I don't feel safe. It's been ages, and looking back on these posts is... something. Somehow I've managed to fuck things up even more than they already were before.

Can't believe I crawled my way out of a hole, only to land in another one, and another one, and now the biggest one yet.

How is it that I feel everything and nothing at all? And I yearn to feel something, something fucking real, something that isn't a fever dream that haunts me over and over again.

I guess this is our folly. Drinking from broken cisterns. Longing for a fix that will never satisfy.

It gets less romantic with every passing day, month, and year. It was never romantic to begin with. But at one point I could love my sadness, love my pain. I could sink in its darkness and comfort. Let it consume me.

Or I still did. I saw it in another and it was a descent into a rush. A sickening flood of a familiar old friend. Pour me a drink of despair and purposed suffering, and I'll flagellate myself. I remember it feeling so wrong, but maybe it also felt right. Maybe right means familiar.

I've picked up the pieces before but this time is different. Knowing evil in the most intimate of ways has marked me, forever. Somehow getting older just increases the capacity for suffering, it seems.

Life gets better, life gets worse. All at the same time. I keep moving back and forth like a swinging pendulum, exerting a force just to stay in motion. Most of the time it feels like every action I take is futile, and like Newton’s third law of motion, my attempts to increase any efforts are met with increasing resistance. Maybe this is all in my head, and the barriers I perceive are just that –– a perception. Does that make it any less “real”? If reality is only perception, and no one can prove otherwise, why does the lack of a physical representation make a mental barrier any less tangible? Even this, now, me trying to articulate this, is futile. I’ve tried what they’ve told me to try –– fake it till you make it, believe you are ever-deserving of the “good” things in life, taking care of your physical health & etc. Why isn’t it okay to acknowledge that, things are always relative, so I will always struggle in some aspect, to some extent? It makes no logical sense that I should –– and I do –– feel guilty, as if this is a fate I’ve resigned myself to and I’ve given up on trying to ~ change my reality with my thoughts ~. I’m genuinely tired, yet it seems as if I’ve barely begun.

Can a person truly separate from what they were conditioned to think and believe as a child? All through childhood to adolescence and even now in adulthood, it feels impossible to shake the sense that I haven’t done enough or achieved what I’m *really* capable of. At some points I used to see that as a positive trait, like a competitive advantage that drives me forward, but it caught up to me. I am so young, yet I feel so old. My eyes should be bright with optimism, but I’ve lost any sense of direction. When I look around me, I feel disillusioned. Is this part of growing older? 

The world just feels so overwhelming. All of it. It’s so difficult to stay alive, to support yourself, let alone thrive. I’m sick of the booming self-help and motivational productivity spirituality life guru industry. I’m sick of the constant growth economics and neoliberal capitalist system that prioritises maximising shareholder returns and reaching that million, no, billion dollar valuation, for the sake of it. When did we start to act like we –– human beings, biological organisms with desires –– were simply here to form the human capital that drives the cogs of the machines and generate “value”, whatever the f--- that means. We delineated borders and named new countries, set up legal entities called companies and passed trade laws. What was initially meant to serve us, improve our lives and build local communities, are now richer, bigger and more powerful than some of the smallest countries combined. So many of us are born into a system we had no hand in forming or influencing, and the power to make decisions is only becoming increasingly concentrated at the top. 

Well, fuck. I didn’t think I’d be brought back to what feels like the melodramatic brokenheartedness of my teenage years but here I am again. It feels downright wrong in my gut, like I should be past this by now; I’m better, more mature than the emotional fool in high school who’d cry over a boy who didn’t want her back. There’s nothing quite like feeling awful and then beating yourself up for feeling awful on top of it. 

Why do I feel so ashamed? All this while I’ve prided myself on being somebody who is collected and in control, perhaps the visceral emotion was an attack on my self-esteem –– something that goes against the ego I’ve identified with. Even now as I type this, attempting to put the last few months into words, I struggle. I struggle to gather my inner turmoil and package in into something neat and delectable to read. The truth is I’ve been running –– running away from dealing with what happened, running in circles around the distractions I’ve built for myself.

I haven’t been able to sit down and grapple with the entirety of us. How quickly we soared to the top of the world... Only to fall from the sky, just as suddenly as we rose. Newton’s third law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. It’s impossible to quantify the magnitude of what I feel and felt for you but you didn’t and won’t believe me when I tried to tell you.

I fucking hate myself so much. I really do. I still struggle to put into words the myriad of things I feel and think everyday, and most of the time I try to put you in a box at the back of my brain and leave you behind, but I know I haven’t really. Not when there hasn’t been a day that’s passed that I have’t thought of you. It makes me sick to my stomach.

How fucking stupid of me to believe the words that came out of your mouth. To allow myself to be put in this position. It disgusts me that I still wonder how you’re doing, that I still hope you’re thinking of me. I still hope there’s hope for us, that you haven’t found someone new.

And that makes me sick.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here. I’m convinced you could never truly love me, not after the way things unfolded... Even, even *if* we both wanted to, the history’s there, and I know you believe there’s no such thing as a fresh start. Yet I want so badly for us to be. There’s nothing I want more. I want to believe that you’ll...