Choices
November 8th, 2025
- A morning hike across Golden Gate with an online group.
- A conversation about startups.
- A lunch in Sausalito.
- A train ride to San Mateo.
- The housewarming party.
I'm standing in front of the door. A party. Thirty people stuffed into a two-bedroom apartment, I could hear music blasting down the hall.
I rang the doorbell. No response. I knocked. No response. I texted my friends. No response.
I paced in front of the door. A numbing cold steel washed over me.
Dissociation. Fuzzy vision. I left. Friends texts came in, asking me to come in. I said I need to leave.
The night is cold and dark. I walk to the train and board. I stop for thirty minutes in downtown San Mateo. I see the groups of people. Friends, families, couples. All of them pacing around lively downtown San Mateo.
Then there's me.
“No. I didn't cry. I don't even know why. I just kept thinking that when human beings get that way, they're no good for anything.” —Osamu Dazai
Safety
I did IFS on the floor. In my apartment.
I felt unsafe. Physically unsafe. A coworker made a comment about snapping my arms that triggered some bad memories.
Feeling humiliated, frustrated with my weakness, and unsafe, it triggered deep feelings of rage and anger.
When I was in middle school, I wanted to shoot up my school. It was fear for my safety, fear for my well-being, and fear that I'd even be alive. I was so scared of all the human beings around me that I wanted them all dead.
And it's rational, because frankly, all the human beings around me at that time were pieces of shit.
Now, I am researching ways to conceal carry a knife or gun. I am sick of the humiliation of being told I am small and weak, and it makes me want to brandish a gun.
I wouldn't do it. But everyday it's like this. Everyday comments about my body. Every. Single. Day.
I am a little man. I get it. I am frail. I am weak. I am frustrated. And it makes me want to rage against the machine and the world and show them why we treat people, human beings, with respect.
Because the fact of it is that a gun can be shot by anyone. You can make a poison gas from at-home ingredients. It just takes one tip of the edge to go overboard.
Value Proposition, Others
The truth of it is that I am allowing others' value propositions to grate against my mind.
I am allowing it. Because I am ultimately responsible for my life and my feelings. All of it. There's no trick here; it's up to me to take responsibility for the words that come to my mind, and the words that I allow come to my mind.
Because other people are... human beings. They are human beings.
People who don't know what they are, people who know what they are. People... human beings, just anyone of us, looking out into the starry night, I see, the lights, lives upon lives. Ignorance, deceit, truth, happiness.
I hate. I love.
What is worth, what is time, what is love, what is all the human condition upon this moment?
I ask, for what is my life up to this point?
What makes good company, what makes time, what makes worth, what makes the human condition worth living? These days.
Reality
My coworker volunteers with high school students. One of his students have been hospitalized, they were found looking down into the bay water on the Golden Gate bridge.
I asked him how old they were, but then I realized that the vast majority of my coworkers weren't mature enough to handle such a sensitive topic. I wouldn't know if any of the people here were brought to that point at any time of their lives.
But hearing of the student made me think of my own days. When I would look down from apartment buildings. High rises. Classroom buildings. Offices. I'd just think how easy it would be just to throw myself off.
Suicide. Life ending. The feelings. Protection. All of it. The memories. The knives. The self-harm. The cutting. All of it.
I am sleepy. I think the most important thing to remember is: I am responsible for my life. I can choose. I have a choice. Always. And it's not that other people are intruding into my life, into my mind, but that my mind is receiving these people and these words.
"For the world is all that is the case... [And] the limits of my language are the limits of my world." —Ludwig Wittgenstein
When I repeat this phrase, I wish to remind myself that perceptions are what define reality. That I choose my perception and what I listen to, and what I believe is to be the truth, and nothing more or less of it, and that any bearing or wish for an objective state of affairs is no more than wishing for the tooth fairy to come again thirty-three times.
For what are the senses, what are the words I speak, what are the things I do, for what is it all but the things I see of it and think of it?
For perception, for observation, for seeing, they are all influenced by our subjectivity, our focus, our desires to focus, and what we prick out and pinpoint out to see. There is nothing but the corpus of our physical realm, our flesh and blood, that entrap and induce us to a certain subjectivity that is best recorded by the written word.
For what I am saying, is that, I have a responsibility. That I have a choice. I always have a choice, and that I shouldn't feel trapped, for if I feel trapped, it is a certain functionality that is leading me to believe so, and not the actual truth of it.
There's always a perception to be had. No language game more right than another, no context no more justification than another, and no human being more right or wrong than another, for, it is all contextual games we play.
To believe in an objective right or wrong, I find it exceedingly difficult to justify. I see no justification in my eyes or life for an objective sense of the world. For when two people see a scene, very rarely do they use the same words, and even if the same words, never the same tone or pitch, for we carry a life's experience in every word or phrase we invent.
For humanity, no two voices sound the same. We are distinct in fingerprint and in vocal structure. It's beautiful, isn't it?
I wish not to pressure myself with responsibility.
But I have choice. I have options. I have choices to believe and not believe, to see and not see, to be and not be. Always.