Stay with me.
‘I need to talk to someone.’
‘Why?’, asks my mind.
‘Because it’s getting too much, and sometimes…’
‘Sometimes what Angel?’
‘Sometimes I feel like you’re my worst enemy.’
‘But I know you, I know you better than you know you. I am you!’
‘ That’s exactly the problem.’
Sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind and not that I’m going insane, no. I’m holding on by a thread, holding on to the good thoughts and that voice that keeps me going in the morning. I believe in healing and renewing the mind but I’m afraid that some things can’t be healed. At least not alone. I need an outside perspective. I need someone to convince me that I am not what my mind has concluded that I am and it’s so overwhelming to just get all this and dump it on someone and expect them to understand so I talk to the only person I know who will get it, me.
And for a while that was okay but now I am looking into the mirror hoping to find some sympathy in the eyes of the once familiar figure before me and all I can see is contempt. I don’t know when it was that the place I called home turned into my worst nightmare. I let people’s voices enter, mold, and change me until I lost my voice. My voice of reason and now all I have is this broken record constantly reminding me of the things that have been said to me. Things that I would rather forget. My Dad always says that I have such a great memory, I guess that is the best and worst thing about me. I can’t forget. My mind won’t let me forget. My whole being has been rooted in the pain and it feels so familiar to relive those moments and remind myself that I am indeed those words. I am the cause of everyone’s pain.
The place that I come to seek refuge from has turned into the place where I am constantly hunted, forced to come to terms with the fact that maybe that inner child in me is wrong. Maybe I am not the person she thinks I am. Maybe I am what everyone else is saying. Mean, toxic, selfish, I could go on and on, I know this song very well.
When? When did you turn into my biggest enemy? You’ve forced me to seek out and look for help elsewhere when I thought that it was you and me till the end. No one else could understand. No one else could penetrate the fortress I had built for us. Turns out our destruction came from within. Maybe the feeling of safety was an illusion. Maybe I have always been hunted but with every year, the predator only gets bigger and bigger and I have been running so much, that I did not for one second turn to see that the predator has always been, you. Me? I did not doubt you. How could I?How could you?
‘I need to talk to someone.’
‘Why? Why talk to someone when you have me?’, my mind asks.
‘Because I am tired of running.’
‘Running from what Angel?’
‘Running from you.’
No weapon formed against me shall prosper. How do I explain that the greatest weapon I have ever faced, is me? How do I fix the weapon without completely changing my own existence? Without changing who I am. How do I suddenly forget the number of times when I was all I had? When I had to pat my chest to calm myself down and stop the tears from flowing. I worry that if I stop running and face myself, then I will have to face many things. That I alone am not enough to handle the things that life throws at me and that terrifies me.
I need to talk to someone. I need someone to see what I see. Or, I need to talk to myself, to understand where it all went wrong but I fear that it won’t go as planned. You see my mind, is a great mind. So smart and so convincing. I think of it as a being of its own. I fear that even as I write this, it’s listening and learning and adapting. It’s preparing for war. To get better tactics to fight and I loved this before, back when I wasn’t the enemy or back when I didn’t realize that I was the enemy.
Is there no way out of the mind? Is there no way out of this cycle? I am like a dog chasing its own tail. Having moments when I think I have it all figured out only to realize that I do not have anything figured out. It’s a constant debate in my head. A whirlwind. To believe or not to believe. I have strangled my inner voice so much that I do not even know who is speaking to me anymore. This voice is not familiar. This voice is angry and out for blood, my blood. But I can not falter. I can not show what is going on inside. I am the help or so I thought.
‘I need to talk to someone, please let me talk to someone.’
‘But do you even know how to talk to people Angel? Where would you begin? Do you think there are ready to listen to all this? Honestly. it sounds a bit crazy. Who would you even talk to? Who would understand?’, my mind asks.
‘Only you,’ I reply and that is the problem.
‘So stay with me.’
(I wrote this about a year ago when I was going through something, I hope that whoever’s reading this and resonates with it knows that, tomorrow will be better. Happy men’s mental health month!)
