Note, December 5 2020: This subject matter will make more sense if you also read Internal Harmonic Resonant Capitulation and the Void.
The following is a letter I wrote starting on March 30 2020 and sent on April 10 2020. It consists of approximately 23000 words so I have split it up into three parts, each as its own article. You can also view the entire document as a pdf here.
Note on Personal Information
I have redacted all names of people. Deciding what to do about names of places was less straightforward-- as was more indirect personal details. In fact, this issue is what prompted me to write the general Note on Personal Information. That Note will help you understand why I have made some of the decisions that I have in order to convert this from a personal letter to a public article in an acceptable manner.
For the past two years I have worked at the same place where I attended college. As such, I have had some kind of presence at the college for almost six years. This makes it hard to separate my experiences as a college student from my present life as a college employee, if I am going to talk about those experiences. That being said, I am a nobody as I have no influence whatsoever on any decisions made at the college.
I refer to the college as its nickname, “MV”. I refer to the part of the college where I work as, “our workplace.” All other names of places have been either stripped of their pronouns or given more general ones. I left in the names of races.
One other thing. Sometime in 2017 or 2018 I went through all of my web pages and censored virtually all inappropriate words. I decided that I do not want to turn away people over something so small and unnecessary. I find that vulgar language lowers the level of consciousness, though I am still in the habit of using it in certain contexts. For this article I have decided not to censor such words, in order to be true to my own quotes.
~
I don't have the heart to not do this.
“One of the most difficult things to do is believe in something when doubt seems to be so much more logical.” - Travis Wildeboer
Overview: What is This and Why?
The main thing I want to convey is the conflict between expressing certainty and uncertainty. The question is whether I can go there 100% of the time. I have always desired to express my heart untarnished by anything in the external world as well as anything which is “negative” or life-degrading. That is my deepest longing. I have expressed that I believe in the purity and original perfection of life. I know we are meant to be something beautiful. But, I find it hard to escape the urge to resist every single thing around me which violates that pure beauty. Consequently there is indignation, frustration, and sorrow. My ideas about being a complete person have largely arisen from an impression that both fighting is necessary and also that not all of the original perfection of life can be recovered (hence the question, Does everyone [have to] have something wrong with them?). From there it is a matter of putting each thing in its proper place. This means the priority is being aligned with the idea of original perfection as much as possible. This requires purity of heart, which means not being weighed down by any kind of fear nor surface-level appearances. The idea is to then let any “fighting” flow naturally from there (if still necessary), instead of pushing oneself to fight per se.
I never completely lose touch with what I believe in: when it does happen I at least am aware that I am just putting on an appearance for people or am demoralized. I never lose all 100% of my soul. My goal, however, is to express 100% of my soul 100% of the time. I find it tempting to share my deliberations and the various things I take pain in. I want every bit of my thought process to be known. However, I wonder if the need for that actually degrades the quality of the process. So, at least this one time I want to try sharing only what is absolutely necessary. I want to give you the best. That is apt because this letter addresses the leader of all subject matter: the void.
Sharing my thoughts is fulfilling because it brings to us a shared consciousness. Sometimes I address my writing to you, remove all of the personal details later, and in the end it looks like an article or essay. I do this because I feel most connected when I am trying to communicate with a specific individual rather than a faceless mass; and, so far I have been able to communicate more honestly and completely with you than with any other human. Personality matters because the most important thing in life is what you are. Deep down, “objective truth” from any source is not sufficient, because the ultimate goal is not just a philosophy but what you become. To be or not to be: that is the question. What you are determines your connection to the void. That is why we are here now. To clarify things I must tell you how we got here.
I am tempted to say that the dumbest thing I have done in regard to you is wait six months before talking to you again after our first conversation, from October 2018 to April 2019. I constantly thought about talking to you but I just did not have enough in me. I had too many doubts, internal conflicts, and sorrows. I wanted to figure out things for myself as much as I could and only talk to you if I truly had to. I did not have anything substantial enough to say nor sufficient heart to talk to you. I would be okay with this if not for the downward spiral which began with long-term injuries, added health problems, and finally climaxed in the global situation we face now. How differently might life have gone if I had had more faith? Why must I often be pushed to the point of having close to nothing left before I rise?
I have made it clear enough to you that while I desire purity and the original perfection of life, I must also have qualities which make it possible for the innocent to exist on Earth without being destroyed by what is materialistic, economic, and fallen. This dichotomy is what makes my existence, “Glorious, and also sorry.” When I met you I had my ideas about how important heart is, yet I also knew I had to be tough. In Fall 2018 I always leaned toward being tough. I knew that even if it meant I would not talk to you much I would have more of your respect that way. With my last letter I turned the tables. Having the experience that I do I was concerned that I would lose my strength before you and you would find me contemptible instead of respectable. Talk is fallen and putting your heart on your sleeve opens you to be crucified. What really is killer to my intellect at this point in the game is that I could have written that letter as soon as I met you, since all of its content and ideas are from that time (aside from Assange being on trial). Timing is on my side, yet I am frustrated to be on the current track knowing that I could have avoided it if I had been less stubborn and demoralized. Or, could I have avoided it? I sometimes thought of asking you about psychic experiences or just telling you straight-out what I was experiencing. Maybe that is what I should have done; instead, some kind of grave has been dug over the last 1.5 years. In vulnerability I get to feel the full extent of my love. I know that my strength comes from vulnerability and that is why I have decided to tell you all the things I have so far. But I waited too long to do that and my letter was also probably too vague on that point. Both heart and strength mandate “no whining” but I did want to express how I potentially have failed both you and myself. Every time that I have written to you I feared that it would be regarded as either deficient somehow or too “dark” and “hateful.” But it turns out that the most undesirable quality is meekness (unless it truly is the best you can do which is virtually never the case). That is why I wanted to talk to you about the expression of certainty. I got scared that you would be scared of me after reading my letter and that was a mistake. I always fear losing what I love and in the end its loss is always my own fault.
In your presence I cannot scrutinize nor deflate myself because that will turn you away from me. At the same time, though, I do not like to impose on anything. After I gave you my previous letter I got caught up in that. I didn't have enough substance to be confident in at that point to overcome my desire to be nothing and non-imposing. I am sorry, not merely in the sense of apology but also sorrow that I felt the need to be that way. I believe that no matter what you do not want me to be that way. Though, I did mean it when I asked whether I could take that textbook.
It has been easy to feel demoralized over and unsure of what I should include this letter. But there is no other true way to move forward at the moment.
On the last day that MV was open, after leaving I decided that I would tell the story of my relationship to you (I suppose “to” you indicates a general relationship whereas “with” you indicates a romantic relationship). I went there because I wanted to talk to you about how life will be different now. My main point regarded being different from before. Most of the times that I have talked to you I have emphasized uncertainty and a degree of anguish. I told you once that I am always both certain and uncertain. The only time I directly expressed the stronger, more certain, more eternal part of myself to you is when I asked you to take my folder last month. I think that is how I will always need to be in due time. Perhaps I was not meant to have that conversation with you. Instead I am communicating the message in this format, which is far more complete because I am giving you the story instead of the distilled message alone, which was the plan at that point.
I ended my last letter by wondering what I am meant to be, all things considered. I can see how my spirit has been quashed into greyness over the years, in various ways. I think I feel sorry over the way this has gone. I'm not sure I want to keep the story as I have told it due to the greyness and sorrow. In how ascended of a manner can I tell it? Must it be “grey” to some extent? I know that if I had to immediately transcend all negativity of any sort I would just tell the story. So, here we go.
Part One is the backstory of how I came to be who I am by the time we met. Part Two (begins on Page 14) covers most of the time that I have known you. Part Three (page 28) addresses 2020; that is, the recent past, the present, and the future. Together these three parts make up the entirety of my time at MV.
The goal of all my writing is to ascend, through the acts of both writing and sharing the writing. A more specific goal of this particular piece is to provide the story behind what I have said over the years.
Part One: Fall 2014-Summer 2018
2014-15: Crushed by the Real World
Along with the shift from uncertainty to certainty is likewise a shift from merely buying time to living actively. The need to buy time is what initially brought me to MV in 2014. I did not want to attend college but I knew I needed time. I launched kimwrate.com in November 2014 and regarded this, the messages I share, and all that goes into them as my real priority. I basically was crushed my first year of school, and that is partially why it took me so long to get an Associate's Degree. At 18 this place was corrupting and demoralizing for me. I was not that accustomed to people who drink, use drugs, and sleep around. I had no good way to handle what I was dealing with. I was basically a naïve girl who had barely ever stepped foot outside of her hometown (with the exception of vacation spots and cross country/track meets). It really showed when I started college. I was not perfectly innocent as I had engaged in semi-regular self-harm for eight months at age 15 and at 16 was hospitalized (in the ER: no medication nor institutionalization involved) for a few hours for being suicidal over what was the beginning of my desire to return to Nature and thinking that I did not belong there nor in current human society (and for also fearing that humans had no higher consciousness. See my book, What is a Real Life?). Still, these experiences did not equip me properly for dealing with what I would find at college. Even though I still lived at home and physically was not far from home, spiritually, psychologically, and socially I had been thrown out into the world alone, like a fawn ripe to be torn apart by wolves.
My senior year of high school I had been significantly weakened by a prescription of antibiotics which followed the extraction of my upper wisdom teeth. All drugs, legal and illegal, medicinal and recreational, take something from you. Always. Every single drug application will always have undesired side effects and damage you to some extent. There are no exceptions. I learned this the hard way and as a result I have not taken a single pill since then which was 6.5 years ago (August 2013). No pain relievers-- nothing. I did try drugs several times (cannabis twice and a “nerve pill” which why did I say yes to that?) during this embarrassing first year of college and now I have had no drugs whatsoever in almost five years (except maybe incidental caffeine several times from tea). I keep saying how things are embarrassing and I have to explain myself but I know I should not do that. Part of the reason I don't need to do that is, as I have said, every experience and possibly even every thing in existence can have value somehow. I was interested in cannabis because I thought it would expand my consciousness and help me to reflect on myself accurately. I had heard about people taking ayahuasca with Amazonian shamans and basically getting scolded by the interdimensional beings they met into being better people. I wanted the same thing to happen to me. In the Spring 2015 semester I was incredibly anxious and demoralized. At the start of the semester I tried my first 100-mile race. In my training during the Intersession I started to have sciatic nerve pain in my left leg (which I later resolved: see The Great Back Pain Myth). Combine that with not really knowing what I was doing to finish a Winter race (didn't bring enough food, didn't have a good way to carry water in the cold) and I dropped out after 62.5 miles. This is the same Winter race I did in 2015 (dropped after 62.5 miles), last year (finished), and this year (dropped after 75 miles), the Beast of Burden. Failing at that race left me with a lot of self-doubt. I was barred from racing for the rest of Indoor Track season and I crashed my Mom's car about a week later: I damaged just a headlight and part of the surrounding body of the car so we still have the car. I didn't affect any other cars so that made the situation less costly and heated than it could have been. At this time I started feeling weak throughout the day, like I might pass out, and that remained to be the case for most of the semester. My heart would race and I would feel light-headed (this problem ended around the time I wrote Moving Away from Self-Criticism on April 28 2015). So, that's part of why I wanted to get punished into enlightenment by psychedelic drugs. I didn't seek them out, though: instead I was presented with an opportunity one day.
In May 2015 our women's outdoor track team won our division's national championship meet, which was a home meet for us. I qualified for the meet in the 3000m Steeplechase but too many of my teammates were faster than me so I did not get to participate. To celebrate the victory most of the women's team and a few of the men went to a teammate's house which was free of parents. This was the first time I tried cannabis, which I consider to be the mildest psychedelic drug. The second and only other time was a month later. What I found is that the cannabis produced a kind of false enlightenment. I was self-reflective when I took it but if it's not obvious I pretty much always am. I felt somewhat less inhibited than usual. The second time I used cannabis all it showed me is that I should not have been in the situation I was in and, thus, if I had just avoided it in the first place I would have avoided using the cannabis as well. The first time I focused on my difficult unpleasant relationship situation and was unable to come to any conclusions: I'm inclined to say that it pointed to about the same (i.e. “you should not be where you are”). Both times I coughed a lot. By the way, I don't think the team broke any rules which would now be important since it was after the season ended. Anyway, I was very close to using cannabis again that Summer but I could feel that not only was the setting not appropriate but that I was too desperate and needy. This might have stemmed from the fact that I thought I needed it so I could be “punished” into enlightenment. So, it ended up that I never did use it again.
All of that tangent came from me talking about drugs. I was talking about drugs to tell you I had been weakened by antibiotics at the start of my senior year and that caused me to slow down significantly as a runner (from a 20:27 5K to always over 22 minutes); consequently, I ended up being slower than most of my teammates in college. That added to my overall weakness as a person at that point in my life and consequently getting crushed by what is not even considered the “real world” but just a community college in a city where people mourn for some past which was more glorious than the present until the factories and military base left and many of the Italians and Irish and Germans left for the surrounding towns because you know why and that's why I live in a town instead of the city, because my parents fled the city (and, yes, that is my ethnic makeup: I also might have a British great-grandparent but have not confirmed this yet).
Time Away from School: 2015 and 2016-17
A quick clarifying note and a story which helps to demonstrate the void and its timing. The semesters of school I attended were Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, and Fall 2017. I did not attempt any others. So, I had an 8-month break from school in 2015 and a 16-month break from school in 2016-17 before I graduated. In May 2015 I left demoralized and was not sure whether I would finish. In January 2016, at nearly the last minute, an urgent feeling came to me which said I needed to go back to school and also be on the track team. I went to a local Indoor Track to see if I could race unattached (the request was rejected). I also talked to our coach and he said he would take me back as long as I could get everything in order academically. There was a mentally handicapped man (I don't know the politically correct terms anymore) at the meet whom I had met several times prior at various places around the local area. He talked to me about MV. I told him I had started school there and had then taken a break. He said, “You should go back to school.” I regarded that as the confirmatory message to my feeling that I should go back. In surface-level terms it is hard to convey the significance since the conversation does not sound that special, but the energy and timing with which he said this spoke to me on a sufficiently deep level. I told the story of returning to school in A Return with Love on January 25 2016.
I enrolled in a class called Security Policies which met in-person just once per month for a total of four times in the semester. During the third meeting I decided to walk out and I withdrew from the class 10 weeks into the semester (around that time I wrote Shrinking Authority, on March 14 2016). I was on track to graduate that semester with a certificate in Cybersecurity. A feeling came over me which I interpreted to mean that I was not meant to graduate then. Combine that with the feeling of the unimportance of this class and I indeed did not graduate. This is another testament to life's timing. If I had graduated with my certificate I might have decided that was good enough and I didn't need to continue school. That means I never would have attended school in Fall 2017 and, as you will see, that would mean that I would not have taken this job. To “normal” people my dropping out of that class was the result of me just being an irresponsible 19-year-old punk. But the meaningful reality is that I had to drop the class so that I could fulfill life in the particular timeline as it has happened. Otherwise I might not have met certain people who have been significant to me including yourself. That particular lecture was held in a classroom which has since been absorbed by our workplace.
I lived in my car from May 31-August 11 2016. In the time prior to this I had become increasingly interested in artificial intelligence. It got to a point where I thought computers might even become people's best friends, more in-tune than any human since each person's computer could know virtually everything about them and calculate how to best serve the person (see Computers and Consciousness). As such, one of the main things I focused on during this time was studying the matter. I typically like to distill my own thoughts on a matter without getting bogged down in what other people have said. I found that a lot of “AI” more or less takes the form of chatbots. I found that way too shallow since it mainly consisted of language. Instead of getting bogged down in language like that, I became interested in discerning what I called “pure intelligence” and then finding a way to build a machine around that. It was not meant to be some kind of brain but the elements of intelligence embodied or embedded in a mechanical form. That Summer I also spent time in the Adirondacks and went camping for the first few times in my life. I remember clearly enough that after reading a physics text in late July a feeling came over me, by which I decided that natural ability should be of greater interest than building technology. This was the start of what has become one of my primary trains of thought, which I basically introduced in An Alternative to the Technological Singularity on November 19 2016 and Expanding Human Capability on December 10 2016. Another important train of thought developed while I lived in my car, which is that I felt I did not belong anywhere. As soon as I arrived somewhere I had to start thinking about leaving. No place in the world was mine. The first time I had thought this was at age 16, as I mentioned above, when I felt the world of human creation was too soul-crushing and simultaneously I was too unfit to live in nature.
Both for the purposes of this letter and given what I have said elsewhere I do not believe I need to speak any more in-depth about May 2016-September 2017 at this time.
The way I returned to school in Fall 2017 was similar to how I returned in Spring 2016: with a feeling of urgency which came over me one day. It was in July 2017 that I felt I must at least finish the class I had dropped. In time that transformed into me taking a full schedule of classes to complete an Associate's Degree in Cybersecurity that semester. I almost did not make it due to scheduling conflicts. Once I had this complete schedule I realized that I still had a season of eligibility in Fall sports at the Junior College level and could now use it. As you will see, it is important that this all came together, due to the way my life would end up going because of it.
2017: Change in Worldview
I did not return to my previous level of running speed until 2017, after I found a program which helps removes toxins heavy metals from the body and heals the gut. I probably had some extent, version of, or kin to Leaky Gut Syndrome after I took the antibiotics and this program healed that (see Heavy Metals Detox: the Basics). I felt stronger and less sensitive psychologically. This was a major influence on my worldview which was indeed changing at that time following the 2016 election, having lived in my car, and three semesters of college (in reverse order). These experiences had shown me both ugliness in the world and inferiority in myself. It was occurring to me that I had been naïve and that people were not as much on the same page as me as I had hoped-- a rather dark yet inescapable aspect of my thought now.
Looking at my naivete, weakness, and misalignment with Nature again and again made me decide in June 2017 that I wanted to be celibate for the rest of my life. It was rather apparent that my sexuality had been my weakness and there was no good reason for that since it would never produce anything of value such as a family. It is kind of a weird situation but it makes enough sense to me: it is like I have to be celibate behaviorally but not psychologically. If I cut off my feelings I have the sense of being a husk of a person. It is like being a robot or even lower. This has been difficult for me to figure out and I partially reflected on this process in the last letter I wrote to you (see “The Spiritual War”): to repeat, how I met a woman when I returned to school in September 2017, ended up sabotaging my relationship to her after months of internal conflict, clarified most of my ideology, ran that race (the Mighty Mosquito) in which I didn't finish but otherwise self-realized to what I believe is the highest degree yet for myself, and then I met you in September 2018 and now here we are.
I disdain returning to this topic again and again because it is viewed by many with disgust, and I understand why. I've assumed you are more accustomed to a left-wing worldview than I am (not that the left-right dichotomy is the real truth, but you have an idea of what I mean). I used to take this general worldview for granted until the changes in 2017 I am speaking of. So if it is not clear, the basic reason for disgust at same-sex relationships is that 100% of such relationships are about power rather than real love. The more dominant, masculine person hurts the more feminine and typically more wide-eyed, naïve person. I experienced this first-hand at 18 as the weaker person. Again, I disdain talking about this stuff but there may be some worth and I have a point (though, should I have a point? Is that not controlling as in, a form of damage control?). I cannot say that I've ever not been single but I had a rather tumultuous relationship to a woman, who is a year older than me, from November 2014 to November 2016. She had a boyfriend the entire time I knew her. Intimate contact happened, as I previously said, only three times; so, that is the explanation for my having “never not been single.” She is the only person I have ever been with in any way. I had my first kiss at 18 and my last at 19, close to five years ago. I am technically a virgin- never entered- though not 100% pure, not untouched. Her boyfriend told her that if she ever was intimate with another woman to “take videos” so neither of them considered it to be cheating (though she did not take videos). These two years were quite painful for me, and my first year of college (2014-15) was the worst of it. I've always said that I felt like I sat in a spinny chair and was spun around hundreds of times. At the end I wrote I Wish it Worked, But it Doesn't on November 18 2016.
Why did I willingly go into this situation? What allowed me to do so was the rather liberal worldview I had at the time. In 2014 I had read unconventional views of sex which advocated eschewing propriety and most taboos. I agreed that furnishing this aspect of life with so many rules seemed fearful and dumb. Unfortunately very little of this reading pertained to regulating oneself and the fact that sex actually has a purpose which is reproduction. Liberalism is basically nihilistic and consequently hedonistic and materialistic in that it says very little matters as long as you don't hate anybody (except for haters). Other than that just do whatever you want; and, moreover, who cares? That is the nihilism of liberalism. Nihilism is just a form of either soullessness or jadedness (depending on what one is to begin with). There is a fine line between valuing fearless freedom and being nihilistic: at 18 I was not refined enough to discern where this line is. Not only that but I was plagued by another aspect of liberalism which it happens to share with Christianity. Christian guilt is the constant need to repent of one's sins and beg for forgiveness. When such a guilty conscience is combined with sensuality the result is a constant internal rebellion and punishing of oneself for that. It was with that psychology that I got myself into the situation that I did at 18. So it ended up that this woman was both the primary educator of how naïve I was and also a nightmare-- both what I desired and also my punishment.
This mostly took place on the psychological plane as many things do for me. This aspect of myself has always confused other people because they are more caught up in the surface world and have less of an inner life than I do. Call that statement “mean” if you want but it is rather blatantly true. This is important because the void requires an ability to see beyond the surface world. The void requires a worldview which states that everything in reality is for the sake of self-realization; hence, Love is just the force that shapes you for your destiny.
Note that my change in worldview led me to remove and edit a number of pages of kimwrate.com, so there are not as many helpful references from prior to June 2017 as there could have been.
In my last letter I told you that I started talking to you because you seemed to fulfill a certain ideal. That is not untrue but the ultimate force which made the necessity of my talking to you undeniable was the void. This is the very subject I have avoided for years. Now I no longer have other desirable options anymore and time is running out. The first question is, how am I going to deliver this message-- with anxious, suppressed blathering or with a temperament worthy of the gods?
2017-18 Schoolyear: Conflicted Over Love
I started this job on February 12 2018. I knew about it only because I had to run cable through our workplace starting on November 1 2017 as part of my Network Administration internship during my last semester of school. I never went in there until I had to. I recognized one of my former co-workers, now working here. I learned about this job from her and I decided that when I graduated I would apply. Interest grew into a conviction that I had to take this job. When I was hired I wrote, “As always, I wonder who I will meet, what I will learn, what the bigger picture of me being here is.” During that semester I traveled to track meets with the school's team and competed unattached. A few of the athletes had been my cross country teammates the prior semester. This included the woman I loved at the time. To make this simpler I am going to tell you that her name is Stacey. Stacey is not her real name: no one currently in my life is named Stacey. For better or worse I could not effectively the story, both here and in future writings, without mentioning that she was my teammate. Anyway, the relationship I had to Stacey was the opposite of the one I had with that other woman my first year of school. My first year of school I was the weaker person in the relationship, mainly due to my inexperience and naivete, and I was hurt. With Stacey I was the stronger one. Two differences from the first relationship were that I never had any kind of physical intimacy with her and I also treated her well. My relationship to her was far more enjoyable than what I went through in 2014-16. We had very few fights or arguments that were not comical or ultimately light-hearted. Stacey is straight unlike the other woman so there was not any sort of physical intimacy but you'd have to be a hedonistic soulless moron to think that is a more important aspect of any kind of relationship than the spirit of the relationship. Physical intimacy is life-destroying if it is done with the economic mindset of trying to take and indeed that is the only way that I got to experience it from the ages of 18-20. It would be simpler to just call the first woman I was with Girl#1. When I met Girl#1 I was 18 and she was 19. When I met Stacey I was 21 and she was 19.
Let me clarify something. In January I told you that I found a man attractive but was also repulsed by the situation and knew “it could not happen,” so to speak. That was correct and I do not feel in that specific way anymore. I had a similar situation during my year off from school. Both of these males were 19 years old at the time that I was attracted to them. Both times I tried very hard to hang on to these feelings but they were too fleeting and unsustainable. I have figuratively beaten myself to a pulp over this but I just do not have what it takes to love a man; and, moreover, it is perhaps not in line with what I am meant to be. So, here I am telling you about all these dames. I met another woman during my third semester of school in Spring 2016 and I basically got my ass kicked again just like I did with the one from my first year of school (Girl#1) so that semester does not offer much to add. That woman turned 19 years old during that semester. This leads me to another thing, which is that I have had not just a pattern but a complete consistency of being attracted to 19 year olds. This has me wondering if for many people this is the last year of life before they become jaded. For people who first attend community college, for example, after age 19 they then go on to a four-year college and get corrupted by the people, ideologies, and drugs there. A major aspect of my relationship to Stacey was my fear of her becoming corrupted, particularly after she left community college. I did not want her to start associating with economic-type college girls who are just “trying to get their fix.” Here you see my fears taking root and consequently my trying to control the external world. I was conflicted not only by my desire for her but also by my desire for her to not be tarnished by this godforsaken world. I experienced the same thing with all of the others that I was attracted to. Again, that could be why the age of 19 is relevant: perhaps I sensed that, in all likelihood, this is the last chance before they are lost to the doom of the material world. I have always failed to do anything effective about it. Now I have to just tell things as they are and have happened.
I have told you that once Stacey refused to talk to me any longer it became clear to me that heart, instead of trying to control the external world, is the true way forward-- even if it means never having what you want on the surface world (like the people you love and their not being corrupted). That is the most important thing I have gained from my relationship to her. The second most important thing I gained is power. From the very first second that I spoke to her on September 13 2017 I insisted on exuding confidence. This was utterly different from how I had always been my whole life. If I had met her any earlier than this we probably would not have gotten along. Take note of this because the void always gives you what you need at just the right timing. This confidence was a large factor in what made our relationship enjoyable. It was helpful that I decided to be this way anyway because I was the fastest runner on the cross country team and was unofficially its leader. Once a week we would run to the golf course to do hill workouts. On the way back one day I saw two of my teammates: I think they started practice late or somehow got separated from the rest of us. I told them I was wondering where they were because, “I need to keep my bitches in line.” They smiled at this. That was the way I operated at that point in my life. It was definitely the opposite of my first year of college. Instead of feeling pushed around by the world, at 21 I understood that the rest of the world was not on the same page as me. That meant that I had to drop any kind of “weird” conversation and exude strength. It was new for me but it seemed that I was respected and I enjoyed this. My teammates were rather opposite from those of the first year, too: no drinking, no drugs, no romantic/sexual dramas-- at least, none that I heard about. No one went out to 18+ nights, which was basically a part of being on the team my first year of school. Likewise, I developed a kind of constructive polarity with people who were more feminine or passive than I was. I helped Stacey to prepare for her first half-marathon after cross country season ended. I gave her workouts to do and I ran most of them with her, including the race itself. She told me she was hoping to finish the race in under two hours and thirty minutes. I told her that I thought she could break two hours and she did. I felt that she and I were powerful together. We appreciated one another's support. By the end of the season I finally was running as fast as I did in high school, in the time before I got wrecked by antibiotics.
Two weeks after cross country season ended I ran an eight-hour race called MFAMTL Fall Edition. There were 77 people in the race and I ran 44.2 miles, which was further than everyone else ran. When I left I drove straight to the mall, where she worked, to return her GPS watch to her. She was walking out just as I was walking in (timing is on my side). I showed her my trophy which is a cardboard star on a ribbon that I can wear around my neck. I was mentioned in the February 2018 edition of Ultrarunning Magazine on a list of women who won outraces “outright” in 2017. Out of almost 400 total races I have been the overall winner of a co-ed race only twice, and this was the first time. We were both proud of my achievement and it reinforced the theme of us being powerful together.
Lightning
The peak of the experience of power actually arrived at the same time as the peak of my internal conflict over this situation. As good as things were overall I could not help but desire her more than I could express. In April 2018, when I was traveling with the track team, the situation reached a point where I would sometimes feel ill. In fact, my dentist found decay in one tooth in February 2018 (there was no decay in August 2017-- nor ever in any of my teeth). It was at that same time that I began to have pain and hard tissue in at least one breast. To use a familiar phrase, I was basically worrying myself to death over this situation. It would be totally unacceptable for her to find out how I felt but I wanted her but I couldn't have her but I didn't want her to be doomed to a mediocre and/or corrupted life but I felt impotent to do anything about that but I would feel sorry if I stopped talking to her. I felt impotent and I also desired to be innocent. Even though I enjoyed exuding strength I could not deny that I also had more sensitive and heartfelt feelings. I often tried to shoo those feelings away, thinking that they had no place in my life and could only get in my way. I had been crushed so many times by exuding weakness, want, and oversensitivity and I had no intentions on this happening again. As time went on, though, it all got harder for me to hold on to. I read a book called The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida and I felt sorry that I was basically incapable of implementing the advice in the book. I am naturally too impotent and there is no way around that.
In the face of looming impotence and ultimate failure, my entire being resisted. My plan for the Cortland Classic Invitational on April 21 2018 was to run, in a single day, the four longest events being contested: 10,000 meters; 5000m; 3000m steeplechase; and 1500m. I had not competed in steeplechase in two years and needed to practice. You would not have believed that I had competed in steeplechase for three track seasons. I could barely even go over a hurdle properly. I always struggled somewhat but never like this. Things did not improve much from day to day. Two days before the track meet, on April 19, I walked away from a hurdle and went back inside. I sat in a chair in relative isolation and did one of the few things I could from The Way of the Superior Man, which was to sit in discomfort with my pain. I opened myself to the most deep-seated pain I could conceive of. In the following hours, separate times I saw two women from the track team and they both asked whether I was okay. I was not crying or anything so my pain must have shown itself on my face somehow.
I want to be clear that this was one of the darkest periods of time in my life. Not only is it difficult to revisit but I am considering that it must be spoken of in its own piece of writing. It cannot just be part of the backstory of a letter like this. I will just tell you that at the Cortland Classic I did run all four races as planned and they went incredibly well. I improved my time in the 10K by 98 seconds (from 44:18 to 42:40) and ran my fastest 5K of the year so far after running the three other races in the same day. This, indeed, was an experience of power, though it turned out to be unsustainable and did not solve my problems. In a later notebook I blamed Stacey for “destroying my heart” and fueling this intense darkness. She “replied,” “You were always like that. I just brought it out more.” That sounds like something she could actually say, by the way.
Spring-Summer 2018: The End
The real beginning of the end of our relationship occurred over my attempt to thru-hike the Northville-Placid Trail starting on May 14. I stopped one-third of the way through the trail; specifically, one mile into the longest section of wilderness on the trail, from Piseco to Wakely Dam. This is the section where I injured my knees on July 27 2019, though heading south instead of north. It is tempting to be spooked by the possible foreshadowing. I have seen in the last few years that the wildest nature requires the most purity as it has the highest potential to destroy you if you go to it out of integrity. Apparently all four times that I went to this trail I was out of integrity enough that I got hurt and more or less performed poorly.
Once I had left the woods I called her since she had originally agreed to give me a ride back to my car when I was done running. This was still the same day on which I had planned to be done but she had other plans now. We argued. I wanted the opportunity to be alone with her. I could feel the meanness in the way I was being but I decided not to hold it back. In the last letter when I referred to “hiding” and “lying” this is what I meant: I tried to find ways to be with her without ever talking about how I felt. I did not want her to know certain details about my life including my past and my website, as I knew that would ruin everything. With this approach I was doomed to fail eventually-- to be overturned by divine order. That doom came to pass starting with this phonecall.
The day she left me was June 18 2018. I went to MV to run 20x400m on the track. It was hot outside-- maybe in the mid to high 80s. Then it poured rain. While it rained I wrote in my car, which ended up being an article I titled, The Struggle vs. the Will. Then I went to see her at work and this was it. I was in wet clothes but I just felt that I had to go. We basically had a 20-minute argument though with a gap of a few minutes while she had to do other things. I had fallen from grace in the last month and it showed, and she expressed the repulsion she had at this. At the end she kicked me out of her workplace and those were her last words to me.
I gave you a fair overview of Summer 2018 in my last letter. This period of my life was possibly the most aligned I have ever been with timelessness and the original perfection of life.
While I was going through all of the things I have spoken of so far, you and I were only a few hundred feet apart from each other (in 2018 you told me you had been at MV in some form for five years). The key is that we were not meant to meet until I reached a certain point in my thinking, which came after that finest day of my life (August 4-5 2018: see “The Spiritual War”) and also long enough after that I was in need of further clarity. I saw you at least twice during the spring semester and I remember wondering whether you were a student or an employee, but that was the extent of it. I received an e-mail from you during that semester. I remember I didn't wonder who you were, make note of your name, nor anything of the sort. I figured you were some higher-up whose position I was not necessarily going to become aware of. Finally later in the semester I saw you walking outside one day and thought, Isn't that that girl?
I understand the amount of detail I have may be unsettling. I find it sorrowful that the only acceptable way to be is some kind of unaware idiot. But, as I have said multiple times now, we know how I have to be. Moreover, the details provided are relevant to the overall point.
Go to Part Two.