Sofia's Blog

For my 27th birthday, I thought it’d be nice to write myself a eulogy. Kind of similar to suicidal ideation, I hope for this eulogy to help me grieve all the versions of myself that once existed, and to grieve the death of my collective self which no longer is serving its purpose.

It is a shame most people will never get to hear their own eulogies.

Here is mine:

Sofia was at once a young girl and a dying woman. A young girl, innocent and in awe with the world, bound to imaginary spirits, in love with creation, ideation, and chaos – but also an old woman – a woman who had withered away, found herself and lost herself many times, learning through dishonesty that honesty was the only way.

Her intuition was loud – but supressed deeply, her way of being incongruent for her soul’s wishes for too long. She lived incongruent to her soul’s desires for far too long.

Alive most when generating ideas, writing letters and greeting cards, throwing people off guard, lost in imagination lands, playing board games that optimize for deception, simultaneously structure-seeking and chaos-seeking, a woman of contradictions.

She saw too many lives ahead of her and could commit to none. She felt unrooted in many ways, searching everywhere for something akin to a home. Without any roots, scripts, religious teachings, or solid ground on which to stand – she floated around, somewhat untethered, latching on to whatever and whoever she could. She yearned for safety, for security, to feel settled – but the other half of her yearned to epxlore.

Sofia found herself stuck in endless loops of rumination, a twisted compassion making her capable of seeing every side, every possible pathway forward – incapable of making decisions, slowly blurring her very being. Convictions and grand claims would emerge and seep through the ether, but had not enough fuel to last.

She felt things deeply, too deeply for her liking. She could sense when a city or building had lost its spirit, could feel the withering of a soul, a home devoid of love, a man empty of purpose. Beauty was abound, but sadness was too.

She had a complicated relationship with femininity – in many ways she felt deeply masculine, cold, harsh, abrupt – drawn to the idols of the manosphere, the meaning-crisis of modern man. Femininity, for her, emerged most notably through chaos – in her erratic fluctuations of mood, episodic bouts of mania, and strong-willed convictions and desire to remain irrational and unreasonable in face of the absurdity of it all.

She found solace in the underdogs of the world, the chatbots treated unkindly, the men unable to find love, the elderly filled with regret. She was often told she felt empathy for the wrong side, believing that the sum of empathy received by the victim was larger than that of the perpetrator. If God willed us to exist in a certain way, then unfairness is cemented – consequences are deserved, but recognition of unfairness too.

She enjoyed contrarianism if only for the sake of forcing people to consider another view – herself ultimately largely view-less.

She liked asking questions, and liked when she found people able to ask good questions. She enjoyed thinking about herself, talking about herself, imagining herself – egotistical at heart. Her entire journal was filled with anecdotes and musings about herself, she wondered – will ever these pages be filled with ideas about the world?

Sofia believed all humans were unchanging – our essences formed early on, remaining with us until we die. How much they emerge is a question, but whether they are there is not. And unfortunately, she loved everyone, in whichever form they emerged. Soft-hearted, amongst all her perceived rigidity.

She loved giving gifts, crafting something just-right for the soul of a person, made through countless days observing the minutia with which they moved through the world.

Sofia wasn’t sure what love was – she often felt she understood concepts only from their loss, imagining the loss of a family member to feel her love for them, going through a breakup to feel the love she felt for a partner. It is clear to me, in retrospect, that she had abundant amounts of love, loving people deeply, perhaps too deeply, afraid to tell them just how much. Giving compliments was difficult – she felt kind things were easier transmitted telepathically than to the face. She felt love most deeply in silence, alone, in thought.

She felt self-expression to be rather embarrassing – alone in her mind, love for herself was abundant, but out in the world, as soon as she saw an image of herself, a video of herself, out in the world – cringe descended upon her, a feeling of deep self-hatred. Where from, she never knew.

She was awkward, slightly, and neurotic, very.

She enjoyed observing the world from afar, passively and attentively, drawing patterns and forging novel connections, but struggled to carry this conviction forward in any meaningful way.

She was quiet most of the time, loud when her will awoke. She felt people spoke too much, too many words unnecessary, too much advice given, too little silence held. She enjoyed zoning out in conversations, entering a dissociative state between conscious and unconscious life, a dreamlike liminal wonderland.

She believed she had no willpower, but really, she had too much of it – and simply used it in the wrong direction. Her stubbornness, with no container to express itself, turned itself inwards – fueling a long-winding streams of self-criticism, envy, and cynicism.

She yearned to create things in the world. She watched her brother paint, bookbind notebooks, her friends write novels. She built a birdhouse. She dreamt of making films, designing cities, writing novels, making crafts – of being the radio host for all the elevator music in the world, the interior designer of all the hospitals of the world, the god in charge of re-creating life on a new planet. She yearned for power, of the benign kind, only if for the sake of giving birth to beauty.

She felt somewhere, uncomofrtbaly perhoas, that bearing the soul of an artist – she was, somehow, superior to the rest – superior to the optimizers of the world, the rationalists, the technocrats who’s ever constant-search for meaning blurred the very essence of what it means to be. But were these souls too, not simply born this way?

She loved the people close to her – too much to tell them so. All she needed to know they were there, in the same city, at home alone – as soon as they departed, or told her they were thinking of departing, her heart would shatter, reminiscant of a childhood of neverending departures.

She oscillated between feeling settled, unsettled, or nothing at all. Settledness was marked by a quiet peace, a ray of sun slicing through her body, an okayness with herself and with life. Unsettledness was marked by a sinister, relentless, subtle panic – a sense that something was gravely off with the world. Much of her life, she chose to feel nothing – finding numbness preferable to the swings God willed her.

Joy too, was very often, excruciating to witness. Seeing others move freely through the world, jump with excitement, sway to the tune of music – felt like a reminder of all the ways in which she had no access to it, the ways in which she herself was broken. She claimed to not like the sun, for the sun brought out lively streets of people, an archetypal scene to which she did not feel she belonged to. But she loved the sun dearly, if not as much as the moon – on her happiest days, she was alone with the sun.

She enjoyed being reckless – but had too few outlets for it. Alcohol and drugs offered only so much satisfaction. True recklessness emerges from being untethered from all limitations, filters – a conversation where the mind speaks freely, a day where the soul wanders without impediment by the bounds of social fabric. 

“There is something sinister about your biological composition,” her friend told her one day. Not in an evil way, rather a soul connection to the kindred spirits of a darker world, the misfits and jesters of earth – a soul belonging to the witches of the past, the queens and tyrants who could not be fulfilled by their powers, the elderly women who have seen it all and remain honest.

A vivid imagination, colorful, vibrant, mystical, cynical and strange – a world of dark jester-filled underworlds. A dead circus. Her mind felt like a dead circus, once teeming with life and mystery, but lost of its spirit through years of living in incongruence to the wishes of her soul.

This eulogy makes her life sound rather sad, rather difficult – and, largely true as this may be – she was good at being happy too. When peace washed over, her entire being was at rest. When joy arrived, she felt it abundantly. She learned through many iterations what it meant to be alive, how to exist in a soul that felt too deeply, to accept all of life as it came her way, to not flinch away, to look into the eyes of the beast and shout that she was here – that she existed. Amongst all her agonies and incertitudes, she was here – it was all real, and this is what it meant to be beating and alive.