A brief look inside the mind of yours truly.

As I try to draft more articles, I need to address something that has plagued my mind for most of this godforsaken year.

In the shortest way I can put it:

I have felt overwhelmingly alone.

Not without people.

Not without love.

Alone.

And there is a grand difference.

It is simple for me to spiral into the many ways I have grown, the plethora of things I have learned, and the things I have developed from. However, this is not how true humility is grown. Self-appreciation is great, an amazing tool for the psyche and a tremendous builder of confidence, which we are all well aware is the key. To achieve humility within myself, which is the true antidote to any internal shame, there must be a level of honesty within my self-discourse.

It was not easy, in the slightest, to gain control over my mind and the many thoughts that spiral and crash within. On this conquest over my sense of self, there was a degree of tremendous loss. An acknowledgement grew within me, that I must sacrifice all I once knew, and all I once held dear, to shed the sore, scar-covered skin that had served as my shield.

This metamorphosis was painful. A stinging, sharp sensation as I peeled away my layers of armour, left behind after years of internal and external war. This process was one I could only undertake under the special circumstance of loneliness.

The skull-bashing pang of your mind coming to the concluding realisation that it despises itself was something that I was not prepared for. It was something I did not want anyone to bear witness to, nor hold the burden of my unravelment. But this need to harness my problems and conceal them deep within my bandaged wounds did not begin as a selfless act of social preservation on behalf of those in my life.

The isolation began far before I had even come to realise that I needed it. The isolation became me. I was one with the concept of being alone, many moons before I realised that I was, before I realised what that truly meant, before I realised its detriment.

It took me until this very summer to realise that I did not choose to be alone. I was alone. I had made it so. It was so self-inflicted that I had grown to believe that it was something I had chosen for myself. Then the mind-splitting realisation had finally crossed into my mind’s eye – I didn’t want to be alone.

In my life, I have constantly concealed everything that I am. The concept of being perceived by those close to me was terrifying. I consistently placed ‘myself’ in rooms full of people, in attempts to feel the caress of connection, without ever truly allowing my ‘self’ to enter the room. Those years of my philosophical spiel, those years of therapy, those years of wisdom-building events, those years of firmly remaining as the ‘therapist’ friend. I realised that I had learned nothing. I was not who I perceived myself to be. As far as I was concerned, I no longer existed. To speak my name meant very little to me. I was a whisper in the wind. Invisible to others, and far more transparent to myself.

I believed there was a darkness within me. One that obscured me from my reality. My own sense of self, blacked out of existence – as if I was some sort of universal mistake.

The fairest question to ask of this is: why?

Because I made a mistake; a collection of mistakes.

I had discovered that I was, in fact, human.

How sobering.

Years of subtle social isolation had dawned on me, all at once, on one fateful night (pardon the Edgar Allan Poe-ism). I had friends, I had family, I had a long-term partner, I had a job full of willing colleagues. And I was still alone. Why did I feel so alone? It left me feeling like existence was futile. It left me feeling like I had made no real impact whatsoever. A ghost in every room I entered. A shell in the shape of a functioning human being. The shadow on the wall.

I found out, deep within my soul, that nobody knew me.

And worse of all, that it was all my fault.

The guilt I felt was overwhelming; the feeling of fraudulence and impostorism that I had willingly subjected myself to, and the choices I had made in the name of ‘self-protectionism’ were too much for someone as gentle as me to handle. I was not equipped nor armed for this level of battle. I found myself outclassed by the reality I had built around my mind.

The night of this above realisation, I attempted something. In that very moment in space and time, I finally opened my mind to what was.

I didn’t despise ‘myself‘. I despised my ‘self‘. This sense of self that I had built around, enclosing myself like a rabid animal with thick bars, so that nothing could ever enter, and that my inner being could never leave. This is no way for any zoo animal in the physical world to live, and this was no way for my truest form of self to live. No wonder I had felt so encaged in my mind for most of my life.

I had locked myself inside and threw away the key.

Then it dawned on me: I must craft another.

I did.

That is not to say that I am entirely well at this current moment in time. I am still getting used to truly living.

But I am eternally grateful for it.

This is the last time I will look back, as I am not going that way.

If you wish life to open up to you, you must open up yourself to life. You are, of course, eternally invited by simply existing within this beautifully chaotic universe.

Oh, and please, show up in your most daring outfit – I’d love to see it all.

TL;DR

I constructed a version of myself designed to protect me, eventually became imprisoned by that construction, and mistook my imprisonment for my identity.