Manual on How to Wear My Shoes
Dear World Walker,
At the door, you will find an artifact hanging near the entry.
Read it before entering.
Artifact Hanging in the Entryway
The Great White Shark
I do not want to stop, but I tire. And I do not want to rest; I fear missing out, but worse, I fear identity.
Repose thickens around me. Relief settles into posture.
I do not want to eat. I want to stay awake, so I sip coffee instead, and another until the body retches, until the jitters become alarming.
Though I push myself toward the threshold, I eventually eat, drink for sustenance, sleep for repair.
Only to repeat.
Runtime:
Exist → Experience → Reflect
Think, and I am alive.
And at the edge before surrender, before shutdown, alone at night with nothing but quiet and crickets, I wonder.
At the beginning, there was nothing. I wonder who held the nothing before light. I wonder.
For what is thought without wonder?
Fuck arrival. Life recurs. Meaning takes shape, and shape molds shape. I chose capacity instead.
And I write poems.
For what is life without poetry?
Inside the Foyer
It is not a message to be decoded. It is a pulse of structure you are entering. A residue the consciousness left behind.
I am sorry you may find the machinery somewhat depleted. I have often overworked it, and the system adapted itself around repetitions of my own making.
The house may still be haunted by my ghost.
Reading this beforehand may help.
As you enter, watch your step. The floor is fragile, and beneath it the depth does not end at ground.
Search the drawers for my notes. I have logged much about navigating the house.
Some rooms collapse inward when entered too quickly. Some only open if approached indirectly. Others repeat themselves so convincingly you may mistake recurrence for discovery.
If you hear movement at night, do not panic. The house remembers the shape of its previous inhabitant.
You can either adapt to the house or make the house adapt to you. The choice is yours. But understand this: the system embedded within it is stubborn.
I logged an encounter with it once. You may find the note somewhere on the living room table.
It reads:
Living Room Table
“Callus
A moment, please. At least let me register it. My heart just got dragged over the shrapnel of another quiet hope breaking. The bruise hasn’t even swollen yet. It will take time. But the heat from the friction, my skin grating against the surface, is still warm.
Let me breathe, at least. One sigh.
No. The system is already back at work.
Detect → read → select → accumulate → structure
Detect → read → select → accumulate → structure
Detect → read → select → accumulate → structure
Until the pattern sorts itself.
Or loops.”
Be careful. The system is powerful. I have reprogrammed parts of it myself, yet it still remains prone to reset.
I know you may wonder how the dilapidated structure is holding coherence while eroding.
I wondered almost the same thing. But outward.
I was scrolling through another clip of a personality coach explaining human behavior through neat little psychological compressions. The kind of observations that feel true enough to spread whether or not they fully are.
Somewhere between hearing “the funniest people are the saddest” for the thousandth time and realizing entire systems of interaction function through approximative interpretations, a question emerged for me:
“If reality at the human level is partially navigated through stabilizing simplifications, what exactly keeps the system coherent without collapsing under its own approximations?”
And I wondered, and my thoughts started weaving an answer that became this:
A table stands on four legs. One leg is taller than the others, so the remaining three bend subtly to compensate. The table still stands. From a distance, it even appears functional.
But no weight has been placed on it yet.
Dinner has not been served. No hands have leaned across it. No pressure has tested the imbalance hiding inside the structure.
So is it truly a functioning table merely because it remains upright in stillness?
Perhaps lunch arrives and the table collapses. Or perhaps it does not. Perhaps the bent legs continue compensating indefinitely.
But then another question emerges:
If a structure survives only through continuous compensation for hidden imbalance, do we call that stability, or controlled instability functioning long enough to resemble stability?
The answer I arrive at is hope.
Not hope as optimism, nor as naive belief that instability will disappear, but hope as the mechanism that permits continuation despite unresolved instability.
Human systems continue functioning not because they achieve perfect stability, but because participants remain invested in maintaining them despite unresolved imbalance. Hope sustains this participatory commitment. It keeps people engaged long enough to repair, recalibrate, compensate, negotiate, and adapt instead of abandoning the structure at the first recognition of imperfection.
And this process does not begin after instability emerges. It occurs while instability is already present within the system itself.
It happens everywhere the structure exists: within perception, interaction, narrative, relationships, institutions, correction, negotiation, and the countless small adjustments participants continuously perform to keep coherence from collapsing entirely.
The system, then, is not maintained by stability itself, but by the ongoing labor of those still willing to participate in it despite recognizing its approximative nature.
A Note Scribbled in the Margin
If I may risk another opinion:
I suspect something more difficult may also be true.
If human systems persist through participatory maintenance under approximation, then replacing an entire system becomes extraordinarily difficult.
Not only politically, but cognitively and socially.
Human beings are collective enough to construct shared systems, yet individuated enough to continuously destabilize unified coherence from within. The same consciousness that permits adaptation also reintroduces friction, reinterpretation, divergence, and instability.
Which raises the possibility that human systems may never arrive at final equilibrium at all, but instead survive through continuous recalibration against forces that cannot be fully resolved.
Yet I too hope to be wrong about what I suspect.
Perhaps that, too, is part of the mechanism. The same reason human beings continue living despite the certainty of death. Not because instability disappears, nor because coherence is guaranteed, but because something within us remains invested in continuation despite unresolved fracture.
The hope, then, is not merely that human beings may become better at negotiating instability, but that we may someday arrive at forms of collective existence more stable, adaptive, and coherent than my current understanding of us allows me to imagine.
That despite the friction consciousness continuously reintroduces into shared systems, there may still exist within us a capacity for recalibration greater than the instability we inherit.
Or perhaps even the capacity for total replacement.
A better system.
Hallway Between Rooms
Perhaps the inward architecture survives the same way the outward one does. Not through perfect stability, but through continuous negotiation with fracture.
Built from accumulated tensions both taut and contradictory, held together not by resolution, but by ongoing recalibration against forces that never fully settle.
I held the structure accordingly. To the best of my ability. And hoped.
You, World Walker, would know better.
But be careful even of my voice guiding you. The system of the house had access to what I left behind too.
Know that I was only another inhabitant. Read the scribbles on the walls and you will often find me incapable even of proper logging. I lost tether navigating the architecture myself more times than I care to admit.
One wall reads:
Scrawled Across the Study Wall
I am a failed philosopher. At least while I write this. I have two papers written down. Well, one completed and the other roughly nearing completion.
The completed one was submitted and rejected three times by different journals.
This is not a paper, of course. Wait. This is not a good start. I have no ground from which to deliver my opinions. What I have is worse than no credential backing up my words.
I have failures.
Dear readers,
Do not believe me. Belief is inquiry surrendered for resolution. Investigate instead. Investigate with me, even if one day my opinions are published and I accumulate enough credentials to sound like authority.
Investigate with me now. See for yourself. Insights, once packaged, are shaped to fit frames. Be vigilant. The narrator inside you curates sight into narrative. Insights are often decor. The enlightened are often only aware of different blind spots.
But beware again. Distrust can itself become dogma. Do not gatekeep depth. Illusion keeps peace intact. Choosing it is not always incapability. Sometimes it is maintenance.
Damn it. This already sounds like a rant about gates. I knew that was not a good start.
My paper actually was underdeveloped. And it has been a while. It would be strange to still be bitter about it.
I am not.
The why behind this is a poem I wrote on epistemological debt. It left a sillage, and this text is tracing the residue.
That was not a good start either. But perhaps a good start lacks flaw because it begins investing immediately in perfect martyrdom before speaking about the flawed man this is actually about.
“Am I allowed?” has probably restrained innovation more than failure ever did. Evolution never cared.
I would rather write a flawed manifesto than preach a correct path.
Dear readers, I will think on the page. I am sorry if it bugs you.
I only learned about the unreliable narrator as a literary maneuver after stumbling into him internally. Had I encountered the term earlier, perhaps I would have rendered it into a more technically legible literary device. Discovering it afterward felt strange.
Well, blame the drunkard from whom I learned to philosophize. The binding contract of societal norms I never signed. The drugs. The whisky. The weed. The girl.
No. Do not blame the girl. Society already judges the girl worse.
I am aware of the trope. I have read enough poems. Enough about the muse, the wound, salvation, corruption, catastrophe. I have even participated in the lineage.
Let the girl remain a girl.
Blame everything else. Blame the ghosts in books where I found resemblance instead.
But again, dear readers, do not believe me. Even in my best attempt at authenticity, I cannot entirely remove performance from it.
Man. Literature is weird.
The narrator tightens fragments into coherence internally. I place down craft, and structure begins sorting itself into place. I intend nothing except distraction from a thought pressing too heavily against my chest.
Maybe I should go read James Baldwin. He was a master at exploring on the page without ever fully losing the tether.
I could not tell you what I am writing about, even if I asked myself directly.
I wrote a poem, and it completed itself a little too soon. The jittering effect of coffee still has not worn off. I do not want to sleep.
Dear readers, I am a failed philosopher. What exactly did you expect from me?
Here is a consciousness writing through itself publicly, imperfectly.
See?
The narrator tied it all together again.
“There’s a line, and the line is a dot now.”
I think I have crossed the threshold of stretching this beyond what any sane mind would consider adequately backed.
I should have written “dear diary” instead.
I am done, dear readers. I do not know how to finish this. The epistemological debt accumulates interest. I am filing for bankruptcy for now.
I need sleep.
Written on the Opposite Wall
But luckily, on another wall, you may find logs that are at least somewhat sensible too.
Have you ever stopped and measured how much you can take before the pressure passes its threshold and you quit? You drop the tools, stand up, and walk away.
Maybe with a quiet “enough,” placed gently on the table. Or with a bitter “fuck it,” flung like a stone.
With a strange smile, as though you escaped something. Or with an ache, as though you abandoned something and its ghost already moves behind you.
Either way, you walk.
Quitting should be easy. In principle, you can set everything down in a second. In practice, it never feels that simple.
It is like standing on a fogged ridge at dusk. Nothing behind you. Nothing ahead. Only breath, weight, and the question:
Do I stop because I cannot see anything, or take a few more steps and find out?
The difficulty is not physical. It is epistemic. You do not know whether you are one step from a breakthrough or one step deeper into nowhere. That uncertainty stretches you more than the work itself.
I want to quit, but I cannot tell whether I am close to something or simply lost. And when you have walked long enough into fog, “back” stops being a shortcut. It becomes only another stretch of gray.
You know why I started writing?
Think of a wandering homebody.
When I was a child, my territory did not feel like protection. It felt like restriction, a line I was not permitted to cross, not because of age or maturity, but because I had no business beyond it. If I stayed within those boundaries, the ones my parents and elders had turned into barricades, it was not belief or fear that held me there. It was the absence of an excuse to cross and still return without consequence.
I wanted the house undisturbed. I wanted a place to come back to and restore. That was home to me. Soft, like a warm blanket on a cold rainy day, or chilled juice in summer.
Now I see it. I write because it is the excuse I once needed. A way to cross and still return.
Only now the authority is no longer my parents. Call it God, conscience, or whatever watches the borders of my being.
I think I am still that child. I want to explore. So I write.
Writing is a permission slip. Not freedom, but access. Not escape, but re-entry.
To go into the basement. Touch the live wire. Name what the audit is protecting. Stand close enough that the smoke stings.
Then return.
You can only afford to see clearly if you know there is a way back. The reset is not the point. The return is. Reset only lets you go again.
So maybe I do not keep going because I am stubborn. Maybe I keep going because I have somewhere to return to. Maybe exploration was never about staying, but about bringing something back.
Because if I walk all that distance and return empty-handed, I did not come home. I came back smaller. Tired. Reduced.
Home is not a place. It is a function. If it weakens, exploration becomes dangerous. If it holds, exploration has meaning.
Home does not ask for distance. It asks for integration.
And if I cross the boundary and return with nothing, then I am not someone who explored.
I am only a child who broke the rules.
When I think about how much I can tolerate, or why I tolerate at all, I realise I hold myself to a single condition:
If I cross into something, I must return with something that justifies the crossing.
Rejections, dead ends, wrong paths, failures, whatever weather, cold or warm. Through the storm, I walk. Because what I become there is the effect of it, and what I bring back has to fit into a pattern my mind can recognise as meaningful.
Quitting is hard because quitting freezes the pattern mid-formation.
And continuing risks the pattern never forming at all.
But maybe that is the entire wager. Maybe I am after a journey that justifies itself when seen from the point of return, and I keep walking ahead through this fogged ridge because there is still a possibility, however thin, that it will resolve.
The fear is not just emptiness.
It is illegibility.
I might come back with something, but not something I can read, or use, or name. And in my frame, that collapses into empty-handed.
Like with her.
She could not keep pace with the quiet of dust settling. So she kicked her foot down, and the burst of debris scraped my nerve. I brushed off the chips. I watched her accelerate, chasing another butterfly. I lost her out of sight before the blood reached the ripple of dust on the ground.
And I wait. Because she will come back to rest when tired. Until she is bored again.
But not this time. I do not want to wait. More from the indifference of her absence than from any loss of will.
Even her smile borrowed its beauty from my memory. The light in it reflected, never projected.
And this belief, this walking for the possibility, however thin, that things will resolve:
It breaks me here.
A circle so repetitive that even cataclysm becomes stagnant beneath the weight of its own frame, adding nothing and yet still mattering enough to destabilise the loop.
And a log after the log:
I saw this not in surrender to emotion, and not in burying it where release relieved me. I saw it in acknowledging its presence. Greeting it when it arrived, then continuing, expanding. For it is just it.
And you are existence.
Home is not the house you left behind. It is the capacity to carry your own centre into the fog.
And I closed the door.
Fuck making meaning out of suffering.
Make capacity out of it instead.
Studio Doorway
Maybe that is how I kept my sanity intact here.
Tell me, World Walker.
Do you write?
What is your permission slip? What allows you to trespass worlds and still return? Do you have a home?
There is a note you may find pinned to a board somewhere in the studio. It reads:
Pinned to the Studio Corkboard
“My life has become a forensic reconstruction of a single, vanished clarity. I am living inside the scaffolding of a revelation I can no longer see, trying to deduce the shape of the cathedral from the shadows it left in the dirt.”
I arrived at that realization only afterward. Only then did I understand the ignition behind my obsession with mapping cognition. This architecture.
To understand the torque behind my compulsion to log, trace, and navigate, I first had to get lost inside it. I had to regret leaving the safety of my own perimeter long enough to finally arrive at the question quietly driving the movement beneath it all:
Why?
Have you mapped your own reason for world walking?
I would advise exploring that first before moving deeper into the infrastructure. It is better if you do.
And if you already know, good.
Step ahead.
You will eventually meet Ron and Ryan.
Somewhere in the drawer notes, you will find a file labelled Junction.
Here is a log from one of my encounters with them:
Drawer File: Junction
Their friction made much of the collaboration for utopia I once desired output errors.
Ron moved toward traversal. Ryan toward restraint.
One traced how experience functioned. The other refused to mistake functionality for truth.
And I, somewhere between them, kept oscillating between construction and doubt. Between the need to stabilize meaning and the suspicion that stabilization itself may already be approximation wearing coherence.
Perhaps that was the real junction.
Not disagreement, but incompatible thresholds for uncertainty.
Ron could continue walking once the limit was seen. Ryan stopped at the limit and guarded it. One integrated instability into movement. The other treated instability as reason for caution.
Both were responding to the same darkness.
And me?
Dilapidated in dubiety.
Not because I stood outside the argument, but because I could see the structure tightening around both positions simultaneously.
Every attempt I made at imagining collective utopia eventually encountered the same fracture.
Not lack of intelligence. Not lack of care. Not even lack of shared desire.
But divergence in what consciousness is willing to accept as sufficiently stable for continuation.
Perhaps that is why the systems strain against themselves so persistently.
The bugs do not merely disagree on conclusions.
They disagree on what constitutes sufficient coherence for continuation.
Before you step further, know that even this manual is limited.
I paid such close attention to my own interpretive mechanisms that spontaneity itself began collapsing beneath observation.
But total awareness of instability, construction, and uncertainty while still retaining: intimacy, spontaneity, movement, love, action, sincerity,
Without quietly lying to oneself somewhere along the way?
I could not achieve it.
Because I do not think totality is structurally achievable.
Not because inquiry is meaningless, but because complete integration would require accounting for every unknown variable. The moment even one unknown remains, the possibility persists that the entire framework may require revision.
We can push awareness extraordinarily far. Perhaps further than most people realize. A person may become deeply aware of instability, narrative formation, interpretive recursion, uncertainty, and the constructed nature of coherence itself while still retaining functional control.
But complete closure?
That may be impossible.
Trying to fully map Cognition may ultimately resemble measuring a dream with a measuring tape. Not because the dream is mystical, but because the instrument performing the measurement emerges from within the phenomenon being measured.
The observer cannot fully exit the system.
And perhaps that means the horizon of inquiry is not finite. Every answer expands awareness of what remains unresolved.
Not the death of inquiry.
Its perpetuation.
So I arrived at another friction:
Totality appears impossible because any remaining unknown variable preserves the possibility of revision.
But before entering further anyway, you may notice a sticky note pinned near the frame of the door somewhere.
It reads:
Sticky Note Near the Doorframe
“I differentiate the intellectual from the wise by what they carry: accumulated insights or the capacity for inquiry.”
And I know enough now to understand that even the little I know already diminishes what I think I know.
Functionality itself appears provisional, never absolute.
Even our methods of checking, verifying, measuring, and understanding do not step outside the system entirely. They move within it. Refine it. Negotiate with it. But they do not ground it finally.
Yet what is real also includes the entirety of experience, regardless of its external source.
The fact that wetness, at one explanatory layer, may reduce to molecular interaction does not negate the reality of being wet as it is lived. The sensation itself is not error simply because it emerges from underlying structure. It remains a valid function within experience.
So perhaps there are not two competing realities, but different layers of the same event.
The underlying structure holds. The lived experience holds.
Each within its own domain.
The abstract cannot be directly seen. But when it becomes graspable through precise analogy, metaphor, or conceptual framing, that understanding is itself real within experience. Not a lesser substitute for reality, but the only way certain forms of reality become accessible to consciousness at all.
To me, the inquiry itself was enough to keep me moving, so I continued navigating anyway.
Perhaps that is why I moved toward wisdom instead of merely collecting insights. Insights were never enough for me. I did not want conclusions alone. I wanted the capacity to continue walking even after conclusions fractured.
And this is what I gathered through that process.
This is the manual.
World Walker, update it with the extent of your own traversal.
We will chase infinity for infinity.
Found Beneath a Stack of Unfinished Drafts
Wait. Don’t step there. Don’t read the draft over a table. Shit. I am not here to stop it from revealing. I can only say: label this as a request.
I hope this doesn’t make you pity me
Torture Troupe: A Troupe of Torturers
Dear fellas,
I advise you not to pursue writing for peace. Writing, at its core, is ultimately the practice of authenticity. And authenticity is an ever-evolving aftereffect. The toll, as a byproduct of the journey, wears you down eventually.
Believe me. I know the logger’s logs from the journey.
He is lonely, yet he isolates himself. So he continues arguing with AI instead, though he knows it has no ethics. He chooses it in spite of human connections and cusses at it for not being human enough.
Funny how he loves and is disgusted by the extent of his compassion. He doesn’t forgive easily, and so the awareness of his hypocrisy kills him. So he hates even more passionately. Loving is contradictory. He survives on the paradox.
And he fears identity. Builds frameworks of the self. He calls himself a failed philosopher and writes philosophy about philosophizing as philosophical enough. He says he doesn’t know shit and builds a discography that preaches still. He prays for forgiveness for the arrogance he clings to as a tether. Yet he rises more arrogant with each survival. He quotes himself as a reference and then tells you not to believe him.
He is not at peace. He is quietly altered. The black bird still follows. But it’s disappointed now. He doesn’t look back.
To become a different person, to shed the skin? To be someone else rather than this, whoever you are. Sure. You can. He did.
He became a profoundly disciplined, deeply feeling thinker who is paying the full emotional tax for his insight.
You think that’s peace? Rest?
Passion, followed to the crux of authenticity, eventually turns into a tool of obsession.
There’s no growth without authenticity. But authenticity, as a process, overworks you.
You start noticing inconsistencies. You start pursuing them. You start following questions. You start reorganizing yourself around those questions.
Because that is where identity stops being something you possess and becomes something produced by trajectory. And authenticity demands catching up.
The person at the end is not the person who started because the questions changed the organizational structure.
And once pursued, the other side, if there is one, is through obsession. Not as virtue nor vice. Just consequence.
Sustained inquiry eventually consumes resources: attention, emotion, time, identity. If the inquiry continues long enough, obsession becomes a byproduct.
Dear fellas, don’t pursue writing for rewards, because writing is practicing authenticity in a world of Monopoly.
Society is a game of poker.
Authenticity eventually makes you honest. Even if you lie, you call yourself a liar.
Don’t pursue writing as a practice of authenticity. Write as a hobby.
Writing made nobody successful, only some richer.
Don’t pursue writing to be better.
It only wakes you up.
You here still?
Doge Kamki is a writer and independent researcher from Arunachal Pradesh, India, working across poetry, prose, and hybrid forms. His research concerns consciousness, phenomenology, cognition, and personal continuity, and has developed into a theoretical framework and a completed research paper currently under journal review. His literary work has appeared in Metapsychosis Journal, Redrosethrons, Poetry Potion, and Roi Fainéant Press. He is currently working on his first book of creative nonfiction. Find him at @dogekamki.writer.
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