Disconnected Reality

I know not who I am any longer, what I have been.. what I was years ago, who I am now.. such a juxtaposition that I cannot see where I am in this time, in this space, in this world, any longer.

It is not that I am truly depressed, despite what my words might express. It is that I do not quite know where I am.. other than the physical facts of where I live and what I do each day.. or do not do.

I used to judge myself based on how well I did in a certain job.. how well I interacted with others, or what my parents thought of me. When I was a child, I expected rejection. I fought it, I railed against it, I set myself up for it. I was so desperate to not be rejected, that I annoyed many around me, to wish me to just be quiet, to just be content.. but contentment is not an easy thing to find, especially if one does not know what it truly means to be content.

How do you measure contentment? How does one recognize it if one has reached it? Is it not the way of life to always be seeking, pushing, and striving onward, towards the next goal, to the next stage in life?

Now it seems that I am frozen in time, entrenched in a reality that is not truly of my own devise. One I do not shy away from, but one that I do not quite understand either.

I once had dreams.. even a simple dream.. a vacation.. a land to visit.. a history to explore. A time and place so far removed from the modern culture, a wish to immerse myself so fully that I could stand quiet, gazing about, and feel that I have become a part of the distant past that is but shadows and illusive songs, intriguing scents, a melody so close, felt so intrinsically within the heart that each beat seems to vibrate through the clouds and horizon.

Something I doubt shall ever be, for life does not always give one exactly what one wishes. Far too often we sabotage ourselves, or more precisely.. I have sabotaged myself, to prohibit me from having happiness such as most can seek to find.

A home, a family, a future. A thread of continuity that can be seen to come from the distant past and in the centuries to come, to thread throughout a contribution ephemeral.

I have so completely disassociated myself, I hear from one who knew me long ago, of how fearful I was, of everything.. everyone. How one I thought was my friend, was more precisely, a friend of my mother’s. To hear it said that I brought so little to the table of friendship, that I was merely a go-between for others to meet. It was a bit of a shock to hear. The past that I barely remember, so far removed from it that I feel, that I can only know that the one who spoke knew the right of it, while I walked through the fog of my life, completely unaware.

I have lived a life as a shadow. I have gone from one job to the next, striving not to make close friends.. for I found early on that jobs did not last as long as one might expect, the economy did not allow for such, and I would need to find another employer, and so on.

There had been a time I was part of a ‘group’, but as often happens, young as we were, their lives grew forward, while mine went on its’ own. I drifted in and out of peoples’ lives, as others’ drifted through mine.

Mine was not a life of ease; I struggled hard to try to make my way through the muck and mire. Pitfalls often in ones’ path, I walked into, not meaning to make the most obvious mistakes. Those things that time and again I seemed destined to push myself into, the worse scenarios, and the most idiotic of choices. Choices that I wish with all I am I had not made, but as life directs, one cannot erase or change those things that have been, only to try and make the future better, to learn and grow.

The mistakes I made, one that has always been the most divisive, was to speak openly of what was going on, to any that I knew. I was too open, I was too blunt, I was too lost and in need of understanding. My mistake was in not knowing who to trust, who I could know would not use such confidences against me, who would not judge me harshly, who would counsel in ways that would benefit me. A label, cruelly given, and heard later by others. Recanted to me by the one who gossiped of it, but the damage was done, the gossip heard, and when my life turned yet another corner, and my decision to try to repair the damage I had done came to be, that label again was affixed to me and all those that I had once known, all believed the label to be true.. without my knowing, without my being given the chance to defend myself. Judged and condemned, turned away.

The difficulty in this is that I have nothing but time to think of those in my past, I have come to face things that I am terrified of, and yet I am not as fearful as I might expect to be.

I am confused by the simplest of things, and the quicksand of life seems to pull me under more and more each day. I see my life slipping away, so swiftly, so effortlessly, and yet I have no control of it any longer. The path my feet trod is not for myself any longer.

As stated before, I would not change the decisions that have brought me to this precise point, I know I am needed and I think somehow that I seek to find absolution for the terrible waste I have made of my life. I close myself off at times due to the terrible fear I have that I will poison another’s’ life, that I could damage another, hurt another, merely from association.

No matter how nonsensical I know my fears to be, no matter how rational thought tells me I am a fool to think such things, the fear remains, the cold chill that grips my heart and mind.

My vague explanations in this moment in time I am sure confound any who would take the time to read them. Even to myself, I must confess, I do not quite understand my own ramblings.

Yet still I feel a need to express them, somehow.. to give some sort of muddled apology for letting down so many, for not knowing what I have left inside to give.. when I feel so empty.. so lost.