Quentin Buisson
Welcome to the black box. This site is not a diary; it is a clinical transfer file. It is the open-access ledger of a system that had to learn to manage itself just to keep from shattering into pieces.
Recent posts
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BLOOD ON THE PASS
People often say that cooking is a job of passion. That is the romantic lie sold to customers to help them digest their meals. The reality is that the kitchen is a meat grinder that uses your love for the craft as currency to buy your silence and submission. I lived in that world. I touched the stars, I crossed paths with geniuses, and I left pieces of my own flesh on the tiles of the rotisseries.…
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TOXICOPHOBIA: THE TRIAL OF THE STITCHED LINES
There is a form of invisible selfishness among those who are sound of body and mind. A quiet condescension from those who have never had to lay a finger on a molecule to silence their own brains. They look upon addiction with a holy terror, but what exactly are they afraid of? Violence? Filth? Ruin? Deep down, their phobia is merely a reflection of their own ignorance. They fear the void they carr…
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BEING FRAGILE
Human beings are born with a presumption of invincibility that is nothing more than an engineering error. We are taught to trust our bodywork. We look at our hands, feel the weight of our bones, the elasticity of our skin, and we convince ourselves that we are built to last, to take the hits. But skin is not armor; it is a mere containment wall. Bones are not marble pillars; they are porous, they …
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THE ART OF REFUSING TO DIE
On paper, I’ve spent twenty years. In the reality of my bones and synapses, I am an exhausted old man who has already lived a hundred lifetimes of pain. For me, depression is not a phase; I was diagnosed when I was only twelve, and it settled in to become a severe chronic pathology by the time I was eighteen. I have lived with death inside me for almost ten years. I am the result of an equation th…
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THE CHEMICAL HEIST
We often hear that happiness is a choice, a matter of perspective or effort. But when your brain is wired backwards, you quickly realize that happiness—or even just simple neutrality—is nothing more than a vulgar chemical transaction. And in my neurological bank account, I’ve been overdrawn since childhood. Living with Attention Deficit Disorder isn't just about being distracted or having your hea…
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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…
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A GHOST BROTHER
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…
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SPARE LIVES
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…
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CHAOS IS BEAUTIFUL
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 …
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GHOST CANDLES
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…
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AN EMPIRE OF PIXELS
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…
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THE ILLEGITIMACY OF LOVE
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…
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A NEAR-RELIGIOUS SHYNESS
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…
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A SOMATIC MEMORY
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 …