How to express the disappointment of being awake, again. It’s crushing. Every night I fall asleep imagining it might be the last time, and the next day I’m torn from that vast, silent oblivion into another span of awareness and endurance. It’s not that life is so terrible, it’s just that its persistence is grinding me to dust.
As my eyes reluctantly open, I can feel the life sucked forward through my eye sockets, attenuated and thin in the struggle to find a way back into consciousness and interaction with the world. Leaves me hollowed, like all that I am has fallen out, is continually drawn out and everything I try to put back in just threads away through those bony orbits. Maybe I’m surrounded by a swirl of who I used to be, who I thought I was, and all I am left is watching it all swirl by – existence defined by absence.
I should want something. I should want to do something. But I don’t. I persist – I wake, I do work, I spend time with my love, and with my beloved cats, I do things. And those all contain joys, but they’re so fleeting, and somehow none of them stick, and I return to this bleak, absent middle ground where I want nothing more than for it all to be over.
I don’t remember the last time I had a dream – not a sleeping dream – a desire, an ambition, a want. The closest I come is wanting to slide out of the world, unremarked and forgotten. If I could simply remove myself from the world without a ripple, I think I would.
I’m acting as I think others think I ought – I work (I work hard, I do good work!), I go to improv, I do a lot of stuff in the background. But I’m serving other people’s dreams and aspirations. I can’t honestly say that they’re mine any more. But it’s enough to enable others to achieve what they want, right? I like feeling useful, I like it when my work is hidden and is unnoticed, but helps. I don’t know if I can wholeheartedly pursue someone else’s dream when I don’t share it. I can support it, and I can help, but how can I lead it? I’d rather build a website than go on stage, and that doesn’t feel like me.
This tram ride to work is taking forever, but it’s time to slip the mask back on. Hide this sunken eyed soulless wanting-corpse from view. No one else needs to deal with this bullshit, and I’m not ready to have to talk about it. Deep breaths, screw the patches over the gaping holes in my face. And on. I persist.
While I realise this reads as potentially quite bad, it’s far better out than in, as they say. It can be hard to separate the despair which seizes and grips my brain from the rest of the time, when it doesn’t and I feel better – loving and loved. The start of the day ain’t great…
This is self-help writing, don’t freak out. Plainly I am struggling a little, but scribbling about it will help, eventually.
