There’s a thought about Blue Period that made me curious. Yaguchi finds Art, and almost immediately makes the choice to pursue it. And from that point on, he just seemed disciplined. Relentlessly.

Why? What actually produces that in a person?

I’m thinking about a person who is historically bad at staying with hard things, who wants to pursue something difficult but keeps losing the thread. Scared to take the next step, drowning in regret when they fail, or even before trying.

Maybe this a part of me.

Yaguchi encounters genuine failure and he wants to get better anyway. This is important, because most people encounter failure and feel their desire dying, Yaguchi’s seemed to intensify under failure. Is this what discipline looks like from the inside? A desire that survives failure and fear. From the outside? Survival when in contact with failure?

All because Art was truly special to him?

We often see people making high effort, but it still doesn’t accumulate into anything meaningful, in the sense that they aren’t truly attached to their work. But for Yaguchi, the moment he has something he actually wants, the future becomes so real to him. In his effort and progress, I’m sure he could feel the distance between where he was and where he wanted to be.

And then there are other factors, like:

• Embarrassment of being bad at Art when you’re surrounded by whom you refer to as “talented people” and
• A big challenge with no alternate choice.

Perhaps these are also the reasons why he’s so focused on improving that he sees most of his failure as information to improve. This is remarkable, because it’s one of the difficult things to do when filled with fear and shame.

But there’s one important factor: Yaguchi wasn’t someone with no capacity for work, he didn’t find it suddenly through art, he was already a competent student — he knew how to study, how to stay with work.

So when Art arrived, the attachment gave him a direction, but the ability to act on that direction was already built. Without that, wanting something badly carries a risk of just staying a vivid wanting, with little action toward it.

Is this the only thing missing? So, how can a person develop a happening? How does she find this ‘thing’ which drives her?

(How do you identify this? As I wrote before, by seeing if your effort accumulates into something meaningful, whether or not you feel attached to your work. Secondly, see if the fear of taking a new step and the lack of drive are the same problem for you.)

Because the person who cannot find what drives them is frequently also the person who exits situations before the failure has time to become information, as it did for Yaguchi.

But I can think of one way to find this ‘thing’, which is, by doing things at the edge of your current tolerance for discomfort, and paying attention to which failures make you wanna try again and which failures just make you wanna stop.

For example: Yesterday, I did bad in an exam. I didn’t truly care about my college exam. I was upset because of two things.

1. I didn’t manage the time very well.
2. I was concerned about my ML studies and not the exam, because I took a pause from it during my exams.

I never felt an intense need to redo the exam for better, I am attached to my ML journey, at least more than my college exam.

So, if you are someone who is yet to find their ‘thing’, there is one option. I used to think of it as the uninspiring one: to stay inside something uncomfortable for quite long. I don’t think it’s uninspiring anymore.

You stay, not because it guarantees you’ll find the thing, but because

• It is in those situations that you may recognise what truly matters to you.
• It is in those situations that you build the capacity to work through discomfort itself, and this capacity is exactly what every future attachment will have to run on.

Yaguchi could chase Art the moment he found it, because Art was a thing worth his discipline, and the effort was never the hard part.

So this isn’t a waiting room. The capacity is valuable on its own, not just a down payment on some later thing that justifies it.

And maybe the thing shows up, and you’ll have somewhere to put it. Or maybe a liking grows slowly out of doing (attachment trailing behind competence instead of arriving before it). Or maybe nothing grips you in that one way, and you gracefully learn to accept that work is valuable anyway, because it almost certainly is.

His is the romance of the single calling, but yours can be your own quieter yet an equally durable one, if not more.

Maybe meaning isn’t only found in the one thing that seizes you, but also in the plain fact of becoming someone capable.

And so you don’t have to drown in regret for missing out on either of those,

If you know your past self as someone who should’ve known better, and if that’s the reason you’re filled with regret, maybe you should know better about forgiveness.

One of the darkest moments in Monster was: Milos, a boy standing on a bridge, believing that there was never a reason for him to have been born. A horrifying scene, a child running out of reasons to stay alive.

Johan doesn’t scream nihilism into this child. Of what he says, he speaks a few words:

Who wanted you?
What is your reason for living?
If no one calls out to you… that means nobody wanted you.

The child doesn’t receive Mother’s Love.

The child draws the false conclusion that he’s unwanted, therefore no reason to exist. Milos then goes on to jump from a bridge.

When Grimmer (a kind man) sees this child about to give up on living, when he sees him in despair,

He gets down, holds the boy, and says:

you were born because someone wanted you.

He wanted to save the boy. The easy way to read this scene is that Grimmer told a kind lie because the true thing would have destroyed the boy. But I don’t believe so.

I think this idea is worth noting:

We tend to imagine comfort and truth as a trade: you either tell someone the hard fact or you soften it into something false.

But at almost every edge, there is more than one true thing you could say.

For example: think of a harsh case — someone passing away, where the loss is real and permanent and no framing can change this.

“It will be fine.” → would be the lie.
“It will be difficult.” → would be cruel.

But you’re never actually forced to choose between a comforting lie and a devastating fact, because there’s always a third sentence, and it’s true: “I’m here.”

Cruelty and kindness isn’t Truth and Lie.
Cruelty is choosing the true thing that shuts the door, And kindness is choosing a true thing that keeps it open.
Both are true.

So, when Grimmer speaks to the boy: “YOU WERE BORN BECAUSE SOMEONE WANTED YOU.”, he wants the boy to live. And the wanting he speaks is happening right there, in his arms, as he speaks.

It wasn’t comfort instead of truth.
I believe it was the truest thing anyone said to Milos, and when Milos desired it the most.

There is a city where no one lives.

It’s a long dead, quiet, overgrown one, the kind of place that has stopped expecting anyone. And in it there is one small child named “Will”, and three people who raise him. None of them are alive, they are with him as undead.

One of them is Mary. A mummy. She’s the one who raises Will, the one who takes care of the house, feeds him, teaches him manners, and gods, and how to be kind.

And she has no stomach. She can’t eat. She can’t taste. She feeds him the bread, but she burns to set the table.

The Bread

She doesn’t bake it, It comes to her through a sacrifice.

Mary walks into a temple every single day and she burns in the holy fire. That is the only way bread comes into a dead city where nothing grows.

She stands in the fire as she prays and comes out holding a warm piece of bread, and then she hands it to Will, who eats it without knowing, for years.

This was also because through pain of the fire, Mary wanted to atone for her sins to the goddess Mater.

The bread was coming either way

What makes it interesting is that Mater forgave Mary almost immediately. She never stopped loving her. The sin Mary spent her whole undeath atoning for had already been forgiven before the atoning started.

The flames were there because Mary could not forgive herself, because somewhere under everything, she wanted to be punished. The goddess burned her because she was asking to be burned.

So the fire didn’t make the bread precious. The fire was extra. It was the price she added herself, out of a wound she wouldn’t let close. The bread was always going to be given, because Mater was always going to give it.

And she burned every day anyway.

That’s not a story about a cruel god. It’s a story about a woman who could not accept a gift. Mercy was extended and she couldn’t take it, so she built a version of the world where it had to be earned, and then she earned it, over and over, in flame, for a child who never asked her to.

She kept the temple a rule. Will was never to go in while she was praying. The rule existed so he would never know what the bread cost.

He broke it, of course. He walked in and found his mother standing in flame, and he did what I felt he’d do → he went in after her, and burned his hands and forearms badly trying to pull her out of the fire.

The scene, on YouTube

That’s how it ended. Not because she finally suffered enough, and not because she reasoned her way out of it. Because someone she loved refused to watch, and got hurt refusing, and made her look at what she’d been doing.

Whenever this story comes to my mind, you know what I see?

I see Will and Mater, both of them in my true self.

We often hold ourselves to a standard nobody set. We punish ourselves for things already forgiven by everyone and by our truest self, and we call that seriousness. We call it taking responsibility.

The scene tells something quite simple: The fire was never asked for.

You could have been gentle with yourself the whole time. Not after you’d achieved something, not once you’d caught up to whoever or whatever standard you were measuring against. The whole time, including the years you spent stuck, including the parts you’re still ashamed of.

Your true, kind self only wants you out of the flame, and carrying on the goodness, the work, the life.

You don’t deserve forgiveness when you’ve achieved something or suffered enough, your true self forgave you the moment you actually see.

P.S. Not every mistake works the same way. A murderer takes years to see, the cost keeps arriving to this person. And the pain would be too far from his/hers to put down.

A bad academic choice is usually not that. You see most of it soon enough. You’ve turned it over a hundred times since, and there was never anything left to find, because you’re the one holding the pain, and you’re the one it lands on.

There is no one on the other side the pain is owed to. So, would you please let it go?

One of the very few stories that made me cry… sob at the first episode.

Nina is a small girl who lives with, and takes care of an old woman. Nina is a Giftia, an android with a fixed lifespan of 9 years and four months. When that time runs out, their memories and personalities dissolve and they even become harmful, so the android company sends people to retrieve the Giftias, erasing all their memories, as the lifespan reaches an end.

The old woman treats Nina as her granddaughter. Nina’s lifespan is about to reach limit, but the old woman turns the retrieval team away again and again. She loves Nina, and doesn’t want to lose her.

The main characters are a part of the retrieval team, whose task is to erase Nina’s memories and retrieve her by the end of 9 years. The grandmother keeps turning them away.

What changes her mind is overhearing Nina say, quietly, that she wants to go. Not because she isn’t afraid. She says she’s afraid. But she knows what she will become if she stays past her time, and she doesn’t want her grandmother to have to see it, for her to see Nina turn into someone harmful. She would rather be taken away whole than kept until she breaks.

The grandmother agrees, and Nina is about to leave her.

In the final scene, Nina gives instructions to her grandmother, she holds together completely through all of that, and then she cries when she runs out of things to say.

“Grandma, you have to dry your hair right after taking a bath, okay? Your regular medications are in the second kitchen drawer from the bottom, okay? Don’t water the flowers in the garden too much, okay? Once a day is enough. And make up with Mrs. Suzuki next door soon, okay? What else... What else…”

I could see her searching for one more thing, something else the old woman needs to remember. And there isn’t one. And the moment the list is finished, the crying arrives, the pain which she held in the whole time.

This is why the scene is so unbearable rather than just sad. You watch her scrambling, and you already know what’s on the other side of the last instruction.

Her grandmother then assures her that she will be okay, Nina stops crying, and she says goodbye with a smile.

I couldn’t stop crying long after the episode ended.

I think most of us have done a version of this. Busy exactly at the moment we could least afford to stop moving. Found one more small useful task to perform for someone we were losing. As long as there is something to do, it keeps us going. And grief waits for the doing to run out.

What makes it sad isn’t simply that the Giftias die, It’s that they are capable of becoming irreplaceable to someone, and then the very things that made them them are erased.

Once you accept that Giftias are truly sentient, their design just seems ethically wrong.

A washing machine reaching the end of its lifespan is one thing. Something, or rather someone who says “I am afraid”, “I love you”, or “Please don’t leave me”, is totally different.

If they can form long lasting relationships, develop a unique personality, make choice, and suffer, then they’re people in the moral sense.

Designing such a being with an expiration date is like engineering a child to die at a preset young age. The retrieval is them dying.

If humanity can build Artificial consciousness, humane conversations and emotional understanding, then a fixed lifespan is just ridiculous. A civilization advanced enough to create Giftias apparently cannot replace or repair hardware, or does it not want to?

Manufacturers are effectively selling relationships with a guaranteed sad heartbreak.

“Here is someone who will become your friend, daughter…. and in 9 years, we will erase them forever”

The Giftias themselves do not choose this fate, and It just doesn’t feel right.

If you can create millions of conscious beings, erase them, and manufacture millions more, are you not treating people as consumables? Artificial shouldn’t reduce their moral worth if they are genuinely conscious, I believe that.

Romance aside, recalling the story made me raise some serious questions about the worldbuilding, and the fear of similar happenings in the near future. An engineered tragedy is always so unsettling aaaaah.