FLEETING THOUGHTS

Five Short Literary Works by TheSwagger13

What you are about to read are five short literary works created by me, TheSwagger13. They are not meant to be perfect; they are just there for the sake of existing. I urge you to simply read. I have tried my best to make this as honest as possible, because they will not contain any cliché philosophical sayings. Rather, they are just things I have noticed, and I have tried to put my observations in words.

Take all advice I give with a grain of salt. I am not a qualified psychologist nor philosopher. This is the most important advice I want to stress out to the reader. While I do include references and notes, I would highly recommend you to do your own research as well. Why? Because everyone is different (I'll explain more on that if you keep reading).

So read, and enjoy a glimpse into my thoughts.

(PS: This is not venting. I did it once and I cringed so hard...)

Can You Forgive Me?

I mess up a lot.
I do stuff that I'm not proud of.
I try to do my best but still fail you.
Can you forgive me for that?

I still mess up a lot.
I still do stuff that I'm not proud of.
I still try to do my best.
But I still fail you.
Can you forgive me for that?

Even then it feels like I'm only going downhill.
It feels as if no matter what I do, I'll still mess up one way or another.
I learn but don't apply.
I still make the same mistakes.
I know what will happen to me if I do this.
I know the consequences.
It's going to get worse.
It will get worse.
And yet I still do it anyway.
Can you forgive me for that?

I wait.
And wait.
I wait for something that will only come if I do something.
But all I do is overthink.
What's next?
I become something I didn't want to be?
I become what I hate?
Is that what I'll do until I die?
Maybe.
But I don't want it to be.

So I try again.
And again.
And again.
But I know mistakes are going to happen at some point.
Maybe I knew it was going to come.
Maybe not.
Mistakes are still mistakes.
No excuse.

Am I better, then?
Have I become something good even after all those mistakes?
Yes, I believe.
No, sometimes, but it'll usually be yes.
Mistakes are still going to happen.
I'll still mess up a lot.
It'll be like a cycle.
Maybe a broken record if I wanted to be creative.
But even after all of that...

Can you forgive me?
No matter the silly mistakes?
Yes, I believe...
Because I can always try again.

Everything Has To (Probably) End

I find it terrifying that everything has to end; because in my opinion, when there is life, there is death. Even the immortal jellyfish isn't safe either, as they can still die from being eaten or getting a disease.^[1]

And I'm not just talking about some random 45-year-old guy dying of a heart attack or an old grandma dying peacefully. When I say everything has to end, I mean everything. The Mona Lisa, the universe, animals, and so much more. To give you a better perspective, I found out about this when I was talking to myself:

"You see that?" my mind tells me. "Your work? That'll be gone one day. Your life? Snap. It'll just go away like that. Why are you even doing what you're doing when it's just going to end up being nothing? I'd call you stupid if I could."

The last point struck a nerve within me; I found that while reading the Bible, specifically The Book of Job. For those of you that don't know what The Book of Job is, it's a book where a really bad guy named Satan (also known as The Devil) curses a guy named Job in an attempt for him to leave his faith. While he does tear his clothes and shaves his head, he doesn't say anything bad about God. Three of his friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar tries to confront him, but Job begins to curse the day of his birth. This is where the last point comes in. In the little translator notes in my copy of the Bible, there's a paragraph that stuck out:

In past centuries people were driven by the uncontainable energy of life. They lived and made sacrifices for the survival of our people. Our parents worked and procreated without asking themselves why. When people reach maturity in critical thinking, they need to answer this question: Why live if, in the end, life leads nowhere?

If that's the case, why do I keep doing stuff when I know for sure it'll all go to waste? Heck, even the Bible sort of implies that there's no afterlife in a way! Well, I don't have the greatest answer, but I have a decent answer that relies on three words:

Because I can.

Call me stupid, but for me it works. Similarly to my previous work, Can You Forgive Me?, I don't think spending my time rotting alone would be the best way for me to live my life. It would be better to at least enjoy the ride while it lasts. Yes, it'll still lead to nothing and everything will probably end, but I personally like to have fun.

A Little Side Note

But let's say you're not happy and you believe that the universe won't end. The reason I'm saying this is because maybe a god (or gods) exist. Maybe we'll be rejoicing up in heaven or the damned will suffer in hell for eternity, and there's no such thing as a permanent end. That's the reason I put the "probably" in the title, as I'm not even fully sure myself.

You'll probably tell me this:

"Bceause I can? That's an excuse! You shouldn't even be talking! My five-year-old son can make something more philosophically abundant than you ever will—"

I get it. But to be honest, any other answer would technically be an excuse. It depends on the person on who you're saying it to. If I told someone to simply stop overthinking, that could be the very thing that changes them forever. I'm not the first person to explain this idea either; I found out about this from a YouTuber called easy, actually. Go watch his videos if you can; they helped me a lot while I was writing this side note.

Anyways, that's all for the second entry.

You Can't Make Everybody Happy

The title of this lesson is something that I've learned the easy way and the hard way. I felt like making this because I felt the first two entries of my writings felt a little preachy.^[2]

You kind of get the idea that when you do something really well, everyone will love it. This could be presenting an art piece, coding a website, or even finally facing your fears to present something to a class. Unfortunately, reality says otherwise. Obviously there will probably be a good amount of people who like your work, but there's always going to be that one person who gives off the feeling of a "it's alright, I guess" or they just downright hate on it. After all, it's mathematically impossible to be loved by everyone. So in order to deal with the people who hate you, simply ignore them and be yourself.

I'm joking. I'm not going to leave you out like that; there's always going to be exceptions.

First exception: Someone is actually telling you what you need to hear.

In other words, this means that some people that may be hating on you are actually giving you advice. The problem is that we usually cannot tell the difference between advice and hate; so, to fix that, I've created a test.

Zack recently created a video for his school project and posted it online. While it doesn't gain that many views, there are two comments. Try to tell which one is a hate comment and which is advice.

Comment 1:

I've seen way too many videos of this specific school project. Maybe next time put in more effort.

Comment 2:

Your camera angles looks like a baby handled it. Try adding a stand next time to get rid of the shakiness.

If you said that comment 2 was the one that gave advice, then you're correct. But why? It's because:

• Even though the first sentence is very similar to the first ("your camera angle looks like a baby handled it"), it specifies what to improve on, stating to add "a stand next time to get rid of the shakiness".
• Comment 1 is vague on what to improve, simply telling Zack "maybe next time put in more effort."

The second exception: You were a massive jerk in the past and you've changed.

When I was writing for a community, I did some pretty stupid things. I ripped off pages (a little like plagiarism) because I just wanted to have a high page count and hope that some people might admire me. Because of my obliviousness, I (obviously) got banned for 1.5 months on the community for what I did, and I was kicked out of a rewrite because of it (me and the owner are now on good terms, don't worry).

What happened next after I got unblocked was also stupid. I remember trying to apologize to another user (who will not be named for safety reasons) because I ripped off one his pages, but I used AI to help write my apology. Safe to say we beefed more and more (and I sometimes kept doing a little bit of stupid stuff) to the point where he didn't want contact with me anymore. This was because I desperately wanted to regain his trust.

My friend said that the situation was funny in his opinion. To be honest, it was a bit funny looking at it, but I'm still a bit sore about it, mainly because everything was public.

So how does an act of stupidity from me relate to this second exception? Well, from what I did, there came one good thing: self-forgiveness.

Self-forgiveness is something that I've rarely seen being explored that well, because from what I've seen, most of the stuff online takes the assumption that you're a victim (could be anything -- bullying, harassment, trauma, etc). This is not always the case, as I just told in my story. What should you do then if you something stupid?

Unfortunately, this is something that I cannot fully help with, as each and everyone else is different. Even if I gave detailed advice, there would still probably be a 20 percent of people who don't like it or it just doesn't work for them.

But I guess I'll try anyway.

Step 1: What you did was wrong.
Step 1.5: You won't do it again, right?
Step 1.75: Right?
Step 1.9: Good. Then you've changed. You're better.

Step 2: You can't just hate on yourself. You wanna feel bettet? Forgive yourself.

Step 3: People can you forgive you no matter what you've done as long as you know for sure you hate what you did.

Step 4: If you've hurt people, apologize to them.
Step 4.5: If you've done something bad to objects or things, try to replace or fix them.
Step 5: If it's not possible to do either of those things, do something to put an an amount of good into the world that's equal to whatever bad thing you've done.

Step 6: Self-forgiveness may not be easy.
Step 6.5: It's probably not going to be a clean process.

Step 7: Even if you forgive yourself of one mistake, another stupid thing may happen.

Step 8: Mistakes happen all the time. Self-forgiveness is needed.

Step 9: A disclaimer: Don't force other people to forgive you. It won't work.

Step 10: But forgiving yourself will be worth it. Always.

And that's all for entry three.

The Hypocrite

Before I realized it, the Catholic Church became part of my life. This is something you've kinda got to expect if you're a Filipino; the Philippines is a predominantly Christian country. The most common denomination you would find first are the Catholics, followed by Iglesia ni Cristo^[3], Evangelicals, Protestants, and other religions^[4].

Do you have that feeling of not being able to remember anything when you were young? That's called childhood amnesia, where you can't think of anything you did before you turned three or four. For me, the earliest memory I had was entering the first grade, and when the teacher asked us what we wanted to be when we grow up, I said a cashier.^[5] When I did start to remember things, one of them was attending church and learning about Catholicism. I learned how to pray the Our Father^[6], I went to church on Sunday, and I attended catechism for almost five years.

The interesting thing is that I live in the United Arab Emirates, where Islam is the main religion. The locals respect us (should it be just locals? A lot of people here are expatriates.) deeply, but what causes a bit of a problem is that the nearest church is a bit far off. That causes one thing: traffic. Me and family usually attend an online mass because of this, but we still do occasionally attend in person.

However, I did have my doubts in the past.

I had an atheism phase when I turned thirteen, which, looking back at it, was extremely edgy. It came to me after a period of doomscrolling religion based stuff, and it felt as if I had been enlightened by truth. After this, I boasted to my classmates and my parents that I became an atheist, and I was proud for the first few days. Atheism was also a head-turner mainly due to its shock value. It felt good for a while... until the aftermath of what I just did hit.

I started to cringe internally when I deeply thought on what I had said. Questions began to flood my mind: Why did I say those things? You still pray sometimes, so you shouldn't be bragging about not believing in God! What about your other family, huh? What are you even doing anymore?

And because of this, I kept drifting back and back from atheism and Catholicism, trying to put a label on myself. I was an attention seeker at the time.

So where do I stand now? To be honest, I'm not too sure. There's a term out there called spiritual but not religious, but I've always felt the opposite: religious but not spiritual. Even when I was seven, I didn't feel spiritual at all, and all the prayers were just out of habit. My Catholic faith still remains, though I do hope it improves in somehow.

Indecisive

On February 2026, an email was sent to my parents inviting me to an GCSE taster session. Me and my parents went to it (being a typical family who'd like their son for a good education), and there were lots of options: art, history, maths, english, science, and a lot more subjects. Most of the choices to me were interesting, and a few of the teachers helped me what to pick.

Wait. What is a GCSE?

A GCSE stands for General Certificate of Secondary education. It's fancy of saying "do this test that you've prepped about five years for and pray your results don't suck". For my friends in America, GCSEs are like a final exam you take during freshman and sophomore years.^[7] Think of it as the SAT, but British.

But I've found the GCSEs to be limiting. Why do I have to take less subjects now? Call me a nerd, but I like anything that's educational. Plus (and with probably with every exam board), the GCSE faces criticisms: students getting burnout due to long hours of studying, additional stress, inaccuracy of predicted grades for those who went to A-Levels^[8], and teacher's racist biases with black races.^[9]

So what will I do? If I had to make an educated guess, I'll learn at my own pace, have a schedule, manage my time, and most importantly of all, touch grass and continue hanging out with friends.

Thanks for reading Fleeting Thoughts! See you next time!

References and Notes