How It Feels

Like dozens of receptors in the brain are all shooting off at the same time.  However, none of them feel significant enough to warrant tending to.  Or rather, there's no energy or way to prioritize which direction to turn so I sit as still as I can and try to make sure no one notices the arguments occurring in my head.  Like I'm about to explode into a puddle of tears that I can't turn off.  A common one for me is palpable desire to crawl into my shirt and escape until I can wake up myself again.

Then knowing that I should know better and ashamed that I don't, but yet I still have to put on a face so that no one else catches my disease.  It's like those "fake it 'til you make it" people say, but feeling more and more like an imposter and less like whoever you used to be.  Like giving up and quitting is the only solution because the simplest of tasks feel like mountains and you don't even own the right equipment.  Like someone entered into your body and you don't know who you are anymore.

It's like being distracted from all reality and trying desperately to fit in so that no one will detect any sense of irregularity.  The only thing you can do is reach desperately for what was "normal" or what was automatic just yesterday.  You don't feel equipped for regular life, let alone difficult decisions or complicated problems.  You want to postpone everything until you're "you" again, whoever that was.

Those people who say they had to take a "mental health day."  Do they even know how this feels?  Do they even know what this is like?  Surely some of them do, but I think it's overused, abused even.

And then remembering that my medicine is on a shelf somewhere because an automated voice system doesn't recognize my voice of desperation.  And I don't know how to share this reality without sounding over-exaggerated so I focus most of my energy on creating accurate descriptions to share.  To say that it's mentally exhausting is either a drastic understatement or somehow the perfect way to describe it.

How can anyone live like this?  I need community.  I don't need solace, for it is not comforting.  I don't need pillowed clichés, they sound like counterarguments in conversation that's nowhere near a debate.  I need someone holding me, nursing me to health.  Solitary confinement is a death sentence.  It's assisted suicide.  This world has cracked before, but this time it's like someone is pulling it apart at the seams.  The small strands that are holding us together are getting smaller everyday.

I needed to share this though it took considerable energy to even get here.  To sit here.  To type here.  I needed to get this out of my head, off of my chest, and into the ether.  Now, maybe, restful sleep will come, if only for a few hours.  Now, perhaps, one strand of the receptors has been disconnected (connected?).  Maybe now I'm one small step closer to getting to be back on track wherever that was when I got here.  Maybe now I'm just a little bit more of myself and less of whoever it is that has been inhabiting me since my mind fell out of my head this morning.  Still, help.  I'm still not still, everything is spinning, even if I'm a little bit more of me than at the start of this literary cognitive diagnosis.

The Third Person

He bought picture frames for a life he didn't lead.  He knew his present wasn't quite the life he was looking for, but he had some sort of hope that contentment would somehow arrive to him as a gift from the future.  In the meantime, the frames lay barren in his empty apartment.  In truth, the space was far from empty, at least physically.  Posters of past adventures and handmade prints from relationships long ago plastered the walls.  Any wall not lined with art held a shelf for books he intended to read or movies he couldn't wait to share with someone else, someone who cared about his taste.

On the outside his life was so far from empty that it was not uncommon for him to hear longing words of envy from acquaintances and strangers.  

"Wow!  I wish I was artistic, but I don't have a creative bone in my body." or "You rested all weekend?  What a life!  I don't even know what that means anymore."

But rest was just one of the words he used to keep people at a safe distance.  He had come to learn long ago that a weekend composed of naps, Netflix, and nights in was far from restful.  Rather, it was mostly restless and very rarely what he wished for himself.  Still, he stayed inside and hoped against hope that his life would suddenly change from the outside.  "Fake it 'til you make it," they always told him.  Another cliché he often heard was the old adage that it's "better to ask for forgiveness than permission," and as much as he wanted to believe that, he couldn't detach himself from his superego long enough to live it.  His mind, though clouded most of the time, was full of shoulds and should-nots, more so than woulds and coulds.

Maybe if he ate more he would be able to find some sense of himself again.  Maybe there was some sort of regimented routine that he needed to find in his life to put himself back together again.  He would sometimes ponder these thoughts but they were mostly futile.  They'd either lead him aimlessly through ruminiations like runaway trains or become vaporous nonsense that quickly molded into forgotten dreams.  There was nothing to write home about because every conversation was the same small talk, only with a different face.  No one wants to hear the silent meanderings of a solitary singleton, he would tell himself as a pretty face walked across the room.

What's the Benefit? What's the Purpose? Is there Any?

If the goal of my work is to make myself not needed, am I in the profession of slowly erasing myself?  And truthfully, the work will continue without me, so where does that leave me?  How do I make meaning from this if it's ultimately not about me?

I hear the screaming through the walls and hope it's the television.  Then I sit and think of the isolation that my generation endures and wonder where it's taking us.  If I was taught inclusion when I was younger and some of that is only coming out now, what will come out of this next generation?  Am I just getting old and beginning to see the neighbor kids begin to tread on my lawn?  Caught between what I was raised to be and what I've learned that I am, I can't choose which way to go.

I know life is gray and something inside me chooses to just stay where I am.  If I stay locked inside these walls then no one will get hurt, but even that's not true.  What about me?  What about the brain between my ears?  Have I no value?  Do I bear nothing of worth?  Maybe I'm just aiming to minimize damage done in the spheres that go with me.

Are you any better for having heard me?  But are you any worse?
Who are you?  And what are you looking for?
Maybe if I knew you we could reach into each other, rather than reading and writing useless lines between us.  This is like a series of miscellaneous dots strung together with barely noticeable lines, but yet you're still reading and, for now, I'm still writing.

I don't know anymore though.  These public whispers do sometimes seem to do something for me.  Perhaps they minimize the isolation or the sentiment thereof.  She said she saw a transformation and now somehow I feel it, but how could any of this ever be compiled into one place?  So the lines connecting the dots that you see here, could you share with me what they've done for you?  What the do for you?  Because by now I'm just hoping that someone's listening or that this will prove some benefit to those in earshot.

You're not alone.  There.  Is that enough?

Nonsense Again

Sure, things are much more fuzzy from far away, but sometimes that green grass somehow seems to beckon me nearer.  It's anyone's guess how I haven't tripped on my own two feet any more than I have.

I want to put the pen to paper, I want to cut the shapes and forms, but it's like I need someone there to hold it for me.  My mind is full.  So many ideas, so many shapes, and soon-to-be discoveries, but my legs don't listen.  My legs cut veins that communicate with the heart.  My arteries keep pushing ideas, inspiration, and creative energy out but my arms and legs can't taste them.  There's something in the gap between that stops me.  I'm a mess really; this isn't even what I set out to do or who I set out to be.  Does anyone even know me?  Can anyone hear this?

Where can I write and come back?  Where can I edit?  Who can I share with?  I wish I could forget it.  There's nothing between myself and who I am, but an increasing expanse between who I am and who I want to be.  Please don't forget me.  Don't lose me.  And don't water the grass on the far end of my reality.  Can't you see I've done enough?  Can't you see the fertilizer I've left in the distance beyond me?

And yet again I'm falling deeper into empty philosophies and barely visible fog and clouds.  Maybe some day I'll escape.  Maybe some day you'll hear me when I'm calling from the inside.  Please

don't

leave

me.