passion can save me out of the matrix

On my own struggle with body dysmorphia, the weight of human vices, the matrix, and how all-consuming passion is the only thing strong enough to break us free.

TW: eating disorder, body dysmorphia

The first part of this piece is deeply personal—my struggles with weight, body dysmorphia, and the conditioning that fed them. The latter moves beyond me, into passion, vices, and the systems that keep us hungry for things that will never fill us. I poured a lot into this, and writing it was both a realization and a kind of freedom—one that, I think, might resonate far beyond just me and more applicable for all readers.

Hopefully, there’s something in here worth holding onto for you readers!!

The matrix wants you small

The first months of my life in the United States were shrouded in a fog I could not shake. A quiet, creeping darkness wrapped itself around me, so consuming and relentless that it seemed to blot out all else. It was not the homesickness I had expected, nor the disorientation of being uprooted and replanted in a strange, sprawling land. No, it was something else entirely—an unspoken struggle, one I’m certain lives in the marrow of every woman at some point in her life.

It was the suffocating desire to disappear into thinness.

I had never been closer to the obsession, never so wholly consumed by this singular fixation: to lose weight. To strip myself down to nothing but bone and skin. To erase all excess. This desire, which had simmered quietly in the background of my adolescence, erupted with a vengeance when I arrived here, alone, untethered, with nothing to distract me from its demands.

For four months, every single thought, every decision, every moment of my life revolved around food. Restriction. Bingeing. Wanting to give up. Then self-hatred creeped back in, pulling me deeper into the cycle. I hated my body. I hated myself for not being able to “fix” it. I body-checked, took selfies to see how “fat” I have gotten, mesmerized over my 15-year-old body. My first thought of the day was about food and diet, and my last thought was probably food and diet as well.

I didn’t just want to lose weight. I needed to. It became a religion, an unrelenting doctrine, something to be upheld with discipline and self-inflicted cruelty. The obsession twisted the way I saw the world—no longer through the lens of curiosity or connection, but through the rigid, punishing metric of weight. I stopped seeing people as people. I stripped them of their stories, their complexities, their essence, reducing them to numbers, to the way they chewed their food, to the calories they silently consumed. It wasn’t just about my body anymore; it was about bodies everywhere. The weight of strangers. The shapes of women in grocery aisles. The meals of my peers. Their kilograms, their portions, their methods of restraint.

It was the darkest time of my life, a time when I disappeared into an obsession that left no room for joy, no room for connection, no room for anything but the endless, futile desire to be less.

But the worst part wasn’t the weight. It wasn’t the food. It wasn’t even the endless loop of self-hatred that had become the background noise of my life.

It was that I lost myself.

I let weight cloud over my life—let it erase the parts of me that once defined me. The parts that mattered. I lost my ability to see myself as an accomplished Trang Linh, as a raging creative, as someone with depth and stories and meaning beyond her body. I had passions once, real ones, ones that made me forget time, ones that filled me with a kind of fire that weight loss never could.

But for all those months, I forgot all of it.

I forgot the electric thrill of consuming ideas, of immersing myself in something so fully that I disappeared into it. I forgot the rush of intellectual curiosity, the satisfaction of creation, the fulfillment that comes from doing something that matters. I forgot my own commitment—to my craft, to my dreams, to the things that made me me.

The Matrix is real

And yet, I know now. This wasn’t just about weight.

This was about vice. About the silent, creeping sickness that pulls you into the matrix of societal expectations, that convinces you to shrink your life into something manageable, controlled, obedient. It was about the fact that I had nothing else in that moment, no other force strong enough to pull me out of the loop, no other obsession deep enough to save me from myself.

The Matrix is real.

Not in the way they portray it in movies. Not a dystopian sci-fi prison with cables in the back of your skull—but something worse. A silent, invisible machine that does not need violence to keep you compliant. A system that convinces you to enslave yourself

It is real. It is here. It does not enslave you with chains or force, it does not need to. It is a system that convinces you to willingly participate in your own containment. It does not have to control you; it only has to make you care about the things it wants you to care about. That feeds you desires you never chose. That hands you a script, a checklist of pre-approved aspirations: be thin, be rich, be beautiful, be admired, be productive, be in this type of career (9-5 corporate grind). And distract you long enough so that you never stop to wonder if any of it was what you actually wanted.

And if you don’t fight it, if you don’t choose something else, it will consume you.

I didn’t see it at first. I thought I was making my own choices. I thought my obsession with weight, with control, with self-discipline, was mine. But it wasn’t. It was programmed into me. Another trap laid out by the machine, designed to keep me small.

And the thing is. It’s not just about weight.

It is the entire system.

It is the college graduate drowning in debt, locked into a job they hate, just making enough to survive, just tired enough to never escape.

It is the 45-year-old who once wanted to be a filmmaker but traded dreams for stability, convincing themselves they’ll return to it someday—though someday never comes.

It is the influencer who no longer lives life but documents it, curating every moment for an audience they will never meet, building a brand out of a person who no longer exists.

It is the girl who opens TikTok for five minutes and wakes up three hours later, her mind drained, her soul empty, but the algorithm whispers: just one more video.

The entire world is a slow, grinding system designed to make you disappear into the mold of an optimized, self-disciplining, self-loathing, ever-producing, ever-consuming unit of efficiency. It teaches you to hate your body, then sells you solutions. It teaches you to crave validation, then sells you status.

It feeds you a lifetime of distractions, a never-ending reel of curated entertainment, empty ambition, hollow aspiration. Get the degree, get the job, get the body, get the house, get the perfect Instagram life. Run in the hamster wheel of self-improvement until you die. Because if you ever stop, if you ever question it,you might realize that none of it ever mattered.

And that’s what they fear.

Because a person who is truly alive, a person who is fully consumed by passion, is useless to the matrix.

A person who burns for something—who is obsessed, who is lost in the depths of creation, of thought, of something real—does not care about the artificial rewards the system dangles in front of them. Someone who is lost in art, in philosophy, in music, in movement, in something real—does not have the time to be conditioned. They do not have the time to care about the empty aspirations the world tries to sell them. They do not need to be fed entertainment, because their mind is already full. They do not need to be told what to want, because they already have something worth wanting.

Passion is the Only Way Out

And that is why passion is the only thing that can save me.

Not passive hobbies. Not surface-level interests that flicker in and out of relevance. Passion, the kind that takes over your life, that pulls you into something bigger than yourself, is the only way out.

For me, that passion is art. Consuming it, creating it, finding new ways to express and lose myself in it. The rest of my life could be spent unraveling its endless possibilities, exploring its depths, letting it shape and reshape me. And in doing so, I will never again fall victim to the vices that have kept me trapped. Passion will save me from the human vices of desiring bullshit: for filthy wealth, for power, for model-like thinness, for status, for approval, for the next micro-trend, the next aesthetic, the next meaningless transformation. It will teach me to love my imperfections, to love my mind, my character, my everything.

When I am consumed by passion, I have no room for self-hatred. No reason to measure my value against anyone else.

Would I have wanted to be rich, to be thin, to be a tradwife, if I had been truly immersed in something greater? If my mind had been drenched in real dopamine, in the high of creation, in the kind of deep, untamed inspiration that makes you forget to check your reflection, forget to compare, forget to chase the arbitrary goals set for you by people who profit off your misery?

Would I have aspired to be thin, to be boring, to be small and self-contained and palatable, if I had spent those months chasing an idea instead of a number? If I had been devouring philosophy instead of weight-loss content? If I had been thinking instead of shrinking?

I don’t think so.

Because passion—when it is relentless, when it is obsessive, when it is the kind of hunger that builds instead of destroys—is the only thing that can break the cycle. Passion shields you from the slow, creeping decay of the soul that happens when you let the world dictate what you should value. It protects you from waking up at 30 and realizing you have spent your entire youth trying to disappear when you could have spent those years creating, building, learning, feeling something real. It frees people from the matrix of manufactured desire that keeps people trapped in a life that does not belong to them.

Because when you have truly tasted what it means to be alive, the idea of submitting to a life of passive consumption, of working for a future that is always just out of reach, of chasing things that were never meant to fulfill you—becomes impossible.

That is the sickness of modern life. That if you do not have something greater pulling you forward, the world will hand you something hollow to chase instead. And you will take it. Because it is easy. Because it is available. Because it is the default.

And the matrix cannot function if too many people wake up to that.

So they will keep trying. They will keep you busy. Keep you scrolling. Keep you trapped in endless cycles of self-improvement, self-optimization, self-destruction disguised as self-care. Keep you hungry for things that were never meant to fulfill you, until you forget what it even means to be hungry for something real.

But I refuse.

I refuse to let my mind shrink again.

I refuse to be another perfectly optimized, highly productive, self-loathing, endlessly consuming, ever-dissatisfied cog in their machine.

Passion, arts, and relentless dedication will save me. Passion—the kind that burns, the kind that consumes, the kind that breaks the leash they tied around my mind—is the only way out.

And I am getting out.

---

Thank you all for the immense support on my Substack posts and notes lately. It has been a light in my days seeing all the notifications, almost an endearing reassurance that these words, these thoughts, are finding a home beyond just me.

An unrelated wall-of-text that I cherish a lot for all the readers!