Puzzles, Oldness, and Glass Boxes: The State of Me

This wasn't originally a blog post but... well, it fits in pretty well.

In the past year, I’ve spent an awful lot of time in confusion. This confusion sometimes translates into ambiguity, restlessness, insufficient confidence, spacey-ness, disillusionment, misrepresentation…whatever applies to the situation at hand. It’s as if someone has taken that almost solved – but definitely imperfect – puzzle of who I am inside and scrambled it all up inside so that the pieces – which are still has beautiful as they had just become – are misplaced. It’s all still there – the passion, the intelligence, the talent for writing and acting and music and art, the knowledge, the understanding, the desire to learn and to collect, the memories, the enthusiasm, the forward-thinking… but it’s all in the wrong place, so that I don’t know anymore how it all fits together for me to do anything productive with.  

                And then it’s like this scrambled puzzle has been pushed into this body that doesn’t know what to do with itself. This body is growing and changing, and this body doesn’t know what it needs but knows how it wants to get it. (Does that make sense? No, it doesn’t, and that’s entirely the problem. It’s unexplainable.) And this body is in invisible pain. This body has aches and sores inside and out, that have not been inflicted by anyone or anything, but seemingly just by the world itself, or by the act of existing.

                This body is young, but it feels old. There is a crick in the lower back, like two boards in a fence have been nailed too tightly together at an odd angle. There is hurt behind the eyes, like a dirty, torn piece of lace encases the eyeballs. Nothing hurt this body, but this body is hurt all the same. This body hasn’t been through any spectacular battle or any marvelous physical feat, but this body is hurt inside, and doesn’t know how to show it.

                My mind feels old too, old and scrambled like eggs for breakfast, with the motivation and the intent and the action and reflection all knotted up. It’s pulled at, constantly, by both my internal desires and my fingers which pull at the strands of hair on either side of my head. I pull at these strands, twisting and twirling them, always doing something, always know they will be there. And then I can’t get anything else done.

                I’m tired of being like this – tired of being in pain, tired of being confused and unsure and unproductive. I’m tired, too, of the insatiable appetite that my mind listens to because it’s confused about how to appease this need for nutrients or rest or just protein, whatever it is the doctors say I need. But mostly I’m tired of being in pain. It’s eating away at me. When I’m not in pain, I’m afraid to take advantage of that and do anything, because I’m afraid it will bring the pain back. When I’m in pain, I can’t do anything. And when I’m in just a little bit of pain, I feel defeated. I’m trying to make it stop, but it always returns. And when it does, I’m not myself anymore. I’m not even that puzzle of beautiful pieces all scrambled up. I’m just a glass box that hides a lot inside, concealed behind its fogged and misted walls.