disillusionment

i am a coward. maybe. 

in my room i have a wooden box full of things i do not want to have to look at but cannot let go of, for various reasons. things that scare me. a cubic foot of terror. 

inside the box there are things that remind me of the one intrinsic truth about myself: i am afraid to be alone. i am not uncomfortable with loneliness; i accept that i must be lonely sometimes in order to really know how to be connected with others. no, i am afraid of being alone because, for me, to be alone is to be myself, and i do not understand what that means yet.

if i knew then maybe, just maybe, i would understand.

i'm sick of being a coward simply because i say i am. so i reach into the box. i push my hand past various pictures and a pair of white sunglasses and couple of armbands from mesa vista and several loose pieces of paper, and i stop at a composition book. clutched in my hand, it feels alright, so i take it out and close the box. for now.

my name is scrawled on the front of the notebook. it was given to me upon an admission to the mesa vista intensive care unit. i decide to open it up; i run my thumb along the edge, landing on a page somewhere in the middle. i let the book fall open in my hands and look down. inside is a message from another inpatient:

"without joy or misery i give you hope"

i gladly accept this gift. i close the notebook and place it back in the terrible box and leave my room and live.

in a world of my own

This morning I woke up and told myself I am a normal person. There is nothing wrong with me, I said firmly,  and out loud. In fact, I reasoned to the room, my affliction is that I am cursed with some sort of super-sanity.  Unrecognized by those who surround me, the ones who are actually painfully unstable, I am often made out to be the crazy one. Which is just untrue.

I probably would have believed myself, too, if I hadn't spent the entire day tucked into the ceiling watching my every move from above.

Depersonalization is one of my favorite symptoms. If taken in the right mindset, it can be fairly amusing, like playing a third-person video game, only with less control of the avatar. It's healthy to remove oneself from one's self occasionally. The important thing is to not get confused.

Because look:

I am watching myself look into a mirror. I am not looking at my reflection; I am looking at myself look at my reflection. So basically I am operating through an external frame of reference. Which leads me to the question, which "me" is really me, the observer or the physical body? And is there even a difference? Certainly there must be some distinction, because the body I know to be me is right there, living as if nothing is any different than when I was in there. And then there's me, disengaged from my physical tie to life, wondering what the hell is going on.

I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't really matter, either way. An overactive sense of self-awareness is   not so bad, right? And pondering these things is what makes people crazy, after all.   So I figure as long as I keep my separate selves in close proximity I can hold on to the delusion that I have some sort of control.

In my world I'm such a star I get to watch the movie of my own life. In real time.

Actually, I'm not a star; I am a fucking constellation.