What do you do when everything feels like it ended before it even started?
When every day, the weight of it all goes out of its way to push you down to your knees.
When every battle you try to fight feels like an unnecessary exertion towards defeat.
What do you do when the world feels askew? Do you fall? Do you hold on?
—March
How painful do you have to be? It’s the last month of this year’s first quarter, and I don’t have the hots for 2023 yet. Maybe it’s partly the consequences of my negligence running after me or the absence of any opening for hope, but it hasn’t felt like my year at all.
Perhaps, it was my fault, and I have no one else to blame, not that I would. In my disarray, I acknowledge every action and decision I made that brought me here in my own chaos. But I try to make things better, only to make them even worse and avalanche straight into me.
But I’ve had moments before where I fell, and no matter how low and hard those moments were, I’ve never felt this powerless. I always have written everything in excruciating detail. But lately, the thing I’ve loved with all that I am feels so much farther than it has ever been. Maybe that’s what it is. The amplification of this melancholy, the idea that I’m never good as I thought I was.
This is rejection. A feeling of invalidation for everything I’ve worked so hard to achieve throughout the years. And maybe it was my last thread, the final pull to the trigger because I was always collected despite the madness—until now.
Until now, as I write, I feel hinged. The words that used to come so easily are now restrained, handcuffed, stuck inside me.
Until now, as I try to look for words, it feels more like a burden than comfort.
Until now, as I meet the blank stare of this empty space, it feels like I couldn’t write a word worth reading.