I think The Alchemist is a great book. It just arrived at a time when I had outgrown the kind of clarity and comfort it tries to offer. Not because it’s untrue—but because I’ve already carved meaning for myself. I’ve fought my way to the summit. And when the book says “When you want something, all the universe conspires…”—I know better. I know the universe is not always kind. Sometimes it fights you—conspires against you. Sometimes it’s silent. Sometimes, I am the universe, pushing myself forward

If Metamorphosis made me feel trapped in expectations, The Stranger made me question why I ever cared in the first place. I was confronted with an uncomfortable thought: what if nothing actually matters? Not in the nihilist "let's give up" way but in the liberating "so why not live on my own terms?" way. If I am not bound by expectation, if I owe no one a performance, then what do I really want?

Where do I fall?

Kafka's world is suffocating, and Camus' world is indifferent. Gregor fights the absurdity of existence by submitting to it; Meursault embraces it and is punished for doing so. One decays under the weight of obligation, the other defies it and is sentenced to death. And somehow, I see parts of myself in both of them.

“I remember being catcalled and men just normally being attracted to me because of the way I looked—although my body began developing very rapidly at a young age, these interactions were rather problematic because I was underage, but that's not the point of this! Those problematic interactions shaped my early understanding of desirability, but in contrast to my experiences here, they stand out for a reason: they existed. I'm not saying I miss that harassment or that male attention but it was only recently that I realized that that has never happened during my time here. And because I moved here before my brain had fully developed, I never quite grasped why that was. I've noticed that only "ethnic" men seem to demonstrate any sort of attraction to me publicly, and now I understand why—and this isn't to say white men aren't attracted to me, or better yet women who look like me, it's just hard to separate fetish and fantasies from genuine attraction.”

“As I sat and pondered, I realized that I could resume my life in a single phrase: 25 years of wretched sobbing. In many ways, tears were a catalyst for the release of emotions I couldn't yet understand—anger being at the forefront of them all. I remember being an angry child. I'm not quite sure who or what I was angry at but the emotion was there, manifesting in ways I could not yet understand.”