Grasping for Shore
"and in my best behavior
i am really just like him
look beneath the floor boards
for the secrets i have hid…"
-Surfjan Stevens
I am absolutely terrified of change. I’m worried that the change will always be worse than the current so I never want things to change. I’m the type of person who digs a rut and then revels in it. I guess I can find some semblance of comfort from forming a routine, even if that routine is not ideal. I am excellent at making things far worse while trying to fix them so I mostly don’t bother to try to make things better. Yet, life changes. It’s liquid and constantly rushing. And here I am, caught in the wandering waves, fighting against the current but I’m just not strong enough. I always have to give in and adapt because I have no other choice. I’m hopeless against external changes and I’m starting to realize I can’t even help the changes that are rushing forth from within.
I remember change was a big deal in high school and became an even bigger deal after graduation. Everyone was always talking about how other people were changing, how they went from good Christian kids to hard partying sex and drug addicts. And I always vowed that I wouldn’t change like that. I’d hold onto my morals, I’d be the same quiet yet loveable Bran that everyone knew in high school. I would not succumb to the world. I failed. I think my first mistake was not wanting to change at all. I guess I never realized back then that I should want to change for the better, to improve myself with each passing moment. And while on the outside, I might seem basically unchanged since graduation, I am a whole new person entirely on the inside. I’ve lost my morals, my trust, my faith. I’ve realized that I am no better than a monster.
I’m still dealing with change, still struggling with whether or not I should remain who I am or try to fix myself. Am I even fixable? As I said before, I usually end up screwing things up even worse when I try to make things right. Before my heart hemorrhaged, I was on a mission to be the best I could be. I was all about self-improvement, about love, about finding out who I am and working with myself to be the best I could be. It’s funny because for a while there, maybe a week or two, I really felt like I was on the cusp of actually…accepting myself. I started to realize that I will never be strikingly handsome or exponentially talented or even that awesome of a person but I was beginning to accept that. That was one thing in my ever-evolving life that would not change and I found peace with that. Believe me, it wasn’t a sad moment. As soon as I realize I couldn’t reach some unattainable goal, it gave me new focus, the motivation to just work with what I was given, not to be better than I am but to be the best I could be within my scope of ability. And just as I was beginning to grasp onto that realization, it all fell away, crumbled underneath me like a fickle foundation.
As much as I tried not to, I did change after graduation and not for the better. I’ve become someone unrecognizable to myself. I’ve become bitter and bored with everything. There is no joy, no happiness that I can find. I cannot find it in art or music, even in movies or eating. It is literally as if I have no heart at all, nothing to swell with happiness or break with despair. There is no overwhelming joy or crippling pain, just nothing. There is only an emptiness, an element of blank that carries me through consciousness. It’s as if there is something that should be there, something that every person has, an essential piece of equipment that defines a human. That, I am missing, as if it simply necrotized and fell away in those waves of change, lost in the salt water that I cannot even conjure up from the corners of my eyes. I am not stimulated in either direction enough to elicit a response, whether it be tears or laughter. I am simply dormant.
I still think about that nasty note I got, the one where the lady said I was bitter, judgmental and preachy. I know it seems silly to dwell on one stranger’s uneducated judgment of me but I think the part that bothers me is that she is probably more right than I would want to believe. I was offended. I’m not like that at all! Oh, wait, I think maybe I am. It is yet another example of a change that I do not want to accept. A simple stranger swoops in and tells me what my former friends cannot see, what I’ve either remained cleverly hidden or what they do not want to accept, that I have become something horrible. It is something that has been brewing for the longest of time, another change that I have fought, a transition that I have tried to reject. Yet, it’s too strong within me and I feel that it’s coming out in small ways, manifesting itself in my perceptions and behaviors, in the way I think and act and see the world. It is a virus, a slow boiling poison that’s working its way within me and I can’t stop it. I see it in my writing, looking back over past pieces, I can feel the ugliness in my words, a slight mean streak that I write off as sarcasm or black humor. It’s there and it’s coming out in my words and in my actions. I don’t know what the cure is because I’ve tested everything I could, from writing to religion and nothing has eased that emptiness.
I’m conflicted. Sometimes I want to give up, to just let the waves wash over me and drown, to let the water soak my skin to the point of sloughing it all away, to simply disintegrate into the liquid. And there’s another part of me that want to keep fighting, to swim as hard as I can in the direction of the shore, to crawl onto something solid, to rejoice in the stagnant sand and find some semblance of stillness. Yet, I fear even that won’t last long enough. Eventually the water will find me and wash me away again and again.
I kind of think I’m destroying myself.