The Last Chapter of My Novel: "Outside in A Desert's Winter Wonder-land", 10/16/24
- John-Michael (Jean-Michel) Valat De Cordova
- Aug 5, 2025
- 6 min read
10/16/2024
I feel really lost, I just came back from a walk I took after panicking about something stupid I saw on Netflix. I missed my one class of the day because I woke up at around 2 PM. There are still two piles of dried vomit in my dorm, because I’ve been too lazy to just clean it up. It really feels like this adventure at St. John’s is best left in the past two months. I obviously haven’t met everyone on campus, but it feels like I’ve met everyone I’d want to. I haven’t been to most of my classes over the past month, but I feel like if I go to any more my head will explode. I feel stuck on the same questions I’ve been asking myself since the beginning of the Pandemic, about who I am and how I want to operate in life, and while I’ve learned bigger words and better grammar, I somehow doubt that I’d be able to come up with anything more than what Plato describes as the fleeting right opinion.
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Is Sanity Relative?
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Life is like a blur, there is constant motion, there is little clarity, and there is little distinctiveness from one to another. But at the same time, that’s what makes it uniquely beautiful. In all of our senses that there is nothing meaningful in our individual lives, we are despite this, able to see the distinctiveness and beauty in all others’ lives. To clarify, what we see in our own blurs, when looking at someone else’s will almost always look different.
If I’m to ditch the blurry metaphor for a second, and adopt another for the sake of clarity. Life viewed on a larger scale is a patchwork quilt, each of us contributing a 1 by 1 construction of our own making, and adding it onto the thing that has seen nearly 100 billion contributions, over the span of the existence of humanity.
To ditch all metaphors, for a second, I want to reflect on my own life. I have repeated the notion that “nihilism is the coward’s way out”, in reference to political philosophy. While that rings true, and always will, on the political stage. I am now taken to reflect on how Nihilism has actually largely been how I approach my own life, on the micro and hyper focused lens.
Depression is what has defined my life. Ever since 6th grade, I’ve felt a looming melancholy follow me around. Briefly, over the winter months spanning from 2022-2023, there was an interlude of mania and psychosis, or at least- what most psychiatrists and psychologists have told me had happened. To someone who experienced this detachment from reality directly after a period of my life where I felt as though I had completely ruined everything- and that life was worth nothing- that detachment and the delusions that came with it, were liberating. In a tragic sense, the worst moments of my life up to this point, allowed me to feel very free after them. The blurriest of motions and states of mind, mania, allowed me to realize that I need to focus in order to allow myself to have honest reflections on myself. The complete removal of any image I had of my life- ego death and psychosis, allowed me to gain a perspective on how life is when I’m removed from it.
That concoction of mental illness and self-doubt being reported on, in my private journal, best left to be seen only by myself, a therapist, and some family; I am now able to take a more dialectical approach to my own existential philosophy of life. With perhaps very little time and wisdom to be able to comment on my own life, it may seem to my future self reading this that I knew nothing. In fact, to me, right now, this doesn’t feel like much of anything. But nothing worthwhile ever feels like anything until it’s done. Sadly for me, I’ll never know what my life amounts to, under that perspective.
Perhaps I don’t need to. Legacy, the concept that we are at our greatest when we are not there to view our ‘greatness’, is overrated. Legacy may be the most fickle thing in our current conception. We never know how it changes, or how the world will change it. There are men, who are supposedly “great”, who are now seen as deplorable, for good reason. John Locke, owned slaves. That’s not good, or virtuous, at fucking all!
Which brings me to something more pertinent to today, what is my legacy? Hopefully, I have none. I am only 17, I have barely contributed to the mass of information that swirls around. My biggest accomplishment is being able to, in 8 months, get 3,000 people on my website. That is impressive, to someone who knows nothing about SEO.
What is perhaps more impressive, is my impact on the people who have impacted me. My dad might've only found out he was autistic because he saw me find out I had my cacophony of mental disabilities (including ADHD). What is least impressive is this writing.
August 8th, 2025
Oftentimes I’ve thought about the moment that I’d read this again. I remember the vagaries, sometimes pondering whether I would feel a weight lift off of me. Whether I’d have another midnight revelation that would somehow “change my life” for all of 23 days and 14 hours. I cried for the first time in months, when I read it. There was some sense of release. But quite frankly, it’s beautiful in a way that I could never imagine.
Often I thought about what would’ve, could’ve, or should’ve happened if I had stayed at St. John’s in Santa Fe. Whether I’d have a fiefdom of a leninist enclave, or whether I'd have turned into a incel defending what I hate the most. My thoughts linger on the people I met, and those who slipped my grasp of ever truly knowing them. Some days, I think of the water that makes me weak.
How I’d love to deign to enter its youthful waters, to turn back the calendar and bring me back to something I never was and never could be, but more often I think of the average joe that would’ve left Santa Fe.
The average joe, the most heroic of all men, women, or otherwise; something I was never brave enough to embrace. But something that was never quite foisted upon me. I think of the time that someone said “god isn’t gay” after I sang Sicut Cerus (of someone who I had, up until that point, admired quite a bit).
I think of the average Homeric simile. Something I could never create even if I was sent back into the times, days, months; or even years that Homer must have taken to draft them. I think of those men whose greatness was grasped by them in life only for it to allude them in their ephemeral legacies.
I think of my fear. The thing that we must be scared of the most, the thing that I will never quite shake off from myself. I shudder when I think how much I remember and how distorted it must be.
Sometimes, I’m excited, I’m happy, and I leap when I should walk calmly. But, when I think of what I once was, I think of what could be. Without the blur of life that you can never quite grasp or let go of.
The things that I carry most with me are the things that I chose to bring with me, and the things that I chose to struggle with without malice or prejudice. I carry books, books, and a laptop. I carry the legacy of my 16 year old self. But I owe something else to more people, I owe something to my countries, to Peru, to France, and to America. I owed something to my future, even when I denied it. I owed something yesterday the same thing that I owe tomorrow. I owe quite a bit, nothing at all, and an average amount all the same amount and all the same time.
Something haunts me about myself, and something haunts me about what may be the future. Sometimes, I make silly accusations, and act like a goofy little geezer. Others, I act like I am president of the globe, and the cl***ers are taking over.
Most often, I forget the things I preach. But often enough, I remember that a better future is possible at every turn of every corner. And, even more-so, I get exactly what is owed to me, nothing more, but certainly not any less.
