Cover artwork by Anton Biletskyi-Volokh, from an unpublished reusable sketchbook in progress. Other work from my sketchbook practice.
A thematic selection of translated notebook fragments.
The idea that identity can be built not on experience and the experience of living through it, but on assumptions about yourself, is quite something. It offers so many ways to avoid reality.
Instead of exploring yourself and the world through experience, you want a quick, ready-made answer to a fairly complicated question: ‘Who am I?’
Some people know the right way everything should be done. And you'd think: well, enjoy it, be happy. But how can you be happy when other people aren't doing it right?
So the righteous lug their rightness around like a precious heirloom, while also trying to fucking clobber anyone who's doing it wrong but feels okay.
An adult is someone who, first, copes, and second, accepts themselves and others.
Gossip, for example, is a good illustration of not being an adult. First, you catch people at moments when they aren't coping. Second, you don't accept that people are different and do different things.
The problem with a consumer attitude is wanting to take something ready-made that isn't yours, but get the satisfaction of having made it yourself. You've bought this and that, and you're still wearing a sour face.
The same goes for defining your identity through your particular collection of products.
People for whom nothing is ever right and everything could have been done differently don't just poison the people around them. They poison themselves first, because living with concealed aggression is pretty nauseating.
What's the difference between being an author and being a consumer?
An author is someone willing to share what they create with the world. It isn't always art. You can be an author in relationships and in life generally, creating something of your own, something unique.
A consumer is only willing to consume, looking at the world like a fat cat at an empty bowl: could you give me something else? It's still not enough, and I'm still not okay.
People who elevate themselves through self-denial usually demand self-denial from others too. Often more from others than from themselves.
Taking responsibility back isn't about guilt. It's about freedom.
If, whenever you notice your influence on a situation in your life, you blame yourself — how could I, what have I done — you don't let yourself feel that freedom.
Greed often shows up not as a straightforward ‘I won't give it to you, it's mine’, but as wholesale devaluation.
Someone who hasn't been bitten by the miser bug can feel happy about another person's success, or even about someone getting something for free: good for them. When a greedy person sees it: of course, everyone gets everything and I get nothing. But I can see that your everything isn't really all that, and it doesn't even have mother-of-pearl buttons.
Because a greedy person isn't just trying to get more for themselves, though there's that too — what would greed be without hoarding? The pleasure lies in other people having less, and worse.
It's astonishing how much time you can spend giving yourself shit. But really, self-abasement and self-blame are a form of self-praise.
The worst of the worst is the best of the worst.
Being unable to let go of the past leaves little room for the present.
Instead of the present, a rubbish dump of unfinished stories and things you no longer need.
Paradoxically, the people who struggle most to apologise or forgive others are those who love really laying into themselves and others with blame, and who carry their guilt around like a prized possession. Forgiveness? But what about all the suffering?
Remorse isn't particularly familiar to them either, except perhaps as a formality.
It's hard to be in the present when the past is full of regrets and the future is full of doubts.
You can't change the past, but in trying to, we often lose the present altogether.
Shame is abandoning yourself to please an imaginary audience.
‘Once I've figured myself out, I'll find something to do.’
The problem is that we figure ourselves out and get to know ourselves through doing things, not through empty speculation about what sort of person we are.
So getting to know yourself means doing something, not just thinking about it.
The image of an enemy is a chest where you can stash everything you reject or repress in your image of yourself.
‘I might be capable of that too, but I don't allow myself such things!’
An enemy is like a caricature of your own shadow.
Noticing other people without losing touch with your own experience of yourself is a balance that can make life much better.
Don't notice others, and you always go around feeling poor and hungry.
Don't notice yourself, and you lose the value of life.
Fear as a way to beat boredom: give yourself a proper fright, and for a while you aren't bored at all.
Imagine how worthless you must feel inside to build yourself up by putting others down.
Psychology Notebook brings together personal observations, study notes, paraphrases and quotations. These fragments are not a textbook or clinical guidance. About the series.