Collapse

There are days when waking up is the first self-betrayal of the day. I'm only thirty-four and yet I feel so weathered. Sometimes I lie in bed and my body feels... ravaged? That's a bit of a dramatic word, but I'll say this. My body doesn't feel great. It feels heavy, like physically heavy, it feels bloated, it feels a bit infected.

Isn't it fascinating that stars die by collapsing in on themselves? My geocentric view of life and death has conditioned me to thinking of death as a kind of erosion. You wither.

The death of a star is so much more violent. And I'm convinced on some mornings that it's how I'm going to go. That I'll be the first human to not just pass, but to collapse in on himself.

You know, I don't belong here. There's only one here so, really, this means that I don't belong anywhere.

Coming to terms with that is difficult. After all, I'm surrounded exclusively by people who do belong here. By people who tell me that I can't see through the fog. By people who seem to think that my experience is a simple sadness. That my experience is standing under a passing rain cloud. That once it passes, I'll see the sun and I'll see the blue sky and I'll remember that life is worth living.

They're wrong. I used to think that they were wrong, but now I know that they're wrong.

I know that these people mean well. I also know that these people do nothing but reveal their own perspective. That they consider their own life to be worth living. That's a perspective that I admire and one that I'm in no hurry to dispel. It's a facade that I wish that I knew how to erect.

And it is a facade.

I've awoken in the middle of the night and I'm trying to force myself to go back to sleep. I'm surrounded by people sleeping soundly, and yet returning to that liminal space is out of reach for me. I know that it's a thing that I can't force. I know that it's something that'll find me when I'm ready. But I'm getting desperate.

What is one meant to do in a place in which they don't belong?

You are the most dramatic person that I know. Actually, dramatic is what I wish that you were. You're actually pathetic.

You think your thoughtfulness makes you special. You think that it separates you from everyone else. That your perspective and your insight are something unique. Something that deserves to be given shape and texture, deserves to be preserved, deserves to be read. Even as you shift voice to talk to yourself, you think that you're doing something interesting. Something that some imagined, faceless person will stumble upon one day. They'll read this and see themselves in these thoughts and, in that moment, you'll be in communion with them. You'll be in communion with a person who you'll never know and who will never know you.

When I have these moments, I feel expanded. I often imagine my soul to be relatively small. Perhaps the size of a baseball. Although, it isn't nearly as firm as one. In fact, quite the opposite. If you were to move your hand through my soul, you'd encounter no resistance. You'd disperse it, like a plume of smoke. And yet, it would reconstitute itself as if it had a center of gravity that held it together.

However, my soul isn't static. Sometimes, I can feel it expand outside of my body. It's often when I'm standing in proximity to honesty. When I read the thoughts of someone who has successfully captured themselves in that moment on the page. When I hear the rhymes of an MC who so vividly conveys their experience. When I sit in front of the painting of someone who seems to feel as inconsequential as I do.

This is capital-h Honesty, and it's the most valuable currency that I've ever encountered. And what's unique about this currency is that literally everyone can mint it and yet so few people do. I suspect that I'll never really know why.

The story that I tell myself is that Honesty could ameliorate so much malaise. We don't need much. I don't know that we really need more than community. People who will help us when we need a hand or care for us when we lose the ability to do so ourselves. People who will see us when we're drowning, even though we know that we can't really do anything about it. It's enough for someone to stand next to us and really see.

You are a remarkable try-hard. You so desperately want your experience to mean something. Why? What is that going to do for you?

Are you aware that you're the reason that you don't get better?

There are days when waking up is the first self-betrayal of the day.