A fear resides within me: a fear of doing the wrong thing, a fear for the world, a fear of hurting other people, a fear of hurting myself, a fear of failure. I feel sick with nerves and a cold chill shivers down my spine. It is stress at its peak – simultaneously paralysing and motivating. Perhaps if I didn’t overanalyse absolutely everything I wouldn’t feel like this. Perhaps if I didn’t overanalyse everything I wouldn’t be so damn exhausted. I lie awake at night, just willing myself to go to sleep, without success. Thoughts wildly run through my mind and I long to tie them up and discard of them, but I feel powerless to stop their antics.
I write and write and write in an attempt to expel from me this poison that flows through my veins. It becomes an addiction because part of me wants to believe that writing has a therapeutic effect and that if I just put everything I feel in words, out of my mind, then I will be free. But it is only a fool’s game. There is no relief in writing, and rather than cleansing my mind and body of every ill thought and sinister deliberation that resides within me, it draws me deeper into myself, sucking my thoughts further and further into this black hole. These ineffable thoughts finally put on paper offer no form of relief, because in the end, they are beyond the description of mere words. Well, almost.
"God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering." ~ Sylvia Plath
Ms. Plath captured it pretty well. Not just the idea of loneliness, but where this comes from. She does not speak of physical loneliness, nor is she suggesting the loneliness of life without the company of friends and family. No, for loneliness exists even in the presence of such amazing people; no, it is loneliness of the mind. Never feeling completely understood, a unique way of viewing the world, and an incessant feeling of desolation over one’s purpose while we’re here. The fear of other people not understanding that and not accepting that, and accepting that it is a part of you. And it does become a part of you. I have lost myself in a spiral of depression over the past few years of my life. I have felt so alone and in such despair for such a long time that I almost feel like I am defined by it. I do not know who I am, and I do not even know the reasons behind my very sentiments. All I know is that I struggle. A lot. And I have only recently realised that it has come to the point where I don’t know how to build a deep relationship with someone except for on the foundations of these debilitating thoughts. Perhaps it is so hard to let go of it because, without it, I wouldn’t know who I am or how to create a such interpersonal relations. Sylvia captures the essence of life’s superficial joys, with the “opiates” and the “shrill tinsel gaiety”, all serving to sustain our joy, yet doing so with no apparent purpose. And the false-grinning faces – how often I have worn this mask… And then the climax. The day that you can finally expel these thoughts from your body, verbalising everything that has been stuck in your head for so long, the words that have scarred your mind and soul for what seems like an eternity. You take a deep breath, and you release them. But the effect is nowhere near what you anticipated. There is no relief, and if there is it’s only temporary. The real pain is in knowing that even verbalising these thoughts does not create change and does not ease the accumulation of confusion, frustration and hurting that has built up over the years. We are given hope all too often, in the forms of friends and delights, moments of ecstasy and elation. But Sylvia was right, it’s never enough and in the end, the loneliness prevails.
X.
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