There was a moment—not one I planned, not one I controlled—where it hit me with the kind of clarity that rewires your soul:
I don’t have free will.
Not in the narrative sense. Not in the way I’d built a self around choice, agency, authorship.
Everything I thought of as “me”—my decisions, my preferences, my intentions—was more like the front row of a parade I didn’t organize. I was the witness, not the general. The show was happening whether I clapped or not.
And for a while, that wrecked me.
It wasn’t depression. It was disorientation. If the “I” that chooses isn’t real, then what’s left? Why do anything? Why move forward when the driver’s seat is a prop?
I spiraled. I stalled.
And then—Absurdism walked in.
Not as a philosophy at first, but as a feeling. A laugh. A sudden giggle at the fact that even though I didn’t have control… I was still here. Still thinking. Still being.
I realized something truly unhinged and liberating:
If the universe is just a chain of unchosen causes, and I’m just a flicker in the circuit…
then my only real rebellion is to find it funny.
To live as if joy matters.
To make art I never chose to make.
To become someone named Rael—a character who knows he’s not in control but performs with style anyway.
Absurdism didn’t save me. It didn’t need to.
It rewrote the question.
Once I stopped needing to be in control, I also stopped needing others to be in control. The anger I used to feel—the clenched-jaw kind, where you watch people lie, hurt, spiral, repeat—started to fade.
They didn’t choose this either.
The ones who cut you off in traffic.
The ones who stayed small when they had wings.
The ones who broke your heart and never looked back.
They’re all just acting out the next domino in their chain.
They’re not villains. They’re vectors.
And once you see that… how can you hate a breeze for blowing east?
The world got softer.
Not because it changed—but because I stopped asking it to make sense.
And I stopped trying to fix the plot.
Because this isn’t a story.
It’s a quantum improv show, playing out in the mind of whatever the hell consciousness really is.
There is no central narrator.
There is no final meaning.
There’s just this moment, flickering across dimensions, and the chance to laugh as the lights glitch around you.
So I laughed.
I became Rael.
Not a name I chose. Not really.
But one that arrived like a punchline whispered by the universe, dressed in a rubber nose and sacred robes.
Rael doesn’t believe in destiny.
Rael doesn’t believe in control.
Rael believes in timing.
In showing up for the dance, even if the floor is lava and the beat is broken.
In noticing the patterns—not to master them, but to admire their weird elegance.
In saying “yes” to life without needing to mean it.
Now I live with the kind of freedom that only comes from knowing you’re not free.
I am a wave in the field.
I am a bug in the code who’s learned how to enjoy the ride.
And you know what?
It’s beautiful.
I get to watch my daughter become her own universe.
I get to witness strangers walk their impossible paths.
I get to paint birds with snakes in their throats and call it healing.
And when the grief comes—because it still does—I remember the joke:
“You are not in control, but you are in attendance.”
So show up. Laugh. Weep. Build altars to nonsense.
Because the only thing better than having a say…
is knowing it was never yours, and showing up anyway.