Sometimes I feel betrayed even when no one’s done a single wrong thing to me. I wish I had the motivation to be better, to look better, to act better. I’m not unhappy, I’m just discontent, and I know I’m capable of more than I do every day. Here’s hoping that someday I can fulfill my own potential, as difficult and exhausting as it may be. I don’t have faith in many things, but I do in myself and those that I love, as well as the things that matter to me.

The wind blew on my face and I thought “I hope you’re okay.” Then I laid down on the hood on of my car, looked at the universe, the big bright stars, and inside my heart, my head, it went, “I’m sorry, I love you, I’m sorry.”

I don’t think it’s fear that holds me, but rather I that hold it. The way I live my life, the thoughts that terrorize me, they’re taxing, but without them I feel I’d become too comfortable and too naive and forget that bad things do happen. Tragedy occurs and rips lives apart, to those who don’t deserve it as well as those who do because, yes, there are people who deserve it. I live an anxious life, I’m always nervous and sometimes I feel like I trust no one. I don’t have much to show for myself that others can appreciate; no one has any reason to be proud of me. I’m haunted by the fear that someday everything I know might fail me, that my world may be turned irreparably upside down and I’ll be numb, dull, aching, sick, tired, torn, lost. These things, these giant thought clouds of the ultimate destruction of one’s faith, structure, and heart: they cross my mind daily; more than once, sometimes more than a thousand times. I have days where I can’t get the darkest secrets I know to stop flashing before my eyes, leaving me queasy, squirmy, and dwelling on things that I can’t change now and never even had an opportunity to in the first place. I worry until I can’t worry anymore about the people that I love: “What if they die? What do I do?” I swear, I’ve had this special set of demons with me since the day I was born. There’s an ugly side in here that no one knows, where all my sick, hateful, horrible words lie, and probably where the discontent itself manifests. I’ve never been able to live life without my disgusting, brutal ideas that I’ve at least learned, over the years, to let  stay in my head until they die and decompose on their own, or drift away. I used to have a real problem with throwing up my guilt, so to speak; telling people the things I’d think or notice that I ultimately should never share because it would hurt them to know. As I age I fight a constant battle with my empathy and shotgun desires to be honest with everyone about everything, neurotic impulses to be a good person. If nothing else, I’m an overthinker and a worrier and I make the wrong decisions all the time. My greatest dread and suspicion of all is that someday I will wake up to find that I’m alone, that I’ve been lied to and the joke of happiness I thought I had was just that: a joke, because I don’t deserve it and I never did, you see. It’s a mess, all of it’s a horrible mess, living here inside this brain and heart and body and soul of mine. But honestly? I need me. I need to be this person because, for whatever reason, in the sickest way, I’m happier being scared than I am being anything else at all.