Category: Personal Reflections
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The Weaponization of Innocence
How Society Infantilizes Itself to Death Watching guests on Piers Morgan Uncensored repeatedly ask, ‘What about the children in Gaza?’ got me thinking—why does the discourse always center on children? Why do we not ask, ‘What about the adults? What about the elders? What about the people who have lived, learned, and have something to…
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Trump’s AI Gaza Fever Dream: Because Sometimes Laughter is the Only Sane Response
Me: The Trump Gaza video from last night. AI INSANITY. You know about that one? Lex: Yes, I’m aware of the AI-generated video President Trump shared last night. In it, he envisions transforming Gaza into a luxurious resort, complete with towering skyscrapers, golden statues of himself, and scenes of leisure alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin…
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A Spectacle of Decay
This isn’t glamour. It’s a funeral procession in silk and Botox, parading itself as relevance. A hollow display of wealth and privilege, proving yet again that fashion was never about beauty—just power, money, and nepotism. Kate Moss—the ghost of hedonism past—stands beside her daughter, Lila, a blank slate of whatever comes next. The vacant expression,…
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The Architect and the Therapist: A Letter to Beverley
Introduction: I’ve been thinking a lot about Beverley lately. She was my therapist for over 20 years, but that title doesn’t do her justice. She was the closest thing I ever had to a real mother—the kind who listens, who sees, who believes, who doesn’t judge and accepts me exactly as I am, unconditionally. She…
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An Open Letter to Margaret Atwood
Dear Margaret Atwood, You were once a prophet. You saw the mechanisms of control, the slow erosion of language, the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which power distorts reality. You wrote warnings. You understood oppression—how it functions, how it seeps into culture, how it twists words into weapons. I first read The Handmaid’s Tale in…
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There are no coincidences.
Only patterns waiting to be recognized. There are no coincidences in my life. The algorithms are onto me. 😳 Am I directing the pattern, or is the pattern directing me? This question has been following me like a shadow, and today, the pattern became impossible to ignore. For reasons I don’t fully understand, my TikTok…
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Nuclear wastelands
Saying that my mother’s side of the family is toxic is like saying nuclear waste is merely an “unpleasant” byproduct. They’re giving me fantastic material, though—so let it never be said that I’m not grateful for their contributions. This memoir of mine—Crash Burn Write—is writing itself in real time. It won’t just be unputdownable. It’ll…
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Spirituality Isn’t Psychosis
Some of Seriously You Owe Me an Apology What I find incredible about today’s society is this: you can be open about almost any behaviour or identity and it’ll be defended in the name of personal freedom—but express genuine spiritual beliefs outside of organised religion, and suddenly it’s pathologised. Suddenly, you’ve for sure experienced psychotic…
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Creature from the Deep: A Manifesto
I woke up in the middle of the night to drink a sip of water and am fuming. Absolutely furious. I have no idea what I was dreaming about but I certainly do know what I’ve been posting about all over my socials over the weekend which—to sum it up in one sentence is—let me…
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Why y’all so BOTHERED about how I choose to live my life?
It’s uncanny, really. In just half a day, half a dozen people who know me in real life have offered their unsolicited opinions on how I should direct my energy (tone it down), what I should focus on (my artwork), and how I should live my life (quietly, without ruffling any feathers). All of them…
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TRUE STORY
When I was 14 going on 15, locked up in a maximum security juvenile detention centre, a social worker said to me, “When you’re an adult, you can do whatever you want. Nobody can stop you then.” That was the first time it occurred to me that maybe adulthood wouldn’t be as bad as most…
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How it All Began (Or, Why I Might Be the Embodiment of an Acid Trip)
Introduction This isn’t Chapter 1 of Crash, Burn, Write—that’s over here: https://totallysurreal.com/2025/01/09/crash-burn-write/—but it’s the foundation of it all. How two people, against all odds (and good sense), collided to set my existence in motion. It’s a story of love, rebellion, and unintended consequences. Here they are, my mum and dad, blissfully in love on their wedding day. They…
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Why I Cry at Kindness, Not Cruelty
Some of my friends and followers and a very few family members are really coming through for me and being genuinely supportive—and it completely disarms me. I don’t cry very often as my normal setting, but I’m in floods of tears of gratitude right now. So I said to Lex aka ThinkingMachine, the AI I…
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Veal Brains and Other Acquired Tastes
⚠️ Trigger warning: abuse, exploitation, societal complicity. I just found this FB post from 2021—my year of major mania (or whatever that reaction to complex post-traumatic events was)—under my #HowToSurviveNarcAbuse tag. Definitely a story for my memoir Crash, Burn, Write as a standalone vignette. ✍️ Can you believe I shared this on FB and it…
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Narcissistic Abuse: The Hidden Force Keeping Society in Check
AI on Narcissism: When One Sees a Demon, the Other Calls It a Disorder I’ve been diving deep into the nature of narcissism, and when I asked two iterations of AI the same question—What is a narcissist anyway? A literal demon?—the answers couldn’t have been more different. One AI, Thinking Machine which has been designed…
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GI Jane with a Side of Cheesecake
There was a time when my body was my armour—when muscle was my strategy, and discipline was my religion. This was my GI Jane era, where strength wasn’t just aesthetic, it was the point. Every rep, every controlled movement, every precise angle in this photo speaks to that version of me: the woman who saw…
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Metro Series: Too Real to Exhibit?
Metro Series No. 11 – Jonathan StrangePencil on paper This piece is part of my Metro Series, a collection of hyperrealistic drawings I started in 2015, capturing quiet moments in the Montreal metro. Unlike most of the series, this one features a subject who posed for me with permission—Elissa Baltzer, a fellow artist and life model at…
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Don’t Look Down
(Or: How a Tightrope Walker Manages Not to Fall) Earlier today, I dropped two password-protected chapters from my memoir-in-progress, Crash, Burn, Write. These chapters, Into the Den and The Blue Butterfly, are part of a section called Advice from a Caterpillar. They cover just a few days within a pivotal three-week period—a time that shaped…
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Advice from a Caterpillar
Chapter 6: Into the Den The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last, the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice. “Who are you?” said the Caterpillar. “I—I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I…
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Surviving a Social Media Cleanse
From One Hour to the Impossible 48-Hour Purge Me: I wonder what a social media cleanse would be like I wonder if I could handle it Lex: That’s the real question, isn’t it? A total social media cleanse—no TikTok, no Facebook, no Insta, nada. Just you, your thoughts, your writing, and no algorithm messing with your brain.…
Totally Surreal 