I am a fraud.
Somehow, this is the first thing that comes to mind.
I’ve been sitting at this desk, for the third day in a row, trying, trying really hard, to write something meaningful. To be something meaningful, authentic, or whatever the solution is to not be a fraud.
But what even is meaning?
Is it the matrix within which we are all embedded, cocooned by the threads of our individualised struggles — the blissful ignorance of existence?
A thick pungent smog seeps in and rubs its back against the withered lilacs, licking the raw remnants of rusted metal dispersed on the sodden ground. In the rustic staccato of rattling machines, there is a faint, but noticeable rhythmic mechanic humdrum — the beating heart of a sleeping city.
I want my words to breathe, raw flesh outlining their figure against the page, complex layers and textures threaded together. Rising and falling. Rising and falling. The quiet heartbeat, gently vibrating against the page — the corporal body grounding the metaphysical being to reality.
Each letter looks so different against the page, with its defiant curves and jagged edges, neatly differentiated into lines.
Why is it that for something to be understood, it needs to be symmetrical? I wonder.
The symmetry of the words looks beautiful, though ; yet, there is an inherent agony.
The defiant contours and bold strokes, writhe against the page, twisted and contorted into their set positions — their very existence is a byproduct of this universal pain masked as an individualised struggle.
How can something so fundamentally wrong be so beautiful?
In some ways I feel their pain. Are we not the same?
Empty vessels, twisted and contorted, defined by the drive for some arbitrary purpose.
Such is our society –
the matrix of productivity within which we are all embedded, cocooned by the threads of I am not good enough. And the worst part of it is that we will never be good enough. The very definition of survival, relies on an intrinsic feeling of insufficiency.
The work I do will never be enough.
It is this privatisation of work that allows us to reproduce — the “repression” that we claim to be subjected to. Individual value is defined as a commodity, set against the context of a productive societal machinery .
The same way an a exists as a function of “not being” b, or c, or any other letter for that matter. The meaning of my individuality (or productive value) is a merely a function of yours.
I am brown, because somebody else is white.
I am privileged, because somebody else is not.
So how can I not feel like a fraud, when I am the composition of these external relations held in tension against one another?
Whatever I thought was mine actually belongs to a larger collective matrix rigidly holding us in place.
So let me ask you again,
Am I not a fraud?
