oh, to be anyone else!
on holding onto the past as if it were a talisman, on wanting to be anything else but yourself
trigger warning: i’m unsure but this entry is a bit serious and strange.
There is nothing worse than losing yourself.
Your self. What makes you you, all that comprises your being, the physical and spiritual mark you alone can leave on the world. The very little that you should never lose in this life.
I’ve lost myself. Funerary tears and a hazy existence have replaced me, someone once-vibrant, twice-shy. I have kissed my own corpse at my own wake, I have said goodbye to what once was and what could have been. Who could I be, now that all I knew has fully died? You cannot resurrect what’s dead, as what is dead has died and remains that way. What followed was an almost-fugue state, arms outstretched in the dark, a foolish somnambulist searching for that door which leads to the waking world. Clutching onto anything, everything, everyone that I could, I absorbed the selves of others so that I could be whole once again.
It is never that easy to be whole again.
Spending inappropriately large chunks of your life staring, salivating at what others have is how I have lived, eternally wishing for the jubilance and stability those around me merely appear to have. For a while, I was content, fully believing that my misery would never change and staring into the little windows people provide into their lives was enough. Oscar Wilde said “Where there is sorrow there is holy ground,” in a letter from prison. This I fully believed- my holy ground was others, where I could live vicariously and escape into a world where a martyr soul did not exist.
I am older now. I don’t know if I am wiser. But I have lived a little more, no longer a sleepwalker, no longer fully trapped in the way that I was, one fearful foot out the door. My mind is in constant upheaval, yet I feel an odd peace and tranquility. Why? The funeral is over, the three days in the dark tomb have passed, and the self has risen, scarred yet a bit more joyous. It is difficult to confess this, that much of my confidence is contrived, that much of me is hollowed out. It is difficult to admit that for the longest time, I felt as if I was merely an observer in my own life, and that I still feel my former life’s shackles on my wrists. What is borne from a life which comprised solely of observing is the wreckage of regret, the loss of purity, and the weight of the truth that much of your precious time has been lost. And the realization that, for a long time, you were not even yourself.
"Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.
Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive
to the voice of my supplications!"
(Psalm 130)
I am no longer the scrupulous, fearful, deeply religious individual that I once was, but I still think this psalm is an apt descriptor for my past two years. I begged and cried to any deity, any power that is or was to change me, to transmute me into the normative, successful, un-suffering individual I was desperate to be. I fought, I prayed, I toiled. I cried into the night, wept and gnashed my teeth, tore out my hair and offered it to Saint Rita. Such a disturbing period of time ended in prolonged sickness, where in my confined status I was left alone with my thoughts, terrifying as they were. I realized that I no longer knew who I was, what I loved, who I truly wanted to be. The ouroboros of my suffering no longer felt so endless, the mouth of the snake was found: I no longer had any sight of my self. They were nowhere to be found, no hide nor hair present.
Even Denji knew what his dreams were, yet I didn’t. For the longest time I was mourning a living being, someone who has not yet died, forgetting that they were living, breathing, and dreaming. Most importantly, dreaming. What were those dreams? What did they look like? As I lay bedridden, I tried to remember what little remained of my dreams and clung onto it like beads on a rosary, letting it nourish me, letting it grow like a little flower in the cracks between asphalt. I avoided dreaming of what others lives were like, fasting from what I once considered to be manna from Heaven, instead dreaming of who I could be. I once again worshipped at the temple of self-improvement, no longer with the motivation of metamorphosis into another being that simply wasn’t me. Expunging the bitterness in my heart due to what could have been but never was, I finally woke up.
Who knows where this path will lead? The world of the living and the waking, I think, is much less predictable than the world of the dead and the asleep. The world of the living and the mundane is veiled in more mystery than we believe- none of us know what could possibly come into fruition the next day, the next week, the next year… Our futures are unknown, covered in a thick mist, even more obfuscated than our dreams. All that we can do is focus on the present, the now. We live in the now.
This is a very different entry than my previous- much more flowery, much more morose, much more… myself. I have done nothing in my past but mourn and weep about who I could have been, failing to bring to fruition the individual I wish to be. We are not perpetual self-improvement-project machines, yet it is necessary to constantly strive to be better, to be who we wish to be, to constantly be open to the love that surrounds us. It is so imperative that, despite how the world has failed us, despite how we have failed ourselves, we learn to start again. It is even more imperative that we accept our experiences with hope and humility, relinquishing our animosity once we have finished grieving, living our one, single life without fear.
Eventually, winter turns to spring, and I wish with all my heart that the next year is my spring, where a light is finally lit in the darkness. Hopefully, 24 will be much kinder to me, and 2023 is much kinder to us all.