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The Quiet Divergence

While my professors extolled the virtues of Foucault, I was absorbed in Lacan.

While they dissected Freud’s psyche, I drifted through Jung’s vast, symbolic landscapes.

And as they championed revolutionary governments, I quietly envisioned a world shaped not by the fervour of ideological battles but by the delicate equilibrium of sociocracy — where decisions emerged not from dominance, but from the resonance of collective wisdom.

It wasn’t rebellion. Not the loud, performative kind.

I wasn’t the student who slammed books shut in protest or baited professors into futile debates. No, my resistance was quieter, woven into the pauses between lectures, in the knowing glance exchanged with an unspoken kindred spirit, in the silent refusal to let convention dictate curiosity.

I didn’t seek to discredit Foucault, nor did I wish to discard Freud entirely (after all, who else could have spun an entire school of thought from the delicate thread of unresolved childhood?).

I simply felt that alternative perspectives deserved more than a begrudging footnote, a polite nod, or worse — complete omission.

This inclination to step off the prescribed path wasn’t limited to philosophy.

While my peers marvelled at the meticulous precision of plastic surgery and dermatology, captivated by the artistry of aesthetic perfection, I was drawn elsewhere — to a realm where the body was not just an object to be sculpted but an ecosystem of energy, rhythm, and silent conversations between forces unseen.

I immersed myself in acupuncture, in energetic medicine, in the idea that healing was not merely intervention, but alignment — a return, rather than a correction.

Yet I treaded carefully, discreet in my convictions, knowing that nothing unsettles orthodoxy more than an alternative that works.

Perhaps it was defiance, or perhaps it was just instinct — the quiet aversion to walking paths so well-trodden that the dust has long settled.

Either way, while the room swayed in synchrony to yet another impassioned monologue on Marxist ideals, I sat in the corner, mapping sociocratic governance into the margins of my notebook — convinced that truth is not something to be taught, but something to be found, often in places where few think to look.

And so, while I may not have repeated the prevailing theories, I carried with me a quiet certainty: thought is most alive when it dares to stray.

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