Loss of feeling

Trust your instincts, they say.  Fight harder, they say.  Pray and let go, they say . . .

As I sat, eagle focused on the screen, I watched The Hunting Ground documentary, silently and alone.  I watched because I needed to.  I listened to the survivors and wondered why I hadn't been that brave.  Why I couldn't speak up as much as others.  And I remembered that I had tried one year.  "Take Back The Night" on my undergraduate campus . . . one year I had tried.  I decided to volunteer and pass out flyers and pamphlets for the event.  I did well, up until the actual date.  I just couldn't show up for the date.  Something inside me felt like a fraud.  Like I was somehow telling people to be brave and fight the urge to be silenced, and yet I was doing that very thing.  I was indeed silent.

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I need to breathe.  Or not to.  Sometimes I can't decide.  It's though my mind doesn't understand.

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Take a deep breath, and open your eyes.  I know it's hard to trust guys.  In time you'll be open enough to love.  Or be loved.  They tell you it gets better with time.  And yet you're still searching for that moment where your life falls into place.  You take a breath, and forget to exhale.  Maybe for a second -- you can feel normal.  Do you even know what that feels like?  Take a deep breath and keep your eyes closed.  Either way your dreams merge into a shattered reality.  The reality is there are feelings that you never have been able to shake.  From a young child up until now . . . Moments that have been etched so deep into your body, though you try to scrape them out, you just can't.  And you try.  Marks become just another part of the journey.  Children pound their fists and heads into the wall, in an attempt to forget.  The dizziness overshadows the day-nightmares.  And the older you get, the punishment gets angrier.  Like the slashes used to feel -- you dig until you're numb enough to close your eyes.

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I isolate myself when it gets to be too much.  Nothing is worse than having those you love, hurt.  But what happens when you hate the person staring back at you?  What do you do when you've been hating yourself since you were a young child?  How do you fight the urge to disappear, when you've never felt visible?

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It's hard to admit hurt, but easy to inflict it upon yourself. And there are moments where handling reality becomes too much, and breathing doesn't feel like an option.  Letting go makes more sense -- especially when you feel lost.  And those times frequent more than you'd like.  

I forgot to function the other day/ While laughing at myself, I reflected back to you/
That stare/ Those eyes/ That face/ Ingrained so deep shutting eyelids scratched you further into my mind/

Patterned Fascades

There's so much going on these days.  And yet there's so much to get done.  You'd think that with all this time left from getting rid of a job that wasn't building my future, but basically killing my lungs, I'd have at least written a few promising destruction stories or at least some emo driven sounding anthems to pass the time.  Given only a few weeks have passed since leaving my last job, which I totally worked for one year -- it stems the reason I should be celebrating the passing of those long, 60+ work hours and enjoying some respected freedom, I have been lethargic to be blunt.  And the only amount of time I've been able to subject myself to writing, has been "Happy Birthday" Facebook posts to people I haven't spoken to in quite some time.  Not that I hadn't wanted to reach out to them, but I've been "busy."  Truly busy -- trying not to jump from imaginary ledges, daily, which you can see can distract you from social media fascination.

I've patterned myself, now, to becoming more so what I had envisioned before.  You know?  When I was on a path towards doing something great with my life.  Before I had to buckle down and latch onto a job with benefits, in order to join the adult world of graduated persons.  The world where bills build up so high, you cannot see the dreams that you once gravitated towards.  I had to sell out and take a job that I knew would not build my resume the way I wanted, but just add another few lines of experience.  I worked another job, and eventually grew so tired I didn't have any time left to devote to writing.  No  time for passion.  No time for relaxation.  No time to do what I initially went to school for years and years to do.  And those same years where I grew financial aid debt and knew I'd have to pay back . . . Interesting how you go through debt to study in a field where after graduation it becomes increasingly difficult to live normally in the "real world," and you inherently turn to other realms of work in order to pay back those same loans.  But I still wouldn't trade those years of university for anything.  I know it takes many years to pay back those loans.  More years than it took me to get through schooling -- from pre-K through Graduate school.

But, today starts a new day.  A new adventure if you will.  A time to go back to what really matters.  What mattered all the time, and yet I was too scared to fail that I went and reached for something that didn't give me any happiness.  Only disdain toward my own self.  I reject the pass jobs that never helped me build as an artist.   I long for the purpose, again.  And I begin anew.  I long for more stories.  Not just out of frustration.  But because there's no other way, but to write.  I long for reaching my goals and dreams.  I long for not wanting to leap from ledges in order to find peace . . . I long for becoming who I know I'm suppose to be.  And I need not to just long, but instead go after what I want.

Though it's frightening to jump without knowledge of how you might land.  It's even more scary to continue on a path of uncertainty in something that slowly and constantly takes from you.  Leaving you with nothing left.

It took a year to break the walls of artistic imprisonment, but now that I'm free -- I'm not going back.  I'm branching into a direction that will take guts, courage and lots of alcohol (just a little writers humor -- I'm straight edge, dudes).  I'm going after my own life and career, without a safety net.  Standing on the edge and waiting to catch the wind to carry me over.  But gladly approaching uncertainty and pushing with my heart this time.  And not my school debt.

Sensory at its best . . .

Wonderful things happen when a hiatus occurs.  Right?  Well, that quite possibly could be one way to look at it.  I mean, how else could I fathom an excuse of not being online for such a long time?  Perhaps I was trying to gather my thoughts, in an attempt to create the BEST POST EVER . . . Maybe it was because I was doing ample research for a new opportunity that just caused me to ponder . . . Whatever it has been, has indeed made the thoughts forcefully purge themselves into a new blog.  So, I guess those absent days were worth it.

It has been almost one year since my last blog post.  I've written new material.  I've even managed to get a few songs posted on my YouTube site.  And yet, it is only now that I've sat down and written a few words to my literary community.  Shocking!

As I sit at this library desktop, listening to myself play "Revising The Days"  (shamelessly promoting myself), I become intrigued at what I've put myself through -- in regards to my writing.  These past few months have been a transition, both geographically, job wise and everything that goes along with it.  But I've stayed positive through it all.  I tell myself, just what I told you all:  those absent days at what I initially LOVE, have been worth it; it will work out in the long run; I just have to persevere; I'm destined for much more than what I'm currently attached to; and that there's only so many more weeks/months until I'm right where I need to be.

Funny that that could have been my mentality post high school, undergrad or even post grad.  And yet months later from that, I sit here, thinking about my future.  Thinking of where I want.  No, NEED to be.  And how long it will take me to get there.  Patience.  That's where I stand right now.  I stand on the preparation side of things, waiting until it lines up.  And although I understand that things don't always go according to plan (I've learned from quite the experiences), I plan anyway.

So, that's what I'm doing, in order to make myself feel better about not going all out on my dreams.  About not posting enough music videos on my YouTube account.  About not posting more blogs on this site.  And about not getting to my ideal destination fast enough.  I plan.  And one day, I'll be blogging from where my plans have met up.

But until then . . . that's what's going on.