I’m Nirgal, i’m 27 and until recently, i never managed to feel comfortable in this messy world.
I never liked going to school, I was bored and i was often reading books or dreaming about being somewhere else while teachers were preaching their rules, their world. I truly loved some teachers, but i ignored most of them not because i didn’t like them, simply because I didn’t feel concerned.
I’ve also suffered a lot, physically and mentally when i was 11-14 years old. I had to go to town in college, and i hated this place, these people, these rules, these never-ending days made of vomited knowledge. I hated it so much that it made me sick plenty of times. I was not happy in this world.
It started to get better in high school. When i was 16, i met some guys with whom i could share some of my thoughts, it helped. I contributed to a anarchist newspaper called “rêvons des révolutions”.
It was a revelation. I realised i needed to write, to share, to alert people about what’s going on !
Since then, i’ve never stopped thinking about how to stop this mess…acre.
Cause i see this mess as a mass massacre. Nothing else. Nothing less.
It always haunted me, and somehow i feel responsible about it.
At the end of high school, i had a choice to make. You know this time in your life you have to decide what your life is gonna be. What you’re gonna learn and what you re gonna work during your entire life… I chose philosophy. I wanted to debate and develop my own thoughts, confront them to others. It wasn’t the good place. I ended the year and watched for something else.
Back then i was thinking : “get quickly a job to be autonomous, then you will have time to write stories.” It wasn’t my smartest idea, but it lead me to fields I would have never been. And I sure don’t regret it.
It’s quite accidentally that i found a job and a school to prepare a management graduate. It was quite cool, half the week sleeping in class, the other half selling and repairing computers in a small shop. But i got bored, repeating the same words and gestures. My boss proposed me to stay after the graduate, I refused.
After that, I’ve worked as a commercial in a small communication company that also had some publishing activities while preparing a communication graduate. I stopped it after nine months because, whatever my efforts to sell the communication products, I wasn’t successful and the only thing i enjoyed during this process was designing and organizing the various actions I intended to find customers.
After I graduated, I tried psychology. I already read a book with mostly the content of the three first years before I even started but it was still interesting. After a few months, a friend working in video games industries told me about a project, and i did what I always wanted to do : I wrote. A fever made of words and worlds took me.
My friend got a job and the project stopped, but I continued writing.
In a few months, i had a blog, I wrote three short stories. I was starting to meet readers and correctors as well as other writers, it was exciting as I was learning so much from all of them. I was in a wonderful community on a website where you can publish your stories, get corrected by others and correct other’s stories. One day I published the beginning of a strange story, something brutal and dark. It came from nowhere and some people in the community loved it and gave precious feedbacks that allowed me to correct and rewrite it like I could have never done it alone. I was happy.
I continued the story on the forum, i posted half a chapter each time. Improved it with the help of the correctors, then i posted the following half chapter. It was working well, but, somewhere like in the middle of the story, the moderators closed the discussion, arguing it was not the place to write a book.
I had no other choice than to make my own forum and get the correctors on it. Some of them were ok, one more half-of-a chapter has been written there, but in the end, it didn’t work as there were a lot of one-time contributors in the writing community.
But the major reason why I couldn’t write anymore is that I had to get a job. My social rights that allowed me to live poorly but happily were about to end. During one year, I tried to find a place, in big shops, door-to-door, mc donalds…
Then, I realised i couldn’t sell anything anymore. It was against everything i strongly believe in. At start, i told myself i was providing advices and services to people in need. It made me like my job selling computers, and i was good at it. But the other experiences told me it’s much more about manipulation, tricks and lies with one goal in mind : steal more of their money. I felt that, to become a good seller, I had to turn off a little switch called humanity.
I then decided that I would never be part of this shit again.
That just lead me into another shit.
No money, no job, no home, no future.
I was pretty lost and confused, not to say almost destroyed, when a friend got me a job in the high school where I “studied”.
It just saved me.
It pulled me together.
Some broken pieces found their places.
Some scars stopped bleeding.
And I wrote again.
The more I was helping the students, listening to them, caring about them, the more I wanted to help myself.
During the last three years, I got a diploma of screen-writing, finished the strange story, got finalist to a writing challenge, worked again on the video-game project’ scenario which, again, aborted. This second fail on the same project told me a few things :
First, do not count on others. If you really want something done, do it.
Do not invest yourself like a blind man in another’s project. It it falls appart, you fall with it.
If I carry my own project, it depends on me. And I wanted to do something concrete, something cool.
That lead me to think more and more about what kind of life I really want. And how to get there.
Eight months ago, Lionel, a dear friend I met in university while studying philosophy, announced me an important decision he made. It’s only now I realise how his life’s choice has changed mine. For ever.
Talking about him could be a long ryde, longer than this one for sure…
We had something in common. He carried a cross, I carried guiltiness. He believes in God, I believe in Humanity.
We talked a lot about people, good and evil, the world. We shared many points of vue, except for one thing. Our faith. Our oath.
And this day, there was something missing in his eyes. The darkness, the pain were gone, as if he had lost his cross. I saw him serene, decided, strong as I never thought he could ever be.
He said he was going to live in a monastery, maybe for ever.
His choice has been hard. He sacrificed a lot of things for something he believes in.
His choice resonated with the crucial one I was thinking about.
At this moment, I had two options in mind : stay in the society, the world where I am born and growth, or leave it to see if the rain is better elsewhere.
It took some time, but I realised that I want to stay in this world but also that there’s no place for me in this world.
I want to be good, be an honest man, and most importantly, I don’t want to have any god or master, a boss or whatever. It’s been a while since I try to follow these words from Nietzsche : “You must become the man you are. Do what you alone can do. Become always who you are, be the master and the sculptor of yourself”.
I also want to have a simple life, to live on my own without having to depend on a system, an organisation. I want to produce my own food, share it with neighbours, share services with them. I don’t wanna eat frozen meat from new Zealand that spent two years in a freezer traveling the seas. I cooked one of these, it was delicious, but it left a strange taste in my mouth.
I need to stay connected. I love music, I use internet daily to stay in touch with friends, search, learn, share… Internet is what you want it to be. For me it’s an extension of my brain. I can live without it, if it disappear, I will not fall apart, I will just be less efficient and lose plenty of time. And I just hate not to be efficient and to lose my time. I’m always looking for better ways to organise and get things done properly. Internet is the perfect tool for that.
I also want to be able to travel to see friends, meet new people, visit new places, new horizons… I want to learn from people all around the world, I wanna meet them, share with them.
I want to travel the world.
That’s all I want and that’s a lot, I realised.
As far as I remember, I’ve always wanted to contribute to something great, something not selfish, something for everyone. I’m a dreamer, and I dreamt a lot about other worlds. I’ve always thought things could be different. Should be different.
And six months ago I had an idea about it. At first, I wanted to make a website to debate about problems to find a solution. During four months, I’ve designed it, talked about with friends, teachers and students. Everyone of them gave me really interesting feedbacks.
It took me a month to get something working with Drupal and the website is online since maybe two months.
It’s called démopolitique.
A web site designed as a tool to help a constructive debate which goal is to democratise politics, to discuss how we can live well together.
The project is actually in beta stage and only in french. As a lot of tools are not completely designed or are under development, it’s mostly a place to discuss about the idea of demopolitique. But we also started, with some other contributors, to discuss about subjects like capitalism or education. Some interesting things have already emerged, and we all have learned from other’s contributions.
It’s mostly about learning, sharing knowledge and point of vues with people that want to see things change. A place where anyone can speak about his life or work conditions and suggest how it could be improved.
The idea is partly inspired from the cahiers de doléances from the french revolution. With modern communication tools, it’s easier than ever to learn, share, discuss, collaborate…
Démopolitique is about that, and it’s about promoting responsible and autonomous ways of life.
As i work in a high school, i’m working on another project pretty close to démopolitique. The project is partly designed and is discussed with teachers, students and librarians. I need to design a new website for this matter for many reasons. it will take time, but it could be running in a couple of weeks. I already have a teacher ready to work on it with two classes before the end of the year. A lot of other teachers I talked to showed interest for this approach. In fact, the project is just a tool to help teachers organise working groups by using community tools. I’d like to make this website a game, where every talent is rewarded. Some students like to search, and are good at it, some others like to synthesise and do it well… A lot of small actions can make something move faster.
I am also part of a fab lab project which will use a tool mostly like démopolitique. The main idea of it is to provide a place with production capabilities and to allow anyone to come and produce anything for a cheap cost.
This lab will encourage creativity, learning and sharing in a sane and autonomous place. We are designing it to be a place where you can live and work, eat, learn and share knowledge with various people.
Ultimately we want to build something like an open source university, where every knowledge and skills will have a place. Somewhere you can learn anything the way you like. You could spend the morning in the field, learning perma-culture, breeding, tracking… and spend the afternoon learning economics, management, programing…
These projects are ambitious and will take a lot of time and efforts. We’re working on it since a few months and can’t count the time spent on it. To be honest, we don’t count it because we just have the feeling we are doing what we’ve always wanted to do.
Since I invest that much in something I believe is good for people, I now have the energy and the willing to make my dreams come true. And I realised lately that some people shared the same dreams and are working for it all around the world. It gave me hope, it gave me faith. Something like a month ago, I said to someone I’d gladly die if I was sure it would help humanity. Sounds a bit fanatic ? It wasn’t. I was pretty desperate about Humanity at this time.
Now, I wanna live.
Anyway, anyhow, I want to help good things happen.
I want to help all of you, with my bare hands if I can.
I’ve always felt I was leaving on an edge.
Between good and evil, others and me, peace and madness.
And I feel like my ryde is just starting.
