My "origin story" (aka an extended introduction)

I spent most of my teens and twenties pretty depressed and jaded about the way that things are. Inequality and injustice snaked their way throughout my friends’ and family’s lives with cruelty and randomness. At first, I learned about and related to existentialism and nihilism in high school and college. These were pessimistic philosophies that focused on the pain and meaninglessness of existence. They reinforced how powerless I felt about everything that was constantly being destroyed around me.

Once I graduated school, there was a long time where I stayed exactly the same. I was extremely unhappy. The sense of inequality and injustice that I felt when I was younger was growing taller inside of me and I felt powerless to change anything, even my own self. I found myself in a place that had fit me six years earlier, but had since outgrown. It was choking, killing me.

It was around this time that I learned about the systemic nature of everything. I learned that people aren’t inherently cruel or greedy, but are groomed to be that way by the major institutions and backward social forces that pervade modern societies. My mental health was violently buffeted by years of trying to be happy and find a genuine place for myself in American society that didn’t exist.

In these same studies, I learned that it was possible to transform reality by turning knowledge and ideas into practice. The idea is that reading and learning aren’t enough on their own; only through personal participation can you truly comprehend things. Through this process, you can develop an intimate understanding of the world and your role in it.

Then, it happened. I changed. In order to do this, I had to let big parts of myself go, parts that had already died, becoming nothing more but dead weight holding me back that I clung to out of blind familiarity. I chose to painfully destroy and kill parts of myself that were not yet dead, but dying. But unlike other dark and difficult deaths that I had faced, this one was different. This one allowed me to become a new thousand-times-lighter version of myself. It was a necessary death which allowed me to transition from being a passenger to being an autonomous human being. I learned how to participate in the practical struggle to change reality.

Before all of this happened, I might have described myself by listing some of my favorite books, songs, shows or films and I would have genuinely felt that because I related deeply to those things, they helped to define who I was. I would have continued in vain to seek out meaning through consumption.

Describing this process is the only way I know how to confidently introduce myself as I currently exist. So hello! I'm Rosa :>