My Ever-growing Monologue: Making Sense of Me

I am trying to draw the line between being a writer and being a narcissist.

There are mornings where I wake up and feel so far away from myself my body doesn’t even belong to me. My bed feels like a sinking hole, I wake up breathless haunted by my past and my fears masqueraded as dreams. I run to the bathroom first thing and stare at the mirror for what feels like forever, probably way too long for my own good. I stare at my reflection and sense that something bigger than myself is staring back. It is sort of an out-of-body experience, you realize that your body isn’t yours anymore. There is something distinct staring at that flesh and I can feel my thin soul craving to get out. Is my body the one trapping me and my potential? I feel like I am meant to be something bigger than flesh and bones.

People don’t understand the power I hold within me. I am trying to find the source of my strength, what makes me this self-assertive being. I excavate into the darkest most vulnerable parts of me that might have remnants of the strength I used to arrive here, at the golden gate. I search for the magnetic force that pulled me out of the water, the source that forced me to stop counting, the source that disassembled the crimson program. Nobody will ever understand my power, and I am certain about that because I don’t understand my power.

You know I rant and rant about my darkness and brokenness, but I don’t think anyone will ever get to face the part of me that has battle wounds of every confrontation I’ve had to stand up to. The closest thing I think I’ll ever get to opening up are these coded messages that only I get to decipher. I have become accustomed to this state of indifference, never knowing if tomorrow will be a wind or a war. I appreciate the underlying fear and uncertainty of everyday life, I have programmed myself in a way where my code runs in fears, triggers, and skills. This darkness that I continue to talk about has been provoked in ways and raised in others, I think I might have been the one to keep feeding it.

I had a dream, I was naive again. It was lovely.

I am starting to understand that my writing isn’t meant to be polished, incredible, intellectual or The New York Times best-selling anything. My writing is raw, unpolished, brutally honest, and I’d even dare say it’s broken. My writing is broken. I can’t think of something more beautiful than piecing together a narrative to the reader's desires, to the reader's affairs. My writing isn’t meant to be understood, it is meant to be crafted into your very own. If anything, I think I am the only one who knows what’s behind my words, how often I use the word liveliness because of my attachment to deadly living. How often I say I long for everything and everyone because longing is the only thing gluing me together. So yeah, I don’t expect to be Shakespeare or a best-selling author, but I hope my stream of thought envelops you in its incandescent waves and heals, awakens, or enlightens your soul or whatever we are made of. I promise to never betray the honesty behind each and every word I ever publish. My writing is broken and it has never been more beautiful.

I fear that without my darkness and my illness every scrap of me will go to waste. It’s idiotic but I truly believe they are meant to be part of me, even if that means I have to keep drowning repeatedly and collecting the weight of everything and everyone. I fear that in my darkness lies my substance. I fear I’ll find myself in an endless stream of desolation and purposelessness. This darkness is tattooed in me, it’s my essence, my script. It’s the nature of my being.

I have the urge to dial 911. There are those moments whenever you breathe in the smell of childhood meals or you replay a song you used to listen to starting your teenage years. That moment where you are taken back to a time when life didn’t feel so complex, so inhumane, I feel the inevitable urge to dial 911. I can’t think about a bigger emergency than the realization that I can’t stop time. I can’t be expected to stay in the moment, reminisce and go. When nostalgia rushes in I am frozen, a knot starts to grow in my throat, and my hands start sweating. I want to make myself so small I am able to get back into my mother's womb. I wish I could just go back and not take my childhood for granted. I need to dial 911, I can’t stop time.

I look up to the sky in search of the colors I can’t find within myself. Whenever there are no pigmented shades, whenever the sky turns gray I wonder if it carries that insatiable darkness I relate to. Could I be the one projecting it? Did I take your brightest colors away?

The world is loud and in words I found silence.

It’s nice to talk to someone from your past knowing that they don’t know you anymore. It’s the most beautiful feeling for someone from such a distant reality to acknowledge your change and embrace it without a single ounce of discomfort. I’ll eulogize the feeling of becoming strangers with someone you once held close, forever.

Therapy is scary not because I fear talking to a stranger because frankly, I am all for it, but because of the idea of being “okay”. What if someone actually manages to teach me that I am not meant to drown every day, that I can get myself out of the water if I want to?

I have a thing for the broken. I am so mesmerized by how carelessly you try to disguise your pain and the number of people you manage to fool. The way you so effortlessly give in to a world that doesn’t deserve you, the way you are a people pleaser but manage to break boundaries. I can see through you, I see the scattered pieces of your soul through your emerald eyes, I see crystal clear through your fainted woods. I am so astonished by the way you impact, the way you manage to dominate everything and everyone, but remain so broken. Your brokenness is beautiful and lord I wish I could hold it. You are a misfit and I am the outcast, I see myself in you. I see your rage, your fire, your stardom, your questions, and I think I might just have the answers.

We are made of the same substance of dreams, overachieving idiotic thinkers who can’t see straight.

I wish I didn’t have to keep proving myself. I wish every time the spotlight shines on me, they didn’t question how deserving I am of it. I wish people weren’t surprised when I achieve greatness. I yearn for people to see my potential. I long for them to see the part of me that isn’t reckless. I wish they wanted to see me succeed. I wish they didn’t say “Congratulations” if they were trying to spell “I hope it doesn’t last long”. I wish I couldn’t see through people, I wish their hypocrisy blinded me. I dream that someday they come to terms with my fire and don’t try to put it out.

Can you see us looking into the corners of ourselves trying to find something, anything that feels familiar? We used to stay up until 5 a.m talking about how you dreamt of saving lives and how often I didn’t know who I was. What happened to those 730 days? We were two lost souls trying to find purpose within each other, we so desperately tried to make sense of our unison. Our connection will remain forever unexplained, we might as well stop looking for answers.

“I think I might hate writing”, my subconscious says after way too many sober words. I have compromised myself and writing, but what if I actually do hate it? Writing scares me, it hurts me. When I start writing, words, thoughts, and ideas that I’ve never actually had the opportunity to give into arise. As a writer that desire to have the upper hand fuels me, the ability to paint my sky a different color. But what if I don’t have that ability? When I write my head goes into autopilot, I have no control over the things I decide to put down. I have no control. It is a reflex, I start pouring, barfing all these words that seem so foreign but feel way too familiar. Writing is another one of my contradictions, it’s where I feel safe the most but it also bends me until I break. I am no longer sure if writing is healing me or just throwing me way deeper into nothingness.

I think words make me fuller, I truly believe they fill me up, they define how much of me I own. When I decide to publish them, you own these words, they belong to you. You have access into the perplexity of my troubled world and that, it makes me as empty as one can be. Maybe one day I’ll find emptiness alluring, but for now… “I think I might hate writing.”

People think the worst feeling is grief… I beg to differ, the worst feeling is outgrowing someone or knowing they are outgrowing you. That moment when you know it’s about to end but you are not quite sure when yet. Conversations run dry and you no longer wish to be around. You think about saying something about it but fear it will shatter the fragile atmosphere you are both set in. When someone outgrows you though, that is the worst feeling. You know you aren’t a victim, you can’t blame them, you knew it was coming. There is nothing left for you to do but wait for a prolonged, painful goodbye.

You were a heatwave on my wildest winter.

It’s funny how you can become a prisoner of your own dreams. It’s been three days, and he is still here watching me, waiting for my voice to crack as I cry out for mercy. He is in every dream and for once it’s not romantic, it's the furthest thing from it.

I love the self-destructive nature of humanity. They give us a pack of smoke with the image of a poor man struggling to breathe, a tube on his throat, sorrow in his eyes. Somehow that never makes us stop, we will always take the smoke if it means we get to tune out reality for a while.

Maybe it’s because I know what’s behind my walls that I let the undeserving in. Maybe it’s because I am not blind to the other half of the shadow, the unsettling contrast. I let unworthiness take control of my every move. It’s because I know I am not better than anyone and somehow everyone is better than me. It’s because I know what happens at 2 a.m, how my mind searches for leverage inside my darkest sins. The feeling of being unworthy comes with a cascade of remorse for feeling this way. How ungrateful can one be?

It occurred to me that while all the people in my life were opening up and getting closer, raving about their triumphs and miseries I never dove into the perplexity of my own. How could I ever unleash my mind in such a casual fashion?

I can’t believe I live in a world in which I overthink if I should wear a skirt every time I step out of my home. For years, I’ve second-guessed my every move and for once I don’t know what to care about anymore. I feel like so many people are mad at me for being happy, it’s almost a superpower. I idolize myself so often I forget I have to look out for my well-being, I am an actual person, I am human. I forget that I am bound to make mistakes.

I forget that I can’t be it all, I forget that I won’t be it all.

Yesterday’s sight was manic. I stood at the mirror searching for bruises, cuts, bumps, searching for some sort of switch that would give me the answer to all my self-loathing and self-doubt, the absence of my control. I was searching for a device, an outlet that would prove to me that someone was in control of my body, of my decision-making, of my mind. Certainly, it must be impossible to be such a self-deprecating fool. After what felt like forever I stared into the dreariness reflected in my eyes, the daunting realization that there was no switch. It’s just me. I am a self-deprecating fool.

I want a love that shatters me, something that makes me feel so overwhelmed I forget what reality and reason mean. I don’t want a love story, I don’t. Isn’t the most intriguing part of love, heartbreak, and self-destruction?

I try to blacklist all the versions of myself that have led me into exile, but the more and more I select, the more I realize all the versions of me have some twisted relationship with isolation. A relationship with destructive secrecy. It is carving into my bones, twisting into my heart, pulling me apart, all I’ve ever known is being stripped away from my very own control.

I bet that not being your type meant I had ambition and dreams. People can’t seem to fit the idea of me and who I am together, it’s almost as if they knew two completely different people. It’s lovely, isn’t it? The picking up the pieces, figuring out you can make yourself whole again. I hate you because you've made blonde hair and blue eyes the symbol of treason. I wonder if there’ll be a chance of owning myself someday because right here, right now there are people who own more of me than I will ever belong to myself. My relationship with food is so toxic, it's the only thing I've never posted on social media. I call 2 a.m the grieving space, there is something that collectively pushes the memory of all the people I’ve lost into thin air and screams how I might just be the one behind it all. I have never felt more guilty about being alive than right now. Art is such a beautiful thing, what some would deem ridiculously idiotic and unnecessary might be the most gorgeous and astonishing thing to people who understand and resonate with it. I’ll always remember you as the one who taught me I didn’t have to be anything but myself to be loved. I feel sorry for those who weren’t told they could be anything and everything. I picked up: ballet, swimming, karate, orchestra, drums, cheer, soccer, business, crafts, photography, and finally writing. I did everything until I found the one thing I’ll spend forever with. The memory of you is much more romantic than you coming back.

You were deception, the way you stepped on my name, the way you walked out, the way you betrayed me, the way you said “sorry”, the way you didn’t mean it, the way I still loved you after the fall, the way I still do.

I don’t trust my intuition anymore, it led me here. There is an emptiness that comes along with achieving. The hopelessness, the end of the high, the questioning, the doubts. Sometimes I wish I’d never accomplished anything, I would be free. It wasn’t until I was mid-air, that I finally allowed myself to feel relief. I am here, I made it.

To you, the reader: I am sorry I am not better at this, I am sorry that I come here only when the wave hits, I am sorry I make myself a victim, I am sorry I am a narcissist, but I am not sorry for writing because it’s all I have.

-D