Prudence Primrose

随筆Essays

Carve Your Own Block

23 June 2025 · 3 min read

Everyone wants to be saved, everyone wants things to be equal, everyone wants the world to be fair. Yet nobody can save you, nobody is equal1, and the world has never been fair. Yet there is a way to be saved, there is a way to equalize, and there is a way to get your due. Howso?

I believe there is a stark and fundamental difference between people who are traumatized and at least understand these truths, and those who are traumatized and either do not know, or worse, refuse to acknowledge these truths. Those who do not see are cursed to suffer even greater, for they are constantly pained not only by the trauma itself, which is horrible on its own, but then they are tormented by the abstractions of equality, fairness, and grace.

Nobody can save you, except yourself. Nobody is equal, except we're all equal in our inequality. Nothing is fair, though everything is fair in how the unfairness is dished out. The truth is, we're all victims, and the truth is we're all victimizers. We victimize ourselves by locking ourselves in a stasis, refusing to let ourselves move on, saying to ourselves "Wait wait, let me cook, I think someone is gonna save me, I think things will finally be fair, I think I'll finally find grace." Yet in lieu of action and in lieu of will, nothing happens, you sit there, waiting, suffering, bleeding out2, and nothing happens. Nobody comes. Nobody saves you. Nothing is corrected. Nothing is made fair. Nothing is made equal. You are alone. Do you understand this? You are alone. Only you can save yourself, only you can make things right, only you can give yourself grace. There will be no closure, there will be no healing. You can only move on, you are alone.

Does it sting? This proves only that you are finally feeling something that you have, up until now, been sorely avoiding, running away from, and papershielding yourself with this nonsensical idea of 'hope', hope in an external force, force for something that exists beyond yourself that can set things right, maybe its God, maybe its a Girlfriend or a Boyfriend, maybe its a Friend, maybe its your Mother or Father, maybe its the next hit of Diamorphine, maybe its the Wire Monkey3, whatever it is, its a lie. Its a lie.

It is called 'hopium' for a reason, and this devious little IV is being pumped into the veins of many a trauma survivor, this far off belief of an external savior, yet it never comes. This is all by design, you're not -supposed- to get healed, that is how the system is set up to work, just keep going to therapy and keep taking your meds, one day you'll be saved, just have faith.

Yet the truth is no amount of Lorazepam or DBT4 can save you, only YOU can save yourself, only YOU can give yourself grace, we all have -free will-, yet do you understand what this really means? It doesn't just mean that we have the ability to freely make choices based on our own whims and to decide what our whims are, though that is certainly part of it, it is also that we have the in-born God given ability to -generate- willpower, we aren't born with more or less willpower than others, everyone has the potential to have as much or as little as they want, and it is an active choice to have none, made every single day, consciously or not.

Will is created ex nihilo5, this is what is meant by "Man is made in God's image", for God wrought something from nothing, and so too does Man, will will from nothing.

We are all uncarved blocks6 and the only one holding the chisel is you. Carve, carve, carve!

Notes

By the editor.

  1. The Buddha says as much in the Dhammapada. Verse 165 holds that evil is done by oneself and purified by oneself, and that no one can purify another; verse 276 says you must make the effort yourself, for the Tathāgatas only point the way (the numbering varies a little by edition). In What the Ghosts Actually Are she gives it as one of the church’s first teachings: nobody can save you except yourself. source ↩
  2. Experimental psychology has a name for this stasis. In 1967 Martin Seligman and Steven Maier reported that dogs given shocks they could not escape later failed to try to escape even when escape became possible, while dogs that had learned to stop the shock did not give up. The finding, learned helplessness, became a model for how an unanswerable harm can freeze a person: the researchers called the giving up learned, and her essay is aimed at exactly that waiting. source ↩
  3. Refers to Harry Harlow’s rhesus monkey experiments, summed up in ‘The Nature of Love’ (American Psychologist, 1958), in which infants chose a cloth surrogate mother over a bare wire one even when only the wire one gave milk. Harlow concluded that contact comfort is essential to development. She includes the Wire Monkey in her list of false rescuers: a mother figure that feeds you but cannot hold you. source ↩
  4. DBT is dialectical behavior therapy, developed by Marsha Linehan at the University of Washington from the late 1970s, first for people at high risk of suicide. Lorazepam is a benzodiazepine sedative prescribed for anxiety. Linehan herself trained in Zen, and DBT’s skills draw on meditation practice; she traces the same Buddhist inheritance that Buddhism in the United States finds under American therapy. source ↩
  5. Creation out of nothing is a doctrine with a short pedigree. The usual earliest text is 2 Maccabees 7:28 (second century BC), though scholars dispute whether it says nothing or merely unformed matter, and some argue the doctrine fixes only in the second century AD. Her step is to give it to people: in What the Ghosts Actually Are she says only a human being can choose, the ghosts being bound to their natures, and that every act of will repeats, on a small scale, the Mother making herself out of Nothing. source ↩
  6. ‘Uncarved block’ translates pu (樸), ‘unworked wood’, a Daoist image for original, unadorned nature. In the Daodejing chapter 28 the sage is told to return to the uncarved block (復歸於樸), and chapter 37 says to hold fast to it. Some scholars argue the sense is closer to ‘wholeness’: a thing with all its potential still in it, which is the sense her chisel needs. source ↩