Memoirs and Musings

Subdued

Walking down the fluorescent-lit corridor at 2:45 PM, that stretch of hallway toward the hospital’s forgotten tail, where Thanatos was hidden and Eros was found in sterile plastic. It was an abyss of a sort, an area of limbo leading to that end where surrender and structured disorder arise. This is where time collapses and contorts in rigid waves. Stepping into that angular stretch, I stared down in search of purification: the sacred in mortal walls. The air carried a faint sweetness. Of undoing. Decay. Flesh.

I knew that something would unspool tonight. It always does. There is always a subtle loosening of symmetry, of breath as if the geometry of the body has grown tired of holding itself together. Something ancient would rearrange itself molecule by molecule. Enmeshed in spirals of medical gaze, I am transformed into the labyrinth itself. Me flowing as an extinguishing angel with decrepit human bodies and monitors.

I was allowed to linger at the trembling of sacred proportions without apology. To study it, to move with it. That permission intoxicated me. There, the veil was permanently thin, a witness to strange composure and brutality through complications and conflict and bodily surrender to medicine, protocol, daily rituals. Just temporarily, within the confine of those 8 hours, I had permission to be obsessive, a socially acceptable way of being obsessive. Constant movement: I felt myself a quiet wheel turning within the vast rhythm of a machine I can barely grasp. Into the unknown, searching through labyrinths in my mind while I walked bleary down that bright hallway in search of a glucometer.

Mall as Machine of Desire: A Deleuzian Take on Valley Fair

"...many days spent walking through Valley Fair Mall alone, in search of meaning inside something as familiar and readily available to me as consumerism. Recently, I stepped into a high-end department store on a fall evening and I felt the air change. It was colder, perfumed, suspended. Outside, time moved in the sunset. Inside, time dissolved into escalators and polished marble. I stopped trying to resist it. Instead, I entered it, imagining I was in a metaphysical realm of brands radiating soft emotional pulls, bodies inside a circuitry, and escalators channeling hypnotic movement."—me, from a fragment written in my journal on 12/11/25

I have always felt cynical about shopping malls for most of my life. I saw them as hollow bourgeois spectacles: overstimulated by that concoction of smells, people, and stimuli. I'd scoff at the Instagram-friendly boba shops and the forgettable restaurants. Yet there is a profound alienation about the mall that appeals to me immensely. The way the mall does everything it can to modify human behavior. No longer animal, but transcended into pure capital necessity. I found a way to enter the mall differently, to embrace it and transcend its boundaries. I now experience it as a dreamlike identity experiment. I dissolve, temporarily, into the materialism surrounding me.

What I saw that evening was a constellation of human bodies wandering, consuming, drifting. Architectural channels that guided and captured movement, corporate brands exerting affective pulls, forming a functioning machine of desire. Through each step I took in the mall's corridors, through the food court and up the escalator, past another "Coming 2026" sign, I felt the flow of capital (transactions, credit, data) passing through each storefront. My mind in a zen-like state, I let the desire emanating from displays and advertisements wash over me. I people-watched: seeing other bodies circulating along escalators, corridors, trendy storefronts and pop marts. I observed the way the mall redirected and intensified the human body to accumulate into absolute consumption. I decided to walk into Aritzia for the first time in my life, something that I never imagined I would partake in. I laid my hand on their famous Slouch Coat and found myself lost in a micro-garden wired inside a larger ecosystem. The lighting was warm enough to soften my gaze in the enormous mirror. The bass-boosted pop music pulsed low and restrained. I was left in an intoxicated consumer daydream state in a way the store wanted me to, because I also wanted to. I could not help but slip into a quiet, trance-like state of wanting. I no longer resisted.

I knew I had become a component plugged into the mall: my gaze, my movement, my attention, my credit card all becoming machinic parts.

* * *

I feel that Valley fair is particularly special compared to other shopping malls in my area in its ability to make me enter a trance. Great mall and Eastridge barely fool me, their clothing and shops feel so tacky, ugly, and outdated that imagining any sort of "possible becoming" is impossible. Valley Fair instead has a luxe and hyperreal artificial interior that doesn't tell me who to be, but instead saturates me with possible becomings. What I mean by this is that the moment I enter the mall, I have left ordinary life to enter a climate-controlled, timeless interior. My identity dissolves, and I then re-attach to new identities through possibilities: “I wear this,” “I could look like that,” "I belong to this lifestyle.” It was purposely and meticulously designed to be this way. Each purchase reterritorializes me into a coded consumer position. I feel this strongly when I shop at a perfumed corporate space or a high-end department store. I can physically feel the modern space of the mall modulating my behavior softly. It is continuous but not necessarily oppressive. More like an ambient form of control that is mild, seductive, and omnipresent. Some stores feel seductive; but others feel hostile and surveillant, such as Bloomingdale's and Byredo. The control that these two shops thrust onto me was less ambient and more forceful, making it dreadful and alienating. I felt so surveilled in there as if a camera were following me from the ceiling, my every movement being gazed upon.

I find an eerie excitement in understanding how my consciousness is being shaped while it is happening. On lonely weekdays, I observe myself becoming someone under lighting and scent at Valley Fair. I look in the fitting room mirror and am offered infinite drafts of possible selves, hanging on chrome racks under controlled light. Identity feels attachable, almost purchasable, and I can vividly picture in my mind's eye the aesthetic possibilities of what life could become. I desire desire. The sensation of wanting, of discovering my potential selves shimmering beyond shiny glass.

Among Others, I Dissolve

Being around people who I have to suppress myself and my opinions around is so alienating that I'd rather be alone. My solitude is less lonely than the constant self-monitoring and fear of being judged and outcasted. Many people are quick to judge me the moment I am authentic, honest, and vulnerable. I like people who naturally just "get" me. There have been instances where people made me feel understood and cared about, where what I have to say actually matters. But those moments are rare.

Faking social niceties. Endless small talk. Pretending I belong. To be who I am is to risk being misunderstood constantly, and I have to be willing to accept that and be okay with it. There's a very specific kind of loneliness that comes from being surrounded by others while having to constantly dilute my thoughts and preemptively manage how I'll be perceived. I'd rather not have to deal with that emotional labor. So I will spend my days going to cafes alone and immersing myself in my various interests. I don't want people to feel sorry for me or pity me. I only want to follow what my heart yearns for without anyone making me feel silenced.

What sucks now is that, now that I am a grown adult and have actualized many aspects of myself, I notice there are people who want to be my friend or know about my personal life, despite me not reciprocating, never having spent much time with that person, or despite me feeling like I cannot be authentic around that person. All my life I have been taught to "mask," to play the game of social niceties, to cultivate social harmony in order to prevent myself from ever being ostracized.

As a result, I unintentionally give the impression that I am more open and socially available than I truly am. In fact, I am secretly so deliberate and careful that it is notoriously difficult to become my close friend unless I feel safe and comfortable around you, which can either take forever or take an instant based on my intuition.

It requires a very high cognitive and emotional tax for me to exist in spaces that require self-betrayal. That is most social spaces. I've already made immense effort to belong, and I can—and often do—partake in social harmony, but I find it soul-eroding. It is a strange thing to me that many people think that belonging is worth the cost of betraying themselves. My choice to remain alone is an ethical choice not to lie to myself. It is difficult for me to make friends because I feel I do not have a lot of common viewpoints with most people, and that is okay. For instance, I am an anti-natalist for radical feminist reasons. There are not many anti-natalists out there. I cannot tolerate your mediocre boyfriend at the hang out when I know he has made you cry and that you are settling for him. I cannot tolerate people gossiping about their friends behind their back only to invite them to their birthday the next day and act like besties. I cannot stand prejudice and racism and will call it out even if it makes you uncomfortable. I notice misogyny in the smallest cracks of every interaction and microexpressions, including internalized misogyny: e.g. putting down other women in a sly way to feel superior about oneself out of insecurity. Generally, I keep a lot to myself, but I am nearly incapable of making close friends because of how fundamentally different my values are to most people. When it came to being an observer and witness to other people's problematic behavior, I used to silence myself for the sake of getting along but it took a toll on my dignity and sanity. My ability to speak up now or not tolerate things that I have outgrown now isolate me further, and that is a good thing because it keeps me at peace.

The moments of being understood matter to me because they prove connection is possible, not because I needed intensity. I love people who care. Who genuinely care about being good, not for the sake of *looking* good in front of others.

For the past five years, I made many friendships because I wanted to break free from the confines of my social anxiety disorder that plagued my entire being. I wanted to go out and do things, to feel like I finally belonged with people, to not constantly feel like an alien or an outsider, and to feel that people actually liked me. I also wanted to help others and be there for them. Ultimately, it did not fulfill me at all; in fact, it exhausted me and left me confused about my own identity and morals. By age 25, I have voluntarily cut off all of my friendships, and I'd finally feel that I can live my truth instead of pretending—but that would be a lie. Right now, I'm still negotiating with the world, as can be observed by my paradoxical need to justify my own solitude instead of simply stating: "This is how I live. Take it or leave it."