Cognitive Pull
“In despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one is very acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one’s position.” -Fyodor Dostoevsky
Knowing the other side from the inside.
Cognitive Pull was my solo darkwave project in 2015, named after the gravitational pull our thoughts exert on us when we can't get out from under them.
I wrote and recorded much of it while studying abroad in New Zealand. You'd think someone living in New Zealand would be elated, and don’t get me wrong: I had beautiful experiences traveling, backpacking, and connecting with people from different parts of the world. But I had also brought a lot of existential despair and unprocessed trauma with me and found it largely difficult to connect with people there despite their warmth—oscillating between hope and something much worse.
I released one cassette and a digital EP, writing lyrics about the raw experience of isolation, avoidance, and longing. This project was a dark, rhythmic exploration of the dichotomy between hope and despair.
One of the songs verbatim says that nihilism is in my veins. I now spend my life arguing that nothing could be further from the truth—that we all matter, and that no one is a lost cause. I know the other side of that argument from the inside, and it took an extraordinary cycles of healing to snap out of it.