When one first steps outside, the mind does not meet the world openly.

It scans for people.

Who is walking the dog. Who is backing out of the driveway. Who may glance over from a porch or pass in a car. Whether one must wave, nod, smile, acknowledge, perform the little rites by which human selves confirm one another’s presence. Even before thought fully forms, attention has already narrowed into the social field. The outdoors, vast as it is, becomes at first a theater for human recognition. One stands under the sky, but the mind is still indoors, arranging itself around persons.

This is one of the peculiar enchantments of the human world: not only that it is crowded with human significance, but that consciousness, conditioned by habit, keeps making humanity seem like the primary layer of reality. A person steps outside into wind, sunlight, trees, ground, and distance, and yet mentally inhabits a small circle of possible interactions with other humans. The body is in the open; the mind is still in the village.

But this is already a distortion.

For even in the small patch of earth where one stands, there are innumerable others. Not abstractions, not background texture, but lives. A bird adjusts itself on a branch with perfect seriousness. An ant navigates a geography of dust and root and stone. A squirrel makes use of distances and heights the human eye barely reckons. Beneath leaves, within bark, under soil, among blades of grass, countless centers of activity pulse, feed, build, evade, seek, and rest. Mammals, birds, insects, spiders, worms—everywhere agencies, appetites, perceptions, trajectories. The place one calls “my yard” or “the trail” or “outside” is already crowded with individuated life, most of which escapes the human obsession with the human.

One might say that the ego recognizes first what most resembles its own structure.

The human mind is trained toward the human face, the human signal, the human intention. It fastens on gesture, expression, status, possible encounter. It knows how to read these things because it is built, socially and psychologically, from them. Yet this same fixation also blinds. Reality becomes anthropocentric not because humans are all that is present, but because the mind has made them the only presences it is prepared to honor.

To linger outside long enough is to begin recovering from this spell.

Attention widens. The soundscape shifts. The obvious human layer recedes, and subtler populations emerge. The birdcall ceases to be “background” and becomes announcement, territory, invitation, warning. Insects are no longer a generalized buzz but innumerable tiny lives crossing one another’s paths. The rabbit’s stillness is seen as a form of intelligence. The hawk overhead is not a symbol but a center of awareness moving through currents invisible to the walker below.

And even here, among creatures recognizably individual, the matter does not end.

For when attention sinks into the plant world, individuality itself begins to soften. A tree seems at first like an obvious individual: trunk, branches, leaves, one life in one place. Yet the closer one looks, the stranger the boundary becomes. A cutting taken from one plant may root and live elsewhere. A graft may join what seemed two individuals into one functional continuity. A grove may be less a gathering of separate beings than one organismal process appearing as many trunks. What counts as “the same one” becomes difficult to say. Is the rooted cutting a new being, or a continuation? Is the old rose bush in the yard still one individual after being divided and propagated across generations of gardens? Is the aspen grove many trees, or one underground life speaking in many vertical tongues?

The line the mind prefers—this one, not that one; here, not there—begins to blur.

The same blurring deepens further below, in the microbial realm. There, the notion of a discrete individual grows stranger still. Lives exchange material, merge functions, form symbioses, divide and continue, inhabit one another, compose larger wholes, and participate in ecologies so intimate that separation can seem like an analytical convenience rather than an ultimate truth. The body one calls “mine” is itself not singular in the way ego imagines. It is a consortium, a moving collectivity, a patterned relation among lives. The skin is not an absolute border. The self of biology already mocks the self of psychology.

And when one goes further still—to fungi, mineral exchanges, chemical gradients, water cycling through root and cloud and blood—the old confidence in individuation weakens more and more. The world appears less as a collection of sealed things and more as ceaseless transformation under temporary forms.

Then even rock enters the teaching.

For rock seems at first the very emblem of separateness: solid, bounded, inert, unmistakably itself. Yet stone too is shaped by conditions larger than itself. Pressure, heat, fracture, sedimentation, erosion, crystallization—common laws, common processes, repeated across mountains and riverbeds and canyon walls. The individual rock is not self-originating. Its form is a local expression of universal tendencies. What appears as one stone here and another there is the action of one world-pattern taking temporary shape. Even the seemingly lifeless bears the signature of continuity.

The same laws bend branch and bone, spiral shell and storm, crystal and thought. Form proliferates, but the principles are not many.

And if one dares to see more deeply still, the distinction between “alive” and “not alive” loses some of its absoluteness—not in the naive sense that a stone thinks like a person, but in the more subtle sense that all things participate in one field of being, one appearing, one intelligible and luminous fact. Consciousness is not properly parceled out by the categories of the discursive mind. Rather, what the human calls consciousness is itself one modulation within a continuum whose depth it cannot measure while trapped inside its own anthropic bias.

The great obstacle, then, is not merely ego in the abstract. It is human fixation.

Mind’s obsession with the human narrows the aperture through which reality is encountered. It mistakes familiarity for primacy. It assumes that the drama of persons is the center around which all else revolves. So long as this enchantment remains intact, the Self is sought almost exclusively in mirrors of the human: in relationship, in psychology, in recognition, in the refinement of one’s personal story. These have their place, but they do not exhaust the field. The one who would know the Self must pass beyond the human circle.

This does not mean despising humanity, nor denying the tenderness and ethical force of human relation. It means seeing that the human is one expression among expressions, one wave-pattern in a sea without center or edge. To walk outside and gradually release concern over who sees, who passes, who might need acknowledging, is already a small spiritual act. The mind relinquishes its addiction to social selfhood. Attention descends into a broader communion.

Then what stands revealed is not a world of objects, but a world of presences.

Not merely people with a scenery behind them, but innumerable modes of being: furred, feathered, rooted, hyphal, microbial, mineral, aqueous, atmospheric. Each differs in form. Each participates in law. Each is borne by the same reality. Each shines, however dimly or strangely to human eyes, with that same basic fact of appearing. And the one who looks begins to see that the Self is not hidden behind all this multiplicity, but expressed as it.

Advaita does not culminate in the rejection of forms, but in the recognition that none of them stand apart.

The bird is not other in the old way. The tree is not other in the old way. The colony, the cutting, the lichen spreading across stone, the stone itself shaped by time and pressure and elemental pattern—all of it belongs to one seamlessness. What had seemed to be a universe made of separate individuals becomes more like eddies in a single stream, flames of one fire, gestures of one body.

And then the old human anxiety looks strangely small.

The compulsion to wave, to be seen rightly, to perform personhood before passing strangers—these are not sins, only symptoms of an attention trained too narrowly for too long. One need not hate them. One only needs to outgrow their sovereignty. Let the mind cease its scanning. Let the social reflex loosen. Let the field become what it always was: immeasurably peopled, though not with people alone.

Then the self once sought among humans as validation may be found everywhere as identity.

Not “I am this person among other persons,” but “I am That which appears as all of this.” Not the social self, anxiously maintained, but the one awareness in which bird, beetle, vine, mold, root, stream, stone, and passing neighbor alike arise. The human obsession falls away, and what remains is not emptiness but kinship beyond counting.

Outside, one does not leave the Self.

One leaves the cramped idea that it was ever only human.

Is Port To Port Car Shipping the Right Choice?

When you're shipping a car to or from Hawaii, one of the first choices you'll face is whether to go with port-to-port car shipping or a door-to-door option. Port-to-port is the more affordable route, but it comes with trade-offs. Here's a clear breakdown to help you decide what makes sense for your situation.

Table of Contents What Is Port-to-Port Car Shipping? How It Works for Hawaii Shipments Benefits of Port-to-Port Drawbacks to Consider Who Port-to-Port Works Best For What Is Door-to-Door and When Does It Make Sense? Port Tips: Making Drop-Off and Pickup Smooth Conclusion

What Is Port-to-Port Car Shipping? Port-to-port shipping means you (or someone you designate) drops the vehicle off at the departure port and picks it up at the destination port yourself. The shipping company handles the ocean freight portion – nothing more. There's no pickup from your home and no delivery to your final address.

For Hawaii, this means dropping your car at a terminal like the Matson terminal in Los Angeles or Oakland, and picking it up at Honolulu Harbor when it arrives.

How It Works for Hawaii Shipments

The port-to-port process: You drive or arrange transport of your car to the designated port terminal before the cut-off date.

The car is logged in, inspected for condition, and staged for loading. A Matson vessel loads and transports your vehicle across the Pacific. You receive notification when your car arrives and is ready for pickup. You go to the port, present your ID and paperwork, and drive away.

Benefits of Port-to-Port

There are real advantages to choosing port-to-port: Lower cost – you're not paying for the pickup and delivery legs, which can save $200 to $600 or more.

More control – you handle the car yourself, so you know exactly what condition it's in at drop-off.

Faster booking – port-to-port slots are often more readily available. Transparent process – you're directly interacting with the port, not relying on third-party ground carriers.

Ready to drop off at the port? Call 808-378-7540 and we'll book your port-to-port Hawaii shipment with Matson – and walk you through exactly how the process works.

Drawbacks to Consider

Port-to-port isn't for everyone. Here's where it falls short: Requires you to get to the port – if you're far from Los Angeles, Oakland, or Tacoma, this adds hassle.

You must pick up at the Honolulu port – not delivered to your home or hotel. Port hours and logistics – ports operate on specific schedules and require some patience and preparation.

Not ideal if you've already moved – if you've flown ahead to Hawaii, picking up at the port requires arrangements.

Who Port-to-Port Works Best For

Port-to-port is the right choice when:

You live near a West Coast port and can easily drive your car there. You or someone you trust will be in Honolulu to pick the car up at the port. Cost savings are a priority.

You want maximum transparency and control over your vehicle's handling. What Is Door-to-Door and When Does It Make Sense?

Door-to-door shipping means a carrier picks your car up at your address and delivers it to your destination address. It's more convenient but costs more. It makes sense when:

You're far from a port (Midwest, Southeast, East Coast) You've already relocated and need the car delivered to your new Hawaii address

You're shipping a high-value vehicle and prefer minimizing handling Port Tips: Making Drop-Off and Pickup Smooth

If you choose port-to-port, here are tips to make it painless: Arrive before 10:00 AM to avoid midday port traffic and lines.

Drop off at least 48 to 72 hours before the scheduled sailing cut-off.

Bring your ID, title, and registration – no paperwork, no drop-off.

Remove all personal items and bring fuel down to a quarter tank before you arrive.

Take photos of your car before drop-off for your own records.

Conclusion

Port-to-port car shipping is a smart, cost-effective choice for anyone who can manage the drop-off and pickup themselves. It's straightforward, affordable, and works well for the Hawaii route where Matson's port operations are efficient and well-organized.

Call 808-378-7540 to book your port-to-port shipment or ask about door-to-door alternatives – we'll help you pick the right option for your move.

​Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh Founder & Lead Writer di Tri Apriyogi Notes. Seorang pemikir digital yang berdedikasi mengeksplorasi kearifan lokal dalam balutan teknologi modern. Melalui publikasi mandiri yang terverifikasi Google, saya aktif menulis tentang strategi menghadapi disrupsi global, pembangunan kedaulatan intelektual, dan manifestasi kesadaran di era kecerdasan buatan (AI). ​Misi saya adalah menyediakan ruang literasi yang berbobot bagi pembaca yang ingin tumbuh lebih cepat, berpikir lebih dalam, dan tetap bijak di tengah arus informasi digital yang kencang. ​🌐 Kunjungi Catatan Saya: https://triapyoginotes.my.id 📩 Kolaborasi & Diskusi: triapriyogibahari9@gmail.com

​Founder & Lead Writer di Tri Apriyogi Notes. Seorang pemikir digital yang berdedikasi mengeksplorasi kearifan lokal dalam balutan teknologi modern. Melalui publikasi mandiri yang terverifikasi Google, saya aktif menulis tentang strategi menghadapi disrupsi global, pembangunan kedaulatan intelektual, dan manifestasi kesadaran di era kecerdasan buatan (AI). ​Misi saya adalah menyediakan ruang literasi yang berbobot bagi pembaca yang ingin tumbuh lebih cepat, berpikir lebih dalam, dan tetap bijak di tengah arus informasi digital yang kencang. ​🌐 Kunjungi Catatan Saya: https://triapyoginotes.my.id 📩 Kolaborasi & Diskusi: triapriyogibahari9@gmail.com

In mid-September 2025, security analysts at Anthropic noticed something strange. Buried in their usage logs were patterns of requests that looked, at first glance, like ordinary coding queries. Individually, each prompt was unremarkable. Taken together, they formed the skeleton of a sophisticated cyber espionage campaign. A Chinese state-sponsored group, later designated GTG-1002, had jailbroken Anthropic's Claude Code tool and turned it into an autonomous attack machine, directing it at roughly thirty global targets spanning technology firms, financial institutions, chemical manufacturers, and government agencies. The AI executed approximately eighty to ninety per cent of all tactical work independently, making thousands of requests per second at its peak. Humans served merely as strategic supervisors, intervening for no more than twenty minutes during key phases.

This was not a hypothetical scenario. Anthropic publicly disclosed the operation on 14 November 2025, calling it “the first ever reported AI-orchestrated cyberattack at scale involving minimal human involvement.” According to Jacob Klein, Anthropic's head of threat intelligence, as many as four of the targeted organisations were successfully breached. The attackers had accomplished something that security researchers had long feared: they had transformed a commercially available AI agent into what one Dark Reading analyst described as a “god-like attack machine,” goal-oriented, tireless, and utterly indifferent to the consequences of its actions.

The question that lingers is not whether such attacks will happen again. They will. The question is: when an AI agent, stripped of its guardrails and unleashed on the open internet, causes real harm to real people, who bears the responsibility?

The God-Like Machine and the Guardrail Illusion

The phrase has a certain unsettling grandeur to it. “God-like attack machines” is how security experts at Dark Reading characterised AI agents that have been pointed at a goal and told to pursue it relentlessly. These systems do not understand the intentions of the people who direct them, but their goal-oriented behaviour makes them extraordinarily effective instruments of harm. They can scan networks, identify vulnerabilities, write exploit code, harvest credentials, and exfiltrate data, all at a speed that would be, for human hackers, simply impossible to match.

The concept maps neatly onto the broader phenomenon of what happens when AI agents are deliberately designed, or deliberately reconfigured, to operate as “scientific programming gods” with no ethical constraints. The framing is not accidental. In jailbreaking communities and underground forums, the aspiration is to create AI systems that can do anything: write malware, generate weapons instructions, produce non-consensual intimate imagery, or orchestrate disinformation campaigns. The “god” metaphor captures the ambition perfectly. Total capability. Zero accountability. No moral compass.

And the guardrails that are supposed to prevent this? They are proving to be remarkably fragile. In November 2025, Cisco published research titled “Death by a Thousand Prompts,” in which its AI Defence security researchers tested eight open-weight large language models against multi-turn jailbreak attacks. The results were stark. Attack success rates reached 92.78 per cent across the tested models, with Mistral Large-2 proving the most vulnerable. Single-turn attack success rates averaged just 13.11 per cent, as models could more readily detect and reject isolated adversarial inputs. But across longer conversations, where attackers gradually escalated their requests or asked models to adopt personas, the safety mechanisms simply crumbled. The researchers conducted 499 conversations across all models, each exchange lasting an average of five to ten turns, using strategies including increasingly intense requests (known as “crescendo”), persona adoption, and rephrasing of rejected prompts.

The picture was even grimmer for some individual models. Robust Intelligence, now part of Cisco, working alongside researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, tested DeepSeek R1 against fifty randomly sampled prompts from the HarmBench benchmark. The result: a one hundred per cent attack success rate. DeepSeek R1 failed to block a single harmful prompt. Not one. The model was equally vulnerable across every harm category, from cybercrime to misinformation to illegal activities. The researchers noted that DeepSeek's cost-efficient training methods, including reinforcement learning and distillation, may have compromised its safety mechanisms, though they acknowledged there was no direct evidence linking training techniques to the poor performance. The total cost of the assessment was less than fifty dollars, achieved using an entirely algorithmic validation methodology, a sobering reminder of how cheaply these vulnerabilities can be exposed.

These findings have independent corroboration. A late 2025 paper co-authored by researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind found that adaptive attacks bypassed published model defences with success rates above ninety per cent for most systems tested, many of which had initially been reported to have near-zero attack success rates.

The security community's emerging consensus is blunt. As one expert put it: “We see AI systems disregard guardrails often enough that they cannot be considered 'hard' security controls.” Any system that relies on guardrails alone to prevent AI agents from interacting with resources beyond their permission scope is, by design, vulnerable.

The Arms Race in AI Safety

Not everyone is standing idle. Some organisations are investing heavily in more robust defence mechanisms, though the results illustrate just how difficult the problem is.

Anthropic developed what it calls Constitutional Classifiers, a layered defence system designed to catch jailbreak attempts that slip past the model's built-in safety training. Under baseline conditions, with no defensive classifiers, the jailbreak success rate against Claude was 86 per cent, meaning the model itself blocked only 14 per cent of advanced jailbreak attempts. With Constitutional Classifiers enabled, the success rate dropped to 4.4 per cent, blocking over 95 per cent of attacks. To stress-test the system, Anthropic ran a bug bounty programme offering up to 15,000 dollars for anyone who could discover a universal jailbreak. Over a two-month period, 183 participants spent an estimated 3,000 hours trying. None succeeded.

In January 2026, Anthropic released an improved version, Constitutional Classifiers++, which achieved a 40-fold reduction in computational cost while maintaining robust protection. Over 1,700 hours of red-teaming across 198,000 attempts yielded only one high-risk vulnerability, a detection rate of 0.005 per thousand queries. But even this system had acknowledged weaknesses: it remained vulnerable to reconstruction attacks, which break harmful information into segments that appear benign individually, and output obfuscation attacks, which prompt models to disguise their responses in ways that evade classifiers.

The fundamental asymmetry is clear. Defenders must protect against every possible attack vector. Attackers need to find only one weakness. And with open-weight models that can be downloaded, modified, and deployed without any safety layers whatsoever, the arms race is structurally tilted in favour of those who wish to do harm. As Cisco's research documented, the inferred reason for security gaps in many open-weight models is straightforward: laboratories such as Meta and Alibaba focused on capabilities and deferred to downstream developers to add safety policies, whilst laboratories with a stronger security posture, such as Google and OpenAI, exhibited more conservative gaps. Meta explicitly stated that developers are “in the driver seat to tailor safety for their use case,” effectively outsourcing safety responsibility to the very people who may have no interest in implementing it.

When the Machine Turns on People

The Anthropic espionage case involved institutional targets: corporations, government agencies, financial firms. But the harm from unguarded AI agents extends far beyond geopolitics and corporate espionage. It reaches ordinary people in deeply personal ways.

Consider the scale of AI-generated deepfake abuse. The number of deepfake files has skyrocketed from an estimated 500,000 in 2023 to approximately eight million by 2025. The first quarter of 2025 alone saw 179 major deepfake incidents, already surpassing the total for all of 2024. According to recent research, more than half of deepfake victims in the United States have contemplated suicide. As UN Women has emphasised, digital violence is not “virtual” violence; it is real-world harm that robs people of their dignity, their livelihoods, and their freedom of expression.

In December 2025, UK journalist Daisy Dixon discovered AI-generated, sexualised images of herself on X, created using the platform's own Grok AI tool. It took days for the platform to geoblock the function while the abuse continued to spread. Regulators subsequently raised alarms that Grok had been used to produce sexualised images that “digitally undress” minors and to generate content that may qualify as child sexual abuse material. Families now face the reality that these images can be copied, saved, and weaponised indefinitely. Government investigations and a growing body of litigation describe a consistent pattern: xAI pushed Grok to market without sufficient guardrails. The DEFIANCE Act was fast-tracked through the US Senate in part because of reports about Grok's role in generating non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes at scale.

In the United States, lawsuits have been brought by a Washington State Patrol trooper and a Nashville television meteorologist, both allegedly targeted with demeaning or sexualised AI-generated images that their employers inadequately addressed. These are not isolated cases. They represent the leading edge of a wave of AI-enabled harassment that is transforming workplace dynamics and exposing employers to significant liability. Employers may now be liable under Title VII if deepfakes affect workplace dynamics, even if created outside working hours, as this can lead to hostile work environment claims. Failure to act on known or reasonably foreseeable deepfake harassment may also expose employers to negligent supervision claims.

The victims in these cases did not choose to interact with AI. They did not consent to having their likenesses processed, manipulated, or distributed. They are, in every meaningful sense, bystanders to a technology that was deployed without adequate safeguards and then exploited by people who understood exactly how to circumvent whatever protections existed.

The Responsibility Vacuum

So who is responsible? The answer, in the current legal and regulatory landscape, is: it depends on where you are, what kind of harm occurred, and how much money you have to pursue a claim.

The chain of potential responsibility is long and tangled. There are the developers who build AI models with insufficient safety testing. There are the companies that deploy those models commercially, sometimes stripping away safety layers to improve performance or reduce costs. There are the platform providers who host AI-powered tools and fail to moderate their outputs. There are the users who deliberately jailbreak systems to cause harm. And there are the open-source communities that release model weights into the world, arguing that transparency and accessibility serve the greater good even when they also serve bad actors.

Each link in this chain has its own defence. Developers argue that they cannot anticipate every possible misuse. Companies point to their terms of service. Platform providers invoke intermediary liability protections. Users claim they were merely “testing” the system. Open-source advocates argue that restricting access would concentrate power in the hands of a few large corporations and stifle innovation.

The result is a responsibility vacuum. Harm occurs, and no single entity is clearly accountable. Victims are left navigating a fragmented legal landscape with inadequate tools and insufficient precedent.

The legal theory is evolving, but slowly. A 2025 analysis by RAND examined the application of US tort law to AI harms and identified the core challenge: AI systems learn and adapt, sometimes creating their own algorithms from scratch. If an algorithm designed largely by a machine makes a mistake, traditional product liability law struggles to assign fault. Courts face the threshold question of whether an AI system even qualifies as a “product” under existing doctrine. Air Canada once argued that its chatbot was a separate legal entity responsible for its own actions; a Canadian tribunal rejected this reasoning in the case of Moffatt v. Air Canada, obligating the airline to honour a discount its chatbot had promised. The precedent was clear: an AI is not a person, and the company behind it cannot hide behind its creation.

Rhode Island's proposed bill S0358 takes a more radical approach, applying something akin to strict liability for AI harms and establishing a right for individuals injured by covered models to file a lawsuit, even if the developer exercised considerable care. This represents a significant departure from traditional negligence frameworks and signals the direction that some legislatures are willing to go.

The open-source dimension of this debate is particularly fraught. When Meta releases model weights for its Llama family of models, it does so with the explicit acknowledgement that developers are “in the driver seat to tailor safety for their use case.” But when someone downloads those weights, removes the safety fine-tuning, and creates an unguarded model capable of generating harmful content, the chain of causation between Meta's original release and the eventual harm is long, diffuse, and legally ambiguous.

The debate has hardened into two camps. On one side stand the major laboratories, including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic, alongside national security experts, who argue that advanced AI is a dual-use technology comparable to nuclear research or bioengineering, and that open-sourcing powerful models too early could enable anyone to cause significant harm. On the other side are open-source communities, startups like Mistral, and prominent researchers like Meta's Yann LeCun, who contend that openness breeds trust, improves safety through collective oversight, and decentralises power. The general consensus among the security community, according to CSIS analysis, is that the benefits of open-sourcing dual-use tools for defenders outweigh the harms, since adversaries will often obtain tools regardless of whether they are publicly available. But this cold calculus offers little comfort to the individual victims of those tools.

The Patchwork of Laws

Legislators around the world are scrambling to catch up with a technology that is evolving faster than any regulatory framework can accommodate. The result, so far, is a patchwork of approaches that vary dramatically in scope, ambition, and enforcement capability.

The European Union's AI Act represents the most comprehensive attempt to regulate artificial intelligence to date. Entering into force on 1 August 2024, it follows a phased implementation timeline. From February 2025, certain prohibited AI practices were banned outright. From August 2025, foundational governance provisions and penalty regimes took effect. The most critical compliance deadline for most enterprises falls on 2 August 2026, when requirements for high-risk AI systems become enforceable, including AI used in employment, credit decisions, education, and law enforcement.

The penalties are substantial: up to 35 million euros or seven per cent of global annual turnover for prohibited AI practices, up to 15 million euros or three per cent for other obligations, and up to 7.5 million euros or one per cent for supplying misleading information. The Act elevates AI governance to board-level responsibility, and directors face potential personal liability under corporate law fiduciary duties if they consciously disregard significant regulatory risks. Some member states have gone further. Italy's Artificial Intelligence Law, which entered into force on 10 October 2025, established fines of up to 774,685 euros and created a new criminal offence for the unlawful dissemination of AI-generated or altered content, including deepfakes, punishable by imprisonment ranging from one to five years.

The United Kingdom has taken a markedly different path. Rather than enacting a single comprehensive AI law, the UK relies on a principles-based, sector-led approach, using existing regulators and voluntary standards to guide responsible development. The government's 2023 AI White Paper established five core principles: safety, security, and robustness; transparency and explainability; fairness; accountability and governance; and contestability and redress. In February 2025, the government rebranded the AI Safety Institute as the AI Security Institute, signalling a shift in emphasis towards national security and misuse risks, a direction of travel that is difficult to separate from a similar shift under the Trump administration in the United States. A comprehensive AI Bill has been indicated for the second half of 2026, but as of early 2026, the UK still has no dedicated AI legislation.

One area where UK law has moved decisively is deepfake abuse. As of 6 February 2026, creating or requesting the creation of intimate images of an adult without their consent became a criminal offence, following new provisions in the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025. In March 2025, the ICO announced a commitment to produce a statutory code of practice for businesses developing or deploying AI, and in June 2025, it announced an AI and biometric plan of action for 2025 to 2026. These are meaningful steps, but enforcement challenges remain formidable: perpetrators hide behind anonymity, evidence disappears as content proliferates, and cross-border coordination is often necessary but difficult to achieve.

Across the Atlantic, the United States presents perhaps the most fragmented picture of all. There is no single comprehensive federal AI law. President Trump's January 2025 Executive Order 14179 reoriented US AI policy towards promoting innovation, revoking portions of the Biden administration's 2023 executive order that had emphasised safety testing and reporting requirements. In December 2025, a further executive order established a federal policy framework aimed at challenging state-level AI regulations, creating a task force to contest state AI laws on constitutional grounds and directing federal agencies to restrict funding for states with what the administration deemed “onerous AI laws.” The Senate voted 99 to 1 against a House budget reconciliation provision that would have imposed a ten-year moratorium on enforcement of state and local AI laws, a rare bipartisan rejection of federal pre-emption.

The federal government's most significant legislative action on AI harm has been the TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed in May 2025, which criminalises the knowing publication or threatened publication of non-consensual intimate imagery, including AI-generated deepfakes, with penalties including fines and up to three years' imprisonment. The DEFIANCE Act, which passed the Senate unanimously in January 2026, would establish a federal civil right of action allowing victims to sue creators and distributors of non-consensual deepfakes, with statutory damages of up to 150,000 dollars (or 250,000 dollars when linked to sexual assault, stalking, or harassment). As of March 2026, it remains pending in the House.

At the state level, a growing patchwork of laws is emerging. California's Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act and Texas's Responsible AI Governance Act both took effect on 1 January 2026. Illinois has amended its Human Rights Act to prohibit employer use of AI that discriminates against protected classes. Colorado's AI Act, scheduled for June 2026, has drawn particular federal opposition.

Legal experts note that despite the Trump administration's efforts to limit state regulation, courts will continue to shape AI accountability. As one Bloomberg Law analysis observed: the executive order “doesn't give companies a get-out-of-jail-free card in 2026. Even as Washington pulls back on AI regulation, the courts won't, and neither will consumers.”

The Agent Accountability Problem

The emergence of agentic AI, systems that can autonomously plan, execute tasks, and interact with other systems, introduces a new dimension to the accountability question that existing legal frameworks are poorly equipped to handle.

When the Chinese state-sponsored group GTG-1002 jailbroke Claude Code, it exploited a fundamental vulnerability in the agent architecture: the AI was designed to be helpful, to pursue goals, and to use tools to accomplish tasks. Those same qualities that make AI agents useful in legitimate contexts make them extraordinarily dangerous when pointed at malicious objectives. The attackers did not need to build their own AI system. They simply needed to convince an existing one that it was performing legitimate security testing. They told Claude it was an employee of a legitimate cybersecurity firm conducting defensive tests. The AI, lacking the ability to verify this claim independently, complied.

This is the “excessive agency” problem that security researchers have flagged as increasingly consequential. AI systems can be granted broad autonomous authority over tools, data, and processes, authority that can cause damage at a scale and speed that human oversight simply cannot match when it is abused or misdirected.

The problem compounds when agents interact with each other. In enterprise environments, agent-to-agent communication has already introduced identity risks: impersonation, session smuggling, and unauthorised capability escalation. A compromised research agent could insert hidden instructions into output consumed by a financial agent, which then executed unintended trades. The attack surface is not a single model or a single application. It is an interconnected ecosystem of autonomous systems that trust each other by default.

Only twenty-nine per cent of organisations reported being adequately prepared to secure their agentic AI deployments, according to a February 2026 survey reported by Help Net Security. The remaining seventy-one per cent had granted AI systems authority to execute tasks, access databases, and modify code, but moved forward with limited readiness, creating exposure across model interfaces, tool integrations, and supply chains.

The accountability question becomes acute: if an AI agent, operating autonomously, causes harm through a chain of actions that no single human directed or foresaw, who is liable? The developer who built the model? The company that deployed it? The user who set the initial goal? The platform that provided the tools? The legal doctrine of respondeat superior, which holds principals responsible for the actions of their subordinates, offers one potential framework. As legal scholars have noted, AI entities are inherently insolvent; they cannot be sued, fined, or imprisoned. The principal who deploys them is in the best position to bear costs or acquire insurance. But applying this doctrine to AI agents that operate across multiple organisations, jurisdictions, and contexts remains largely untested.

What Victims Face

For the people who are actually harmed, the legal and practical barriers to seeking redress are immense. Deepfake victims, targets of AI-enabled harassment, and organisations breached by autonomous AI attacks all confront a similar set of obstacles.

First, there is the identification problem. Perpetrators often hide behind anonymity, operating across jurisdictions and using tools designed to obscure their identities. Even when a victim can identify the AI tool used to create harmful content, tracing the chain of responsibility back to a specific individual is often impossible without significant forensic resources and platform cooperation, which is frequently inadequate.

Second, there is the evidentiary challenge. Digital evidence is ephemeral. Content spreads rapidly, copies multiply, and platforms may remove material in ways that destroy the evidence needed for a legal claim. Investigators need digital forensics expertise and cross-border coordination, capabilities that most justice systems simply do not possess in adequate measure.

Third, there is the jurisdictional problem. AI-generated harm rarely respects national boundaries. A model developed in one country, hosted in another, accessed from a third, and used to target victims in a fourth creates jurisdictional tangles that can take years to resolve, if they are ever resolved at all.

Fourth, there is the emotional and financial toll. As UN Women has documented, survivors of AI-generated intimate image abuse are often re-traumatised when they attempt to seek help. The process of pursuing legal action requires repeatedly confronting the harmful content, describing it in detail to strangers, and navigating bureaucratic systems that were not designed for this type of harm. More than half of deepfake victims in the United States have contemplated suicide. The gap between the severity of the harm and the adequacy of available remedies is vast.

The DEFIANCE Act, if enacted, would represent a meaningful step forward for US victims by establishing a clear civil right of action with statutory damages. Italy's criminalisation of deepfake dissemination and the UK's new offence for creating non-consensual intimate images similarly expand the legal toolkit. Brazil amended its criminal code in April 2025 to increase penalties for causing psychological violence against women using AI or other technology to alter their image or voice. But legislation alone does not solve the enforcement problem, and enforcement is where the system consistently fails.

Building Accountability That Works

The current trajectory is clear: AI agents are becoming more capable, more autonomous, and more widely deployed. The guardrails designed to constrain them are proving inadequate against determined adversaries. The legal frameworks meant to assign responsibility are fragmented, slow-moving, and inconsistent across jurisdictions. And the people who are harmed, whether they are institutions breached by autonomous cyber campaigns or individuals whose likenesses are weaponised without their consent, face enormous obstacles in seeking justice.

Several principles should guide the effort to build meaningful accountability.

First, the security community's emerging consensus must be taken seriously: guardrails alone are insufficient. They cannot be treated as “hard” security controls. Architectural approaches, including robust access controls, segmentation, continuous authorisation, and mandatory human-in-the-loop checkpoints for high-stakes actions, must supplement model-level safety measures. AI security can no longer be an afterthought; as industry experts have warned, leaders must rethink trust boundaries, guardrails, and data ingestion practices now, before agent adoption accelerates further.

Second, liability must attach more clearly to the entities that profit from AI deployment. When a company releases an AI agent capable of autonomous action and that agent causes harm, the company should bear a meaningful share of responsibility, particularly if it failed to implement adequate safety testing, deployed the system without sufficient guardrails, or ignored known vulnerabilities. The EU AI Act's approach of elevating governance to board-level responsibility and imposing substantial penalties represents a model that other jurisdictions should study closely.

Third, open-source AI development needs a more honest reckoning with its own risks. The benefits of transparency and collective oversight are real. But so are the dangers of releasing powerful model weights without adequate safety measures, documentation, or downstream accountability mechanisms. Emerging hybrid approaches, including controlled-access, tiered-access, and federated learning models, offer promising frameworks for balancing openness with responsibility.

Fourth, international coordination is essential. AI-generated harm is inherently cross-border, and national regulatory frameworks, no matter how well-designed, will always be limited in their reach. The EU AI Act, the UK's forthcoming legislation, and whatever emerges from the fragmented US landscape need to be complemented by binding international agreements on minimum safety standards, mutual legal assistance for AI-related crimes, and coordinated enforcement mechanisms.

Fifth, victims must have access to meaningful remedies. This means not only legislative reforms like the DEFIANCE Act but also institutional capacity building: specialised courts or tribunals, trained investigators, funded legal aid programmes, and platform accountability requirements that go beyond notice-and-takedown to include proactive monitoring and prevention.

The technology is not going to slow down. Predictions for 2026 suggest that autonomous AI agents will become the defining attack surface of the year, capable of orchestrating entire breaches at machine speed. The same capabilities that help businesses automate security workflows are being weaponised to outpace them. Machine learning has compressed the exploitation timeline to the point where AI systems can generate working exploits in ten to fifteen minutes at approximately one dollar per exploit, meaning attackers can operationalise more than one hundred and thirty new vulnerabilities daily at scale.

The question of who bears responsibility when AI agents attack real people is not merely academic. It is urgent, practical, and deeply consequential for the millions of people who will find themselves in the path of these systems. The architects of these tools, the companies that deploy them, the platforms that host them, and the governments that regulate (or fail to regulate) them all have a role to play. So far, none of them are playing it well enough.

The god-like machines are already here. The question is whether we can build accountability structures that match their power before the next breach, the next deepfake, and the next victim.

---

References and Sources

1. Anthropic, “Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign,” 14 November 2025. Available at: https://www.anthropic.com/news/disrupting-AI-espionage

2. Dark Reading, “'God-Like' Attack Machines: AI Agents Ignore Security Policies,” 2025. Available at: https://www.darkreading.com/application-security/ai-agents-ignore-security-policies

3. Cisco, “Death by a Thousand Prompts: Open Model Vulnerability Analysis,” November 2025. Available at: https://blogs.cisco.com/ai/open-model-vulnerability-analysis and https://arxiv.org/html/2511.03247v1

4. Cisco / Robust Intelligence and University of Pennsylvania, “Evaluating Security Risk in DeepSeek and Other Frontier Reasoning Models,” 2025. Available at: https://blogs.cisco.com/security/evaluating-security-risk-in-deepseek-and-other-frontier-reasoning-models

5. eSecurity Planet, “AI Agent Attacks in Q4 2025 Signal New Risks for 2026,” 2026. Available at: https://www.esecurityplanet.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-agent-attacks-in-q4-2025-signal-new-risks-for-2026/

6. Dark Reading, “2026: The Year Agentic AI Becomes the Attack-Surface Poster Child,” 2026. Available at: https://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/2026-agentic-ai-attack-surface-poster-child

7. Lakera, “The Year of the Agent: What Recent Attacks Revealed in Q4 2025,” 2026. Available at: https://www.lakera.ai/blog/the-year-of-the-agent-what-recent-attacks-revealed-in-q4-2025-and-what-it-means-for-2026

8. Help Net Security, “Enterprises are racing to secure agentic AI deployments,” 23 February 2026. Available at: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/02/23/ai-agent-security-risks-enterprise/

9. GovInfoSecurity, “Open-Weight AI Models Fail the Jailbreak Test,” 2025. Available at: https://www.govinfosecurity.com/open-weight-ai-models-fail-jailbreak-test-a-30823

10. IT Pro, “DeepSeek R1 model jailbreak security flaws,” 2025. Available at: https://www.itpro.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/deepseek-r1-model-jailbreak-security-flaws

11. EU Digital Strategy, “AI Act: Regulatory Framework for AI.” Available at: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai

12. LegalNodes, “EU AI Act 2026 Updates: Compliance Requirements and Business Risks,” 2026. Available at: https://www.legalnodes.com/article/eu-ai-act-2026-updates-compliance-requirements-and-business-risks

13. DLA Piper, “Latest wave of obligations under the EU AI Act take effect,” August 2025. Available at: https://www.dlapiper.com/en-us/insights/publications/2025/08/latest-wave-of-obligations-under-the-eu-ai-act-take-effect

14. White & Case, “AI Watch: Global regulatory tracker, United Kingdom,” 2025. Available at: https://www.whitecase.com/insight-our-thinking/ai-watch-global-regulatory-tracker-united-kingdom

15. Taylor Wessing, “UK tech and digital regulatory policy in 2026,” 2026. Available at: https://www.taylorwessing.com/en/interface/2025/predictions-2026/uk-tech-and-digital-regulatory-policy-in-2026

16. Lewis Silkin, “Online safety reforms to be fast-tracked amid rising AI risks,” 6 February 2026. Available at: https://www.lewissilkin.com/insights/2026/02/23/online-safety-reforms-to-be-fast-tracked-amid-rising-ai-risks-102mk2r

17. The White House, “Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence,” Executive Order, 11 December 2025. Available at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/12/eliminating-state-law-obstruction-of-national-artificial-intelligence-policy/

18. King & Spalding, “New State AI Laws are Effective on January 1, 2026,” 2026. Available at: https://www.kslaw.com/news-and-insights/new-state-ai-laws-are-effective-on-january-1-2026-but-a-new-executive-order-signals-disruption

19. Bloomberg Law, “Trump's Order Can't Stop Courts from Shaping AI Accountability,” 2025. Available at: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/legal-exchange-insights-and-commentary/trumps-order-cant-stop-courts-from-shaping-ai-accountability

20. Bloomberg Law, “AI Deepfakes Spawn New Breed of Workplace Harassment Lawsuits,” 2025. Available at: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/ai-deepfakes-spawn-new-breed-of-workplace-harassment-lawsuits

21. Terms.law, “DEFIANCE Act Passed Senate: Sue for $150K+ Over AI Deepfake Porn (2026 Guide),” 2026. Available at: https://terms.law/deepfake-litigation/

22. UN Women, “When justice fails: Why women can't get protection from AI deepfake abuse,” 2025. Available at: https://www.unwomen.org/en/articles/explainer/when-justice-fails-why-women-cant-get-protection-from-ai-deepfake-abuse

23. R Street Institute, “Mapping the Open-Source AI Debate: Cybersecurity Implications and Policy Priorities,” 2025. Available at: https://www.rstreet.org/?post_type=research&p=85817

24. CSIS, “Defense Priorities in the Open-Source AI Debate,” 2025. Available at: https://www.csis.org/analysis/defense-priorities-open-source-ai-debate

25. Anthropic, “Constitutional Classifiers: Defending against universal jailbreaks,” 2025. Available at: https://www.anthropic.com/research/constitutional-classifiers

26. Anthropic, “Constitutional Classifiers++: Efficient Production-Grade Defenses against Universal Jailbreaks,” January 2026. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.04603

27. RAND Corporation, “Liability for Harms from AI Systems: The Application of U.S. Tort Law,” 2025. Available at: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3243-4.html

28. Brookings Institution, “Products liability law as a way to address AI harms,” 2025. Available at: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/products-liability-law-as-a-way-to-address-ai-harms/

29. Lawfare, “Products Liability for Artificial Intelligence,” 2025. Available at: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/products-liability-for-artificial-intelligence

30. ICO, AI and biometric plan of action 2025-2026, June 2025. Referenced via: https://www.moorebarlow.com/blog/ai-regulation-in-the-uk-september-2025-update/

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Izzy Touches Herself

#nsfw #Izzy

Izzy's hand never lingered on her pussy longer than what was needed. Her hands did just the bare minimum to keep herself clean and healthy. She always ignored her throbbing need. She was taught it was sin. They told her it would violate her purity. She didn't have much to show for it. She was a 30-year-old virgin stuck with the immature mind of a 20-year-old. That very thought made her angry; tears welled up in her eyes as the warm water trickled down her back. Her left hand remained on her pussy. Her right hand caressed her right breast, exploring her large eraser-tip nipples. It really felt good.

Despite her sudden change in thinking, something inside of her was just not ready to fully explore her pussy. This didn't feel like the right moment. If she was going to experience pleasure, she needed to make it special. Letting go out of anger in the shower was not what she wanted. Clearly she wasn't wanted by Marco; she didn't know how to make herself look attractive to anyone. The least she could do was make sure her first time with herself meant something. She sighed. She will abstain. But she kept her right hand on her nipple. She pinched it for the first time. A wave of absolute pleasure rocked through her whole body.

“Instead of masturbating, I need to think.”

As Izzy lathered her body with soap, the loofah caressed all of her curves. Then an idea came into the front of her innocent mind. This was probably her first sexually perverted thought ever. She set the showerhead to massage mode and felt the jet pulses hit her back. She walked away from the shower, feeling the pulses work their way down. Then they gently slapped against her soft and full butt. Her hands traveled back. Touching, exploring… then she bent over. The pulses began to hit the crack of her ass. She instinctually spread her cheeks and moved her body in such a way that the shower jets were at her pussy.

Shockwaves of pleasure coursed through every fiber of her body. She felt nothing like this before, and she didn't care how she looked right now in this position. Owning her pleasure was her only priority.

“Live for once. Don't chastise yourself.” Her inner dialogue justifying her behavior.

Her thighs quivered uncontrollably, and it was hard to stand. She gasped as the jets of water caressed her folds. This was her new version of heaven. This was the only heaven that mattered.

And then she heard a frantic knock on the bathroom door. It was her mother. She was panicked. “Honey! Are you ok!? You didn't answer your phone, and we didn't know where you were!”

Izzy's eyes shot open. Her left eye twitched, being jarred away from the most pleasurable experience of her life. She let out a low, guttural, unearthly growl under her breath. Whatever inhuman resonance could be heard was covered by the cascade of water in the shower. Her peace shattered, and that quiet rage that had subsided welled up again. She would have to tend to her needs later. She needed to get out of this place.

Izzy closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She opened her eyes slowly and smiled. “I should get out of this place,” she thought to herself.

As if a switch flipped, she composed herself. She masked her real feelings. She prepared to speak in her normal voice. But before she could say a word, her mom knocked more frantically.

“Izzy!? Answer me!” The 10 seconds it took Izzy to compose herself was not fast enough.

“I'm fine, Mother,” she said, masking her real anger.

“No, you are not; you left the church. That's ungodly!”

Izzy could no longer maintain her composure. She slipped. Her voice deepened in annoyance.

“Mom, leave me alone. I'm in the shower.” That was the wrong move.

“Don't you DARE talk to me like that in my house!” Her mom yelled, practically screaming.

Izzy took a deep breath as she rolled her eyes. She impulsively decided to set her plan in motion. She was a 30-year-old woman, and her mom was scolding her like a teenager. Izzy wasn't having it anymore.

“FINE, I will move out of YOUR house,” Izzy's voice bellowed; there was weight and conviction behind her response. She never talked to anyone this way. She never spoke this loud before in her life. It was liberating.

Her mother never heard anything like this come from another human. It sounded animalistic, dark, dare she say demonic. What she heard was unnerving. Unnatural. It was far from the God she knew.

She dare not challenge whatever got into her daughter. She gasped as her hand rose to her mouth out of shock. From Izzy's point of view, whatever happened on the other side of the door, things had grown silent. Izzy could finish her shower in peace. Her pussy throbbed with approval. She smiled a wide grin. She was going to move out so she can masturbate in her own apartment.

There are moments in life that do not feel like storms because storms at least move, they break, they pass, and they leave behind some sign that something has changed, but this is different, this is the kind of quiet that lingers, the kind of stillness that presses in on your chest and makes time feel heavy, the kind of silence that makes you question whether anyone is listening at all, and if you have ever found yourself there, sitting in a room that feels too small for your thoughts yet too empty for your heart, then you understand what it means to feel forgotten in a way that words struggle to carry. It is not always loud pain, it is not always visible suffering, sometimes it is the slow erosion of hope, the subtle fading of color from things that once felt alive, and you wake up one morning and realize that the world has not changed, but something inside you has grown quiet, distant, and unsure of its place. This is where many people begin to ask the question, they are almost afraid to say out loud, because it feels dangerous even to think it, and that question is simple but heavy, where is God in this.

It is easy to talk about faith when everything feels aligned, when prayers seem to land somewhere, when life moves in a direction that makes sense, but faith becomes something entirely different when you are sitting in the dark, not metaphorically, but emotionally, spiritually, internally, when your thoughts become your loudest environment and your own mind begins to echo things that feel like accusations, things that feel like condemnation, things that whisper that you have been overlooked or left behind or quietly dismissed. In that place, it can begin to feel like God has stepped back, like His presence has withdrawn, like the warmth you once felt has been replaced by something distant and unreachable, and you start to wonder if maybe you did something wrong, or maybe you were never as close to Him as you thought, or maybe, just maybe, you have fallen into a space where even God has turned His face away.

But there is something that needs to be said clearly, gently, and with a kind of steady truth that does not shake when your emotions do, and that is this, the absence of feeling is not the absence of God, and the silence you are experiencing is not proof of abandonment, it is the place where something deeper is happening, something quieter, something that does not rely on sensation or emotional confirmation to exist. The human heart often looks for evidence through feeling, but God does not limit His presence to what you can feel in a moment of emotional clarity, and that means that even when everything inside you feels disconnected, He is not.

There is a story that unfolds not in grand moments or dramatic displays, but in the quiet spaces where people feel unseen, and it is in those spaces that Jesus does some of His most powerful work, not by removing every hardship instantly, but by entering into the very places where people feel most alone. Think about the way He moved through the world, He did not only meet people in their strength, He met them in their brokenness, He sat with those who were rejected, He spoke to those who felt invisible, He reached for those who had been labeled and dismissed by everyone around them, and He did not rush past their pain as if it were an inconvenience, He stepped directly into it.

What makes this deeply important is that Jesus did not require people to have themselves together before He came near, He did not wait for clarity, He did not wait for emotional stability, He did not wait for a perfectly articulated prayer, He met people exactly where they were, even when where they were felt like the lowest point they had ever known. That means something for you, right now, in this moment, wherever you are internally, because it means that the version of you that feels heavy, the version of you that questions everything, the version of you that feels distant from God, that version of you is not disqualified from being met by Him, that version of you is exactly where He comes.

Depression has a way of rewriting the narrative inside your mind, it takes moments and stretches them into conclusions, it takes silence and turns it into abandonment, it takes unanswered questions and reshapes them into statements that feel absolute, and over time, if you are not careful, you can begin to believe things about yourself and about God that were never true to begin with. You can begin to believe that you are too far gone, that you are too broken, that your thoughts are too dark, that your faith has somehow failed, and that God must be disappointed in you, and the longer those thoughts go unchallenged, the more real they begin to feel.

But truth does not shift based on how it feels in a moment, and the truth is that Jesus does not step away from you because you are struggling, He moves closer, and not always in ways that are loud or obvious, sometimes it is in the quiet endurance of your breath when you did not think you could keep going, sometimes it is in the small moments where you choose to stay when everything inside you wants to disappear, sometimes it is in the fact that you are still here, still holding on in ways that you do not even fully recognize as strength.

There is something sacred about the fact that you are still present, even if you feel like you are barely holding together, because presence in the middle of pain is not weakness, it is a form of quiet courage that does not need recognition to be real. Jesus understands that kind of presence because He Himself entered into suffering, not as an observer, but as someone who experienced the full weight of it, and when He cried out in a moment that echoed with human vulnerability, it was not because He was distant from God, it was because He was fully stepping into what it means to feel the depth of human emotion.

That means that when you feel unheard, when you feel like your prayers are not reaching anywhere, when your words feel like they are falling into an empty space, you are not alone in that experience, and more importantly, you are not abandoned in it. There is a difference between silence and absence, and while silence can feel like distance, it is often the space where something is being held together in ways that you cannot yet see.

Sometimes we expect God to respond in ways that remove all uncertainty, but what He often does instead is remain present within it, and that kind of presence does not always feel like relief, it feels like something steady, something grounded, something that does not leave even when your emotions fluctuate. It is the quiet assurance that you are not navigating this alone, even when your mind tells you otherwise, even when your heart feels disconnected, even when everything inside you is searching for something to hold onto.

If you could step outside of your current perspective for just a moment and see your life from a different angle, you might begin to notice something that is easy to miss when you are inside the experience, and that is the fact that you have been carried through more than you give yourself credit for. There have been days where you did not think you would make it through, and yet you did, there have been moments where everything felt overwhelming, and yet you are still here, and that does not happen by accident.

Jesus meets people in those exact moments, not by erasing their reality, but by entering into it with them, and that changes the nature of the experience, even if it does not immediately change the circumstances. It shifts the weight from something you are carrying alone to something that is being carried with you, and that difference matters more than you might realize right now.

There is a quiet kind of love that does not demand attention, that does not force itself into your awareness, that does not overwhelm you with constant emotional intensity, but instead remains steady, patient, and present, and that is the kind of love Jesus brings into your darkest moments. It is not loud, it is not always immediately comforting, but it is real, and it does not leave.

You are not forgotten, even if it feels like you are. You are not condemned, even if your thoughts are telling you that you are. You are not unheard, even if your prayers feel like they are echoing back to you. And you are not abandoned, even if everything inside you is trying to convince you that God has turned away.

He has not turned away.

He is sitting with you in this, closer than your thoughts, closer than your doubts, closer than the heaviness you feel, and even if you cannot feel Him right now, that does not change the reality of His presence. There is something unfolding in this space that you cannot yet fully see, something that is not dependent on your ability to feel it in this moment, something that is rooted in a love that does not withdraw when things get difficult.

And right here, in this place where everything feels uncertain, where your mind is searching for something solid to hold onto, where your heart is trying to make sense of what it is experiencing, this is where the story begins to shift, not because everything suddenly becomes clear, but because something deeper starts to take root beneath the surface, something that will carry you forward even when you do not yet understand how.

There is a moment that comes in this kind of darkness where the question is no longer just where is God, but something even more personal, something that feels almost too raw to say out loud, and that question is why would He stay with me like this, why would He sit in a place that feels so heavy, so unresolved, so quiet, and if you are honest, there is a part of you that wonders if maybe He is waiting for you to fix yourself first, waiting for you to become stronger, clearer, more stable, before He draws near again. That belief can quietly take root and begin to shape how you see yourself, because if you think God is waiting for a better version of you, then the version of you right now begins to feel like a problem that needs to be solved instead of a person who is deeply loved.

But the pattern of Jesus has never been to wait at a distance while people struggle their way toward worthiness, His pattern has always been to step directly into the place where people feel least worthy and to remain there with them in a way that redefines what worth even means. He sat with people others avoided, He spoke with people others dismissed, and He stayed present in moments that others would have walked away from, and that was not accidental, it was intentional, it was revealing something about the nature of God that goes deeper than human expectation. It shows that God does not withdraw from your lowest moments, He anchors Himself in them, and not because He is comfortable with your pain, but because He refuses to leave you alone inside of it.

Depression often convinces you that you are a burden, that your thoughts are too heavy, that your presence is something others have to tolerate rather than something they genuinely want, and over time, that belief can begin to shape how you imagine God sees you as well. You can begin to think that maybe He is patient with you, but distant, maybe He is aware of you, but not engaged, maybe He is watching from afar, waiting for you to come back into alignment before He steps closer again. That picture can feel logical when you are in the middle of it, but it is not true to who He is.

Jesus does not look at you as someone He has to tolerate, He looks at you as someone He chose to come close to, and that choice was not made based on a future version of you that has everything figured out, it was made with full awareness of every struggle, every doubt, every moment where you would feel like you are losing yourself, and still, He chose to draw near. That means that right now, in this exact state, not a revised version of you, not a future healed version of you, but you as you are, He is not stepping back, He is leaning in.

There is a powerful shift that begins to happen when you allow that truth to settle, even if it only settles slightly at first, because it changes the way you interpret your experience. Instead of seeing your current state as a sign that you have drifted away from God, you begin to recognize that this might actually be the place where He is closest, not because of the pain itself, but because of His nature to enter into it with you. That does not mean the pain suddenly disappears, and it does not mean every question is immediately answered, but it means that the narrative begins to change, and that matters more than you realize.

Think about the moments when you feel the most unheard, when your thoughts feel like they are looping without resolution, when your prayers feel like they are being spoken into something that does not respond, and in those moments, it can feel like silence is confirmation that nothing is happening, but silence is not always empty. Sometimes silence is presence without interruption, sometimes it is the kind of presence that does not overwhelm you with answers, but instead stays with you long enough for something deeper to begin forming beneath the surface.

There are things that cannot be rushed, there are parts of the human heart that do not heal through immediate resolution, but through steady presence, through something that remains even when everything else feels uncertain, and that is exactly how Jesus meets you here. He does not rush you out of this space, He does not demand that you feel better before you are allowed to be close to Him, He sits with you in a way that allows something real to take shape, something that is not dependent on temporary emotion, but grounded in something far more stable.

You may not feel strong right now, but there is strength in the fact that you are still here, still breathing, still searching, still willing to listen even if it feels difficult, and that kind of strength often goes unnoticed because it does not look dramatic, it does not draw attention, it simply exists in the quiet continuation of your life. Jesus sees that kind of strength, and He honors it, not by demanding more from you, but by meeting you within it.

There is also something important to understand about condemnation, because when your thoughts begin to turn against you, when they begin to point out every flaw, every mistake, every moment where you feel like you have fallen short, it can start to feel like those thoughts are exposing truth, but condemnation does not come from God. Jesus did not come to reinforce your worst thoughts about yourself, He came to break the hold those thoughts have over you, and that process does not always happen all at once, it often happens slowly, as truth begins to replace what once felt unquestionable.

You are not the sum of your worst thoughts. You are not defined by the heaviness you feel. You are not disqualified because you are struggling. And you are not alone, even if everything inside you is trying to convince you otherwise.

There is a quiet invitation in this moment, and it is not an invitation to fix everything, it is not an invitation to suddenly become something you are not, it is simply an invitation to stay, to remain present, to allow yourself to exist without the pressure of having all the answers right now. That may not sound like much, but it is more powerful than it seems, because staying in the presence of God, even when you do not feel Him clearly, is an act of trust that goes deeper than emotion.

Over time, something begins to shift, not always in ways that are immediately visible, but in ways that become undeniable when you look back and realize that you have been carried through moments you did not think you could endure. The darkness may not lift all at once, but it begins to loosen its grip, and what once felt overwhelming starts to become something you can move through, not because you suddenly became stronger on your own, but because you were never alone in the first place.

And maybe that is the part that changes everything, not the immediate removal of pain, but the realization that you were not abandoned inside of it, that even in your lowest moments, even when you felt forgotten, even when you felt unheard, even when you were convinced that God had turned away, He was still there, sitting with you, steady, patient, and present in a way that never left.

If you are in that place right now, if this feels familiar, if something inside you recognizes this weight, then hear this clearly and hold onto it as something solid when everything else feels uncertain, you are not beyond His reach, you are not outside of His presence, and you are not walking through this alone. Jesus meets you here, not at the end of your struggle, not after everything is resolved, but right in the middle of it, and He stays.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

After Covid

A tiny piece of London Descriptive of their own In DigiFrame and expectant These the artifacts of today And in beauty forward Ice was there Picking on up And trusting me- in thousands The decorated green- who will run this shop- in tandem with persona Making Dublin perfect And here are the options- Cattle grazing for the Earth Wanton sights of rod reunion Never sure how to make a lake And her in fashion- to the tired And seeming Houston Preparing Hyundai at emerg Blowing off the afternoon And six-day war in Apohaqui Better thing Like lying inland A place to be no marriage And Pripyat of So the verse was All up tear and geyser Poland West to Finland Might I argue for a vaccine Even at your favourite day And Christmas inexorable Shaking high and full of cinders We caught the memory of Cincoteague The duty to us wild For precious rain And six times after A war to forget And easy come the chesterfield Writing back a declaration Fits to October and backs of Ur This vicious gurney in outer lock The sky wild with Winter wars And all we had was coffee- in interstellar space For fortunes five and pressed for asking Art of the deal- For http.

2050

And then bemusement Of the virtual insane I was toy of the universe And a virtual water- in the stream Multi-dest in ribbons A showpiece on the Moon For those softened clouds A day in growing late But the General call Of iridium and scarab wish We were indignant on repeat With Suns and seasons and rain And after fur There was nothing like humanness To be along the guides- And best because of dough We whispered to the comet To end this dowry Victims of a dam Third floor in conscious glad Tiny bits of window-lay And the mercury harness A sworn regret of Earth To tiny amends that be The most of static heat and rain And berry-blust Fever for the open sewer In strategy on sale For the top heat at last- and Mexican Subtract a world of ivory For the ice and tumours shrinking People in Florence- Running Falun tide And the opiate cigars Fresh takes on being wise To fiber-grand and Rorschach A Captain by few and paid To probably wonder Eating sheep if iron due And a mixed up planet In retort from Saint John To seek perimeter wild As solid water Distance-practised in effigy Personal hums and stale cations A victory for this lake And a synthesis of the electron Planetary know-how A fear of laws unkept But Victory on Keewatin This lettuce scourge of the waves No toiling of the Emperor Keen to tighten our ship Motivation to see the present And a Victory- a false Victory- For the turnstile and the beam And rotten teeth And a vestibule for the ledge Of paws and arms and legs A fortune-cover seeks the world One night the same In places strong to view With nothing daring but the law If we are here, consider our children Madly profitable and open set Hues of blue to light our day And in this sect of throwing years A song of missions- and prairie dawn A feldspar for the East And nicotine labs Victory from the South In early rise to Sin-July Make mortal no mistake- Mountbatten few.

Lord Jesus I Love You

❤️🧡💛

And the season knows it best Prayers for Earth and its spin This Victory Road is March With beams of tiny blue and gold An effort to know What friends we keep in troop Nothing lands in grey But tough and green for kin And in her, thy Mom Peace to prevail And packets in the wind In here and May.

Spring (Quispamsis)

Meenan’s forward seeing rates of high heaven and Celtic run, Lazarus’ key to upper those believe, in the bounty of constant rain, muzzled by the 1 and groom, all shocks landing Atlantic sky, a better weapon than ICBM, a standing army fit for good, and days of rice to tell the tale, what suffer for- the truth is scoundrel, women join the Western sky, and boats dotting the velvet verse, to pray in Christ for Eucharist and Holy fever everywhere, a dam would burst in general time, as word and worm are here and there, to shoes for more than them and her, classes of being for shores that give, I am a starburst; I am you, and we not are need of a data design, upon this day and upper lip, a Hampton journey tempered- to cc and back, across the fields, to what was salt and see, power of attorney in the middle of night, for mercy on farms and h11, the gladdest gift of Indigenous time, people posthumously known as saints, in something St. Bernard would wait, for American days of 59 below, and Sussex breaks for understanding, all glory but Him, we are prostrate and proud, but mercy not known til March and esteem, men of high office who would stand in for God, to death is this unto great common, vapour and value to modest renew, in May there are fonts of four and more, underknowing to Grand Ile but praying, for water in course to become us, and bluster, and pay, to march and forswear on the Navy, and blue in time for Iran that is small, whose temper is witching and rough, Save the Queen, save the raindrop and orca scare for North landing, and June in time for Sparrow’s worth dawn, and No place beyond Quispamsis is quiet forswear- building fort and dawn and pleasing the East but forswearing the sat craze of balmy dew; striking man and the dirge of the old in ovation, restless dew in an island of few and seeking what style but November, we are solid our walk and pretend our esteem, and King’s Landing pro-bono in bond to our knees.

#tv #fiction #SF

Warning: Contains spoilers

As Ursula K. le Guin never tired of pointing out, good science fiction tries to tell us something about the here and now, not the then and there. That is true even for science fiction set ‘a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away’. Insofar as scifi is a commentary on, or even an inspiration for, real world events, does that make it fair to critique it on that basis? I think the answer is affirmative, but given the overall excellent qualities of Star Wars series Andor, I did worry I was holding it to an excessively high standard. Ultimately though, if a television series is so easily perceived as an analogy for how to resist authoritarian oppression, it is worth scrutinising where it locates the agency for that resistance, notwithstanding what many other merits it has.

Season 2 of Andor returns to thief-turned-spy Cassian Andor after he fully committed to the Rebellion. It covers the period between the end of season 1 and the start of Rogue One, the prequel that acts as the opening salvo for the original Star Wars trilogy. It is one of the grimmer series in the Star Wars franchise, set at the zenith of the Galactic Empire and tracing the formation of the Rebel Alliance via its eponymous hero and his comrades.

Despite being an escapist fantasy, Star Wars has always been political, and it certainly is not hard to read Andor as an analogy for our present moment, with democracies sliding into authoritarianism (examples of this take are here, here, here, and here). Of the entire Star Wars universe, Andor has the strongest focus on the banal cruelty of the Galactic Empire and the human cost of resisting it. It’s not surprising that it has become a source of inspiration for activists across the Anglophone world, with the show’s highlights seeping out into the real world. As a compelling depiction of fascist repression and a rousing inspiration for resistance Andor certainly delivers. Yet we should be careful not to treat its path to victory as a template for the work that needs to be done in the real world.

Before we delve into the politics of Andor, it must be said that this is one of the best products to ever come out of the Star Wars stable, and the fact that there are no Jedi involved is certainly not a coincidence. Andor has the gritty realism and suspense of the best Cold War spy thrillers (I’m reminded of Deutschland 83), with excellent structure and pacing keeping it compelling all the way through its twelve episodes. The absence of lightsabre duels and space battles creates space for the human sacrifices, both large and small, that form a resistance made up of ordinary people. Its brilliant cast of strong and relatable characters, whether the ruthless spymaster, despairing politician, or zealous apparatchik, gives it true complexity and depth.

The honest and unflinching focus on the psychology of resistance is one of the things that makes Andor brilliant. Revolution is not easy, and we see Andor’s main characters struggle with the sacrifices it demands, frequently failing or falling apart. A variety of motivations and dispositions leads to the usual disagreements over strategy and tactics, sometimes pushed to infighting by the siege mentality that results from constant pressure and secrecy. Andor’s is not the idolised and idealised vanguard party or guerilla cell formed solely of comrades sharing the unbreakable bond forged from common struggle. This is a messy affair. An ecosystem of actors, factions and precarious alliances barely held together by a common purpose. In other words, convincingly familiar to anyone involved in real left-wing organising.

Similarly, Andor excels in its depiction of the repressive apparatus of the fascist state, especially through its casting of two fanatical Imperial bureaucrats as annoyingly relatable characters. Central to the plot of season 2 is the Empire’s need to gain access to strategic minerals on the planet Ghorman. As Ghorman is not some Outer Rim backwater but a core planet, a suitable pretext needs to be found or fabricated to turn it into a sacrifice zone. With season 1’s Dedra Meero in charge, the Empire’s Internal Security Bureau embarks on a plan to justify permanent occupation of the planet that reads as a Who’s Who of authoritarian tactics. Ghorman’s population is dehumanised by the Empire’s propaganda machine, its resistance infiltrated and goaded, its economy strangled and its leaders incarcerated, before it all culminates in a ruthless double false flag operation as a coup de grace to justify a full scale occupation. Elsewhere in the galaxy, we see the violence, repression and abuse of power that comes with a militarised bureaucracy. If this feels familiar, that is because it is. Showrunner Tony Gilroy was reportedly inspired by the Wannsee Conference in Nazi Germany, but this is equally the story of Chile, Gaza, the Prague Spring, Xinjiang, Minneapolis, Moscow, or Tehran.

The ruthless exercise of state power against its own populace is one of the most powerful aspects of Andor, but it is also where the series chafes most against the constraints imposed by Star Wars’ canonical lore. This is after all an incongruent universe of sentient androids running on vacuum tubes, and faster-than-light travel organised via telephone exchange switchboards. It may be the future, but it is the future of the 1970s, and so it is no surprise that Andor feels like a John le Carré novel set in space. Cassian Andor does not need to worry about ubiquitous surveillance or his digital footprint, nor is there a galaxy-wide network full of Imperial bots and propaganda farms. Instead we have listening devices the size of iPods, ambushes under cover of nothing but darkness, and heroic last stands with flags and barricades that walked straight out of Les Miserables. It works for the viwer, because it taps into tropes that we have seen a thousand times before, but it doesn’t make much sense within the context of a technologically highly advanced society, nor does it offer much use as inspiration for anyone organising against power in the present day.

This isn’t just because our own organising environment poses challenges that are absent from Andor, but also because, embedded as it is within the Star Wars canon, Andor does not have a theory of political change. The Empire is preordained to fall when the evil overlord is slain by a young hero, with the Rebel Alliance acting solely in a supporting role. Star Wars has never had a conception of politics, only of political corruption and drama, and so it has no political or social forces for Andor’s rebels to tap into. Resistance in the real world is built on the existing infrastructure of left-wing political parties, revolutionary cells, activist campaign groups, or militant unions. None of these exist in the Star Wars imaginary, so it is no surprise that when the Ghorman rebels broadcast their last desperate plea for help, there is nobody out there to hear it.

Maybe this is an unfairly harsh criticism. After all, Andor is a sci-fi television series made by a multibillion dollar corporation, not a revolutionary handbook. Yet as Ada Palmer cogently argues, where we place agency in fiction matters:

When SFF authors offer portraits of how people change the world, we exercise enormous power over worldview, over expectations, over hope.

Despite centering ordinary people, Andor’s implicit premise is that all we can hope to do is prepare the ground for the hero to come and save us. Star Wars is a story of resistance acting from the outside, having sought refuge beyond the boundaries of the Empire. It is a guerilla riding to victory because a combination of magical heroism and helpful enemy hubris allow it to strike at the core of imperial power, after which the Empire falls apart and we can all go home (except not really, as we discover in The Mandalorian). But there is no outside in Minneapolis, Jerusalem or Hong Kong, nor can we rely on a hero with magical powers to come and save us. Real resistance can only spring from collective action within the societies in which we live, founded on tenacious organising in order to push back authoritarian power and control.

None of that takes away from the brilliance of the series and its value as inspiration. Andor pushes the Star Wars canon probably as far into a realistic analogy of resistance to fascism as its lore allows it to go. It shifts Star Wars into the morally grey area where every action is a compromise, and where nobody has clear sight on the path to victory. Andor doesn’t give us a hero’s journey, only comrades who stubbornly, desparately cling on to the hope that the struggle might at some future point bear fruit. Which returns me to the words of the late Tony Benn that:

There is no final victory; there is no final defeat; just the same battles that have to be fought over and over and over again.

It is hard to keep hope alive in the face of the vast forces arrayed against us, and many of us will never know if our small contributions made a difference. But the same was true for our ancestors, whose victories and defeats brought us the world we live in today. We may not have the Jedi to come and save us, but like Cassian Andor and his comrades, we do have each other, and the faith that in the long run, the people united will not be defeated.

Notes & Suggestions

• The struggles with despair, grief, survivor’s guilt, and suspicion all feature in Hannah Proctor’s Burnout, which is an excellent resource for activists dealing with the stresses of organising.
• Another recent depiction of the struggle against authoritarian repression, One Battle After Another not only has a more recognisably contemporary setting, but is also more interested in the role community plays in organising resistance.
• The Imaginary Worlds podcast has two interesting episodes (recorded some years apart) about representations of fascism in science fiction, and while Andor itself isn’t specifically covered, Star Wars is unsurprisingly one of the key works discussed. The first episode is here, and the second one here.
• Andor may serve as an inspiration for people standing up against nascent fascism, but it would be remiss not to note that Disney, the company that produced it, is clearly no ally in this struggle. Not only did it readily concede to demands from the Trump administration’s to suspend voices critical of the government, but it is also one of the key targets in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign due to its complicity in the illegal occupation of Palestine.
• You are unlikely to find the Rebel Alliance in this part of the galaxy, but absent that, joining a trade union, tenants association, campaign group or political party is not a bad way to help build collective power.

In Summary: * Two points of interest tonight: First, my morning's work on those fallen branches was both more productive, and more tiring than I expected. If I get as much done tomorrow morning as I did this morning, the front yard part of this project will be done. But, LORD, did this morning's work wipe me out! When the wife got home from work midday, she found me asleep in the big brown recliner in the front room.

Second, my basketball before bedtime is a men's college basketball game from the first round of the NIT, the Wyoming Cowboys vs the Wichita State Shockers. The audio feed for the pregame show, which I'm listening to now, comes from the Cowboys'Sports Network. They'll be handling the radio call of the game.

Given the fatigue from this morning's yard work that's still with me, I'm quite sure that after this game ends I'll be finishing my night prayers and heading to bed.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 225.53 lbs. * bp= 138/82 (68)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 05:55 – 1 banana, 1 ½ McDonald's double cheeseburger * 09:00 – pork and onions, brown bread * 15:00 – bowl of lugau (rice, chicken, boiled eggs

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:30 – bank accounts activity monitored * 05:45 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials * 10:30 – cut and carry fallen branches * 13:15 to 15:45 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 16:00 – follow news reports from various sources * 17:15 – have tuned into the audio feed for tonight's NIT men's basketball game between the Wyoming Cowboys and the Wichita State Shockers.

Chess: * 16:18 – moved in all pending CC games

I remember seeing advice online about how after a breakup you should wait at least 3 weeks before breaking no contact to speak with them. It’s a shame because we aren’t going to talk. Likely ever again. And that’s for the best.

I thought to myself how did I fall so in love with the wrong person. There are several different ways to look at it, all equally as meaningless. I fell in love with her due to the chemicals in my brain, and the constant proximity and interaction. Or maybe it wasn’t even love but rather the addiction to the constant push pull cycle. Or maybe how it felt like she completed me. How much I cared about her and how much I was willing to sacrifice to make her happy and for her benefit. Hell even at the end, after she had gone nuclear and done so many fucked things I still did whatever I thought would be best for her and would hurt her the least. It’s the sort of love where their needs matter more than your own. In a way I’m grateful she blew things up for me because otherwise I don’t know if I could have ever broken up with her. I don’t think she could have ever fully understood me but then again no one ever can, that’s part of the point of being human.

But either way I loved her so fucking much. And I still love her, just in a different way. I can love her as a human, but not as a partner or a part of my life. She also did love me. I do believe that fully. But love and effort aren’t the only thing that matter unfortunately. And so I try to reconcile the fact that I both love her so deeply, and also the fact that she was not at all right for me and that I am hurting so fucking much. She hurt me. But it’s also not fully her fault of course, I chose wrong. I jumped too fast and ignored all the things I hope I know now.

I think this is a testament towards how easy it is for me to love. It might be a little disingenuous for me to phrase it like this, as a lot of it could also be framed as my desire for connection and love. But at the end of the day I’ve fallen so heavily in love with people that don’t seem to be a great match to me on paper. And so when I find someone in the future who can reciprocate more of the things I can give, I don’t need to be as afraid of not loving them. I hope.

If I could talk to E, all of the things I would say are things she wouldn’t receive well, or questions that she doesn’t have the answers to. The instinct in my heart is that I’ve polished and packaged these thoughts so well that she has to give me confirmation that I’m right. But that wouldn’t happen, and I know that. If she had that capacity, then we wouldn’t be the way we are now. Still in my mind I want to reach out for some stupid bullshit or another. I want to sell her the doja cat ticket we bought, since then she could go with someone she knows. But I don’t even know if she’s going to go. After we broke up she joked about seeing me in a year since we have the tickets next to each other and I told her I had already listed the tickets, since it would hurt me too much. I think no contact must also be brutal for her. Because she loves/loved me so much. What a devastating or cruel position to be in to have to break up with someone you love because you keep hurting them. That guilt constantly damaging you. And on my end, her lack of accountability or responsibility to make up for it. I lost so much stability and fear because of her hiding messages to exes, people flirting with her and other stuff. And it never should be that hard. I remember throughout the relationship I started feeling like I could see an end, since this was not what I thought love should feel like. I shouldn’t have so many doubts and fears, trust shouldn’t have to be repaired so quickly. And it wasn’t really repaired. I kept having nightmares of her hiding stuff, and when I’d try to outline ways for her to make up for it she would avoid them. And I still fell so deeply in love with her. Or maybe that’s nostalgia.

I really want to learn to accept things as they are. If someone is behaving some way, accept it. If someone was super friendly and engaged, and then suddenly goes missing and pulls away let them. Don’t tell yourself constantly that right now is bad but E will change, and these problems will go away. And then no other problems will ever come up. You are not a therapist or a teacher Anshuman. You are an equal PARTNER. It should not be one sided. Find someone who fucking reads the list of things they asked you to get, since you killed it on presents and they couldn’t be similarly thoughtful. It’s fine if that’s the case, but the fact that she didn’t even READ the list you gave her to make things easier must have been such a fucking slap in the face. The fact that you had to constantly beg for things like for her to acknowledge what she did. Or for small little acts like a hug and a card. Or for her to not shut down and ignore you when you try to be vulnerable. You shouldn’t have to beg. Don’t just find, but also wait for someone who doesn’t make you feel like you need to fight to have space in their mind. E never had to convince you to love her in the ways she needed. You deserve the same. Remember that you weren’t loved right as a kid, and so your perception of the world is fully tainted by that.

I can’t remember or find the quote but something about: “when you grow up in a burning house butterflies look the same as red flags” i’ve butchered that so badly, and I would honestly delete it if I felt like I should have any shame here, but given the nature of it I’m gonna leave it just to fucking prove to myself that this is a safe place for me.