On Absence

I’ve been gone for a while.

The last year has not been an easy one for me. Fresh off the heels of an excruciating months long breakup, laid off from a job I loved in an ego driven political power play, surrounded by feelings of inadequacy that have existed for as long as I have but have taken a most oppressive turn. I have tried to make the most of things as I trudge forward, but I have been haunted by a constant pressure telling me I am becoming a ghost in my own life.

To be fair, when I look back on my life I find I have always been absent in some way. I haven’t felt like a real person in a long time. Every few years, I wake up and realize that I have nothing, that I can’t create anything out of who I am and what I have. That I’m isolated in all things and I’m really, uncomfortably lonely.

Perhaps I think too harshly of myself.

On some days, I lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling for hours, full of weird electricity but stuck without an outlet. I haven’t written in years; I have one real friend and no real hobbies; I spend a considerable amount of my free time getting drunk and high with half strangers at the bar. I am no longer a real human being, full of spirit and personality and zest. How long have I been this shell?

Reminiscing on my last relationship (although perhaps ruminating would be a better word for what I do), what I miss the most is feeling like a person, or at least pretending I was one. I miss not being alone. I miss not feeling absent from myself. Lately, I watch my life go by instead of taking part in it. I live halfway in the past and half in an imaginary alternate reality where I’m a fleshed out human being. Every day is a blur of the same monotonous existence: I wake up and go about my day barely alive, never experiencing anything worth my mind. I don’t know how to wake up from this state of comfortable despair. I don’t know how to become a person again.

Recently I’ve found myself beginning to stir, or at least, feeling the light outside of me start to tug my mind back into a solid state. I hope that my writing this is a sign that I’m waking up. I hope that I can stop writing sad blog posts and turn into a person I think I’m supposed to be. I hope that I can turn into a person. Maybe my whole life has felt empty because I was young and stupid. Maybe it’s time to think again. I have a secret fear that I’m meant to be stupid forever, an unknowing cog in the machine. But maybe I still have a chance to remove myself from that story and create my own. Maybe I’m allowed to have hope for my own future.

I think I’ll go back to school, soon.