Battle for My Brain
I am certain no one reads this except my amazing mother, my #1 supporter. I am aware that these words are just shouting into the void and that they mean nothing to those of you clicking through your favorite YouTube videos or Googling celebrity news. There will come a day when I attempt to lure you into buying my books with glittery ads and promises of greatness. Alternately, there may be a time when I give up entirely and forget these attempts altogether. But today, this post, this is for me.
Those whom I love the most are suffering, as am I.
It is agony...to be so out of control. To have no real say over the happenings around you. To have to watch as your entire world burns and ash rains down upon you, the smoke smothering you as you witness the fear and the anxiousness flood the eyes of those you love, their tears carving trails through the black ash on their faces.
The me of last year, so full of hope, attempting to make something, to build my own ladder out of the rut I have burrowed into, is exhausted. Even then, I knew my world was crumbling, but I thought I could be quicker than the sand that was burying me. Since then, the wind has gone from my sails, and I am tired of fighting. I struggle with my own self to be different than who I am.
Why am I so laden with the inescapable drive to do more? To have more? To be more? It’s not the desire for riches or shiny, expensive cars, but to do something with my life more than just shit, eat, sleep and clock in to a job where I make other people money whilst losing all sense of myself? Why do I have these beautiful, lacy words that line the outer layers of my brain, always pushed to the edges, always surviving as a priority. Where did all of these bills come from? They are drowning me. Life as I know it is drowning me. The pressure bears down, harder and ever harder, and I can’t breathe. It is squeezing the literal life out of me. I am going blind. I am getting old. Silver swaths decorate my temples. Wrinkles now never unfold around my eyes. And the clock is evermore ticking.
The darkness will close in on the world as I see it, and I will run out of time. Sweeping views of cliffs and mountains and wild, rushing rivers will be but blackness before me. The ethereal Northern Lights can dance above my head, something I have always wished to witness, and I can be never the wiser that it ever even happened.
Instead, I waddle, exhausted, into a workplace with fluorescent lighting and social hierarchies and something called frenemies and bend my busted back over a desk, typing mindlessly as my legs swell and my soul dies…every single day.
Poverty will break anyone.
Those authors I so admire, the ones who made it, they had the most valuable asset anyone can possess and none of us value… time. They were not clocking in before the sun hits the sky and unlocking their doors in the darkness, well after the sun has set. Their entire days were not wasted, with no sight of the sun or smell of fresh air, with nothing but the sound of catty whispers and the clicking of keyboards.
That is the luxury I am starving for. I have no need for a sports car or a rolling mansion or notoriety. I want time. It is supposedly mine, and yet, I have no claim to it if I don’t want to starve. Time would be the grandest gift I could ever receive. To wake in the day, with no worries of money, and to be able to pour out of me the words and the ideas that have been so stifled for so long. To surround myself with the gift God gave me in the security that I will not be homeless.
I am afraid. Terrified. In my heart, I cannot picture myself at an old age. I don’t know how much time I have, and I am painfully aware of each wasted minute. I wish I could simply show up to my life like so many others do. I wish I could measure the value of it only by the length whilst mindless of the breadth, depth and composition of said life. I wish I could just hold off my own dreams until I have made some company a sufficient amount of money that I can then retire and pursue my own desires and hope I don't die before I get that chance
. I wish I could quiet that shrieking inside of me that screams to get a move on doing the things I want to do. The sands pour evermore through the hourglass, and still, I am stalled. Stuck. Frozen in a life I never asked for. My body is failing. It is the only one I have, and if it falters, so do I. I want to not want. I want to undo the desire to travel and to see and taste and feel and experience the events that make a life worth living. I wish I could stop the booming voice that always urges me to do those things. I don’t want to live a tortured life. I want to wallow in gratitude at the smallest things and be content in an uneventful existence. Why can’t I quash this pushing, this pressure, to do more?
