86 · Brutal Openness

My past misconception — and see, I can say this fluently now without any emotional sting; see, I can watch my own thoughts, that's the metacognition; see, I said I did it wrong, not "people" did it wrong, a conscious effort against hasty generalisation and false ego — was thinking openness is about being accepting or easygoing. It's not. High openness means you are constitutionally incapable of holding a value without eventually questioning it. It means you dismantle your own frameworks as a matter of course. And somehow, I can't explain it, admitting I'm wrong no longer affects me emotionally. I guess it's a coalescence of having dealt with a narcissistic, tyrannical, alcoholic uncle's striking verbal abuse and manipulation — which gave me both a glimpse of malevolence in humanity and of how trauma stains people — along with a great childhood from my parents, and God by my side.

Being open-minded is not something beautiful and calm. It's frequent, brutal destruction — literal internal destruction. You know the truth that you are 99% wrong about most things, and you break every part of your beliefs on schedule. It's internal pain tolerance: how much can I kill my ego, make myself vulnerable, confront that I am wrong, that my effort is often useless for generating the desired outcome?

I can't say I am right. I am a Christian and a theist, but all of humanity is fundamentally agnostic — nobody can say as verified truth that God is real. That sentence starts a whole ontological cycle: what is truth — moral, empirical, foundational? What is real? Is the process of establishing truth the scientific method? If so, aren't we confining something transcendent to mere logic? But isn't that all we have? Then aren't these discussions futile? And we jump from Camusian absurdism to Nietzsche's dead God and around again. Even Jesus cried, "Why have you forsaken me?" — that outcry shows not all thoughts are "mine." They manifest from the flesh and the spirit both. The body says "this is the limit" — but that's just a manifestation; zoom out from the internal pain, watch yourself suffer, and you can bear far more. And this is not "atheists are wrong." This is what debates actually need: not stark juxtaposition but topological interplay. Two people discussing theism shouldn't be A versus B; it should be A plus B viewing it together from both sides. Both should be able to say — wow, that's right, that's interesting — abandon their position, lean fully into the opposite, hit a dead end, and walk back together. It's unfathomably rare to see this in intellectual discourse, especially public discourse.

And eventually it circumnavigates to the advice I need to hear: when your position becomes part of your identity, abandoning it feels like death.

I think one downside I have to manage is assertiveness. When you're off the charts in openness, you accept and listen to every insecure voice inside you, and you listen very openly to criticism. That's your superpower — you iterate where most people's pride blocks the feedback. But I lack the assertive, forceful level of execution when the situation calls for it. And now is the time for it. Listen to everybody who gives advice — be excited for negative feedback, it's the true alpha. But when you know what your gut says: reject every single thing and do what you know. For me, right now, that means: don't cancel the LSE application when the offer comes; ace the A-levels; and if it breaks, go back and reapply to Trinity College, Cambridge — again. It's totally worth gap years to reapply for the dream. With the stats in hand, you get in.

One thing I really need to change: the mental framework of "most people" versus me. Those constructions are instilled in me and they're false comparisons that feed either pride or despair. Say "I," and say it precisely.