“Losing Your Appetite Because You’re Sad Is The Worst Feeling Ever.”

Thought-Provoking Digital Illustrations by Davide Bonazzi That Expose The Flaws Of Our Modern Society.

“I can’t tell you exactly what I’m looking for, but I’ll know it when it happens. I want to be breathless and weak, crumpled by the entrance of another person inside my soul.”

— Aimee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

Sometimes I feel like I am in a bathtub filling up faster than I can drain it. And lately, the drain is clogged and I am drowning and drowning and drowning.

I am losing air faster than I can handle; killing me slowly, suffocating me with black spots filtering over my eyes, decorating my room’s walls.

It’s a strange sensation, that of time running out. Who chained me to the bottom of this bathtub in the first place? Who is turning on the water, was it me?

I am the hand of ruin; the catalyst to my own destruction. Salvation seems beyond reason and unfathomable beneath the water.

Writing was my drain.

It breathes fire into my lungs and ice into veins. It’s the only time I feel in control, powerful… alive.

Now, the doubt, guilt and shame ties me to the silence. It weighs me down and binds my hands below. I don’t think I can tell which way is up anymore.

Words are losing meaning and the space between them is an abyss.

I am told to have hope. To write of the sun after rainy days. But what do you write about when the sun burns you charred and the rain soaks you to the bone?

God, I need five more minutes of peace.

I know it’s too much to ask, I haven’t been your favorite for years.

I am drowning, lost and fearful.

My heart has turned to solid as my body sinks further. Is floating up even worth it at this point? Or should I let the darkness continue its course? After all, who am I but a hollow vessel to tell it to stop.

I don't know how many times I survived myself without telling anyone.

-V. J.

Why do humans need companionship?

Why can't be satisfied by being alone with ourselves?

Humans are known to be social beings,and no matter how much we may love our alone-time,we will always choose,with such alacrity even,to spend some of our time with someone whom we deem worthy of being around us.

It is an inexorable truth,which no matter how strongly you are opposed to,will show itself to you some time or another.

It is surely up to you whether to understand it or not,but there will come a time when your good intentions aimed at protecting yourself will backlash.

At that point in time there will be no one to turn to,all your choices will pour down on you and you will see no path ahead of you.

After realizing what companionship means to you,everything will become undeniably stressful.

Is it because of fear?Do you just not know how human interactions unravel anymore?Or what is it?

Usually it would be wise to let go of such feelings by interrupting the friendship causing them,however that is not the case in such a context.

At this point in time you only have one option:try not putting this companionship ahead of everything else,instead just hold it dear to you.Hopefully everything will be set in motion once again.

03/10/2021

It wasn’t a long time ago,though it supposedly was.

Here I laid,in this same bed,hugging my covers as tightly as I could,

genuinely wishing to become one with them and vanish in that exact moment.

It felt like a void,the harshest and heaviest one could experience within their bodily existence.

My mind,an abyss.

My body,an havoc.

Somewhere,somehow,I envisioned a version of me which could grasp that forlorn warmth.

She welcomed it in the most easy-going manner,very-well knowing how fleeting that emotion would be.

It was not light,nor was it fuzzy,or bubbling or anything at all.

It just was.

It was right.

May it be precognition or the strength of my will,I do know that THAT was the precursor to who I am now.

I’m alive,living who I yearned to be.

And a lot more than than that as well.

I find myself opposed to the view of knowledge as a passive copy of reality.

- Jean Piaget 1896-1980

How do we learn things? The answers to this age-old question have been examined and analysed by many scientists. There are plenty of prominent theories explaining cognitive development and helping us to understand the foundation of knowledge.

One of the most prominent answers to the question has come from a Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget.

The legacy of Jean Piaget to the world of early childhood education is that he fundamentally altered the view of how a child learns. And a teacher, he believed, was more than a transmitter of knowledge she was also an essential observer and guide to helping children build their own knowledge.

As a university graduate, Swiss-born Piaget got a routine job in Paris standardising Binet-Simon IQ tests, where the emphasis was on children getting the right answers. Piaget observed that many children of the same ages gave the same kinds of incorrect answers. What could be learned from this?

Piaget interviewed many hundreds of children and concluded that children who are allowed to make mistakes often go on to discover their errors and correct them, or find new solutions. In this process, children build their own way of learning. From children’s errors, teachers can obtain insights into the child’s view of the world and can tell where guidance is needed. They can provide appropriate materials, ask encouraging questions, and allow the child to construct his own knowledge.

Piaget’s continued interactions with young children became part of his life-long research. After reading about a child who thought that the sun and moon followed him wherever he went, Piaget wanted to find out if all young children had a similar belief. He found that many did indeed believe this. Piaget went on to explore children’s countless “why” questions, such as, “Why is the sun round?” or “Why is grass green?” He concluded that children do not think like adults. Their thought processes have their own distinct order and special logic. Children are not “empty vessels to be filled with knowledge” (as traditional pedagogical theory had it). They are “active builders of knowledge-little scientists who construct their own theories of the world.”

Piaget’s Four Stages of Development

Sensorimotor Stage: Approximately 0 - 2 Infants gain their earliest understanding of the immediate world through their senses and through their own actions, beginning with simple reflexes, such as sucking and grasping.

Preoperational Stage: Approximately 2 - 6 Young children can use symbols for objects, such as numbers to express quantity and words such as mama, doggie, hat and ball to represent real people and objects.

Concrete Operations: Approximately 6 - 11 School-age children can perform concrete mental operations with symbols-using numbers to add or subtract and organizing objects by their qualities, such as size or color.

Formal Operations: Approximately 11 - adult Normally developing early adolescents are able to think and reason abstractly, to solve theoretical problems, and answer hypothetical questions.

Albert Einstein once called Piaget’s discoveries of cognitive development as, “so simple only a genius could have thought of it”. As the above shows, Piaget’s theory was born out of observations of children, especially as they were conducting play. When he was analysing the results of the intelligence test, he noticed that young children provide qualitatively different answers to older children.

This suggested to Piaget that younger children are not dumber, since this would be a quantitative position – an older child is smarter with more experience. Instead, the children simply answered differently because they thought of things differently.

At the heart of Piaget’s theory then is the idea that children are born with a basic mental structure, which provides the structure for future learning and knowledge. He saw development as a progressive reorganisation of these mental processes. This came about due to biological maturation, as well as environmental experience.

We are essentially constructing a world around us in which we try to align things that we already know and what we suddenly discover. Through the process, a child develops knowledge and intelligence, which helps him or her to reason and think independently.

For Piaget his work was never just for a closeted coterie of scholars and researcher but had real world application. Piaget was able to put his work in a wider context of importance. He said, “only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual”. Piaget’s theory centres on the idea that children, as little scientists, need to explore, interact with, and experiment in order to gain the information they need to understand their world.

girl you look like you drop common loot when defeated

Loneliness is a Dangerous Thing

‘Everyone knows there are forms of cruelty which can injure a man’s life without injuring his body. They are such as deprive him of a certain form of food necessary to the life of the soul.’                     - Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

Rootlessness and homelessness, though similar in nature, are also quite different. A person who is rootless may very well have a home, but does not have a sense of belonging, they identify themselves as ‘the other’. 

Since the end of World War II, migration has increased significantly with people opting to set up their life somewhere new, whether this be for a job, education, religion, or whatever opportunity this may provide. A person disentangles themselves from the ties and bonds that they have with one place and form this relationship somewhere new… this is now home.

But home for you may not always be home for the new family that you set up. I have mentioned this before in another post so I won’t go into it in too much detail, but when looking at those with extremist and ‘radical’ thoughts, we find that they are often children of those who have migrated. The parents have chosen to build home in a new foreign land and build a relationship with that place, but the relationship is not so straight forward. This relationship is a half way house between assimilating and holding onto one’s culture; the migrant chooses which parts of the new culture to adopt and which parts of their old culture to hold onto. This might vary from eating and drinking habits, clothing, social life, it could be anything. 

The child of the migrant however, having not chosen but instead having been brought up with this conflict between the two cultures feels lost. This is something I have thought about for a long time, but Arendt put it into the words I have been searching for for so long. 

The child feels a sense of rootlessness. 

Arendt argues that those who feel rootless or homeless will seek out a home for themselves at any cost, which can have disastrous consequences. 

She states that for an individual who feels rootless and homeless, often with this comes the feeling of having an existence that is not meaningful or fruitful. To find this sense of belonging, individuals often turn to exclusionary movements and groups, which actually only increases the feeling of alienation and rootlessness. Now they are in a group that only contains people such as themselves, perhaps from one place, class, religion, etc. all together feeling like outsiders, because of the absence of others of a different background. 

Arendt says that uprootedness has been ‘the curse of the modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution’.

Loneliness is a dangerous thing. When a person is lonely, when they feel their roots are not in any ground but sort of drifting from place to place, a person is not themselves. Who are we, after all, without a background against us? Just an entity, perhaps? 

‘To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.’

In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.

- Friedrich Nietzsche