reading room
Trying to Bite Your Own Teeth
i'm so unsure
whether uncertainty is wisdom is jut fear with a reading list.
I envy people who seem able to arrive at conclusions without circling them for three hours first. People who say things like "this is obviously wrong" and apparently sleep perfectly well afterwards.
Which is interesting, because I use words like "obviously" too.
I wrote "cruelty" earlier without hesitation.
It's strange how quickly my uncertainty disappears around suffering.
Then I spend fifteen minutes choosing between two moisturisers as though one of them contains the morally correct way to exist inside a body.
Sometimes I stand completely still in supermarket aisles because every choice suddenly branches outward into consequences I cannot fully calculate.
Factory farms. Packaging. Rainforests. Advertising. My own hypocrisy. Whether wanting anything at all already compromises the whole exercise.
Meanwhile somebody nearby has already chosen cereal without accidentally questioning the structure of reality.
Or worse, I do know how I feel, and the feeling arrives first while the explanation rushes after it buttoning its shirt.
Split-brain patients do things and then the brain invests a reason smooth enough to trust.
I think about that constantly.
How many of my beliefs were feelings first?
How many arguments are just emotions with better grammar?
And if that sentence felt convincing, was that because it was true or because my brain enjoys symmetry?
Love appears. Fear appears. Disgust. Tenderness.
I never consciously select any of them.
They simply arrive already carrying names.
Maybe morality does too.
I still recoil from screams before philosophy arrives.
I've spent entire evenings trying to untangle conviction from instinct, then trying to untangle instinct from social conditioning, then trying to determine whether the distinction even exists.
At some point the whole thing starts folding in on itself.
Something ancient in me still hears rustling grass and prepares for teeth.
Which probably kept somebody alive once.
Truth may have been incidental.
And then I realise the thing producing all this doubt is the exact same organ I'm trying to doubt.
A brain examining itself feels a bit like trying to bite your own teeth.
Or trying to look directly at your own eyes without a mirror.
SOmetimes I genuinely think everyone else received some fundamental instruction manual that I misplaced immediately.
The world keeps telling me to follow my heart.
My heart is tissue and electricity.
It reacts before "I" do.
Maybe certainty does too.
Bertrand Russell wrote that stupid people are full of certainty while intelligent people are full of doubt.
In ordinary life that often feels true.
Science works.
We can predict eclipses centuries in advance, photograph black holes, send signals into space and receive information back from things older than language.
Every sunrise feels persuasive.
That bothers me.
Because persuasion isn't proof.
Pattern is not proof. Habit is not proof. Memory is not proof.
And still I set alarms as though tomorrow has signed a contract.
I buy groceries like the future is guaranteed to arrive.
The assumptions work with terrifying consistency.
Enough consistency that doubting them too much starts to resemble illness.
WHich is maybe why almost nobody does it all the way.
Sometimes I think if I questioned every assumption with complete sincerity I would never leave bed again.
Or speak.
Or tust language enough to finish a sentence.
The strange things is that society mostly functions because people pretend they know enough.
Doctors. Teachers. Parents. Scientists.
Me.
Especially me.
I keep writing sentences that sound definitive in a poem about uncertainty.
I don't read philosophy expecting answers anymore.
Mostly I read it the way people watch demolition videos.
One argument kicking holes through another.
And then another arriving to kick holes through that one too.
Sometimes I lie awake wondering whether rationality is just an extremely sophisticated form of guessing correctly often enough.
Or whether that sentence itself only feels intelligent because I've heard variations of it before.
I say "I" constantly despite not understanding what that word refers to.
Am I a consciousness looking outward at a world beyond itself?
Or part of the world mistakenly experiencing separation because separation happened to be useful?
I don't know how I could verify either.
And even that statement quietly assumes verification is possible.
Maybe consciousness produces reality. Maybe reality produces consciousness.
Maybe both ideas are embarrassingly human.
Maybe the need to choose between them is too.
I reach for a glass of water before becoming aware of deciding to reach for it.
The songs somebody listened to at fourteen until two in the morning. The exact tone a person used once that still reappears years later without permission. Being called "too sensitive" often enough that it starts sounding medical.
Apparently large sections of my brain have stopped keeping me informed.
But guilt still exists somehow.
Regret too.
I still replay conversations from years ago like my brain is trying to revise history through sheer repetition.
Maybe certainty is unavoidable.
Or maybe I only say that because uncertainty becomes exhausting after enough years.
Sometimes a chord progression resolves in exactly the right way and my body believes it before my mind has time to object.
Then five minutes later I'm back to questioning whether meaning itself is only another feeling arriving too quickly.
Sometimes somebody speaks gently to me and for a few seconds doubt stops talking.
Not permanently. Just long enough for me to notice the silence.
Walking home through cold streets with music in my headphones feeling almost unearably grateful that consciousness exists at all.
Then immediately wondering whether gratitude is just dopamine misinterpreting itself poetically.
None of those feelings were chosen either.
They happened to me.
I care about frighten animals in a way that genuinely hurts sometimes.
We can map distant galaxies while building industrial systems designed around screaming.
I notice I never put quotation marks around suffering.
Maybe that means something.
Or maybe pain only feels morally obvious because evolution made social creatures that way.
Or maybe saying that already feels vaguely monstrous.
I honestly can't tell anymore.
Maybe this is intellectual honesty.
Or maybe I'm just afraid of becoming somebody who mistakes confidence for understanding.
Tomorrow I will probably speak confidently again.
I'll say "that's cruel" or "that's beautiful" or "I know."
And part of me will believe it completely.
Another part will immediately begin interrogating the sentence.
And another part will become suspicious of the interrogation too.
i'm still unsure
— Lilith