what makes you beautiful
alert: i disclose some of 'person of interest' sweet plot, so if you love to see the show freshly, consider.
among axis II personality disorders, i think that being a sociopath isn't that bad afterall. schizophrenia is obviously worse, for example. the upside of being a sociopath is that your brain is technically incapable of feelings, or you feel very little. it would make things somewhat easier, i imagine, because you dont get hurt. meanwhile, normal but damaged people develops strange defense mechanisms and these mechanisms can cause very unpleasant disorder in their life.
in that sense, sociopathy is a neat end. the other end of sociopathy is (somewhat) a borderline personality. and this end is way messier. you feel, but the emotions are intensified. so when you find a compatible nervous system (ie you fall in love), your brain releases so much chemistry it floats your mind over the clouds. you feel excessive joy and delight in every single way, of every single day. then the curse comes. you break down. it is a free fall into a deep dark abyss, never reaching the bottom. it is not mere sadness. it is everything in this world suddenly losing meaning. it is non-sense in every atom holding up your reality. it is a series of moments that in one second, i plan my life, and in the next, i plan my death. it is a torturing cycle, of phorias, and when the subsconscious mind reaches a point that it decides i (or whatever me as a whole) cannot take it anymore, it issues a halting command to completely shut down the whole system, just to be sure, just so i dont get hurt. so i lost appetite in everything, in foods, in coding, in logic, in martial arts. barely survival. it is a blank state of non functional, where the anticipation is infinitely empty and the blinking cursor in your mind screen irritates you to death and you wish to disappear from the surface of the earth, into some high dimension that curls itself up at the scale of quark size. yes, escape into the void between atoms. it's like waking up feeling so broken you just want to close your eyes with the desperate hope that you wake up again in an alternate reality.
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living at borderline is like forever living in a distorted reality. there is no way out of it. therapy, dancing, writing.. are just coping mechanisms. just like sad people spend a lot of time in their bed. sleeping is a natural defense mechanism. when you sleep, you dont think. it is amazing to contemplate, how far the brain would go to avoid the painful struggle of existential crises. like falling in love, like fixating on someone, hating something, chasing a target, working like no tomorrow, and other things like that. everybody needs a sense of purpose. taking that out of us, there is a vacuum in our soul that would crave intensely and can lead to uncontrollable actions and consequences.
they say we cheat nature. no we dont. with birth control and the prospect of having sex without consequence, we still reproduce. because offspring comes with a package of marvellously powerful chemicals that generously flood our whole system, changing from brain to body to mind to lifestyle. everything. especially if you are a female. a female has a wired-in sense of purpose, that they can trigger the process almost at any time. that's why many of them cannot open their mind to other people's choice of anything difference. that's why they can be very protective of their property. because they dont have to suffer the agony of muddling through the darkest mess of having a broken self: losing sense of purpose. losing sense of purpose is losing your sense of self, is losing your ego experience, is when your reality collapses and you fall frenzily through the crack of the reality fabric. into oblivion. everybody fears oblivion. yet, somehow ironic, we are all technically alone in our mind.
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in these episodes of losing color in the mesmerizingly blue sky above, of melancholy veiled upon flowers like a dead spell, you would understand that it is comforting to have a sense of purpose. even if it is technically just a delusion of purpose.
root tells shaw that "if we are just information, noise in the system.. might as well be a symphony". root loves shaw. and shaw cares. when samaritan captures shaw, it puts her through a new kind of torture technique. it intervenes into shaw's brain to simulate a fake reality. the reasoning is that, it doesnt know how to break shaw, so it would just let run the random simulations, trying to figure out a way to turn shaw on her friends. thousands of times shaw wakes up in a simulation, thousands of times she tries to escape, but sometimes they let her wake up in real life. this is to make her lose her sense of reality, lose the knowledge of what is real what is not. so that even if she truly escapes, she doesnt know what memory is hers, what is planted anymore.
in all these simulations, with very sophisticatedly calculated moves from samaritan, she starts to walk the road the opponent wants. but when it comes to the point of facing root, it always ends there. shaw always shoot herself. the reasoning is that, there is a probability of the simulation being the real life (samaritan plays a mixed strategy). and shaw cannot be sure anymore. so her best response is always to shoot herself, just to be sure, just so root doesnt get hurt, even if there is a probability that shaw really dies. because root is a soft spot. and there is nothing samaritan can do about that. shaw, a sociopath, tells root about some "person i care about". quite simple. i said that once. i understand her.
later on when the machine takes root's data history and evolves itself into some kind of root-machine merger, it tells shaw that "there is this thing root might want to tell you. you always thought that there is something wrong with you, that you dont feel the way other people do. but root always thought that it is actually what makes you beautiful.."