Happiness

I never believed in it.

To me, for the longest time, happiness seemed only an elaborate illusion that human beings came up with to justify not acknowledging the weight of being.

Which is not to say that i didn’t believe in a good time.

Far from it.

I lived fiercely, every choice at every moment only made by answering two questions.

Will it make me freer?

Will it be fun?

And I was able to live so fiercely because I knew, or believed anyway, that the brightness would always be followed by the dark.

But, I think I was only always so miserable that i was climbing highs just go fall straight into lows.

Chasing the thrill of escaping the burden of being, straight into drowning in the depths of what it means to be human…

It’s different now. The past couple of years, for too many reasons to get into anywhere, I am finally learning what it means to be happy.

And for the most part, I am.

Which brings us to the reason I’m writing this post.

I know most of you reading my posts here may think I’m always depressed af. But that’s just a thing. I deal with intense thoughts and feelings by writing about / around them.

I mean, it’s one of the ways I deal anyway…

Definitely the healthiest one, ah.

Just thought I should put that on record. Especially now that i am facing the first long dark tunnel of this new phase of my life.

It’s still a way away, but I can feel it reaching out to me, even as I move towards it, my shadow racing ahead and already merging with the darkness that awaits.

I can’t help but be a little concerned, because the old miserable & self destructive me had her own ways of navigating through these things.

Set yourself on fire and sail through, comfortably numb.

Happiness is a new burden… And I’m not numb anymore.

I’ll burn if I have to, though. I don’t think I can ever stop doing that completely. In fact, I think that’s what it means to live.

We burn for different things, using all our past experiences and present dilemmas and future anxieties to light up our path forward, for ourselves and for those we love. And we keep reemerging from those ashes until one day there’s just nothing left to give.

I don’t mind burning. Especially not now, when I have things and people worth burning for.

But i can’t help the desire, the itch, the need to cause myself enough pain so that i can no longer feel any of the hurt that comes from outside.

Ah, I guess the blame is on me.

But I’d rather be shattering glass than any sort of hammer…

Anyway, so, yeah. TLDR; I’m happier than ever, but I bleed misery through words to heal, hence the sadder my writing, the better I’m probably doing.

Cheers. And may you be happier too.

Peace out.

Fire & Ash

I don’t know what I’m doing any more.

“I live because I can’t die.”

I used to think that way, once.

And, then, since then, so much has happened.

Entire lifetimes I could have once never even imagined, let alone believed possible.

But, now, at the end of it all, I feel like I am back at the start.

A little bit wiser, a lot more jaded. Faded. Older. Just as exhausted.

And I can’t decide whether the memories of striving, yearning, wanting, trying, hoping, believing, burning… I don’t know whether they make bearing this… Void… Easier or harder.

The thing is… I’m no stranger to this place.

But I am beginning to feel like a stranger to myself…

You see, I’ve always been a lot like fire.

Pretty to look at from a distance, drawing you closer with warmth and brightness when the days are cold.

But nothing more.

It’s hard to be more when you’re so busy being so angry.

So busy consuming yourself simply so you can feel like you’re also one of the living.

Self destruction is actually just a facade.

For darker, brighter, lonelier things.

I guess the main difference between now and before though, is how desperately I now desire to be by myself.

I don’t know if it’s because those games of trying to understand people stop being fun once you’ve played enough of them.

At the end of the day, people are just people.

And I’m just a person too.

A tired person, made of carbon and dust, with any light nearly all gone, bled out into everything and nothing over the years.

Because, the main thing about burning isn’t the pain or the thrill or the danger.

It’s not even the destruction (though watching flames devour all that is good, and all that is bad, especially amidst the dark, is certainly special).

It’s the fact that in the end, only ash remains.

And that’s how I feel these days.

Like ash.

Is it strange that I’m only relieved?

…

When I was younger and felt this way, I would dream of sleeping for a thousand years.

I think, despite how bad, so much worse, truly terrible really, things were as compared to now, I never was able to rid myself completely of the hope that eventually things would be better. Even if it were to take a thousand years.

I don’t think I believe that anymore…

Don’t even want that anymore.

I only want to disappear.

Not dramatically, even.

Just… Like a dream.

Like, you wake up,

and…

it just all fades away.

Like ash with the breeze.

Like smoke on the rising wind.

I’m just so tired of being all the time…

And it just leaves me slightly sad… Because I wasted so many years of my life unable to really appreciate how beautiful the world was.

I finally see it. I see it all. And I want to see so so much more.

There are people I love, more than I have probably ever loved before. And I want to be there, here, for them.

There are so many places to go, things to do, experiences to experience and feelings to feel.

But I’m just so tired…

So very tired…

To be Or…

What does it mean to be?

Not human or even oneself, but to exist, in all your sums and parts and then the things that exist in between and beyond those.

I have never been able to answer this question.

Some times I’m too far away from everything in existence, and some times I’m too deep into one small fragmented aspect of being.

The distance above, the depth below, it’s like I keep oscillating between the two. Like between the nothingness of a space where I could explode from everything I try and contain within in the absence of a world outside, or the pressure of a depth that squeezes the life out of me, leaving me breathing in nothing but whatever it is that surrounds me so completely – something that I can not survive on.

There’s no air, there’s never any air. Then how am I always on fire? And if I’m always burning, why do I then forever feel like I’m drowning?

I mean all of this in a very abstract state, by the way. The years have seeped the feelings out of me. There’s no urgency, no pain, not even any regret. I can only feel the medium I exist in.

But then again, hasn’t that always been how it’s been? O

Only thing that’s really changed is that I’ve stopped pretending to accept it, and really have.

I think…

Sometimes I feel like an alien lost on some foreign world. Sometimes like I’m the only one that should be here.

Does that sound vain? I don’t know. I don’t feel vain. I don’t feel much anything, tbh.

Just out of place.

Like I just don’t know how to reconcile the world inside with the one outside my head.

I don’t know why.

It’s not like I’m hurting or even angry. Like I said, things have never been better. I’ve never been more sorted and balanced and stable and sane. And happy.

But even that leaves me feeling weird. Because while I’ve always been disconnected, at least I knew who I was.

My rage. My pain. Even my confusion. These were the colours my soul was always painted in, as far as I can remember.

Who am I now?

Am I even any more?

Descartes said he knows he is because he thinks. But what if that’s part of the illusion? The thinking, as much as the being…

I think the problem is that I don’t know what I want.

But that’s not entirely true.

I do want things. It’s just that, in the absence of any certainty as to who I am now, I don’t know what it is I truly want and what is only part of the illusion.

Though, I guess this has always been true too…

I don’t know how to end this… Confession?

I was gonna say rant, but that’s not what this is. Not even a confession, really. Nor a plea.

Maybe it’s just a fact.

Maybe it’s not even that.

… I think, though, as long as I want to at least ask myself these questions, no matter how distant or deep the answers, whether they exist or don’t, whether they change Or never come… So long as I have the questions, I am here.

Anything and everything exists in three parts.

I think as long as we can be one and not close ourselves off against the second, the third will happen automatically.

Pain, destruction, creation, confusion. These are only words for necessary phases of being.

I don’t mind going with the flow.

I’m just worried at how unworried I am about merging into the stream.

And I can’t tell whether it stems from too much or too little of something.

Nor what any of it means.

I’ll figure it out though.

Or not.

But as long as it’s still fun to try, I guess it’s not all meaningless just yet.

Like the clever boy said, we live, so we love.

Indeed. We live.

So we love.

And we love,

So we live.

💚

The I of the Storm

13.10.2012

I have a confession to make.
Yes, I’m afraid there is just the one;
You see, I’ve run out of time,
I’m afraid of the morning, afraid of the sun.

You must understand the urgency,
it keeps me from rhyming;
but, as you would know, best of all,
It really is all in the timing.

I think I have a penchant for being distressed;
It seems as if I thrive in chaos, relish in the pain;
On good days, it seems like a clever battle plan,
Oh, Hide in the sunlight, only to fight in the rain?

After all, I am no girl; only a storm wearing skin,
and you were just the only place that i had left to go;
but you are always found out by your sins,
and, on your door, i shall cast a shadow nevermore.

But as i leave, i would just say one thing?
and i hope that you will understand my turning,
Is it such a crime to welcome the rain
when you find your world just won’t stop burning?