章 1: Reborn
*Yawn*
I live in a sixty square meters apartment with my parents and sisters, we moved here from the suburbs ten years ago when my father bought a kebab shop here in the Cenisia neighborhood almost four kilometers from the city center.
The alarm rang for the fourth time in a row, I was finally forced to wake up by the risk of getting late again at the physics reparation course.
Yeah, it was early summer and lucky me had to wake up early to go to school because my grades had been so poor that I was about to fail my third year of high school.
It's not like I even tried to be good at it, my free time was dedicated to reading web novels and fairly enough I had dedicated all my energies to that only having a break during the excruciatingly long school lessons.
I was so caught up in it that I didn't even want to lose any time eating so for almost two weeks I lived only on jars of Nutella, without bothering with anything else.
I was so focused that I didn't notice that my previously meager knowledge of English had risen at an astonishing rate almost as much as my weight.
Even though my body never had a six pack up until that time I was only called fat a couple of times due to my height which truly was my saving grace, but after those two weeks even being seven feet tall couldn't have covered the forty pounds I had gained.
It was the fattest I ever got, almost 180 pounds per 180 cm, I still remember the pain of my poor knees which creaked despairingly with every step I took on my way to school, sometimes I still hear their dying wails.
{Thanks to this experience, my legs are still in a bad shape but after losing weight at least my knees are looking better than before and are extremely grateful to have received some mercy after 17 years of abuse.}
And then it was all a downing spiral, as much as my English grades rose the grades in all other subjects fell dramatically, much to the surprise of my teachers and classmates who saw my rise and fall, but I was indifferent to all of this, right?
Well, I have to admit that the frequency of my suicidal thoughts rose by a fair bit in those times and I think that I contemplated Death far more than a Lich would do in his immortality, before having his Phylactery eaten by the budding MC, but still, isn't that just adolescence?
Well, I admit that my timely two-week vacation from school also didn't help me build a good impression for the teachers, so it couldn't be helped that I ended up becoming my classroom's dunce.
{Thanks to this experience I gained a morbose interest in death, nihilism, and similar themes, you can understand the great feeling of pride and loss I felt when I read Nietzsche and found that he had come to the same conclusions a hundred years before me. Reading his Thought was more of a dreadful confirmation than anything else.}
It was what I would call a Heavenly Reversal, I had been one of the students with the highest grades in my class and intelligence had always been a strong part of my identity so I was really viewing the universe from a whole new light. And no, I'm not exaggerating, I experienced all of this as a mighty catastrophe, I only bore through it thanks to my godlike Escapism.
Looking back at it, I can't understand where I found such strong persistence, I may have reached degrees of alienation even Marx hadn't thought possible, and can't help but praise the dedication of my younger self, even though everything may as well be lumped up as the foolishness of youth.
[Thanks to this experience the gloomy seed of relativism was planted in my consciousness.]
In the beginning, my friends/classmates tried to understand and help me, but I avoided their timid attempts with excuses and silence, it warmed my heart to see them care a bit about me but I was moved no further, everything they did be it teachers or fellow classmates was only met with my indifference. It was only a question of time before it became reciprocal. Utter desolation. Loneliness.
I held no value in the context of social relationships known as school, where grades and beauty defined who you are, instead of money and beauty in the much wider world of society. I came to adopt the view that school was just a smaller, safer(debatable but true in some sense) version of society which just gave you a taste of the ugliness and opportunities which the greater world offered, at least it allows some degree of fragility we may say...
[Thanks to this experience the budding seed of disillusionment in human relationships was planted in my unconscious.]
Even though they came to know about it in the end, as all lies and liars shall be exposed in the end except of course, Andreotti(Speech and Illusion 100), I am grateful to the Wisdom of my younger self, he had the insight to understand that he couldn't bear the lack of even his family's support which up until then had blindly supported him.
In a way my failure that year and the web of lies which I created to cover it, where the first crack in the castle of glass known as trust and which we as a family promptly destroyed after just a bit of pressure.
[This experience really made the seed of disillusionment sprout a fair bit, it was an extremely painful experience but it gave us the possibility to face the proverbial skeletons in the closet before they began dancing by themselves to rip us to shreds]
Well, it's understandable, because I was, and I still am, the only one who is not allowed to fail.
As the first male child of my immigrant family I bear the hopes of social climbing and the pride of my father, the love and hopes of returning home of my mother and the loves of my sisters which look up to me as a role model. It was obviously prohibited for me to perform poorly at school, even more so to fail a grade and add to my parents' hardships.
{I still remember how I felt distant from everyone in those time, it was such a strong feeling of alienation, the pain and happiness of others, their suffering, was nothing more to me than a beat of a butterfly's wings, only later would my Future Self experience the apocalyptic hurricane which arose from this illusory distance}
[This experience kindled my interest in karma, the connection between things, events, people, and other holistic concepts such as Yin and Yang, the Dao, Wuji, Taiji and the Tao which were also so dear to me thanks to my readings of web novels but which I, at the time, didn't give much thought.]
Well, I destroyed all of this for the sake of my egoistic hopes and desires. Everyone in this world sees success in different ways. In Italy you are far away from success if you fail, in protestant countries like the US and the UK they have a broader conception of this, you are truly far apart from success if you are a loser, as you can see the second definition is not as narrow-minded as the first, allowing space for failure and looks at life as a whole and not just at the small bits which make it up.
[And it was in that period when I lived for my own desire, that I truly felt alive for the first time in my life, it was maybe this feeling of 'aliveness' that made it possible for me to bear the pressure of the suicidal thoughts and the pain brought by that same choice of living by my will.]
Am I a loser? Certainly not, for now, but back then everybody thought that I was a lost cause without any hopes of saving because I didn't care about what they, the majority, cared. I had a whole different set of values, what was valuable to me was trash for them(nobody was interested in what I did find worthy, but that had always been the case), and the same was true for the opposite. And in that was the novelty of the situation, I wasn't willing anymore to act as your quirky average joe for even 6 hours a day of the week, I was on a strike and nothing could change my mind.
It is still true even now, but I've learned to adapt and adopt their values.
In school they see success in good grades, in society in a high salary, my father in a medical degree, my mother, well I still don't understand her that much, maybe she will accept any kind of outcome in the end but she may not by my side in the end. These are the expectations that everyone has to deal with, and depending on how much they are in conflict with their Ambition and so, with their projectuality they will have to split their energy between dealing with themselves and coping with Them.
You see it's not that strange that I ended up trying to escape from such a problematic reality and in the end, I finally succeeded. It was three years ago that I began my journey in the World of Self, or should I call it, surreality?
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