Author’s Reflection

Although I move within a discipline I genuinely embrace, I continue to feel like an outsider, a consciousness misplaced in its own environment.
I watch people work with me, speak to me, and later turn away, grow resentful, fabricate stories.
This cycle has become the atmosphere in which I live — repetitive, inevitable.

People insist they “understand” me, but I know their understanding is merely a projection shaped by their own interests.
If I cannot fully decipher myself, how could they? Their certainty reveals nothing but their need for advantage, not insight.

I remain optimistic toward the world, yet pessimistic toward human relations.
As in Camus’s L’Étranger, I glimpse the same estrangement.
Refusing conformity, refusing the comfort of the crowd, has become the convenient reason for others to reject me.
Perhaps I was already the target; the reason only gives them permission.

I prefer solitude — reading, reflection, museums, the silent dialogue with history, philosophy, and language.
These affinities draw me away from the collective, and in doing so, they construct the conditions of my own inferno.

No Exit & The Flies — To resist belonging is already to inhabit hell

As long as I engage with others, I remain exposed to the look — and thus remain within the structure of hell.
We tie ourselves to one another, we restrict one another, and no one becomes the sovereign of their own existence.
Sartre makes this clear in No Exit and The Flies:
the Other’s gaze shapes, confines, and distorts the self.

If you fail to coexist peacefully with others, the tension you create returns to you as indifference, misreading, and withdrawal. Only by momentarily adopting the perspective of the Other can you escape making them your torment.
If you let their judgment determine your being — if one opinion unsettles your entire existence — you become a performer at the mercy of the audience.
We must refuse this spiritual servitude.
The gaze of others cannot be our compass; it can only be our obstacle.
Through self-interrogation and a clear grasp of our own freedom, we diminish the need for external approval.
Yet the deepest hell is self-constructed.
If you attribute every failure to the world, if you refuse responsibility for your freedom, then you become both prisoner and guard of your own anguish.
One must confront oneself, renegotiate the terms of one’s existence, and reclaim the freedom that is already ours — painful, demanding, and absolute.