Paul Conti

Did I get so lucky for 25 years, nothing bad happened?

Nothing but bad things are going to be happening.

Am I cursed?

Is my family cursed?

And I think that leads to, you say, the learning about the human mind.

In retrospect, I think I understood at the time, to some degree,

but not like I do now.

I can put words to it now, right?

Of like how incredibly important, powerful, powerfully important negative emotion is, right?

That how a sense of guilt and shame and vulnerability can just pervade

our entire life perspective.

So all of a sudden, we're swimming in a very different soup, and it's a frightening soup, and it's a toxic soup.

And I'm most struck by that.

And that goes along with the idea that we're not taught that emotion always beats logic.

I think the idea of Descartes, the idea that we're rational creatures, that kind of comes down to us through Western thought,

is like completely not true like we're rational creatures only if there is an emotion grabbing for our attention right like you know we're attending to one another we're being very logical right what we're doing now if we heard a frightening noise right outside the door like we'd be entirely different right the emotion would trump everything and say stop paying attention to this right now safety is at stake and we we think differently feel differently behave differently right and

This is what happens to us, not just in situations where something yanks us from one emotional state to another, but it can be very, very pervasive.

So my sense of anger, frustration, inadequacy, and then soothing in unhealthy ways, soothing by drinking too much, and then kind of hating myself in the first place, and hating the world around me, and then starting to think, well, who cares what happens?

There's some very dark thoughts

and choices that came from a changed perspective of self in the world.