- Long Numb Face -
Never smelled a love,
Not even from a thousand yards.
I hid it in the quiet part of me,
ashamed to see it on a paper,
yet I barely feel any guilt at all.
The sun is nearly gone,
and only the cold moon stays with me.
Not angry, not happy, not surprised—
just one long, numb face I can’t quite fix.
Here comes the wounded owl,
and the long, dull night waits for my surrender.
by Shamsaddin Amanov, 29/11/2025
Note to the Reader:
This book contains themes of death, grief, depression, and suicide. It is not an
instruction, not an invitation, and not a performance. It is a testimony: a mind
speaking plainly, sometimes sharply, often imperfectly, searching for a clean
sentence in a messy world.
If you came here for comfort, you might find it in unexpected places. If you
came here for certainty, you won’t.
About the Book
This is the story of Elias, told through his thoughts. He thinks like some
people breathe: constantly. He feels, but he mistrusts feelings. He calls belief
a fog and facts a blunt object. He speaks as if he has already made a
choice—and then spends the book proving how difficult choices actually are.
About the Author
Shamsaddin Amanov (b. 1999, Azerbaijan) wrote the first edition in 2019.
This Second Edition revisits the same voice with cleaner structure, clearer
English, and fewer detours—without sanding off the roughness that makes
the testimony honest.
MY DEATH
03:39, Lund, Sweden.
After everything I’ve thought, I’ve reached the last thought: end it.
Not dramatically. Not with a soundtrack. Not as a threat. Just as a conclusion.
How can a person be sad and calm at the same time? I don’t know. I only
know that I stood up. I looked at myself in the window and noticed my
hair—how long it has been since I last cared? I tied it up and said, quietly,
like I was greeting a stranger:
“Hey. I haven’t seen you in a long time.”
Let me make the ending explicit. I am not writing a clever fiction that tricks
you. I’m not hiding the final page behind a plot twist. I will die at the end of
this book.
And no—this is not a suicidal invitation. I’m not asking you to copy anything.
Life is not a group project. If you are here because you feel close to the edge,
take that seriously. Talk to someone. You deserve more than your worst hour.
So why write this?
Because some people live in their hearts.
I live in my head.
And my head doesn’t shut up.
This testimony is what happens when a mind refuses to stop—when it keeps
turning the same stone, hoping the underside will finally explain why the
stone exists at all.
If you don’t like a paragraph, you have two options:
1) Skip it.
2) Write feedback on blank paper and send it to me. I’m everywhere.
Welcome to a lot of skipping.
THE WINDOW
I am at home. I lean out of my only window like it’s a ritual. I smoke. I listen
to the rain. And I try to trap the smell of it in my mind forever.
Forever—whatever.
The smell has a name: petrichor. Chemistry explains it. I don’t care about the
chemistry. What I care about is this:
A smell can unlock a whole person.
Write “vanilla” on a page and someone will smell it in their mind—without
vanilla being present at all. That should terrify you a little. We like to believe
reality is outside us. But so much of reality is manufactured inside us, quietly,
without consent.
Even emotions seem to have a scent. When someone enters a room, you can
sometimes feel their fear before they speak. When someone is truly happy,
something in the air softens. Maybe it’s body language. Maybe it’s chemistry.
Maybe it’s both. Either way, the mind records everything, then lies about
what it recorded.
And here is the more brutal truth:
If the mind manipulates something as simple as smell, what do you think it
does with meaning?
NOTHINGNESS
Try this:
Think about nothingness for ten seconds.
You can’t.
You can close your eyes—and still you’re watching. You can silence the
room—and still you’re hearing. Even when you “think of nothing,” you are
thinking of the idea of nothing, which is still something. A shape. A color. A
space. A black screen. A quiet room.
We can imagine only the concept of nothingness, not nothingness itself.
So, in a way, it’s not “nothing.” It’s nothink about nothing.
Now take it further.
If you asked two people to imagine nothingness, would they imagine the
same nothingness? No. One might imagine a black void. Another might
imagine white fog. Another might imagine sitting in a silent room.
People argue about God the same way.
You can’t ask someone born blind to imagine red. They’ve never met red.
They can’t build it from scratch. So when religious people say, “You can’t
see God, but He exists,” there’s a poetic argument hidden inside it:
We are all blind. Maybe we can’t see what’s real.
Fine. That’s poetic.
But I’m not sure poetry should run the world.
WE ARE NOT SPECIAL
You want the simplest, ugliest sentence?
You are not special.
Not because you’re worthless. Not because you can’t love, build, heal, create.
But because the universe did not design you as a main character.
You are the final product of unawareness—of biology that didn’t ask
permission, of history that didn’t consult you, of randomness that doesn’t
apologize.
People hate this idea. They call it depressing. They call it nihilism. But
sometimes “specialness” is just a blanket we pull over our heads so we don’t
have to look at the cold facts.
The worst part is that the belief “I am special” often becomes the foundation
of a whole life. And when that foundation cracks, people fall into panic.
So they replace thinking with believing.
And believing, most of the time, is not courage.
It’s an escape route.
BELIEF, FEAR, AND CONTROL
Why should I fear a creator who claims to love me?
The “testing God” idea is what I can’t stand: a life designed like an exam. The
rules are unclear, the grading is invisible, and the punishment is eternal.
Fear is old. Humanity used to fear cars, then planes, then the ocean, then the
moon. Fear shrinks as knowledge grows.
But religion doesn’t shrink that way. In many minds, it grows stronger when
the world gets more complex—because complexity is exhausting. Belief can
be restful. Belief can be a shortcut.
People say, “Religion gives purpose.”
True. It does.
It gives a script. It gives a role. It gives a reason. And when your pain needs a
reason, religion offers one immediately. Not necessarily a true one. But a
usable one.
And in history, usable beliefs often win.
Even dictators understood this. If you want to control people, you don’t only
police their bodies. You police their souls
CRIME, MORALITY, AND THE “GOOD PERSON” PROBLEM
Here’s a question that makes people uncomfortable:
If there is no God—no heaven, no hell—what stops a person from doing evil?
Some will answer, “Empathy.” Others will answer, “Law.” Others will
answer, “Conscience.”
All valid. But not complete.
Because here is the dark truth: many crimes go unpunished. Many evil people
die peacefully. Reality doesn’t guarantee justice. Nature doesn’t care. The
universe does not keep a moral scoreboard.
So belief becomes a social tool. It adds an invisible camera. It adds
consequence when the law fails. It says: even if no one sees you, someone
sees you.
And yes—this can reduce crime.
But it also creates a society of spiritual surveillance: doing good because
you’re watched is not the same as doing good because you understand
goodness.
So morality becomes a question:
Are you a good person… or a trained person?
GUILT, THE SUPEREGO, AND IDENTITY
Guilt is one of the most human things we do.
It hurts. It punishes. It keeps us awake at night. But it is also a guardrail.
Freud had his trio: id, ego, superego. I won’t worship Freud like a saint. But
the model catches something true: human beings contain a violent animal and
a judge inside the same skull.
The superego is that judge. It humiliates you. It shames you. It whispers,
don’t.
Without it, a person can become terrifyingly free. Free to do damage without
regret. Free to treat others as objects. Free to act out every worst impulse with
no inner consequence.
So as much as guilt feels like a disease, it is also evidence that you are not a
monster.
Identity works the same way. The problem is rarely the identity itself. The
problem is the inner courtroom:
“Is it fine?”
“Am I allowed to be this?”
“Will I be punished for being myself?”
A person loses years not because they are broken, but because they keep
asking permission to exist.
MEMORY: FALSE, FRAGILE, CONVENIENT
Memory is not a recording.
It’s a story.
You can plant stories in people with confidence and timing. You can say,
“We met before,” and watch their mind scramble to cooperate—because the
mind hates uncertainty. It prefers a wrong answer to no answer.
That’s why false memory is common. That’s why déjà vu exists. That’s why
people misremember not only events, but feelings, motives, entire selves.
And once you accept this, a lot of human pride collapses:
We argue as if our minds are courtrooms.
But our minds are theatres.
And we are not only the actors.
We are also the audience, applauding ourselves for scenes that never
happened exactly as we claim.
END OF GAME
03:41, Lund, Sweden.
I told you earlier: I don’t know why I exist, but I know why someone might
decide not to.
My mother, Sara, was born in 1965. She studied, she lived, and at some point
her body began to betray her. Illness doesn’t only damage the body. It
rewrites identity. It turns a person into a patient. It turns privacy into
paperwork.
She believed in God. Truly.
And still—belief did not protect her from suffering. Belief did not negotiate
with biology. Belief did not stop the slow theft of dignity.
I am not angry at her for ending her life. I’m angry at the silence between us: I
never got to ask what the final weight was. Pain? Fear? Exhaustion? Love,
even? The kind of love that tries to reduce burden for others?
I grew up without a mother.
One of my creators was dead.
So, in my private language: God was dead too.
People romanticize death. Or they demonize it. I don’t do either. I think death
is the most honest thing life contains: the one conclusion no philosophy can
debate away.
I also know this: many people die for stupid reasons—panic, heartbreak,
humiliation, money. Life is bigger than those reasons. Life is also unfair
enough that some people carry pain that doesn’t look “stupid” at all.
If you want the cleanest definition I can offer:
Suicide is the deactivation of material existence in one step.
Not heroic. Not romantic. Not moral. Not immoral. Just final.
And if the universe has judges—if there is an afterlife—then here is the last
“game” that haunted me:
Do you tell the truth and risk punishment?
Do you lie and risk punishment?
Do you choose a belief for safety?
Or do you admit you never knew?
End of game.
And if this testimony has any dignity, it’s this:
I tried to be honest inside a world that rewards certainty more than truth.
03:41.
Lund, Sweden.
End.
I’ll treat this as if I’m writing a long, honest report about your book to you.
I’ll break it into:
Whole-book summary
Structure
Themes & ideas
Tone & style
Psych / philosophy / “scientific” commentary
Favourite quotes
Evaluation, scores, and concrete suggestions
“Disconnectedness in the Testimony” is a hybrid of confession, philosophical essay, and psychological notebook framed by a fictional self, Elias, who is preparing to die in Lund, Sweden, in the middle of the night. From the start he tells the reader he will die by the end of the book and insists it is not a suicide manual but a private testimony that the reader is allowed to overhear.
The “plot” is minimal but important:
Elias explains that this book is essentially him talking to himself before he “loses his beautiful head,” and that he did not write it for others’ approval. It’s his testimony and the reader is invited to skip anything they dislike.
A long middle stretch deals with religion: how it shapes morality, crime, reproduction, and power; whether God exists; and whether religion is a “win–win bet” in terms of afterlife vs purpose in this life.
There are digressions into beauty and relativism, LGBT identity and guilt, guilt and superego, anecdotes about false memories, learned helplessness (elephant and banana stories), and social experiments.
Near the end, Elias returns more directly to his personal story: his mother Sara’s illness (likely multiple sclerosis), disability, faith, and suicide; how he grew up without her; and how, for him, “God was dead” when she died.
He then openly describes his own planned suicide as a “deactivation of material existence”, emphasizing he isn’t doing it for love or melodramatic reasons, and planning to donate his money to people in need.
The book closes with a kind of logical “game” about telling the truth or lying to hypothetical divine judges and then: “End of Game. And, end of the chapter. And, almost the end of the book, too.”
So the “story” is: a young man on the edge of self-annihilation tries to think honestly through existence, belief, guilt, and responsibility, and leaves this messy, passionate testimony behind.
The structure is fragmented but patterned:
Framed by time & place: 03:39–03:41, Lund, Sweden, reappearing as headings.
Divided into numbered segments (*** 2 ***, *** 8 ***, *** 10 ***, etc.), which behave like chapters/essays but with a strong through-voice rather than discrete standalone pieces.
Nothingness & the mind (imagining nothingness, distraction, multitasking)
Being not-special & star-dust (you are the final product of unawareness)
Religion, crime, population, and control
Identity, guilt, sexuality, superego
Perception, false memories, banana experiment
Mother, illness, suicide, false memory, Freud, nirvana principle
Final game with God & closing time stamp.
It’s not a classical linear argument. It’s more like an intellectual long night, where one thought triggers five others and everything eventually returns to: “Do I stay, or do I switch myself off?”
You spend a surprising amount of energy on how we think about nothingness: its color, its logic, whether two people could have the “same” nothingness, and the paradox that imagining nothingness already makes it something.
Key conclusions:
We cannot think pure nothingness; we only think the idea of it.
Multitasking, distraction, and even noticing you’ve closed your eyes are proof that the mind is “a ceaseless engine.”
“Thinking about nothingness would be a deactivation of your own mind… which is impossible scientifically.”
This is a philosophical + cognitive science mix: you’re groping at phenomenology (what consciousness can or cannot apprehend) and cognitive limits, without formal jargon.
You push hard against the idea that humans are special:
“You are the final product of unawareness. And of course, randomness. Now, how much special do you think you are? For me, none.”
Being special is framed as a defensive myth to escape brutal facts and reasonless existence.
But then you do secretly treat some things as special: your mother, your intellectual honesty, your own decision to die “for the right reasons.” That tension is interesting: on the surface you’re anti-specialness; underneath you care deeply about how one lives and dies.
This is probably the densest theme.
You question whether science has become a new religion, with some people following it “blindly.”
You argue that if we can never know we were wrong, a belief can function as “truth” for us, and religion becomes a comfort that cannot be falsified subjectively.
You describe religion as a win–win bet: it gives purpose now and possibly heaven later, and if you’re wrong you never know.
You also treat religion as social technology: “the perfect way of running the world,” citing Napoleon and an empirical paper that more religious countries have lower property crime rates.
But emotionally, your problem is not just logical; it’s ethical and personal:
You dislike the idea of being constantly monitored, tested, evaluated by an invisible boss.
You’re angry with a God who allowed your mother’s illness and death despite her belief, and you equate her death with God’s death.
The book sits in a space between atheistic humanism and resentful ex-believer. It’s more emotional than Dawkins, more psychological than Hitchens.
A big chunk examines whether morality survives without God:
You invite the reader to imagine no God, one short life, born poor, and no divine punishment: would everyone still avoid crime?
You suspect that a lot of “uncommitted crimes” are prevented by religious fear, and that without it, states would have to rely on harsher policing.
Morality here is treated quite behaviorally: in terms of incentives, punishments, and “crime doesn’t pay” vs the reality that many criminals never get punished.Yet your own stance is: I personally wouldn’t steal or hurt others even without God. That’s where your ethical seriousness comes through.
You dive deeply into guilt:
You use Freud’s Id–Ego–Superego model to explain why guilt, although painful, is a crucial inner brake on cruelty. Without a superego, someone could “grab a circular saw machine and cut a person into slices” without remorse.
You see guilt as “so humanistic” and think humans are good at scorning themselves.
You apply this to LGBT and racial identity, arguing that the core problem often isn’t the trait itself but the internal question “Is it fine?” and the way that question eats away at dignity.Here, some of your opinions about pride parades and “own caring” are philosophically provocative but also limited by lack of lived experience; you’re trying to push toward radical self-acceptance, but at times you risk underestimating structural oppression.
You clearly enjoy psychological experiments:
The banana/knife experiment, where students misremember a banana as a knife because their unconscious expects a weapon in a violent scene.
Detailed description of false memories: how you could plant a small story (“you forgot your phone at the cinema two years ago”) and someone under pressure might “remember” it.
You use these to support the broader idea: our minds are extremely unreliable narrators. This feeds back into religion, into “love at first sight,” and into the unreliability of our own life stories.
The frame and the end of the book revolve around suicide.
Your mother’s suicide is treated with a mixture of empathy, incomprehension, and philosophical reinterpretation (her death = “God was dead”).
You distinguish between “stupid reasons” (debts, romantic heartbreak) and what you frame as more “rational” reasons (severe illness, philosophical choice, donation of wealth).
From a literary angle, this gives the book a high emotional voltage and a stark honesty. From a clinical / ethical angle, there’s a clear risk: readers in pain might latch onto the rationalisation. You do say explicitly that the book is not an invitation to suicide and that you “hate stupid deaths,” but the entire frame is still a mind on the edge.Very direct second person at times (“Do me a favor… think about nothingness for 10 seconds”), and very confessional first person at others.
You constantly break the fourth wall with jokes, clarifications, meta-comments about your English and your references.
It feels like a long, intense conversation with a smart, slightly chaotic friend at 3 a.m.
Mix of sarcastic / darkly comic (“my ex-girlfriend excluded” from fancy EX- words)
Earnest and wounded when talking about your mother and about fairness.
Didactic in some religion sections (you’re clearly venting frustration).
This oscillation is part of the charm but also part of why the book can feel emotionally exhausting (which may be what you wanted).
Strong at:
Striking, memorable sentences (we’ll get to them in the quotes).
Turning abstract things (nothingness, guilt, specialness) into concrete mental experiments.
Blending references (Freud, Napoleon, Game of Thrones, Travis Scott, Hinduism, population data) into a personal voice.
Weak at:
Paragraph discipline: thoughts often run long and twisty, which matches the “disconnectedness” theme but sometimes dilutes impact.
Redundancy: you return to the same ideas (being not special, the testing God, religion as control) many times, sometimes almost verbatim.
Some grammatical slips and word choices (which you already self-acknowledge) can occasionally blur the clarity of complex arguments.
Overall: raw, vivid, slightly messy, but very alive.
Your core position is a blend of:
Existentialism: no built-in meaning, no specialness, no guaranteed purpose.
Soft nihilism: you don’t think nothing matters, you think nothing is given — so humans invent myths (religion, specialness) to cope.
Atheistic humanism: you care how people treat each other without God (donating money, hating unfairness, arguing against cruelty).
Comparisons that make sense:
Camus (“Myth of Sisyphus”) – you are looking the absurd in the face; the difference is that Camus concludes “we must imagine Sisyphus happy” and chooses revolt; your narrator chooses self-deactivation.
Cioran – the aphoristic despair and fascination with nothingness is closer to Cioran than to analytic philosophy.
Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” – the self-aware, self-contradictory narrator who knows his logic is questionable but keeps digging anyway.
A few things stand out:
High metacognition: you are very aware of your own thinking, bias, and even the limits of introspection.
Guilt sensitivity: whole sections revolve around guilt (superego, shame, parades, survivor’s guilt around your mother, guilt about your own advantages vs poor/disabled people).
All-or-nothing thinking sometimes pops up: e.g., either religion is an illusion/elusion or it’s completely true; either we’re special or we’re random dust.
Control vs helplessness: you admire accepting responsibility (for having kids, for believing, for donating your money), but also feel that cosmically everything is absurd and random. That tension is psychologically rich.
About the suicide framing:
As literature, this is an honest portrayal of a mind walking through its justifications and doubts. As psychology, anyone writing this way in real life would absolutely be flagged as high-risk and in need of support, not intellectual debate. The book itself tries to defuse this by insisting it’s not an invitation to suicide and mocking “stupid deaths,” but the underlying content is still extremely heavy.
You integrate:
Cognitive/perceptual experiments (false memories, banana/knife misperception, smell of fear, etc.)
Population statistics and crime–religion correlations (citing Ellis & Peterson).
Historical anecdotes (Anna O., Freud, Nirvana principle).
This isn’t a formal scientific book, but you use science essayistically: as supporting characters rather than strict evidence. Sometimes you admit the weakness directly (e.g., the unsourced experiment from a translated psychotherapy book).From a “scientific writing” perspective, it’s:
Good intuition, interesting examples, but reference standards and experimental rigor are loose.
From a personal essay perspective, it works fine and even adds flavor.
All kept under ~20 words, with where they came from:
“We can imagine only the idea of nothingness, not itself. So, nothink about nothing.”
“You are the final product of unawareness. And of course, randomness.”
“It is not the century of believing; it is the century of living. As the name implies: BE LIE VING.”
“Beauty will remain beauty no matter how you name it because beauty is already beauty without confirmation.”
“What I ‘believe’ is an experiment, experience, excursion… When you sum them up, it is equal to science.”
“The worst part is the thought of being special is the fundament of one’s life.”
“She gave me a life, and she took her life afterward… So, God was dead.”
“Suicide is a deactivation of material existence in one step.”
“Our topics are often switching like the beats of ‘Sicko Mode’… sometimes non-serious themes are needed for mind relief.”
These are the lines where your voice and idea fuse into something memorable and publishable as standalone quotes.
For a self-written, early-twenties, philosophically ambitious book that tries to mix:
personal confession
pop-psychology
atheist critique of religion
existential reflection on death
…I’d place “Disconnectedness in the Testimony” somewhere around 86–90/100 as a raw, debut, “underground” text.
If I break it down:
Concept / ambition: 95/100
Thematic depth: 90/100
Structure & coherence: 78/100
Prose / style: 85/100 (with peaks over 90 in certain passages)
Use of psychology & science: 80/100
Emotional impact: 92/100
There are real flashes of brilliance. There are also places where the book meanders or repeats itself, or where an argument could be more nuanced.
Voice: instantly recognizable, consistent, and honest. You sound like you, not like a generic philosophy textbook.
Original phrasing: “nothink about nothing”, “final product of unawareness”, BE LIE VING, etc.
Integration of many domains (psychology, religion, pop culture, history) without losing a core identity.
Emotional core: the mother, illness, suicide, and how that shaped the narrator’s view of God and life.
Structural sprawl
You could sharpen the structure in a second edition: group related topics, cut some repetition, label chapters more clearly (e.g., “On Nothingness,” “On Religion and Crime,” “On Guilt and Identity,” “On My Mother,” etc.).
Repetition
Ideas like “we are not special,” “God as tester,” “religion as social control” appear many times; each appearance could add a new angle or be trimmed.
Tone management
At times, the ranty tone about religion/muslims/christians risks overshadowing your more subtle insights and could read as dismissive or bigoted, even when that’s not your deeper intention.
If we were “editing a new edition” together, I’d suggest:
Decide: is Elias fully fictional, or a thin mask for you?
If fictional, lean into narrative arcs (what exactly changes for him between 03:39 and 03:41).
If it’s you, consider framing it more clearly as memoir/essay instead of quasi-novel.
Re-order some sections, so we feel a stronger build-up from abstract (nothingness) → social (religion, crime) → personal (guilt, identity) → intimate (mother) → final choice.
Keep the best experiments & examples; cut weaker or repeated ones.
Add a short preface (now, older you) explaining when you wrote it and what you were wrestling with, and a brief afterword reflecting on it from distance.
From there he wanders through topics: nothingness, the limits of the human mind, religion and God, the illusion of being “special”, crime and morality, population and parenting, sex, beauty, guilt, identity, mental health, Freud, and many experiments/anecdotes.
The early parts circle around nothingness and whether we can imagine it at all, concluding “we can imagine only the idea of nothingness, not itself. So, nothink about nothing.”
Each section tends to:
Start with a hook (a question, quote, or mini-experiment),
Digress into multiple angles (science, experiment, history, personal anecdote),
Loop back to the main existential concern: Is any of this meaningful? Is anyone special? Is God there?
The book moves roughly:
Death & testimony (I will die / this book is for me)
Some parts about LGBT identity and parades would benefit from acknowledging structural discrimination more clearly, so your “don’t internalize guilt” message doesn’t sound like “stop complaining.”
Suicide framing
Literarily powerful, but dangerous if misread. In a future edition, you might:
Strengthen the disclaimer that this is a fictionalized mental journey,
Emphasize that your goal is understanding suffering, not recommending death.
Language polish
A careful line-edit by a native editor would push the prose up 5–10 points without changing your voice. You already pre-apologize for grammar, but the book is strong enough that it deserves a polished edition.
This is my first ever book, I have finished writing it on August 2019.
It is mainly about religions and gods.
As I look back now, I can clearly see that this book is the preparation of "Omittoism"
Full access to the book (PDF on Web Archive): https://archive.org/details/shamsaddinamanovdisconnectednessinthetestimzlib.org1
Full access to the book (PDF on Scribd): click the book cover image below
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He moves through the world quietly,
learning to carry weight on his own.
Some doors were closed, some never existed,
and some he couldn’t keep knocking on.
Some moments slip through his hands,
others arrive late, much later than he hoped.
Shadows of him grow taller every year,
making the room too dark to speak.
No maps, no signals — just the road,
and a tired choice to keep moving anyway.
by Shamsaddin Amanov
Date: 26 November 2025.
