everything feels wrong. but maybe it's just me

someday i will wake up feeling lighter

Everything is rewiring. But it’s all just me.

There are so many loose strings and loose ends, and I feel whole, but not quite. Am I afraid of my own greatness? Things are happening for me. The world is moving under my feet. I feel my heart at the center, receptive and open from all directions. I feel myself under the tide, capable of feeling every vibration, every hum, every song the ocean can sing. Are there meant to be answers? Life is all action, but for once I am placing my own foot to the brakes, unsure as to why myself. I keep telling myself the answer will come, but in the early mornings, there is no voice but my own. I get caught in the frenetic tripwire of my thoughts.

Am I thinking too much? Placing myself in a storm of thoughts before anyone else can? I keep thinking about how I don’t want to listen to other people’s ideas for my life anymore, but I am unsure of what ideas are my own. Am I sweeping myself into inaction because I’m afraid? Or because I can’t imagine past this point.

My imagination is tricky— I keep trying not to confuse real life with fantasy. Am I incapable of coming up with the rest of the story of my life, is that it?

I am finally above the waves, feeling the wind on my face. I came up for air. It’s not quite what I imagined. I came to the conclusion that the world is not my own. I cannot control it. It exists beyond me, far away. My own world, the one I’m creating, seems much better to me in retrospect. But when I come up for air, I am borrowing time, looking around restlessly, and the world doesn’t belong to me. It doesn’t belong to me.

I have my solitude and my storytelling, but the world doesn’t belong to me. I wish people could see what I’m thinking, so it’d be easier to explain. I feel everything. From below, from above, from within. There are answers, but I don’t know if any of them are the right ones. And I know there is a time for everything. But the world doesn’t belong to me.

I look around and see things move and people move their hands, their feet, the sails. The wind works against them, and there they go again. The summer cannot be summer here just as winter cannot be winter. No one lets anything exist on its own where I live. I feel like I’m going crazy trying to describe it.

How do I explain it? This feeling inside me? Everyone is growing and tripping into themselves, but I see the expansion because I am imagining it, writing it myself. But I cannot work against that clock. It’s why I borrow time. Nothing belongs to me.

I keep trying to place my hands on anything solid, but my hands move with the waves. I feel every pulse. I am trying to reach forward, backward, through time, and past it. When you know so much of everything, and nobody listens, are you sure you know anything at all? Is this how God feels — at the reins of life, when only he knows the next step — does he go crazy in that way too?

How am I feeling? For some reason, I'm ashamed.

Ashamed that I might fail. Ashamed that I’m not doing enough. Ashamed because I feel like I should be doing more. Ashamed because I’m me.

Where did this feeling come from? How did it manage to sneak up on me? Was it in the middle of the night, when the curtains were drawn, and the city was asleep? Was it in that apartment where I left my vacant heart and replaced it with a new one?

I feel like I have so much left to do with so little time. But who am I performing for? Are all those goals just shame, too?

Everyone keeps telling me to do something, as if my days are made up of nothing. Life feels like it is moving all around me, and I’m the only one standing still. Even the rain won’t come. It’s too hot.

I try to wash off my shame in the shower, but I tremble again when I come out to the light. With every cup of coffee, it’s like the gut punch stares back at me, taunting me for not doing something, but I don’t know what.

And if I’m not moving, it’s out of fear… Fear that it won’t work out… Fear that I’ll embarrass myself… Fear that people will see me trying. Fear and shame continue to mix and render me useless. How do I move?

What am I doing? Nothing. And I don’t know why I can’t get myself to get up.

I scream at myself in my head some mornings. Get up. Get up. But to no avail. What am I waiting for? Who am I waiting for? What do I want? How do I get it? And is what I want just a reflection of what someone else wants for me? How can I tell? I’m afraid that I don’t know the answer. I’m afraid it might never come.

All I know is that if I continue to stay here — in my hometown, in all the places where I’ve never felt I belonged — then something in me will die. Something is already dying. Is that where the shame comes from?

I told myself this morning that I believe myself to be worth the trouble. What trouble, exactly? I’m not entirely sure. The trouble of making mistakes, of trying, of failing, of feeling afraid? I don’t know why that’s such a hard thing to say: I’m scared. I’m scared of everything that moves these days.

…Scared of not living up to my potential, scared of not following my own heart, scared of being unable to distinguish between my voice and the voice of others, scared that I won’t be good at something, scared that I’ll find myself wandering a ditch on my own. The future feels so futile when I feel like this.

I think everyone expects me to be fearless. Or maybe my determination is meant to render that fear into nothing. Sometimes, it does. But oftentimes, I have to fight myself. I don’t have much fight in me right now. I just feel caught in the storm, trying to find an answer, or trying to make a path out of the fog.

How do I move? Where am I supposed to wander to?

Whose voice am I listening to?

In all my dreams, I’m waiting by the bay for someone.

Sometimes, the dream takes place during the day, and I’m staring out into the sea, looking for any sign of her.

I see her so clearly in my head — her, against the backdrop of blue, lit under the sun like a petal in a garden. She’s laughing, about something, anything, and there’s the reflection of the light over her face. And I keep screaming out for someone to hold her, to capture her. There, under the glimmering light, look at her. Take a picture for me.

The first time I felt alienated from myself, I was ten. At school, there existed two versions of myself: the excellent student and the girl in the background. I walked all around campus with one foot in front of the other, careful not to draw attention to myself. When it got cold, I zipped up my jacket and placed my hands inside my pockets. It was weird. I was by myself, but everything I did was because of some other version of myself; an entirely different person, almost.

I would alight like a matchstick sometimes. They call everything anger when it’s really just grief, I learned. But all that fire didn’t feel like mine. So it’s been that way for a long time. Sometimes, that girl — that other version of myself — will get angry for me. Later, she’ll tell me: Why don’t you ever speak up for yourself? Why are you like this? Speak up.

I played sports when I was younger, but I was always too afraid to try out for any sports teams. I wanted to be good, but I thought there was no possibility I could be. I wanted to play soccer. But, she didn’t come out and force me to join, so I stayed inside, afraid of the world and longing for it all the same.

I read books, wrote them, discarded them, wrote some again. I thought about my grades and my future. An academic career meant something, maybe. It could be some fragile opportunity to make way for myself and escape.

When I was thirteen, my mom kept begging me to work. Eventually, I started counting down the years. Just four more years. Just three. Just two. Just one. By the time my 16th birthday came around, I was already applying. Before then, though, I felt like I had already been working.

I dressed my brother for school and picked him up. I brushed his teeth and begged him to take a shower. I showed up with snacks I would steal from the grocery store near my school and forced myself to cook. But nothing was good. I felt so guilty for being unable to cook a decent meal.

Everyone else felt the same way. Just get up and make an egg. It’s not that hard. So I got up and I made eggs. Sometimes, they were a bit burnt or unseasoned. My brother said he didn’t want to eat them. I tried to think of other things he could eat instead.

All my meals were the same as his. Snacks and apple juice. Cereal and nearly-expired milk. At least we were suffering together, I thought. To no one’s surprise, I turned sixteen and got so sick I had to be sent away.

I was collapsing. Fighting to stay awake or to stay upright. I would walk home from school and dig my nails into my palm to keep going. Eventually, I would faint. My brother saw it once, and I heard his voice in the distance and tried to crack my eyes open.

When I got sent to my grandma’s in Mexico, she made me drink herbal teas and supplements. A tea in the morning, supplements in the afternoon, and something to help me sleep at night. It was malnutrition and stress. I had iron-deficient anemia, the doctor said.

When I got back home, I went back to work. I had started college by that time, and I was desperately, desperately wanting her to come back to me. Keep me alive. Please. I’m so tired.

She showed up, eventually. I felt like a hollowed-out shell, but she showed up. She got my younger sister dressed for school. She made her breakfast. She walked her to class and hugged her before she left. She never let her go until she waved goodbye.

She came back home and washed the dishes. Cleaned the floors, fluffed the pillows, and got dressed for school. She went to every class. She wrote endlessly in old journals. And then, she would get home and work again.

She’d come back home, clean the dishes again, make something to eat, and then get back to her homework. Over and over again. For a year, then two. For forever, it seems like.

Sometimes I have dreams where all I’m doing is working.

At night, I would feel like an empty can in the wind. Again, I would plead. Help me. Come back. Keep me alive. Then, there she was, like a firecracker, exploding all over the place.

I could never look at myself in the mirror. I felt bad that she had to take on this body. All skin and bones and crooked teeth and acne and fear. But I had dreams of what she could look like.

In my head, she was the most beautiful girl there ever was. She dyed her hair, played with makeup, and had a lot of friends. Those dreams were just spoon fed fantasies. Everything seemed to be.

I got us through school. I got us a dorm room in a University. She got us food when we had no money. Eventually, I got so sad I couldn’t even envision her anymore. I reached out every night and every day. Come back. Come back. I spent half a year like that, lying awake at night and pleading for her return.

She came back to me in the summer. She was a loaded gun. She cleaned the dishes, washed the floors, and did the laundry. But there was a boy. And for the first time in all my life, she was nervous.

So, someone else was born. She was lighter. Careful with her footsteps. Delicate with her words. She did her makeup, dressed up, and sang in the car. She lit up rooms and made jokes that everyone laughed at. She danced and danced and drank like she had never considered running away.

And then the world went dark again. She went mute. She got so small that eventually she just disappeared.

It was just us two again, clinging to each other.

But life is so heavy, and I’m so close to seeing someone else bloom, but every time I see her in the mirror, she feels farther and farther away.

It scares me sometimes to say my own name. It’s like an admission of guilt. I am the one running away from myself, I think. And I don’t know how to get myself to stop.