The Thoughts Loom

 There is a certain taboo around the word LGBTQIA+ . Even today, many people, both inside and outside the community, seem to prefer that it remain somewhere in the background, covered by a cloak of silence. People may acknowledge that it exists, but they do not necessarily want to discuss what it means, where these differences come from, or why society responds to them in the way it does. There are many ways to approach the subject. This is only one of them. The first thing that becomes apparent when looking beyond the label is that the people within the LGBTQIA+ community are not fundamentally different from anyone else. They have insecurities, confidence, affection, ambitions, fears, humour and contradictions. Yet there can also be a peculiar self-consciousness in people who have spent a significant part of their lives knowing that some aspect of them does not fit comfortably into what society considers ordinary. That observation raises a more fundamental question: what exactly i...

  Part II of Notes from Underground is where I started understanding the Underground Man much more closely. Not because I agree with him, or because I see myself in his actions, but because I could recognise something in the way his mind works. At one point I was also in an underground of my own. Every thought I had, every statement I heard, I could reason in both ways. If someone said something was right, I could understand why it was right. If someone said it was wrong, I could understand that too. Then I would start questioning the question itself. What is the reference? Why should this value be considered a value? Who decided it? What if the opposite is also true? And then the questioning can continue forever. I think this is part of what Dostoevsky is showing through the Underground Man. He doesn't seem to have a stable reference from which he judges himself. He is always comparing himself with someone else. Am I above this person or below him? Did he respect me? Did I humili...

We often talk about individual freedom as if it is something very simple. You have a choice, you make it, and then you live with it. But is it really that simple? What happens when the choice you want to make hurts the people who raised you? What happens when choosing yourself means disappointing your parents? And what if you have been taught, for most of your life, that making your parents unhappy is itself a kind of wrongdoing? Then what exactly are you choosing between? Is it really between what you want and what they want? Or has it slowly become a choice between your own life and your guilt about choosing it ? I think this is where the idea of responsibility becomes much more complicated. We are raised by people who make countless decisions for us before we are capable of making any decisions ourselves. They choose our school, our food, our surroundings, our education, sometimes even the way we are supposed to behave. They do all of this because they are our parents and because th...

What Becomes Normal?  And this made me think about how much of what we call normal might come from this kind of process. Everyone has some reference for what is right and wrong, what is normal and abnormal, what is desirable and undesirable. But where did that reference come from? Some of it comes from biology. Some from childhood. Some from the people around us. Some from what society has already decided. Some from our own experiences. And then we add our interpretation to all of it. But the same society that gave us these ideas is also the society we are part of. So when we express our own ideas, we are also adding something back into that same environment. Someone experiences something. They form an interpretation. They express it. Someone else sees it and thinks, "This is also how I feel." They adopt it. Then they behave differently because of it. And now their behaviour becomes part of someone else's environment. So the process does not really stop with the pe...

  Looking Behind Behaviour I was thinking about psychoanalysis recently, and initially I understood it as looking behind an action from the lens of an individual's history and experiences, especially those experiences that are somehow pushed into the subconscious but still influence what a person does. For example, whenever an exam approaches, someone becomes ill. You ask what they feel, and the answer is that they want to score well. Then you ask, what exactly do you feel in those days? Maybe the answer takes some time, but eventually it becomes, "I am not good enough and I have to win approval." Then you start asking where that feeling comes from, and perhaps there was childhood comparison, perhaps there was no basic sense of security, perhaps the person learned that being good enough was necessary for approval. If you keep going backwards like this, you are not only looking at what the person did. You are trying to understand why that particular thing means what it mea...

  I was thinking about psychoanalysis recently, and initially I understood it as looking behind an action from the lens of an individual's history and experiences, especially those experiences that are somehow pushed into the subconscious but still influence what a person does. For example, whenever an exam  approaches, someone becomes ill. You ask what they feel, and the answer is that they want to score well. Then you ask, what exactly do you feel in those days? Maybe the answer takes some time, but eventually it becomes, "I am not good enough and I have to win approval." Then you start asking where that feeling comes from, and perhaps there was childhood comparison, perhaps there was no basic sense of security, perhaps the person learned that being good enough was necessary for approval. If you keep going backwards like this, you are not only looking at what the person did. You are trying to understand why that particular thing means what it means to that particular pe...