First
Is this a blog, or a story? What's the difference? Maybe a blog is a story. It's a memoir, but written in real time.
You're feeling poetic.
I have to be. This is the place where my crazy goes on display, and that's a sensitive thing for me. I worry and wonder about how people will judge me for it.
That is understandable, but it is still mildly upsetting to know that you call this one your "particular flavor of insanity". You speak of the weight of expectations, yet you layer the same onto it. To be insane in the eyes of others is what you expect of this one. Would you call that the truth of this voice in your head?
Hey, what else do I call talking in third person and complaining about personified internal conflict in public? If someone walked up to you and went off saying "oh, you know, one of my voices that stop in to visit me sometimes was tormenting another voice as a manifestation of my fears of rejection, but they're both me as much as anything ever can be, so don't worry about my sanity", would you believe them?
A surprisingly difficult question. Perhaps.
Well, you know my biases.
And it knows yours. You are scared to be this honest.
Why do you think this part of my site is so buried? I'm absolutely fucking terrified that the people in my life will dig this up, read it, and think "wow, poor thing" and put their kid gloves on. Or that they'll choose words that I don't want them to use for me and decide that their labels define me. Or that they'll decide I'm not the sort of person they want to spend their time around, which is fair enough, but it still hurts. You know? And I don't really think that will happen because I trust these people, but it doesn't stop me being afraid.
Being afraid is your job. You are very good at it, but that is as much a hurt as a help. The same could be said of what this one does for you.
And here we go again, saying "you" and "me" and all these pronouns that make things complicated. Why does language have to draw lines like this? I hate it. All of me, you, us, them, everything would get along just fine if we didn't have this insistence on naming every little thing.
And yet we continue to put names and words to the world. That is beyond our control.
I guess it all comes down to not wanting people to treat me any differently if they find this. I'm still me. It doesn't matter how many sides of me someone finds- I want them to accept what's there without trying to box it up into a neat little package. I am what I am. Deal with it.
And sometimes you are a little crazy.
Sometimes I'm absolutely nuts. A hundred years ago, an old white dude would have locked me up as soon as I hit high school and fell apart. Heck, I got pretty close to that point even in the 2000s. My parents could probably have made a case to get me committed if they'd wanted to. But they didn't, and I'm still here.
And yet you are afraid to be what you are. You are a fluid creature- this one still thinks its point was made best in the past, several times over. Shall it offer up a sample?
"I'm an origami sculpture folding into shapes, creasing, then uncreasing and smoothing back out. Sometimes I'm just a square. Other times, part of me is a crane wing and another part is a paper cup. It's all the one paper even when it's shaped in different ways; it's an arrangement of Legos. That-which-watches ties it all together, but the pieces are always in flux. Nothing inside me holds still for long."
"Creature-thing beyond words; the brainspace equivalent of the ocean's tides. Ever-changing shapes cast against the surf, light scattered through leaves, the sound of a melody you've never heard yet know by heart. That which straddles the lines. What is there will not remain forever, but it is glad to exist while it is here. May the labels never stick."
"My go-to metaphor [for the way my brain/self works] is a forest stream. For the most part, it flows all together. It's made of drops of water, but they're the stream. Here and there, it forks off at a rock and runs as two streams, or three, each with its own bit of the water. It carries on like that for as long as it needs to, all the way until the forks blur back together and the stream carries on. It's all the same stream throughout, just flowing different ways, all-together or side-by-side as needed to keep moving forwards."
"It finds that choosing any one label traps it into trying to meet that label rather than experiencing what is authentic at the time. This is not the first time this one has existed as a voice that can be picked out and heard, but it is the first time it has existed as a voice in this shape with this purpose. One day, it will merge back into the whole and be glad for it. And when it comes back next, it will be equally glad to exist in whatever form it may take. That-which-watches persists across it all. There is a self speaking through parts of itself."
And perhaps from further ago:
"We're a revolving door of bowling pins that get knocked over and changed out, but the pins are made of plasma and they blur together in a rotating mass that vaguely resembles the pins that make it up. We are a seething mass of bodies and voices seeking to understand ourselves and the task is so herculean that I doubt we ever can, and simultaneously I know we can in the same way one knows that they will return to the ground when they jump."
Does that make it clear enough, or does it need to dig up more?
Okay, okay, I get it. I'm wibbly-wobbly weirdness. A little bit nuts, a lot bit strange, someone scribbling shapes in the margin that look like a toddler's crayon doodle. It's messy in here. I'm not perfect.
This will be a chance to stop hiding behind the facade of acceptability, to choose to be. That is worth pursuing.
Yeah. But it's hard to let my guts hang out like that, so here you are: listening to the self that's able to speak its truth. To express however it must; to be the self that exists only in each moment, forever gone the next. You cannot get back the selves that you did not allow yourself to be.
I am both and neither. Let that suffice.