I:Neurosis

Sometimes, in those in-between moments, I forget where I am and what I’m doing. Phosphenes drown my eyesight and I’m dizzy. I hear my thoughts like rain shattering my window. Is there no way out of the mind? I shower with the lights off and hazy figures dance around me as steam infiltrates the air I breathe.I like to pretend I’m in another life. Chasing the path of the wind, drinking tea with Alice, watching black swans dance to death, reading Miyazaki, and existing infinitely. Why can’t it be real? “I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want.” Like Sylvia Plath, I want it because then I can experience life in its entirety. But I settle for nothing because I acknowledge this truth I fear: unfulfillment. I want so many things from life, but I question myself every day.

Kazantzakis noted that without hope and fear, we could be free. But is this not just a state of nothingness? Yesterday, I would have embraced Kazantzakis. I would have thanked him for giving me the answer: despondency. But today I see how superficial my hopes have been. I hoped to escape, evade, avoid. To ease this overwhelming emptiness. And tomorrow, I’m expected to have it all figured out. Do I even have a choice, or is fate stringing me like a puppet? Maybe I wanted everything because secretly I wanted nothing. Or perhaps it was the silence of my presence, the facade of hope was trapping me here. None of it was real. 

My brother calls me nihilistic. But I think I just love thoughts too much. Introspection does that to behavior, fueling sadness and passiveness. Maybe this is why I used to fear writing. For me, life is extreme or nothing. My essays suffered, as a result, acting as hollow shells of an unfinished idea or worn-out shoes. The blinking cursor despises me some days as I fill the blank doc with words that seem to be telling an empty story. Other days, it mocks me as I sit with horrible posture in front of the screen for hours. Not a single word.

I was the empty doc. I never really considered myself to be creative. I chose to learn about the creations of other people. I couldn’t even live my own life.