Your circus, your monkeys!

You can blame society,
You can blame your parents,
You can blame God,
But you need to understand that who you decide to be,
Who you are today,
Is merely your responsibility.
..
There’s no justification to hurting others,
To ruining them,
To ruining yourself.
Not God,
Not society,
Not your parents.
It’s all on you.
..
Contributing factors?
Yes.
Hardships?
Definitely.
Destructive?
100%.
But never justifications.
..
The minute you wake up and decide to do nothing about it,
Decide to throw blames and stand still,
Decide to never take full responsibility for your actions,
It’s all on you.
..
You think it’s predetermined,
You want to believe that the injustices that happened to you,
Define who you are,
Because it’s easier to be the victim,
The one who demands sympathy,
Who thinks they’ve earned it, somehow,
Than to be the survivor,
Who demands respect,
Who, despite everything,
Has turned out to be so full of love,
So full of love that it overflows to fill all the cups on their table.
..
It’s easier to be the victim,
And maybe, somehow, you are one.
But is this, really, who you want to be for the rest of your life?
Passive, pitied, unaccountable?
Because I know, for sure,
That my answer is no.
..
What will yours be?

It’s Time To Let Go

I know you want to stay.

I know that you want to believe that the pain will stop.

I know that all the voices in your head are convincing you that staying is the safer option.

I also know that love is blind,

And so very stupid sometimes.

Your gut feeling is right.

It was right all along.

Nothing is going to change.

You will still cry yourself to sleep.

You will still live bearing the threat of being abandoned if you do not follow the rules.

You will still wake up every morning next to someone who’s constantly reminding you that you’re not enough,

Like choosing you is a favor.

I know you want to believe they’ll change,

See your worth,

Suddenly realize you’re the best thing they’ve ever had,

Finally give you the love that you deserve.

It. Will. Not. Happen.

People change, yes.

But never into a whole different person.

Toxicity is in the blood.

It will mutate and change its face,

It will manipulate you into believing your judgement was wrong,

Unfair,

But it will still be there.

Growing,

Evolving,

Engulfing you until you become a shadow of the person you’ve always wanted to be.

Is this what you deserve?

Is this your actual worth?

Why are you selling yourself cheap?

Aren’t all the people who love you and respect you enough to let you know how precious you are?

Why are you lowering the bar,

So low,

That literally anyone can step over it?

It’s time to finally understand that what you’re in,

What you’re holding on to,

Is not love.

It’s the idea of it.

You’re so consumed and blinded by the idea of finding love that you’ve forgotten to try and figure out what it should be like.

And THIS is where you went wrong.

The rush to find your soulmate,

The paralyzing fear of ending up alone,

The peer pressure,

Believing you had a task with a deadline to finish,

All of this has led you to accept whatever came your way.

You lost yourself in the process.

But is that what you really want?

Is this who you really want to be?

Isn’t it, finally,

The right time to leave?

Once bitten, twice shy.

‘Was I good enough?’

I wonder as your shadow dances somewhere in the back of my mind.

I have lost.

I have lost this battle between everything I wanted and everything I needed.

It was an inevitable loss both ways, anyway.

I walked in unprepared.

I brought all the wrong weapons to a war that should have been with no weapons at all.

‘Where did we go wrong?’

I contemplate all the options and all the answers.

I wonder if it went wrong at all.

It felt like I was constantly trying to earn validation from the sorry excuse of a mess that you’ve always been,

That I’ve always been, too.

It was a wild goose chase,

That went on forever.

But deep inside, 

I knew that nothing was more doomed to failure than hoping to catch a wild goose.

And we were,

As doomed as they came.

It wasn’t rocket science,

Someone had to bite the bullet.

So I did.

And it tasted as bitter as anything ever had.

To admit your absolute failure,

To admit that you’ve been chasing your own tail for a very long time,

It crushes you.

It makes you doubt every thought you have, 

And every decision you’ll ever make.

It holds you down for a very, very long time.

You’re constantly in a grey zone,

Not knowing much about anything.

It’s always the calm before the storm for you, 

Never knowing when the storm will strike,

Never knowing when you’ll make another decision that will suck away the rest of the life you have in you.

You see,

The problem is that you always believe that you know better than everyone else.

That you are smarter than all.

Until you realize that no, you’re really not.

Next time,

May be you should just acknowledge that you don’t know it all.

Maybe that would save you,

For once.

On Time Wasted

Is there a greater sin than wasting your time in things that degrade you and pull you down?

Because I don’t think there is.

We procrastinate a lot.

Delay taking decisions that we know we will have to take one day.

We’d rather stay the same than change.

Because change is scary.

We keep spiralling down because we’re too afraid to claw at the walls and start climbing back up.

And time passes. Bitter, irreplaceable time.

Time is the only thing you can never reverse or fix. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.

When you finally open your eyes, you realise that you lost precious moments that you can never bring back.

You were so consumed in yourself that you missed all the things that were happening around you, eventually losing yourself too.

And now, you’re a stranger.

Yet, one question will always remain: Is it too late now?

Life’s Little Illusions

We survive.

We fall, we break, then we get up and heal.

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday we will.

Sometimes we need a strong blow, an electrifying shock to dislodge us from the illusions we live in.

We tend to believe, a lot and unconditionally.

But life lies.

The world tells you what you want to hear, what it takes to keep you sane.

Then it lies.

Then you mourn and mourn until you snap out of it.

And see everything from a different perspective.

You go back and relive all the signs you’ve missed.

All the things you believed when everything around you screamed that they were not true.

Day by day, you wake up a little more.

You feel sorry for yourself a little more.

You become confused a little more.

Can life be so unfair? Or is it saving you from yourself, somehow?

All the things you’ve lost, did they define you? Or was it you who added something to their definition?

Were you so foolish to keep hurting yourself the way you did? Or were you very smart to keep going until the end?

Is there a moral for all the pain you put yourself through? Or was it all in vain?

Questions you’ll never understand.

Answers you’ll never find.

A soul that you’ll forever try to heal.

And the journey of life keeps going, even when you stop midway.

Fear.. among other things

It takes courage to spill your heart on a page that might be read by someone on the other side of the globe.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I don’t have my life together.

I feel no shame in realising that I’m still a long way from figuring out how to deal with my insecurities.

I grew up with an anxiety disorder, one that not many people who know me actually know about.

It’s exhausting to fight a war inside your head every single day.
– Mickie Ann

My body was not created to withstand the same amount of stress as everyone else nor to deal with it in a rational way.

To be honest, I’ve never seen myself as a fragile person. In fact, I would bet that most of the people who had any contact with me would rather say I have a strong, determined personality. Which I might, or might not.

I’ve beaten myself down much more than I pulled myself up. Once my stress goes out of control, I switch to self destruction mode immediately. I then start to lash at myself, thinking of every mistake, bad decision, miscalculation I’ve ever made in my life.

I feel inferior to everyone and everything. I wouldn’t go near the mirror for days. I feel like I don’t belong to anything around me. I start losing my confidence, my self esteem. In these moments, my whole world seems to be cracking. 

I have yet to mention the panic attacks, the certainty that something was going to happen to me or to someone I love this very moment. A feeling that intense is capable of shattering your mental state in seconds. 

The feeling that my head is about to explode with the million scenarios going on inside and the demons racing all around it.

The nights I spend crying when I truly and deeply know that it is uncalled for and that if I had to say a reasonable reason for all this, I wouldn’t be able to.I tried to open up to closed ones about it, but no one seems to actually get a grip on what exactly is going on in my head. I can’t blame them, to be honest. If I hadn’t been through this and someone came and told me about it, I would think they’re probably being very dramatic, or just going through a phase. 

Let alone the times I would be too embarrassed to speak about it out of fear that they would think I’m a whiner, complaining all the time for nothing.

I’m writing this, to whom it may concern, because I’m convinced that the first step to deal with something is to acknowledge its presence.

I’m not ashamed to finally admit, that my head is not the way everyone else’s is.

I know I’m not alone and I’m certain that there are many people out there going through the exact same thing I’m going through.

Seek help, and keep your faith going.

You deserve some peace of mind, no matter how impossible it seems to achieve.

The Absence of the Present

I wake up to the restless noise of the fan spinning in a never ending pattern. I slowly open my eyes feeling like they’ve only been closed for a minute. I check my phone, which is my morning routine, only to find out that I slept for much less than I should.

No alarm was set, nothing scheduled for the morning, just the fact that my brain refuses to shut down for a few more hours.

I drag my still sleeping legs out of bed with puffy eyes, a sore throat and no idea of what to do next.

The fact that something still doesn’t feel right strikes me like an ice cold rock in the face.

I’m back to this dark hole of spiralling thoughts and mixed feelings. I’ve never been pulled out of it, always got stuck there for days and days.

It will make no sense to anyone. It’s my misery and would only make sense to me.

I’m still standing in my door with half open eyes and shaky legs staring into the opposite wall hoping that a graceful shadow that once merged with it would reappear to help me and lend me a helping hand.

The sound of my phone ringing physically pulls me out of this haze, but my brain and heart are still stuck there..

Imperfect But Complete

Let’s first agree that “perfection” doesn’t exist and fairytales are not real.

If your life is perfect, then something is not right.

We all spend way too much time seeking perfection that we actually miss enjoying the beautiful imperfections that we have in our lives.

Look within your hearts and find the spot that feels most comfortable, whether it is a place, a person, a memory, a feeling, a melody, a picture, anything! This spot exists in every heart. The spot that could take you far away and draw a smile on your face at any given time. That spot is everything you need. It is the spot that makes you feel complete.

You don’t have to try to change the world around you to be satisfied.

Cherish the things you have.

Fall in love with the imperfect.

Hold onto me, always and forever.

Always be my tender spot.

For only you can complete all the missing parts of me.

Untitled

I have no title here. No attention grabbing, dramatic, glimpse-giving title. To be quiet honest, I don’t know where this is going to take me.

Have you ever tried the feeling of emptiness? Not the “emptiness” you read in novels, where the main character feels nothing at all. In fact, that type of emptiness should be considered a bliss. Not feeling anything is the best thing you can feel. No rush, no rattling thoughts, nothing. The emptiness that I was referring to in my previous question is something else. Something far away from the nothingness emptiness. The emptiness that I mentioned, is the literal emptiness. Like there’s nothing inside you.

Have you ever felt like you were hollow? That type of emptiness? The feeling that if someone knocks on your skin, they would hear an echo answering them back. The type of emptiness that nothing can fill, or at least that’s how it feels. The emptiness when even the voices in your head are quiet, and it’s not because they have nothing to say, it’s because they don’t want to speak to you anymore. They are tired of you; of your stubbornness and happy lies. They’re tired of speaking to you because you never really listen to them.

Suffocation, the type of suffocation in which, even if you were put in a bubble with nothing but a plenty of fresh air, you still wouldn’t be able to breathe. Even if oxygen-rich air was forcibly pumped into your lungs, you’d still choke on it.

Insignifcance, by everything and towards everything. You matter to nothing and nothing matters to you.

You no longer have the urge to speak, because it seems like even if you say all the words in the world, nothing will make sense. Not to you, not to anyone.

You just need, even crave, someone to just be there. Not to speak, not to soothe you, but just to be there.

Loneliness in crowds.

Needs, many of them.

Familiarity no longer exists.

You no longer know what you want, if anything at all.

You need them to say all the right things and take all the right steps, yet deep inside you know that’s ridiculous and impossible.

They’re human, too.

But so are you.

And that’s the part you were missing. You forgot that it’s okay, even for you, to break down. To stop pretending. To expect nothing but comfort until you pull yourself back together.

You don’t need anyone to fix you, but you need everyone to give you the chance to fix yourself. No pressures, no questions, no expectations, just time. Comfortable, happy, unconditional time.

So you grab a pen and a paper and spill your heart on empty pages hoping that, somewhere between the mess that you will create, an answer will be found.

And I’m still searching..

Self Battles

It takes courage to make a decision, and sometimes it takes a lot more courage not to make one.

Sometimes the hardest decision you choose to make is to do nothing about it. To let it die.

For a long time I’ve been lost in my head.

For a long time I felt abandoned, unimportant and insignificant.

Now, just the opposite.

I can’t still quite understand how or why it all happened. I can’t even understand how nothing changed after that.

The plain truth right now is that I can’t really understand anything. Not a single thing.

I don’t know what to believe. I have no idea which direction to go, especially when all directions are equally misleading at the moment.

I need help, I just don’t know from whom or in what way.

I don’t need the reassurances anymore, or the promises, or even the apologies.

Or maybe I do.

I really can’t tell.

I’m becoming my own enemy. I want everything. I also want the opposite of everything. I swore I would never let this happen. And I did. And I’m happy, when I really shouldn’t be.

This may be nonsense to everyone reading my words here, but to me, this is as sensible as I can get right now.