That something is necessary as a protective measure in a certain context, doesn't mean it is necessary always. When the pain of being wounded is too much to sit with, when the enivornment is not safe enough to fully tend to your wounds - you tend to them all the same when you store that pain away, shelve it, build protective layers around it. Like the day turning to night and night to day, your life's circumstances change too. Our world sometimes is the place where we get injured. It is also sometimes the place where we get to treat those injuries. Even those, that for our own safekeeping, we have convinced ourselves they don't even exist - or shouldn't. 

Trying to find one fixed, formidable, unwavering, stronghold - setting in stone who and what we are, is a necessary adaptation to certain conditions in the world. It is not necessary always, and not even possible at times. Although it may come across as a challenge to your peace of mind and everything you've made out of yourself so far, this doens't always have to be treated as a hostile threat. That the pores of your skin get to open, doesn't contradict the itegrity of your body as a whole. That, depening on the condition of the outside world, those same pores sometimes have good reason to close, doens't make that body any 'more real' either.

The head can be persistent in its promise that once you figure the whole puzzle out, you will manage to arrive at the ultimate truth about who you are, or what you need to do - that there is one thing, that, once it's finally figured out, will be the key that unlocks every carrot that life is dangling in front your nose, just beyond your reach. Just a little more of your reserves, even though you're already running on fumes. Always almost there. And never quite here.

Where this is exhausting you, keeping you from rest, from recharging, from experiencing down-time, the time, the opportunity and the calling to recallibrate will present itself. Maybe before everything that you are still investing in allmost getting there and then runs out. Maybe afterwards. But it will come. That moment where the promises made by a disembodied headspace are unveiled as nothing but wishfull thinking.

You are not ultimately this or that. You are definately this in some contexts. You are definately that in some others. But definately and ultimately are not the same thing. Your being is not complete or static, even if pretending that it is, is required in some playing fields.

I've had many experiences, that caused me to question: "If I'm not the one to hold everything together, will there be anyone or anything to hold me?" Actually, it is only recently that I have been able to consider this as a question at all. There was a new 'no' that presented itself to me around every corner of my life when I was young, that made me conclude that "I need to hold everything together by myself", period. That only after I perform, achieve, deserve - I maybe can unlock the being held and seen and supported, as a reward. That I need to become something deserving, someone good, strong, beautiful, wise, respected, whatever. While at the same time, all of this striving towards some ultimate goal, quitely imprinted that other illusion of ultimateliness: that because of not just being there naturally, ultimately some kind of insufficiency must be my nature in stead. That the harder I try, the more I am exposed for being somebody who needs to try in the first place. That I ought to be somebody like all those others who don't seem to have to try at all, because it is just their nature to belong.

The ultimatelilessness that I am writing about here, as one of the developing axioms of trauma philosophy, pertains to self-definition. It is the name I give to a mental note, that I train myself to become aware of, once I go down the path of trying to pin myself down again. Trying to present myself in a fixed form. That might be one of the rules of one of the playgrounds I enter, but being definate doens't define me.

There are a lot of situations that trigger me to fall back on trying to present myself as someone or something complete, something who needs to first qualify for being seen. That I must define myself and that only after that I get to relate. But that's not how becoming works. 

We don’t define ourselves first and then enter the world. We define ourselves through relation, through contact, through being seen while unfinished.

'Ultimatelilessness' is a word I use, to remind me of this. A word I invite to come up, when I lose myself again in my attempt to persuade myself and those in my environment of my completeness, the fixed form that I pretend to have. I intite it to come up gently, and nudge me from being worried about coming across as complete, back to being present as a person of integrity.

I'm leaving this here now, noting that the direction this wants to take me in, is to contrast what I experience as a longing and desire for near-future completeness, with present integrity. Also noticing that all of this is not yet in the form of an axiom, but that I will alow it to for now.

AK - 23 feb 2026

There are situations where coming home equals being nothing but safe, and warm, and peaceful enough to come to rest. Especially if you haven't been albe to get to that kind of resting and recharging for a long time.

But there are also situations where being at home doesn't end at the front or back door of your house. Where the edge of the inhabitable world is where you are actually need to go in order to come back to life, because of the real risks you take there. If that is the homecoming you are keeping yourself from, the walls that you designed to keep you safe, may require some gentle knocking down.

The sweet-spot is there where you are not only safe, held, and perpetually risk-free. Just safe enough to risk something real. To have stakes, to have skin in the game. To want, and be wanted. Dead or alive.

If you have trauma, you have already been there. And if the trauma persists, you do well to retreat to the safe space where you tend to your wounds. But putting all of the weight of everything that has happened to you on your own shoulders - one form that this often takes is pushing yourself to heal yourself already. To make of your home that perpetually safe space to rest, to recharge, and to achieve that self-installed directive of getting your own act together. Only to further isolate yourself, to overcharge yourself with the task to recharge, which then doesn't work. 

Home is where the heart is. Resting and recharging is part of what is needed for it to come alive again once I follow it outside. 

23 feb 2026

In meeting others outside, trauma tends to calibrate us in such a way, that we go out to exchange the objects the countours of which seem to match up with the desire-shaped holes that much of our current psychoeduactional stories tell us somehow consitute our personhood.  That the main thing that makes us subjects in the first place, is something that we experience as a void in ourselves, that takes the shape, and that shifts shape also, and dynamically matches whatever the thing that we desire and long after looks like. Trauma philosophy acknowledges that this is one way of accurately describing how subjectivity, and, by contrast, objectivity functions for many who identify as human subject, but not for all.

That's a different axiom all together, but relates clearly to this one, which is about untangling the difference between exchange and contact. Understanding yourself as fundamentally lacking and seeking from the outside something to fill the void, primes us to meet others solely for the purpose of transactional exchange. We call this the marketplace, and the kind of healing we seek there, and we ask from it, can have us believe that every step we set outside of the front door, is one onto that marketplace. This way of intentionally marketing oneself as someone interesting to trade with, and reducing other to silimilar limitations, inspires a philosophy of transactionality, as an often subconscious driving force, keeping the false promise of us being able to trading ourselves into prosperity alive. It also obstructs other modes of being together, which is about being in contact, rather than being in exchange.

Language here is important. 'Sharing', 'trading', 'exchanging', all of these verbs can have different undercurrents in different contexts. Exchange signals transactionality, but there are forms of exchange, for instance, exchanging experiences or stories, that actually connote sharing more than transactionality. You could of course argue that what makes exchanging songs or stories a worthwile experience, is the knowledge or inspiration that you take home with you afterwards. But my experience is that it is being present while being in contact with others in a moment that is shared - that this is what makes that way of being outside so valuable.

The other way around, where 'sharing' functions as a marketing term, as something engulfed and swallowed whole by the lack-based industry that feeds its ugly head: like and share. There is little to nothing of the real contact, of two or more people sharing a moment, while truely connecting left in that kind of sharing.

It's the forces of our own brokeness and as yet unattended pain, that inspire us to disembodied transactional exchange in ever-further isolation. It is what inspires us to downgrade our gifts to commodoties that if our salespitch is right, we can maybe get some kind of sustenance for in return. When the reality of it, is that I can only share my gift with you, there where our paths meet. I couldn't sell you my gifts, even if I wanted to. And for the record: I don't.

My gifts are hindered by our as yet unattended pain too. It's what makes all of this come out awkward. Broken. Incomplete. But as something ready to share as is, whenever I have enough courage to actually go out there and be in contact with others.

24 feb 2026

Individuality as a trauma-response; as coping mechanism. Mankind's relatively recent theories on human subjectivity and the objectivity that is supposed to be it's opposite pole - the scientific and commonplace understanding of what it means to be a subject, though apt and applicable to many, not to all bodies in one universal way.  

Taking things personal as a clear and consistent sign that the personal experience has been systematically overlooked, and that this is what requires acknowleding and attention. Falling back on yourself, safety in being rejected and in how that enables you to maintain and extend the skills and tools you have convinced yourself you cannot live without - for such good reasons.

Noting this here, noticing my thoughts branching out at a speed I cannot follow them and so taking a break now. 23 feb 2026