Cover photograph supplied by Anton Biletskyi-Volokh.
A thematic selection of translated notebook fragments.
As the subject is, so is their speech.
In a merger, difference is always a threat.
Grieving exists so that you do not have to experience what happened as a fresh sorrow every day afterwards.
Subjecthood is impossible without a process of willing.
For an obsessive person, someone subject to compulsive preoccupations, going round in circles is firstly a way to reduce anxiety and secondly a time to rest: while you are wound up, you can put all your tasks aside.
In a way, suffering is even convenient: if you give up the idea of being the injured and innocent sufferer, you will have to stop looking for someone to blame and complaining about fate, and get on with your own life.
Someone who sees people only in terms of functions sees themselves in terms of function too. This often gets you wound up, but robs you of a sense of life.
The main currency of our time is the capacity to adapt.
Sometimes leaving maladaptive patterns is blocked by this: if you are already maladapted, you cannot become maladapted again. What is broken does not break.
For an anxious person, giving yourself nightmares is a way to calm down. Besides, frightening yourself brings interest back into life: fear is never boring.
Actively coping with unbearable circumstances without changing them is, essentially, activity within passive adaptation.
‘Nothing works out for me’ is usually said by people who, when something does not work, keep doing the same thing, which produces the same result.
When someone is unhappy with their life, life usually gets worse to show them that their dissatisfaction was somewhat imagined. Life teaches as best it can.
The rescuer position is not about competence, but often about pride and conceit: those fools certainly will not cope without me.
The further we try to run into the future to foresee everything and soothe our anxiety, the more likely we are to encounter uncertainty there, or even the figure of death itself.
It is important for tension and relaxation to alternate. Getting stuck in tension leads to exhaustion; getting stuck in relaxation means living half-faint and apathetic.
There are no unfinished gestalts; there are endings you did not like.
The downside of showing off is that you always need someone outside you who can read the display like an open book.
Anger means burning your strength on the world’s imperfections instead of investing it in gradual changes to what you dislike.
The weaker the inner sense of safety, the greater the fear of showing yourself. While nobody knows what I am like, nobody can catch me.