People often tell me that they admire my high level of self-awareness. I’d make a great candidate for therapy, they say, because I know my ills, my wanes and my desires. I know what’s wrong with me. I’m not walking around blissfully unaware of the pain I cause myself and others. I don’t like it. I wish I could hide my problems. I wish I didn’t give a fuck if someone walked straight into my warpath of sadness but knowing that I hurt people makes me feel worse.
She told me to fix my face. Said that I looked angry. She knows that I’m not angry at her or anyone else but that I look unapproachable toward the people who trust me. Story of my life.
There’s this weight on me that I can’t shake. Call it whatever you want to: laziness, fear, lack of self-determination, who cares. It feels like a weighted blanket; shit’s comfortable. Sadness equates to comfort. I don’t know what it means or how it feels to be happy. I’m drenched in dread. The amount of times I’ve silently cried to be released from this world is unmeasurable. I just want to be done with this experiment called life. I’m clearly failing at it, at something.
I admire people who have a life. People who wake up in the morning with a purpose, with some destination to reach at the end of their world. I really don’t have any purpose, in action and in actuality. I wake up as wasted space. I go to work, I go home. I sleep, I dream. I wonder about what’s on the other side of this pain. I act like I have the solution to the problem but realize I don’t know what I’m doing. I wither away under my own expectations. Rinse and repeat.
I’m reading a book about passion and purpose. The first question asked of me was “who are you?” The anxiety it brings to answer that question drops me to my knees. Honestly, I don’t know. You have dreams as a child, these stars in the sky bright with possibility. But then life shows you that it’s hard and you think all of those stars are impossible to reach.
Or that you have no fight. The message playing repeatedly inside of my mind: you have no drive. You have no fight. You settle. There’s something truly bitch-made about you. You just don’t want to do anything. Your parents coddled you. Absolutely no one believes that you are capable of doing anything in this world and that’s why they stay out of your way. There’s not a part of you that needs to be here. Like, what’s the point of you being here? There isn’t one. If you went missing, no one would care and if they did, they would only miss you because it inconveniences them.
So that’s who I am: this absolute space of nothingness.
I hear that voice implanted inside of me telling me that all I say about myself isn’t true. It’s been there since I lost the ability to advocate for myself. God gave it to me as a means of counter-attack against whatever this enemy overthrew in my mind to keep me thinking this way about myself. They don’t tell you that the Holy Spirit is a tool of self-sufficiency. But I admit to drowning it out on my own. It’s loud though.
As I write this, it’s answering all of what I say about myself with a truth: that you are somebody, that you matter. That you’re a product of all these things that happened, things not by your own hands. These problems didn’t happen overnight so they won’t go away as fast either. Give yourself some grace. Your parents raised a smart and kind person and did the best they could with getting you ready for the world. The truth: no one is ready for this shit. This life shit is hard. People fail at this thing all of the time.
Your dreams will always find their way back to you. You just have to leave where you are.
Actually, they’ll meet you half-way. Whose expectations are you trying to live up to? Yours, others or Hers? You’re built for some wars that others would easily succumb to if faced with the threat of violence.
There’s nothing wrong with acquiring the tools you need to get yourself out from where you are. You have a therapy appointment on Wednesday.
ciara roslyn-james 