sadness

Let me put it into words

- Sheylara 11 Comments

There is a certain stuckness in me.

I keep saying I will blog. Then I sit at my computer and start playing Cafe World. I play some songs on YouTube. I plurk a bit.

Every few minutes, I will feel a sensation at the edge of my mind. I try to ignore it, shut it out, but it occasionally breaks through the barrier and screams, “BLOG!”

I freeze.

And freeze.

For minutes. Maybe hours. Time becomes meaningless, anyway.

Then I blink and go back to Cafe World, Youtube, Plurk.

It seems my mind refuses to process anything real.

Because real is painful.

There are many little delights in life, sure. Like butter on hot toast. Or a baby’s smile. Whatever you’re into. But there are even more horrors and they crowd out the little delights. The horrors are the ones that shamelessly demand attention and, in trying to combat them, you become dysfunctional for a time.

Sometimes, for a long time.

I wish I could say what bothers me, but I can’t find a starting point.

The horrors are the things in life that cause you pain, make you sad, render you defenceless.

When you allow one horror to surface in your mind, it opens a portal through which all the other million horrors pour through unrelentingly. They kind of crowd your brain out so you see nothing but blackness. It is so overwhelming that you can’t even begin to describe what’s happening in your mind.

You can only freeze and wait.

After some time, the horrors get bored and they go home. But not all of them. Some of them are overstayers. They chip at your little delights all day (as if you had any left in the first place) and make diabolical noises, just to piss you off a bit (as if you needed any more pissing off).

But these are the inconsequential horrors, minor annoyances you have to learn to put up with. The big ones have gone home temporarily but you know they’ll come back again for a visit with no warning. And soon.

All your life, you’re fighting to banish the little ones and seal the portal against the big ones. You know that nothing short of an apocalypse can ever destroy them for good. But there is nothing else you can do in the meantime. Only fight.

It’s when you’re fighting that you develop a certain stuckness. Perhaps a blankness. Because you can’t really multi-task that good and you have to channel all your energies into fighting or blocking out. In either case, you become dysfunctional.

Ergo, stuckness.

Sad

- Sheylara 14 Comments

When I’m sad and disappointed, I always tell myself that there are so many other people worse off than me. I should be grateful and happy for that.

And I know it’s true.

So, why doesn’t it work? Why do I still feel sad and disappointed?

I try to dissect my feelings to analyse them away. I imagine myself reaching for my heart, where bad feelings seem to congregate, throbbing and wanting to burst out of their prison, and I grab hold of it.

I grab hold of my heart and pull it out my chest and look at it.

It’s red and bloody and little. Yet it holds so much. So much disease and darkness and fear and pain.

I give it a squeeze. I put it under a running tap. I cut it in half. I slice it in pieces. I say, “Whatever’s in there, it’s just feelings. Intangible and invisible and nothing. So how could it possibly hurt me?”

It’s a nothing, my heart. Whatever’s in it, it’s nothing.

I put it away, in a corner of my room, in a shelf, in a box, wherever. I don’t want it anymore.

I dissociate myself from my feelings, from the pain, from the bad stuff. Because the heart, bearing all that hurt, isn’t in me anymore, therefore I’m not hurt.

I’m free! I’m fine! Life is absurd, anyway, so why let it bother me?

But I can still feel my heart inside me. It’s still there no matter how many times I take it out and put it away. It still provides safe harbour for my feelings, good and bad. It’s part of me and I can’t shed it.

So I get angry and I say to it, “You’re just an organ. A bloody, throbbing tool whose function is to keep me breathing and walking. Therefore you can’t hurt me.”

It’s silent. It continues to throb. And with every throb, hurt spreads out of it and travels in every direction until every part of my body is filled with the hurt, so that my body becomes weak and helpless.

I have removed so many hearts from me. There are so many hearts sitting around in shelves and boxes and bins. And yet it’s still in me, stubbornly beating away, wickedly gleeful.

Hah. You can’t get rid of me. I’m you as you’re me.

Defeated, I sit in silence and feel the pain, live with it.

Next time. Next time it’ll work and then it won’t hurt anymore.