[The notes are messy, as though the author has just learned to write.]

I am afraid.

Even now, months after my acquaintances companions friends freed me, the Collective keeps showing up in my dreams. In them, we I'm searching, and empty, and existing as someone I don't even recognize. And the worst part... is that it feels natural. It feels like that's how we I'm meant to be. My voice is not my own. My thoughts are not my own. And I wake up, and I can't tell which is real life and which is the nightmare.

I hate it. I want to hate it. My identity was... who I am.

It's supposed to be getting better. I'm supposed to feel normal again, but I have to learn to use new limbs, and I don't have horn magic anymore, and I tasted death and it was terrifyingly instant. Except I wasn't dead, really.

...What does it mean to have a soul?

[Notes are illegible]

And then, today, I had to relive the Collective again, this time as part of some sick, twisted mind spell in the dungeons of the Crystal Empire, because fate just wants to punish me. And I saw the Collective again and I felt it and I couldn't go through that again and I needed it to STOP –

And there was fire, for a second.

I think I've been running from myself.

I am not special. Not brave. Not strong. Not even a freaking individual. I'm miserable and lost and weak and scared and I've been pretending my whole life that none of that is true, pretending that my parents were wrong, but I keep facing the truth, over and over and over. Even foals can tell. I'm worse than a failure.

I'm nopony at all.

And I can't escape it.