http://www.oprah.com/spirit/the-truth-about-the-people-you-cant-forgive

"If we can find a way to live inside of a deep gratitude for our own undeserved grace and mercy, past hurts have very little power to cause us pain in any lasting way. They are not worth our time or energy. They are mere sludge and dredge in the great school and journey of life. The gratuitous surrendering of hurts ("forgiveness"), the refusal to make them our identity, is almost the heart of the matter. If you do not transform your pain, you will with 100 percent certainty transmit it to others. And, I am afraid, you will have pain! Both the Buddha and Jesus seem to say that pain is part of the deal, and its overcoming is the very shape of enlightenment." 

Permanently deleted my current Facebook and my Facebook from high school, and downloaded all my data off them. This is officially my only public outlet. I need to find a way to download and back up all my old Tumblr data as well now. And my newsletter...which I will get to soon. Also I finally saw Tomb Raider 2018 and it's honestly...amazing? I really hate men lmao. They're the only reason it was rated so low critically. As a tale of a 20-something solving ancient mysteries and discovering untapped strengths, it's all I could have dreamed of.

This is what 24 felt like

This is what 25 has been like

I'm fascinated by the idea of being haunted or supernatural contact thru the internet, especially as it extends beyond the internet or bleeds into the everyday, because the internet is a ghostland in itself. Just as someone attaches meaning to fragments of an image, orbs or solar flares or unexpected shadows, and builds upon it, interpreting it and completing it for themselves until it becomes whole, we allow ourselves to be interpreted and consumed based on a silhouette rather than a full person. An outline of who we are for the rest to be filled in by the other. Meaning is built upon the ethereal. (Good) horror movies about the internet draw upon this idea of the self-made ghost. We haunt the internet and the internet haunts us. We allow ourselves to be fragmented in order to haunt others.

There's a lot of lonely people desperately reaching out for something or someone to save them, lost and directionless spiritually. Going along with the next trend or the next revelation put in front of them, waiting for a zeitgeist breakthrough. I wont ever be one of them, because I refuse to. I find it pathetic and sad, jumping from one sense of faith or purpose to the next thinking each one is The One. Rather than building with each new experience in the development of the Self. The Self is unshakeable. Each leap of faith is a new cataclysm, a new shining light, revelation to revelation to revelation. Earth shattering truth that can be developed on your own, that can build, that can create. It's okay to destroy your Self and build it up again but only if the blueprint is already there. Destroying the self and building a new image each time, there never is a sense of self to begin with. There is no Self, so your world will continue to shake and you will continue to be searching from ground zero. Keep searching but to keep building.

Interest in paranormal as way to circumvent trauma

Some quick notes:

"I am arguing that alien-abduction memories are best understood as resulting in a blend of fantasy-proneness, memory distortion, culturally available scripts, sleep hallucinations, scientific illiteracy, aided and abetted by the suggestions and reinforcement of hypnotherapy. **But this analysis is still insufficient for an understanding of the phenomenon.** As the abductees themselves say, 'If you're telling me it didn't happen to me, that I made it up, why in God's name would I WANT to?'...But Donald Spence also argues that the validity of our conclusions–the HISTORICAL truth of our explanations–is irrelevant. The important question is: Do our beliefs have NARRATIVE truth? Do they provide us with meaning and value? When people believe they were abducted by aliens, does this help them to understand perplexing or upsetting aspects of their lives [finding a measure of similarity to PTSD victims]? If so, the explanation is going to be persuasive, satisfying, and resistant to argument [concluding these stories give them peace because of some relative knowledge of some cause, are transformative for their lives in giving them perspective, a worldview, orients them to the banality of living in relation to this world]." 

- Susan Clancy's author's intent from Abducted: How People Come To Believe They Were Kidnapped By Aliens, a book I find problematic in its approach to the phenomena but fascinating for the fact it was initially meant to be about sexual abuse victims' "recovered memories" but sexual abuse false memories seemed far more controversial to debunk than alien abductees who the public already has little sympathy for so she chose to explore her thesis through them instead. While kept as two different subjects here, I do think there's probably a huge overlap in people's propensity to believe in the paranormal and their desire to escape or distract from their situation or circumstances, which I'm obviously not immune to. As a form of trauma reassignment, it seems much "easier" if equally scary to refocus that energy and fear and curiosity and latent emotion onto something that is in a journey of "being discovered" rather than concrete things that have already "happened". Reading more about gnosticism, UFOs, the paranormal, I see a large similarity to the sort of distraction, exasperation, and processing work one undergoes coming to terms with trauma. The man who lives in fear after alien abduction and the man who's frustrated that nobody believes his Bigfoot sighting are fighting a similar internal battle. I'm reminded of Mysterious Skin where the trauma of child sexual abuse is easier to render in hindsight as alien abduction because it lends a mystery and recurrent, randomized element to something that was a concrete action of the past specifically enacted upon an individual.

"the Female Gothic narrative of the persecuted heroine in flight from a villainous father and in search of an absent mother.3 Studies exploring a distinction between ‘Female Gothic’ and ‘Male Gothic’ had seen this plot as typical of female writers, while male writers tended towards a plot of masculine transgression of social taboos"

"In her Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (1995), another contributor, Anne Williams, argued for the existence of ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ formulas, which differ in terms of narrative technique, plot, their assumptions about the supernatural, and their use of horror/terror.5 She looked back through the use made of Greek mythology by Freudian psychoanalysis to locate the origins of the Female Gothic narrative (typified by female point of view, happy ending, explained ghosts and an adherence to terror), in the myth of Psyche and Eros, as opposed to the Oedipal myth which underpins the male version."

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~leila/documents/TheFemaleGothic-ThenNow.pdf