I have such an intrigue with capital, maybe it is because it is the only thing I can understand, economically, politically, socially, even culturally.

As I age, year after year, hidden in the suburbs of miles upon miles of asphalt seas, funded by the ventures of the wealthiest Americans, for the intention of keeping themselves distant and away from subjects such as me, you, or even the next average proletarian, that I grew up afraid of the roads. Of the outside. It is uncanny, how little I can speak of it. In only the langauge I have been colonized with, not raised with, that I can explain why I never wanted to go outside. I did not want to. Cars had terrified me, and I didn’t want to understand driving in them. I always kept my head down when we were in the car and I barely remembered or cared to remember locations, my family tried teaching me, but the lack of experience and various other interpersonal factors kept me from going out (it IS Phoenix, Arizona, after all… open street view and look at the weather and now imagine summer break…) At certain times, I didn’t want to go out and travel. I was utterly depressed anytime we did travel. And sometimes refused to go out when they went out. The result of me simply enjoying the pleasures that capital provided me inside the comfort of an air-conditioned room. The comfort away from people, which my fear my family instilled in me had only increased my fear of the outside world.

There were better pleasures inside, there was escapes from the toils and utter despair of this world through internet forums, discussions, chatrooms, about the things you like. And how grandiose it felt, as a young child, knowing the ins and outs of computers, the wild landscapes that was the internet, and the subtle realization that no one around you understood nor cared enough about the ‘computer’ to interupt you. Stealing your brother’s or mother’s laptop, and turning it into a device for your own utter enjoyment: free games, free books, free movies, etc. I was atomized! In essence, a pure subject of capital. Even if I had access to those free books, movies, etc., I had entrenched myself and my behavior, my desires to commodity-machines that can ONLY BE REPRODUCED through capital, through the purchasing of internet, the maintenence of your computer through financing, it being a source of capital in and of itself, with how you can use it to create and make new things. Of course this isn’t the worst part of it, the worst part of our modern, internet infrastructure and the capital required for its maintenence is that, it is an entrenched form of it. Our world is, as to say, surrounded by digitally-owned privately-operated forces, forces beyond the ‘consumer,’ the musician, the developer, the artist, the writer, even the journalists, photographers, and videographers. The reader. The listener. The theatre kid. And if you are raised in it, it has inescapably grasped onto you and your mind. This isn’t an experience I’ve had exclusively: Many Gen Z, especially those that started, still attended, or finished highschool during the COVID-19 Pandemic has been defined by the switch to fully digital lifestyle. It has affected them and their own social life. I’ve been on dates, tried dating many, many people my age, but reasonably, as a consequence to atomization and being isolated to two spaces: your personal and your professional/school life, we all struggled with connecting. A good date goes from laughs and enjoyment, to months and months of ghosting or building up the nerve to send a message or playing by unspoken rules of social media engagement. A friendship can turn sour from emotions playing high, and being unable to interpersonally interact with it. Struggles separate from romantic and platonic life affect how we behave in the personal, and we are not taught or have been in socially stimulating environments to deal with it. A rape can happen, between you and your lover, and you have no one, absolutely no one, to talk to other than him, so you force your emotions, live with it, and even let the worst of your emotions bottle up and explode at the worst time. No sisters, no community, no outside recourse other than capital, social-capital, ultimately, capital that you can utilize to create social awareness of it - social atomization resulting in almost consistently, a liberalizing of our relationships to everyone and everything else.

The naivety I had developed from being quite atomized from the rest of the world is astounding. The amount of times I’ve been proven wrong on my assumptions on people, has made me an utterly cynical person, as I’ve grown into my adulthood. Sometimes, my naivety still leaks out, as I trust the facade of a good nature people provide, but it is either until I am given a reality check or I run right into the brick wall that I start to realize how much this world has been tempered, almost calcified, into this living, socio-economic struggle we are forced to wake up to every morning. Although I am a growing adult, I still have a hurt, misguided, and sorely isolated child who needs to heal, who was given a whiplash of an experience being raised. On one side, the liberal passificity of American childcare culture - on the other, the very aggressive, and trauma-guided ‘single-head’ patriarchy I was raised under, that I was entirely forced to deal with, with no recourse whatsoever. No one I knew nearby. No one who cared enough. No one who had enough capital to support me. The only recourse is the liberal means to defend myself, which had only isolated me and endangered me more, arguably, made me just as big a monster as those I fear.

This isolation has also built into me, an ego-centricity that has been wilted off and dying, like a sick branch on a tree, which has made me believe my experiences were special, unique, and even guided, spiritually. I had always taken spiritual signs seriously, as I had a fleeting, but hopeful, disbelief in God and spirituality. I cannot tell if it is because of the monotony of Americana car-culture living, under the isolating forces of capital on all sides, that had conditioned into me a religious psychosis around unfamiliar and new information. It could very well be something else. When I used to speak of God’s beauty, I used to speak of the new experiences I had, with things humanity had already explored and already discovered.

I never once laid my eyes on a coast.

I’ve written in my journal, about my two near death experiences, drowning as a kid. Both has instilled in me a completely irrational fear of the ocean and of big wide open spaces. So as I speak of God’s beauty, I sit, hide inside, in fear of it! Sometimes, the sensation of water rushing over my head invokes a panic attack. Showering would evoke panic attacks, and explaining it to my family would only result in cold neglect. I’d wake up from nightmares, to my mother shouting and screaming at me that I am ‘only lying so I won’t sleep’. So I would suffer by myself, I would learn not to ask, not to even stare, or know about this world; my parents saw something visibly hurt me, but I never told. I didn’t know how to ask for help. It was as if atomization had fully finished setting in on my child brain: “Never ask for help. You will only be reprimanded for trying to build something out of weakness.

It kept me silent, and not just in familiar territory, but to enter into a lion’s den and hide in what I may think is familiar territory, while not realizing how isolated I am. How little I seem to matter in the minutia of my own life. I get sick, and I don’t ask for help, I just quietly let myself toil whatever pain I may have. I feel depressed, hurt, even upset about something, yeah, then it’s not my right to complain about it. Things could be worse. I could have my guts spilling out from a bombing run. Or I could be hit with white phosphoros.

Atomization has also introduced me to my worse fears, and built an anxious nervous system that I do not think is controllable without seriously revolutionary principles. No community can fight back against it, as all our modern day communities are intertwined with the logic of atomization: the logic of capital itself.

It has both started a resistence of my own problems and understanding them, and set into motion a passive acceptence of the worst to come. I cannot understand when it began, maybe when I realized how much my life was under threat as I came out as a trans woman to my parents, but this really starts off as a reactionary drive to survive; not in a political term, but in a psycho-social term. That any threat to my own well-being, no matter how minor, would set off this anxious nervous system built into me by the isolation my family forced me into. This is in no way to psychologically evaluate myself, but more to show off how atomization has resulted in various chaotic relationships, to say the least. An inability to come to terms with reality, maybe an insistence on the right thing even when others don’t know what that means. Maybe even a romantic obsession over the betterment in oneself, and romance and platonicism, and community as a catalyst for that! You ask people to join you on these grand trips, knowing that it won’t even amount, even matter, to the little moments you missed out on while trying to see the beauty in the world, trying to enjoy your own life.

There are many societal and personal contradictions to confront... Too much to speak of. And this article is a mess, anyways.

All there is to speak of is the coasts I have never laid my two eyes on… Of course, I have traveled to California beaches many times, I’ve seen the rocky costal of Maine, the …packed… shores of Roman beaches, the cool breezy wind on Dutch ports, I’ve lived along the shores of rivers, and seen much similar sights… But consciously, I never sat there, with my human eyes, with something behind me, supporting me to look at, to grapple with a world I can comfortably turn my back to the water and remember fond memories of the coast… My eyes have never laid eyes on a coast… Only a sea of bad memories that you drown under, with no control over the waves that pull, and pull… and pull