently astonishingly attractive, and I cannot see any of it.


What do you fear most?
Oh gods, spiders and earwigs. Luckily the later is not that popular.
I believe all fear is irrational. Everything that makes us worry, fear or loathe is irrational and has to be overcome. And so I am trying to overcome the fear of spiders as well.
I also fear clowns, I have a phobia, and generally wild animals. I love nature but animals terrify me, another paradox, I love them and I am a vegetarian, but I won’t go on my own into a forest. I cannot even walk through the park in Oxford since we have cows there. I thought I am going to die the other day when I had to squeeze between them, luckily a man cycling by saw me and stopped by to help me out.
There are very few serious things I fear. I long for death, I had countless suicide attempts when I was younger, I don’t fear giving up or failing. Right now I live because I have to, but I hope for the day to come when I will just blissfully give up.
The only thing I truly fear is being like my parents, it seems I inherited all that’s the worst in them, but I hope I have learnt my lesson from that. Besides, there are so many people I love and I cannot show them how much I love them. I am truly emotionally impaired, I am quite a loving and open person but I give the impression of being snappy and arrogant because I fear people getting close to me. I don’t know how to show emotions, both positive or negative, people take me to be the coldest, most mercenary bitch. This applies especially to my grandma who is my whole life. All there is good in me I have taken from her and I feel, fear, that I have never showed how much I love her. I know it. It is driving me mad, I cry endless nights, I receive counselling to help me show love and I still cannot, and I know she will die soon. Unfortunately life has separated us, I don’t even get to see her anymore.
I actually do not think I will be able to cope with her death, I am dead on the inside at the though of it.


What are your major strengths of character?
Honestly, none. Besides, it seem like there are two sides to every characteristic and there are not better and worse ones. I am ignorant in a good way, if that makes sense. I care about people a lot, yet I am unable to show it, but there is a dimension in which I quite frankly do nott give a shit and would not share a tear or a thought. I was told that I am: the cutes, tiniest little girl with the biggest balls one could have. Is that good? Not really. Big balls, big mouth, and so on. Which is not always true. I think my character as a whole is a strength and I am called “what every man wants”; pretty, attractive, smart, an academic, successful, loving, caring, understanding and talented being a painter and photographer, and now also a writer. But I am also full of hate, which can sometimes show.
That would be my strength - I am loyal only to my hate.


What are your major flaws?
Right now the arrogance which I cannot control and I don’t even mean. On average, people would take being a depressed, hateful person to be a flaw. However I consider myself exquisitely virtuous, way way above average. Oh wait, you said flaws? Oh yes, superiority complex.


What are you good at?
I swear, pretty much anything that does not involve numbers or dancing and singing. I am good with individual sports, at everything artistic I do tends to be fantastic, and I am not praising myself, personally I think I am not good at all, but others keep on telling me otherwise. I am amazing at ignoring things, I just clench my fists so hard my knuckles turn white and turn around to carry on the opposite direction. It applies to almost any situations, unless it is something that lies straight on my way - then I can simply walk over it. However, I am not really good at this game called life for that reason. I learnt to run away from every obstacle I cannot either move or step over.


If you could do one thing, and you know it would be successful, what would it be?
Live in Martin’s Westeros and be a Sansa who kills Jofferey and happily lives with Sandor Clegane. Hahah I am only joking, that was my fist though, I live in the world of my favourite stories And I am madly in love with the Hound… Not as much as with Theon Greyjoy, though. I guess this says quite a lot about me.
Now, in all seriousness I would hope to change people’s mindsets and turn all the effortless, lazy and stupid religious people into efficient, self-sufficient atheists so they would become happy, loving and open-minded people. Not freaks like Richard Dawkins. In fact, I have very little against religious people, plenty of my friends are, but then there are “those” ones which I want to strangle, those hypocritical, pathetic, immoral vermin. I have a young housemate who slept with 20 random men in a year but when you say “penis” that person starts screaming and calling you ungodly.  Then she goes to a church every Sunday, but never on her own, she is too scared of churches to go on her own. If that happens, she goes to a pub instead.Oh, and fossils were to troll the scientists. It's so paradoxical. I can never and I will never comprehend this sick immoral illogical ill-logic.

Unless the questions asks about something in my life. Well, there are 4 things I want to do equally much, and if any of them would come true I would not be complaining and be equally happy. I want to be a professional photographer, a writer, a painter or a philosopher (ethicist), or maybe just an artist? As long as I can have a happy life in Sweden.
In fact, if I could just have a happy life in Sweden, without too much struggle, that little countryside red house and someone to love I would not care that much about my career.

I do love Sandor Clegane though, and this slight obsessiveness is one of the last bits of a child in me...


What are three events from your childhood that helped shape you into the person you are today?
I cannot think of a single one from the top of my head. I could give plenty of psychological or social backgrounds, but nothing specific. It’s all one haze. I started erasing the memory of my past some time ago. All I know was that my grandma was always the most important to me, and I probably realised it even as a child. Besides, all the typically traumatic experiences, seeing someone die or things that would normally stir people never really put any impact on my.
1. Probably the time “the Hobbit” was put in my hands my life suddenly began to have a shape. 11 or 13 years old? Just like that I knew what I like, what I will like and what I want to do, especially combined with the discovery  of “Eragon”. I read the back and thought “what? He is 16? That cannot be! I want to do that too! Be like a young Tolkien!” Never really done much in that direction until now.
2. One of my most vivid memories was when my mother pushed me away, I am not sure how old I was but definitely over 9, maybe even 12 or 13? I went to give her a good night hug and was rejected for being too heavy. Well, I was always a slightly roly-poly child. Not fat, but everyone seemed to have a problem with it. Where I come from people are generally quite fit. It fcuked me up for life, even though now I know she did not mean it… Or knowing my mother she probably did, I still struggle. I cut off myself completely from my parents after that and now I am unable to get close to people.
3. Lastly, I am scared of forests and wild animals. I could not walk into a deep forest on my own to save my life. As long as I can see people or open space I am fine. The reason for that is, as I child, I was attacked by a wild boar while picking wild berries. There was a little piglet which I was stupid enough to pick up; the little bugger started to squeal and suddenly this huge thing jumped from a bush nearby…


What are your annoying habits?
I do not have any “annoying” ones, though I have a bit of an OCD. If you have time to lean, you have time to clean.
Oh, let’s not forget - I am always late.
I have general problems with expressing myself. One annoying “habit” is my sophisticated selection of vocablurary. Here, I am just letting the stream og thoughts come out as simple as it can be, without using exquisite language. But I tend to use words most people have never heard of in my daily life conversation. I am very, very careful in my choice of words and their deliberation.
Besides, I speak in an awful awful manner, which is most likely to be a result of my careful deliberation. It seems like I am completely socially impaired. I sound mean, arrogant, cocky and up myself, not adding that I can insult people. The funny thing about it is that I do not actually mean it. In fact, it always comes as a great shock to me since I normally mean the opposite, to be nice and friendly.
I call it a habit since it started as indeed attempting to be a horrible person, to put people off. I hate close contact with others. I never had it in my life from my parents, as I have already said in the previous answer, I freak out when someone gets closer to me than the distance of my arm. I immediately go in the defence mode.
I smoke a lot. That annoys people.
And I bite the insides of my lips until they bleed.


What secret in your life do you hope you never have to reveal?
When I was young, but old enough to have heard about it, I accidentally found a tape with pornography (really subtle one, pretty much a movie with a lot of sex) in my parent’s video collection, looking for something else, and watched it. And found other ones.
Nothing else that I really would be ashamed of. And only in the face of my parents.


What is your philosophy on life?
Ouch, this has a potential to be a long, long answer… I am a philosophy student specialising in Ethics and Morality, I have a very complicated system...
I already know that my writing will express it as much as can be acceptable.

The crux of whole life philosophy to me is something Hume said about human nature. That it does not matter. Life will be life and it will go on, even if we don’t know that the sun we rise tomorrow, and we do nott know that, even if we do not know whether the world does not disappear when we close our eyes, we will carry on the way we must. Life is a task to be done and every bit of us expresses that. We can build all those moral philosophies but in the end who truly sticks to them? Few of the actual greatest philosophers did. There is our intellectual, academic life when we conjure all those fantastical constellations of believes, but when facing real life, it is in out nature to forget about them.

The actual theory is rather dark and I can only briefly summarise it. It is not pretty. It is dull and depressing. In general, I try to be a Stoic and fail miserably. I believe emotions are the disease of mankind and getting rid of them would be the perfect solution. Life would still make sense, but it would be based on our intellectual capacities, not our blind desires. I despise existentialism. Decision making can be perfectly valid and all the more just if our logic is not deemed by what we feel. Emotions are not what makes us human. They are basic instincts which we managed to clothe up in this wonderful concept of society, this most primitive, group, communal conscience.
But it is of no surprise to me that this is the case. Life is an ugly burden. As my master said: if children were born as an act of reason, mankind would cease to exist.




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Now, for the reflections, I have read what I have written and left it exactly as it was. There are so many things I repeated! I know there are such a big part of me, but I never imagined they could be so inter connected like one, reoccurring answer. Can you see it too?
I get a clear overall view of how this will shape my writing. I don’t think there is anything in particular that I would take from in, a situation or a character, it always ends up as a slight mix or at leas it has been like this so far. I will put a huge impact on my moral philosophy; if I cannot do that, I don’t see the point in writing.
I already know that the main trait of character in my character would be to be emotionally impaired, just like I am. It does not seem like a good idea. I feel that it can go terribly wrong and I can create a dull, linear and predictable character with unrealistic personality, but I cannot do it otherwise. I will definitely put a lot of impact on creating a perfect life, like my life has always been. I have not mentioned that, but my parents always loved me and have never done anything wrong to me. It is more that they never had time and never cared about who I am and what I was doing. Very typical, I know, but I also know how much this can scar.