GHB-Anniversary

As a loyal reader, you might have been surprised I did not post during the yearly June Fever. You probably expected another melancholic spiral, an elegant descent into the patterns I’ve perfected over years of practicing emotional numbness portrayed as artistic melancholy. Those who hate me have been refreshing the page, waiting for my inevitable collapse back into familiar abyss. Those who love me wonder if this transformation is real or just another elaborate performance. I actually had been wondering the same exact thing.

So here’s your update, no birthday bullshit, no manufactured introspection. Just a year since I accidentally rewired my brain with G and discovered that feelings aren’t just a collective delusion we all agreed to pretend exists.

Exactly one year ago, I edged death by overdosing GHB. I danced so close to death I started sending my passwords to friend like a weird suicidal note, drafted my will in broken sentences between waves of dissociation. Then, the peak was a complete dissociation watching my entire existence compress into few minutes of an overdose. I saw every memory, every void, every carefully constructed wall crumbling in seconds. The peak passed. I obviously did not die. Something else did; the carefully constructed dam began leaking. Neural elasticity unlocked some neural connections that gave me back emotions I did not acknowledge as existent, converting me from an apathetic emotionally numb egotistic maniac to an egotistic maniac who feels. It was a weird ride. It was a weird ass night.

I cried a lot that night. For the first time in around eight years, I actually felt a baggage of an emotional backlog getting cleared in few moments. Years of emotional debt collected with interest, demanding payment all at once. I thought I would wake up the next day not giving a shit after realizing I am alive safe and sound. I thought the next morning would be me back in my fortress of indifference. I thought the drug-induced emotional awakening is just a new phase that I unlocked with a drug, another drug-induced glitch in the matrix. Days passed. Then weeks. The feelings did not stop arriving. I have not invited these guests in and apparently they were knocking for a decade.

I found some of emotions I have not actually felt since middle school clicking again. It felt weird. I felt weak. But as always, it is something new so better enjoy the fun while it lasts, right? It felt like learning to breathe underwater: wrong, impossible, but suddenly necessary (especially that I don’t know how to fucking swim, literally and figurately). Every emotion hit like a foreign language I had totally forgotten I once spoke fluently. Weakness dressed up as humanity. But it was new, and I’ve always been always a sucker for novelty, so why not ride the dick of this chemical accident to its logical conclusion?

Except it didn’t conclude. Six months in, the rewiring just kept going deeper. I started reconnecting my emotions in a way I have never formerly experienced. I started doing things that would’ve made the old me vomit: I started caring about people (without calculating ROI), caring about my friends (and more importantly, acknowledging them as more than NPCs). I started actually to give a fuck about my career and not die in the soul lacking river of comfort. I wanted to care about career beyond its utility as a distraction from the void affording Dahan meals and daily weed. I started to connect more with my family like real people instead of biological accidents I just happened to share DNA with. I did all of the happy shit I know people usually enjoy. I enjoyed it fully for the first time in almost a decade. I evaluated many of my connections, strengthening some, working on some, moving on from some. The change was weird but I enjoyed every bit of it. I loved the good feelings. I loved the bad feelings too, each ache proof that my nervous system did not completely atrophy. I loved vulnerability, either mine or my closest ones', it became my new drug of choice. I was getting more dependent, more externally-fueled, weaker. I was being more human by the day, it sucks, but I actually do love it.

But let me be crystal fucking clear: having emotions is terrible. It’s painful. It’s frightening. It makes you doubt yourself for reasons beyond intellectual inadequacy. It makes you judge yourself through lenses you did not know existed. It makes you distance yourself from the other people in your life for reasons other than pure indifference. You distance yourself from people not out of superiority but out of genuine hurt. It’s like voluntarily signing up for chemotherapy when you were perfectly content being cancer. It makes you selfish, sometimes out of envy rather than apathy. Everything I thought I wanted turned out to be exactly the hell I had been avoiding. So no wonder it’s something we don’t want to do on our own.

I always thought emotions are that superficial thing that people keep faking that they acquire and everyone was avoiding the truth of their inexistence. To me, it was humanity’s longest-running performative art piece. People talk about emotions a lot, they keep explaining how they feel with words and keep stuttering. I always believed it’s a facade, everyone pretending to feel while secretly knowing it’s all theater. Turns out the joke was on me with everyone actually experiencing this shit while I sat in my anesthetic bubble, mistaking numbness and power for actually being alive. It took too much strength to go through that transition. And sorry for the feelings that went unacknowledged. I realized emotions are not something that only weak people have.

Unfortunately, it was not just an internal battle of me against me. I was in a war where every memory demanded recontextualization, every relationship requiring translation from indifference to… whatever this is. I was used to being the gravitational center of not giving a shit for so long that people orbited me specifically for that quality. It felt like a confessional booth that never offered absolution, just my beautiful seven course indifference. People brought me their sins like offerings because they knew I would not judge and not out of kindness, but because judgment requires caring, and caring was never in my repertoire.

That’s why I sometimes brought the worst of people. I attracted the parts of people they hid from everyone else. Not in a bad way though; I did not transform them to fucked up assholes, I am just raw enough that I do not care about the perception of my sins to those beneath me. I was raw enough to make their darkness feel like daylight, and a year ago that was to me anyone. That made people come to me to celebrate their sins, glorify the bad sides within. My inability to give a fuck made me a safe space for everyone’s worst self.

I did not judge, more accurately, I did not care. I did not give a shit about whatever anyone does as long as I am not affected. I had rules, sure, no cheaters in my 2-degree inner circle, certain lines that determined whether you got to witness my very specific and particular brand of glory. I am like Switzerland: neutral and cold but profitable if you know how to work the system (entertain me without adding any negative ROI). Something was recognizable though once the new feelings started appearing one after another, and one reflection followed another. I found a striking similitude to my fourth grade years when I was snooping over the messages of random people I hacked and kept reading how they act in the dark, religious people infidelities, friends back-stabbing, and all kinds of shitty acts that made me build walls to avoid dealing with those flawed scums in the first place. What happened one year ago reevaluated the classification function.

Suddenly I could see people not just in relation to me. It is weird when you actually evaluate those around you in terms of how good they are towards their neighborhoods in the social graph. As you get one step farther in breadth, notice how their acts change in terms of transparency, honesty, and kindness. Two steps out from their center and you see who they really are, or at least who they become when they think nobody is keeping score. What even surprised me more, is that I did not have my former mindset of just direct elimination; I found myself learning more about people, understanding them, connecting them' I tried to find good in people. What made it hard is the fact that I was the sin-shower everyone came to for a sin-praise. The sin-shower I had been running for years had created some weird expectations, people came to me for validation of their darkness, mistaking my state of indifference for approval. Every shrug was interpreted as absolution. And suddenly I had to recalibrate every one of these connections through a lens that actually gave a shit.

I went back to all of these connections to re-evaluate, and that yielded weird reformation in how I cared about people. Once I found out I am capable of caring about those who matter to me with actual deep emotional core rather than an intellectual obligation, the optimization function had to change. New parameters, new outcomes. I needed to choose who I am willing to invest in wisely. It is sad that I missed many opportunities to connect with those who may have left due to my former stubbornness. But at least I got lucky enough to snatch a rebirth to connect a bit with who were still there.

I expected one year with emotions will make me hate people less. Technically true, but only because what I called “hate” before was just sophisticated indifference. Now I hate differently. My hate now is fueled with some of these bad emotions I despise. I hate with contempt, I hate with disgust. I hate with resentment, I hate with disrespect. I hate with anger, I hate with mistrust. What I defined as the emotion hate formerly was just indifference. I now am capable to actually do hate with the full spectrum.

But at least I could experience genuine kindness from people. I got to trust people in ways I was never capable of. I started valuing kind people over the smart ones. I started understanding the roots of good which I previously considered inexistent. I have never thought genuine kindness exists. Not as performance or strategy, but as actual human experience. I am happy I could finally see people who love me and share the feeling rather than just appreciating their existence. I am finally I can actually experience love and how good it feels. No wonder after all of these years, when I did fall in love, I fell in love with kindness.

When I left Egypt two months ago, I was very grateful I could say my goodbyes and actually feel them. Not just process it, not just document it, but actually do feel it with its full weight. I was glad I could share what my closest friends always had towards me but I never actually felt. I was saying goodbyes knowing I will actually miss them, and I did miss them. I am not homesick (let’s not get carried away with this transformation), but there is a specific ache for connections I spent years unable to fully access.

Nevertheless, I am very grateful that I could spend my last few months connecting with those who mattered. To the kind souls who stood by me when I was basically an intelligent void: thank you for your patience with my emotional learning disability. Thanks for those whom I had to my side without recognizing their kindness magnitude. Thanks for the kind souls who were there years ago but drifted, those who drifted when I could not reciprocate: what was not appreciated then is carved into whatever I’m using for a heart now. To those I hurt with my indifference: I am sorry. To the flawed people who are still stuck in their own loops: everyone can change. I’m walking proof that even the most committed emotional atheist can accidentally find faith. I learned to see the good in people for once. I still do not believe everyone is good in core, most of you all are still asshole/ creeps/ maniacs, but I believe everyone can change, and I hope all of you get to change to the best version of yourselves, just please for the sake of the shitty experience we call as humanity, be a kind soul, it is hard but worth it. I do not really believe in souls, but I finally got to believe that our brains are actually capable of more than just elaborate pattern recognition. Do not consider the meaninglessness of life and the apathetic nature of existence an excuse behind fucking up when nobody is watching. There may not be a god up there, but know I am here watching you, and one day you will be perceived in ways you never expected. We are alone all in this together, might as well make it bearable for each other.

Be a kind soul. It is simultaneously easier and harder than being clever, but apparently, it is worth it. Even if it takes nearly dying to figure that out.

Happy b̵i̵r̵t̵h̵d̵a̵y̵ G̵v̵e̵r̵s̵a̵r̵y̵ G̵a̵n̵n̵i̵v̵e̵r̵s̵a̵r̵y̵ GHB-Anniversary to me!

Below is an image of me exactly one year ago contemplating existence.