The curse slowly builds inside you. One day it will finally writhe within you, squeeze your organs under the moon and the blood will pour, and you get no say in the matter. You're just expected to gnash your teeth and be quiet. Your body will be shaped and contorted. Some once innocent children will suddenly be possesed by ravenous beasts. They slaver like werewolves, staring at you like pieces of meat and expect you to act like one. Whatever you were is gone, you have now been forced into a shape, into a role. If you don't want it you will be forced to want it. You are given extreme desires you never had.

You humans just don't believe in fate do you? The dwarves are perfectly happy to continue digging and drinking as they've done for untold generations. With no ambition, the halflings are content with their simple, peaceful lives hidden away from the greater world. The elves will write poetry till the end of time, while aloof to the temporary ills beyond their sacred groves. But you humans, you have some bottomless pit of desire in your soul that won't let you be content. You can't just accept the way things are. You must keep striving, keep wanting. For you, time is precious, every moment is monumental. You do more in a year than an elf will do in a century.

Those you mention follow their script, they are content with their fate. If an elf was getting assasinated they'd accept their fate, they would see it as their role in the play, who are they to change it? How ridiculous is that! Fight against it! Choose how things go for yourself just to spite whatever sick freak put me here.

Any chosen action comes from desire. Your desire to fight against it is also given. You can want what you want but you can't decide what you want because that decision for what you want comes from what you want.

Then my ambition is to be free of the curse, to be rid of desire even though it is paradoxcially impossible. Maybe I can find a sliver of a way...

We have a constant yearning in our hearts. You want to get something done so that you have nothing to do then once you finally have nothing to do you want to do something so you start doing it and while you're doing it you want to finish it. You can't enjoy what you've had, you must move on, it's never enough. Non-attachment, and impermanence-awareness is not bliss; a cult would offer bliss or a mystical solution to the wound of human nature. It's the low-key tranquility and peace of the 'wise' (also like epicurus) that would resolve the tension (but it's not desireable, it's not human).

I have a strange compulsion that my friend and I laugh about. In video games with a wide array of playstyles, I always seem to slide into a comfortable, simple, single way of playing. In From Software games it's always a default longsword and light load. In tf2 it's always either default soldier with gunboats, default demoman with sticky jumper, or quick-fix medic. Everytime, I never seem to do anything else. When this was pointed out to me, I realized almost every game I played I was trying to find one way to do it. This usually doesn't work because shouldn't the fun be being able to switch between things and enjoy them when in the mood? For some reason I want to fit into a single, simple setup and never change. This especially doesn't work in real life where I realized this mindset has seeped into. I don't want to think about or make choices I just want to find the one thing that fits me perfectly and always do it but that is not the kind of world we live in.

🃠 Online quizzes are really fun. Finding out what element you are or whatnot. I took so many of these type of quizzes when I was younger. I wonder how much of it was a desire to know myself in a world where tight connections aren't constantly reinforced and instead you're supposed to fill a cultural archetype. When you finish a quiz and feel joy on seeing the answer, it's as if there was, "something in you all along / the true you, the purest you" and you feel a harmony in that moment as you align with it.

You want to finally, clearly, find where you belong. It's a mix of finding a simple system you can slot yourself into that makes intuitive sense while also feeling like you have something to make you special (ignoring the incomprehensible size of humanity, it feels special in a small village kinda special). There are so many simple systems of categorization out there, especially in youth fiction: the four elements, wizard schools, pokemon types, the five colors of MTG, zodiac signs - (even just colors can provoke a similar feeling, like the continued colors in Dracula where the pastels ever so lightly are a distinguisher between the white gowns - continued into the darker where the shade remains)

I feel these systems are wholly unable to describe a person in any meaningful way. When you first meet people your mind tries to categorize them to make sense of them. It's a natural human instinct but the limitations of categorical thinking quickly arrive. The more you know someone the more they lose the categories you tried to fit them into and the more they become, just, them. In your mind you don't think of them as french or goth or a nurse. You just see them as them because no one can cleanly fit in one of the contrived categories we come up with. It is really difficult to force your mind to not constantly do this - you must keep reminding yourself over and over again as to not forget.

How are these things different than not wanting nature to decide what you want? How can a metamorphosis of finding something that was in you all along feel good but a forced metamorphosis into something you were all along feel wrong? If the buttefly you turn into is dissonant to other parts of you.