“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.”
— Mitch Albom
Love is actually truly beautiful…weird, painful, but beautiful. And I think that’s nice. You know, we INTPs aren’t unfeeling robots, we truly feel emotions extremely intensely. It is just more rare for us to feel something than it might be for others. But that’s exactly what makes our emotions maybe a little more special, at least for us. They are the proof of our life, of the fact that we’re breathing and living, the proof that we actually don’t just fake all of what we are. My true emotions, the way they overwhelm me, the way I can’t understand them, they bring me comfort. They are something I cannot understand or grasp, and I absolutely love it. Finally something else takes control over me, and somehow it brings me rest. At those moments I stop thinking. I just stop. And I had no idea I needed it as much as I do. But it’s so peaceful. And so complex. And so depressing, yet uplifting, living in a blue euphoria. Sometimes, emotions become a drug for me. They throw you into a dream, that will never become true, and yet, I think sometimes it is good and important to live in that dream. And it’s okay to feed that dream, to add more moments that meant nothing in reality, but meant the world for you. Emotions are beautiful. Emotions are something that should be loved, and something that should be feared. They are extremely powerful, and I believe in the strength of emotions more than I believe in the strength of intellect. Emotions are able to show you the truth through the lies they say. And I’m amazed by that.
05/28/2021
Fear and excitement.
Greatest oxymoron to have ever lived inside of me.
There is such a lack of balance in my soul,emotions seem to be extending their roots further and further in that which is my tangible existence.
A grandiose future awaits me,every cell in my body and every sliver of my being seems to be propelling themselves so as to reach the right spot in time.
It feels preternatural,as if what life made me go through is not anywhere near describable as pain,it is no more than the path i had to go down to in order to achieve my current standing.
I am no more than myself,thus I am all there is to live.
damn baby you are beyond mortal comprehension, wanna make me insane?
“It’s always dark. The sky if not grey, is black. The snow thigh high slowly grows waist deep. But the tall woman, her dark shawl pulled taut, walks on anyway. The tall woman walks alone, deeper into the woods among a crowd of trees she finds her place”
— Sujata Bhatt, from “She Finds Her Place”, Collected Poems
“One has either to take people as they are, or leave them as they are. One cannot change them, one can merely disturb their balance. A human being, after all, is not made up of single pieces, from which a single piece can be taken out and replaced by something else.” - Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice
You’re smiling at me like the gate is closed and there’s nowhere for me to go.
You’re smiling like I still want you
through all the slurring, the blurring of your addiction and the cold, long winter of your silence.
You’re smiling like we’re living a party, baby and my eyes aren’t on that neon exit.
You’re smiling like I’m a boomerang, destined to circle back right into your hand
to relive that experience.
Your biggest insult to me.
— s. lee { x }
I find myself opposed to the view of knowledge as a passive copy of reality.
- Jean Piaget 1896-1980
How do we learn things? The answers to this age-old question have been examined and analysed by many scientists. There are plenty of prominent theories explaining cognitive development and helping us to understand the foundation of knowledge.
One of the most prominent answers to the question has come from a Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget.
The legacy of Jean Piaget to the world of early childhood education is that he fundamentally altered the view of how a child learns. And a teacher, he believed, was more than a transmitter of knowledge she was also an essential observer and guide to helping children build their own knowledge.
As a university graduate, Swiss-born Piaget got a routine job in Paris standardising Binet-Simon IQ tests, where the emphasis was on children getting the right answers. Piaget observed that many children of the same ages gave the same kinds of incorrect answers. What could be learned from this?
Piaget interviewed many hundreds of children and concluded that children who are allowed to make mistakes often go on to discover their errors and correct them, or find new solutions. In this process, children build their own way of learning. From children’s errors, teachers can obtain insights into the child’s view of the world and can tell where guidance is needed. They can provide appropriate materials, ask encouraging questions, and allow the child to construct his own knowledge.
Piaget’s continued interactions with young children became part of his life-long research. After reading about a child who thought that the sun and moon followed him wherever he went, Piaget wanted to find out if all young children had a similar belief. He found that many did indeed believe this. Piaget went on to explore children’s countless “why” questions, such as, “Why is the sun round?” or “Why is grass green?” He concluded that children do not think like adults. Their thought processes have their own distinct order and special logic. Children are not “empty vessels to be filled with knowledge” (as traditional pedagogical theory had it). They are “active builders of knowledge-little scientists who construct their own theories of the world.”
Piaget’s Four Stages of Development
Sensorimotor Stage: Approximately 0 - 2 Infants gain their earliest understanding of the immediate world through their senses and through their own actions, beginning with simple reflexes, such as sucking and grasping.
Preoperational Stage: Approximately 2 - 6 Young children can use symbols for objects, such as numbers to express quantity and words such as mama, doggie, hat and ball to represent real people and objects.
Concrete Operations: Approximately 6 - 11 School-age children can perform concrete mental operations with symbols-using numbers to add or subtract and organizing objects by their qualities, such as size or color.
Formal Operations: Approximately 11 - adult Normally developing early adolescents are able to think and reason abstractly, to solve theoretical problems, and answer hypothetical questions.
Albert Einstein once called Piaget’s discoveries of cognitive development as, “so simple only a genius could have thought of it”. As the above shows, Piaget’s theory was born out of observations of children, especially as they were conducting play. When he was analysing the results of the intelligence test, he noticed that young children provide qualitatively different answers to older children.
This suggested to Piaget that younger children are not dumber, since this would be a quantitative position – an older child is smarter with more experience. Instead, the children simply answered differently because they thought of things differently.
At the heart of Piaget’s theory then is the idea that children are born with a basic mental structure, which provides the structure for future learning and knowledge. He saw development as a progressive reorganisation of these mental processes. This came about due to biological maturation, as well as environmental experience.
We are essentially constructing a world around us in which we try to align things that we already know and what we suddenly discover. Through the process, a child develops knowledge and intelligence, which helps him or her to reason and think independently.
For Piaget his work was never just for a closeted coterie of scholars and researcher but had real world application. Piaget was able to put his work in a wider context of importance. He said, “only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual”. Piaget’s theory centres on the idea that children, as little scientists, need to explore, interact with, and experiment in order to gain the information they need to understand their world.
02/03/2021
It’s not me.
It wasn’t me being so out of it that everything seemed dull.
There was and there is a reason.
No overthinking ended up being futile insofar as it became a starting point for a new series of events.
Things started making sense as some behaviors connected themselves with words spoken by the people in question.
Incongruent actions were carried out by people who are no more coherent themselves.
It’s okay as much as it will not worsen.
I will not just bear with it and that is a given.
———————————————————————
My world has yet to change.
What has fundamentally morphed is only myself,albeit I have to carry on like this for a while longer.
I must work on myself without trying to find distractions,whether they force themselves in my life or I let them in willingly.
It all depends on my capability of consciously making the decisions which are waiting in line and have been for a while.
I don't know how many times I survived myself without telling anyone.
-V. J.
I have cried more than a few times today and we both ask myself, what is wrong?
Well, I am looking at myself waiting for the answer, I seem unable to conceive that it is I who is supposed to speak, I who is supposed to know.
I don’t know.
I look at myself expecting an answer but the mirror doesn’t flinch.
.
I have to be smart and I have to be different or nothing will have meaning, but already nothing means anything so why this desire to be apart from everyone while crying out: why am I apart from everyone?
.
I don’t know if I like the things I like or I just think I do, if who I am is who I really am or who I think I am supposed to be.
I am my best friend but that is only because I have no other friends.
.
I feel light years away from everyone else but I feel galaxies away from myself.
I want to be everything so much that I end up being less than nothing.
.
You can’t replace all the blood in a person.
Do you know what that means?
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I burst into tears at signs of tenderness and I live a new life every day, I feel more the character than the actor, I feel more the actor than myself.
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I cry at fictional scenarios and I joy in thoughts of strangers, yet I cannot call my friends back or reply to a single text.
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It seems instead of finding love I find new colors of sorrow, new ways to cry and new languages in which to say it hurts.
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Do my words mean something even if I don’t?
I don’t. I don’t.
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I am tired of categorizing my emotions as symptoms.
.
Everything I’ve ever written is the same thing, repeated.
You can guess it by now.