Fear – In-Threes

26 April 2020

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Transparent Markers

In relationships, where is the marker between ego and self respect?

In respect, where is the marker between ego and sense of self?

What do we know about sense of self? My sense of self shifts everyday, from its very foundation. I spend a lot of time oscillating between an understanding of my scope of self and then an understanding of how many of those parts are interacting on a daily basis.

How many people are convinced that they haven’t looked deep enough into themselves? Like they haven’t peeled back the layers far enough and what they understand to be of self might very well have left a few layers unexplored. What if you’re only a talented liar when it comes to lies you tell yourself?

I’m convinced this is the case with a lot of people who harbor the fear of being hurt, or who have at some point or the other in their lives, decided against the long hard road of emotional unease, opting instead to pretend that something never mattered that much, never got deep enough to hurt them to distraction. That fear of vulnerability is an acceptance of self deception; a contract to lie to oneself for as long as necessary and maybe till the day they die, a bed of uncertainty made that will grow doubt and confusion for a significant portion of one’s life. It’s as simple as this – if I fear my hurt to the point where I am unwilling to feel it all the way through, I will throw up blocks with varying levels of dishonesty in order to build a solid enough labyrinth in my mind to prevent my access to the truth aka the pain. That labyrinth will only serve as the shaky foundation to my continued perception of my self and my values and my strength. This foundation will leave cracks wide enough for anxiety, self doubt, self loathing, and depression to seep in and find purchase. If one is susceptible to these things, at least.

Whenever the day comes that I then want to dig out, break down this house on its shaky foundation, I will find that it’s been welded with a variety of stuff I had no business gathering. Now the chaff and grain are identifying as self, now I identify as part chaff, now I’m doubting my worth. Now I’m doubting me. How does one go about untangling that? And how does the building’s demolition not feel like self destruction? How do you start from scratch when the scratch you’ve so far come to understand has been a lie?

Where is that marker exactly? Where is that sense of self?

Anyway, I’m a stone in this quarry, a sailor on this sea. I’m currently struggling with these questions. I’m on a constant search to find me.

Inspiration Journaling

2 February 2020

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A Shaky Breath

What is the sound of resolve?

A crackling

Fanned flames of frivolous hopes framing the doubt dressed in darkness?

The firewood of punctuated ululations severing ties that leave

you on your feet but do not feed you on your toes.

A scraping

Rubber licking asphalt one grain of hard-fought grey after the other?

Barren boots warring against the smattering of wet skin on

fiery hard packed ground

Toppling time and again because you knock yourself down as often as the world does.

Like nothing

Silence so absolute with a world not watching

Breath held, waiting interminably for the other shoe to drop

When you know you never intend to let go of the laces

you cling to; because you are in control.

Bet it looks like a shaky breath-

Arms crossing, folding into one’s chest

Mouth agape, teeth bared, eyes focused

Above the “insurmountable best”

And it feels like a reckoning

Like fear and faith, or fear alone

or an emptiness – a will wilted, but alive

Whispering secrets of your unmalleable core;

Bone to unshakeable bone.

Prose et Poesie

22 September 2019

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Save.

Come, pour it all out to me. In a moment of true need.

Shiiiiiittt. You woke up hella late, slept through hella alarms, and cost yourself 20 bucks this morning. Best believe you’re broke enough right now that that makes a difference. A huge one.

You’re having a rough day – can’t you tell? Can’t you smell the doubt, anxiety and self derision – sulfur fumes rising from the well? You’re tempted to gather, to push through, to self-love, to pull loose of this infernal grip.

But today? No. Today, you could have maimed a man in a UPS outfit, if he’d turned out to be a burglar.

Save.

You don’t save. You haven’t yet managed to save yourself. It’s been years in this war that you’re fighting; Constantly engaged and projecting to the world so you don’t have to face yourself. So you can face another and hate the shell. It’s hollowed out – that hologram, because the mirror’s a hoax.

You can’t project your worst on to the world and then face the demons that stare back because you can’t slay a reflection of a problem when the problem is you.

Save.

How can you save others, how can you save yourself? Service. Full service pain. Full service problems. A continental strain.

Why you can’t win at this war? Why you’re always losing? You’re not being you. You’ve been hiding under years of rock and shield. Under years of cover from soul. Sometimes you can’t feel it anymore, what you would do. You see it sometimes in quiet bursts. In eclipses of fear-defying proclamations. You see it hide, retreating tactically as you backtrack your ‘lapses’ and pad over the cracks in the sculpted suit you present as yourself. You see it. Can you save it?

Can you save you from you?

Being honest to yourself is a war you have been losing. But the war, not the battles. You see the truth through the chinks in that armour. You will save yourself – piece by stone, hard, metallic, piece. Then you will save that armour. To remind yourself of what it is to live in the fear, in emotional squalor.

You’re having a bad day.

No one can save you but yourself.

Because no one else can save you from yourself.

Journaling Prose et Poesie

7 September 2019

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Gifted-Public-Figure Has Died at Aged-age

“Gifted-Public-Figure has died at aged-age.”

Seldom do I swim in a sea of envy. I lie.

Envy waits patiently for me at my door each night and stands sentry till morning. It accompanies me – walking ahead on my route each day, morphing into fantastic shapes of alternate states of being. It pops out at each corner to say “I’m an option, if you’d heed it”. It draws in with play-fighting and truth-meandering; faux soul-searching.

Envy fears all things

Gnaws all things

Seethes through things

Corrupts good things – envy never mends.

Gifted-Public-Figure has died and I, I was inspired. And envious.

Not of their death, or even of their life. But of all those who are finding or have found their purpose, and are thriving in pursuit of the thing, even at 39. And then, I was envious of their mind.

But then that left no space to grow!

That left no space to ponder my own issues and grab my own weights.

It left no roads on which to be bare-back, worn down, weary, and soaking.

It left no reason for me to find a valley to fill with a sea of my pain and dive into, so I could swim to the other side and sing. All it did was encourage me to drown.

All I heard were songs at the corner with tempos of mourning, of cries to drop down, dig a hole and bury my soul. Then use all my powerful potential to water the seeds of waste and prune their poisonous vines where I had laid them.

All it showed me was waste when all I desire is grace.

Today hit’s different. Because I saw a light, just the one.

Then others quickly rose to affirm it. So I knew it was the light at the end of a tunnel and not a train hurtling towards me on the tracks.

Gifted-Public-Figure has died at aged-age. And I took my envy of perceived accomplishment and I put it on the road. I shaped and carved and filigreed till I was sure it would hold. Then I set it beside my other fears and worries, anxieties, doubts, and excuses.

I set it with no spaces between the cracks as my next stepping stone.