Quentin Buisson

THE RIGHT TO BE STUPID

There are many mechanisms that cause me to regress—or rather, that hold me back. Shyness is one of them. It is a genuine coil of barbed wire wrapped around my throat, stripping me of the right to speak and share my ideas. I constantly wonder if my opinion and my vision of things are even worth hearing. In the face of strangers or thrown into a crowd, paralysis strikes. I prefer to blend into the s…

Buisson Quentin

Recent posts

A GHOST BROTHER

Mar 09

I think I would have liked to have an older brother. The thought hit me with an incredible violence, bringing tears to my eyes without warning. It is strange to mourn the absence of someone who never existed. To cry for a ghost. If I’d had that older brother, I would have wanted him to be my shield. To stand between the world and me. I would have wanted him to protect me from the stares and the bl…
SPARE LIVES

Mar 06

I have to admit that I found, and continue to find, a massive escape in the video game industry. I got a taste of this incredibly dense world from a very young age. My earliest experiences were limited to Flash games. The website Friv comes back to me with absolute clarity; it was a goldmine for the little boy I was, someone who knew nothing of that universe. Consoles? Multiplayer? I hadn't a clue…
CHAOS IS BEAUTIFUL

Mar 06

There are a thousand ways to seek a state of trance. Some find it in the adrenaline burn of sports; others release their dopamine through manual or visual arts. For me, it is music that transcends. Growing up through shifting social circles and encounters, I forged a dense musical identity, absorbing every era and every scene. I walked in time with the melancholy of Damso, the brilliance of Kanye …
GHOST CANDLES

Mar 06

There is a powerful word that defines my early years, but let’s be clear: when I talk about adolescence, I’m not talking about that period of purity they sell us. I’m talking about real adolescence. The kind where you are dropped into the middle of the world, armed only with the survival mechanisms you forged as a child, in solitude and struggle. Very quickly, through my choices and my relationshi…
AN EMPIRE OF PIXELS

Mar 05

Everyone goes through periods in life that seem wilder than the next. Whether brief or stretched across years, there are ways to forge alternative lives for ourselves. Parallel universes that, viewed through our own lens, become more than real—just waiting to be shaped without limits. In my young life, I have drifted between many faces, many passions, and many roles. As a child, truth be told, my…
THE ILLEGITIMACY OF LOVE

Mar 04

There is a chasm. A silent, invisible abyss that stretches between the way I view the person I love and the way I view myself. In my last piece, I spoke of the shyness that paralyzes me, that visceral refusal to associate the body of the beloved with acts my mind deems degrading. I thought I had exhausted the subject when I typed the final period. But writing has that effect: it was precisely as I…
A NEAR-RELIGIOUS SHYNESS

Mar 04

Within me exists a shyness unlike any other. It has traveled with me through time and space, reshaping the contours of my romantic relationships and the very way I perceive myself. Shyness has many faces. There is the kind that seizes me when faced with a mind greater than my own, when someone's intellect or aura leaves me awestruck and reduced to silence. There is a general shyness—an endemic lac…
A SOMATIC MEMORY

Mar 04

There are survival mechanisms within me, psychic disjunctions that the human body invents to keep from sinking when faced with the unbearable. For a long time, the idea of dying was familiar to me, almost comforting. Lacking the self-esteem necessary to simply tell myself "I deserve to breathe on this planet," I developed a detachment mechanism very early on. Through the eyes of a broken child, I …